Petr Nickovich was holding his experiment in a corner behind the main building of the Dacha where it would be out of the wind. Which also meant out of the sun. It might have been prettier if his balloon was in the sunlight. It would certainly have been warmer.
What had really brought her out into the cold to see it was the idea that, some day, a much bigger thing like this might let people fly. Petr Nickovich wasn’t looking at the balloon; he was writing out calculations. Then he looked over at Filip Pavlovich. “I was right. The heated air lifts a little more than a quarter of an ounce per cubic foot.”
Filip Pavlovich just nodded.
“I must have the hydrogen you promised me,” Petr Nickovich insisted.
“Yes. Fine. We’ll talk about it, but inside.” Filip Pavlovich was visibly cold even in his heavy clothing. “Where it’s warm.”
Natasha smiled, though she didn’t let it show. Petr Nickovich was not one to take being laughed at well and keeping the peace was part of Natasha’s job.
As they blew out the candles that were heating the air for the balloon, Natasha thought about what was going on at the Dacha. It wasn’t just Bernie, the person that this was all about. There was Lazar Smirnov, a member of a cadet branch of a great house, who was sitting in one of the buildings, winding wires in a coil. Slowly, carefully, making what he said would be a generator of electric. He carefully painted the wire with lacquer and laid one circuit around the coil, then waited for it to dry before he did the next. He was a volunteer, here because he wanted to be. Sure, he and Bernie had talked about insulation and electromagnetic fields but he was the one doing the work. And Lazar could have hired a small army to do any work he wanted done. But he wanted to understand electric power, so was doing the work himself.
It was a strange attitude in Lazar and it had come from Bernie. “You want to learn how a machine works, build it yourself. Set someone else to doing it and they’ll learn it instead of you.” Bernie had said that more than once and clearly it was having an effect. Servants here were treated better, talked to, not at. You might need the expertise they had gained on your next project. Natasha was not sure where it would all lead.
Part Three
Chapter 29
January 1633
It worked. Andrei Korisov had tested it, even firing it several times himself. The results were good. Not perfect by any means, but the third major version of the Andrei Korisov Rifle was a workable weapon, even a good one. It seemed to Andrei that it had taken both more and less time than it had. More because of all the frustrations of the last two years and less because it was a genuine revolution in the design of fire arms.
He sent a message to Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev telling him so. Sheremetev sent back, “Send some to the Dacha. Let’s see what they say,” by which Andrei was allowed to know that he was not forgiven yet for the failures of the AK2.
Bernie knelt on the blanket laid out at the Dacha firing range and fired the new gun from the gun shop. It was the third day of testing and it had passed the bench tests pretty well. The lip had helped a lot with the outgassing. It no longer cut you if you had your hand in the wrong place, it just hurt like the blazes.
Bernie wanted to make sure that the outgassing had been licked enough so that it wasn’t a danger to the user. He was also making a point. Andrei wouldn’t get it, but by now Filip would. So would Natasha. Leaders lead. They don’t assign some poor peasant to take the risks.
Bernie opened the chamber lock by the lever-action and pulled the spent chamber. The lever-action allowed the back of the chamber lock to be pushed forward, forcing the lip of the chamber into the barrel. It also allowed for the quick removal and replacement of the firing chamber. Bernie knew that Andrei hated the added complexity of the lever-action. But by now the fact that Andrei didn’t like it made Bernie at least open to the idea. Andrei was probably right that simpler was better both for production and for ease of maintenance. But the lever-action of the chamber lock was simple. Four moving parts, all of them interconnected. Levers moved the back block of the chamber lock back when opened and forward when closed. The back block of the chamber lock was shaped like an upside down barn with a peaked roof, and fit into the back block in only one position. That meant that to line up the chamber only the back and front of the chamber had to be precisely finished, precisely fitted.
He was about to stick another in when he had a thought. He half cocked the lock, flipped up the frizzen, tapped the touch hole on the chamber over the pan. Sure enough, a few grains of powder fell into the pan. Bernie closed the frizzen, inserted the chamber, closed the lever action cocked and fired again.
He looked over at Nick. “How am I doing? Hitting anything?”
“You’re hitting a bit low, Bernie,” Nick told him.
“It’s the black powder drop,” Bernie complained. “After a life time of shooting smokeless, I can’t get used to it. What about adjustable sights, Andrei? I know we talked about them.”
“They are an added expense and no one will know how to use them.”
“Cheap asshole,” Bernie muttered under his breath. But in a way he knew that Andrei was right. Russia wasn’t like Germany, where you published a cheat sheet and suddenly everyone knew how it worked. Likely as not, in a Russian village, there was no one who read or wrote. And if someone did happen to be literate, having something read to you once was not the same thing as having the cheat sheet there to look at. It made it a lot harder to disseminate information in Russia than it was in Germany. And, as best as Bernie could tell, that was just how the powers that be liked it. Bernie reminded himself again that it wasn’t his job to reform Russian politics, then went back to leading by example.
“Okay, Nick. I’ve tried it now. Ten rounds as fast as I can. Time me.”
It took him two minutes to send eight rounds downrange. Call it four rounds a minute as long as he had loaded chambers and used his trick of tapping the chamber to prime the pan. Theoretically, you could do that with a muzzle-loader, though, in the real world, two or three rounds a minute was more likely. And Bernie was firing a new weapon. Given some practice, he could probably get faster. A pro with this thing might get to five or six rounds, though Bernie doubted that even the Russian Davy Crockett would manage more than that. Well, maybe if he had the chambers lined up and handy and didn’t worry about where the chambers went after he fired them.
The AK3 could be reloaded kneeling or prone, and that went for reloading the chambers too. They were only five inches long, after all. With loaded chambers, five to eight rounds a minute. With unloaded chambers, two or three, about even with a muzzle-loader. And as of late January of 1633 there were a grand total three of them in existence.
Bernie stood up. “All right, Andrei. You have a working prototype. We can add a couple minor tweaks, but overall it looks like as good as we are going to get with the tech base we’ve got. How can we help you guys get it into production?”
It was educational, Natasha thought, to see the effect Andrei Korisov has. He was undoubtedly brilliant and often right, but so self-centered and irritating about it that you wanted to argue the other side just to be against him. Andrei’s negative example had helped to open Filip’s eyes to the virtues of treating peasants and servants with respect. Not as much as Bernie’s positive example perhaps, but it had its effect. Natasha knew she was affected the same way Filip was by both. Andrei would point out that Russian peasants couldn’t do this or that. Natasha would immediately want to find one that could-and she usually could. Individually. But how did you get enough of them taught?