Bernie froze.
At first Cass thought he had made his point, but Bernie wasn’t really looking scared. Mostly he was looking pissed off.
It occurred to Cass that pointing a loaded gun at Bernie might be pushing it a bit. He really hadn’t meant to piss Bernie off, not till he got the lay of the land, anyway. Especially, he hadn’t meant to let Bernie-boy know that he was competition.
“Hey man, it’s no big deal,” he said, putting away the gun. “If you got dibs on her, I’ll back off.”
Cass knew he was smarter than Bernie. He hadn’t done well in school, but that was because school just bored him. Besides, he was a football star. He didn’t need to bust his hump in English class. He knew he could pick up what Bernie was doing pretty quick. He could probably push Bernie out, if he wanted to. But he wasn’t going to put up with much crap from the dumb-ass down-timers. Not him. Not ever.
Chapter 42
Cass winced at the bright sunshine when he walked out the door three mornings later. “Oh, man, that hurts.”
“Think you might want to be a little more careful with the booze?” Bernie’s smirk was irritating. “Sun shining off snow can really dazzle you, but the biggest part of your problem is your hangover. Three days and three hangovers. No wonder it hurts.”
“Maybe,” Cass muttered. Drinking was about the only thing he was enjoying. Well, that and the girls. Every place they stayed had servant girls. Even staying away from Bernie’s boss—and wasn’t it a laugh that a girl was the boss in Russia—wasn’t hard, not when you had all those other girls around.
Bernie put on his heavy coat. “You ready? Let’s get a move on. This trip is taking forever. I wish the car was running, I really do. Steering and braking with no power while being towed behind a team of horses is a real pain.”
“What did you expect? The thing sat on blocks for years, man.” Cass snorted. “Let’s go. Get to this Dacha place and see if you can get it running.”
Hours in the carriage with only a couple of troops who didn’t speak English was a real bore. But Cass didn’t want to ride on one of the carts out in the open and especially didn’t want to be on horseback. Too cold for that, by half. It was the usual order today. Out ahead of everyone, a double column of ten guards on horseback spread out. Then came the rolling stock. First came the fancy-ass sleigh that the women were in. Cass hated to admit it, but it was actually kind of neat. Boxy, but still sort of streamlined and buffed to a high gloss. Then Bernie was freezing his ass off in that old junker of his. Cass was behind Bernie’s car in his carriage. Then all the carts with all the stuff the Gorchakov dude had sent. At the end of the line there were six more guards. Plus guards in some of the rolling stock.
* * *
Bernie patted the dash. “Oh, yeah. Once I get it running it will be able to do thirty miles an hour at least. Even on these roads and pulling a bunch of stuff.”
Vladislav Vasl’yevich was riding beside Bernie’s car just then. Partly because he was actually interested in how it worked and could see lots of military applications for these motorized vehicles. Mostly, though, over the course of a day’s travel, he would spend time all along the column. He checked everything, several times a day, to make sure everything was working and looked for trouble before it happened.
Vladislav had seen and reported on hundreds of military applications in the time that Bernie had been at the Dacha. He hadn’t exactly been ignored. The czar now had a .30-06. It was handmade with gold engraving, but there was a very limited supply of bullets. There were people making new guns, flintlocks, but only in small numbers, as experiments. There were the war games in the Kremlin. But in Vladislav’s opinion the military had been slow to consider the potential usefulness of the up-timers’ innovations in weapons and tactics.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing that . . .” Vladislav stopped at the shout from the front of the column and shots ringing out. “Bandits! To the knyazhna.” He looked around to assess the situation.
The road here curved from southeast to east. The bandits had either been spotted by the guards out in front or had sortied too early. Probably spotted—that shout had been Petr Kadian’s. It was a large party, it must be. This many trained solders wouldn’t be easy to overcome. From the noise, there were probably around thirty or forty bandits. Most were hitting the front of the column, and the outriders on the north side, which was the inside of the curve. That meant that Vladislav’s men were more spread out than the bandits were and the bandits could react a little faster. Vladislav noted in passing that Bernie was trying to get his .30-06 out of the back seat of the car. That could help, depending on how Bernie held up in combat.