The door slammed open, jerking Cass out of his daydreaming. “What is it?”
“We got a message from Moscow,” Andrei said. “A rider brought it.”
“Why didn’t they use the radio?” Cass asked. He and Andrei generally preferred to only deal with the spies they knew about. They weren’t fond of visits from Moscow.
“It’s broken. Again,” Andrei said. The radio network was new, incomplete, and full of problems. It was plagued with equipment failures because each and every radio was hand-built, as were the alternators that powered them. Andrei handed Cass the message.
Cass looked at it blankly. Cass couldn’t read Russian, as Andrei well knew. It was just one more of Andrei’s little digs. Just like the double bandolier Andrei was wearing. More tooling than Cass had, and way the hell more gold leaf. Cass had introduced the bandoliers less than a month after arriving at the Gun Shop and over the past couple of months they’d become all the rage. The advertisement of personal power and wealth that a bandolier full of chambers represented was irresistible to a certain class of Russian noble.
“General Kabanov wants to know when we will be delivering the shipment of AK3’s to the Moscow Streltzi. He’s getting impatient. If we don’t get them there soon, he’s liable to call for an investigation.”
“Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev will never let that happen,” Cass said. “He’s in this up to his eyeballs. We had to pay him enough. Tell Kabanov a month, just like we agreed. Look, Andrei, we’ve talked this out before. Everybody knows that we’re skimming. Only you, me and Ivan Petrovich know how much. This is brand new stuff. There’s no way for anybody outside to tell how many failures we have for every working gun. A fifty percent failure rate isn’t unreasonable. And a forty percent failure rate, with us skimming ten percent, that’s pretty good. Most of your guys aren’t going to realize how well the drop forges are working now. So we sell one gun for every gun we deliver and we make a fortune. We deliver two chambers with every gun and sell five, and we make another fortune. We keep it up a few years, then we retire to rich estates, just like we planned.”
Andrei was rubbing his hands together but it was clear to Cass that Andrei’s sense of entitlement was winning out over his caution.
“So we write General Kabanov a nice letter, telling him that we’ve had serious quality control problems, but we will, through long hours and hard work, soon have the full complement of two hundred rifles for the Moscow Streltzi.”
“And what do we tell him about the cannon?”
Cass winced. The cannon were a whole other issue. Cass wasn’t the most sensitive guy around and he had killed people in the heat of a fight and worked the servants hard in the Gun Shop, but the casual way Andrei sacrificed serfs and slaves to the development of new weapons had horrified him. Well, bothered him, anyway. The problem with the cannon was figuring out how many teeth an iron breechblock needed—or even a moderately high carbon steel one.
When Cass had arrived, Andrei was working up an interrupted screw ten threads deep. Vladimir had provided the basic designs. When a double-charge, the standard testing charge, was tried in the gun, it had blown the breech out as though it hadn’t had any threads. The breechblock had sailed like a cannon ball, bounced off the ground, shifting fifteen degrees to the right, torn through a wall twenty meters behind the gun, and killed four people. Kill was really too mild a word. It had pureed four people. Or at least the parts of them that had been in the way. The only good thing you could say about it was it had mostly been quick.
Andrei wanted to try a fifteen-thread interrupted-screw design next and that was what they had done. Andrei also wanted a Welin breechblock, but he couldn’t have one. The Welin was a complex breechblock with levels of threading so that more of the breech could be threaded. But while Russian craftsmen were good they were slow! slow! slow! in terms of making something as big and complex as a Welin block. Between the Russian craftsmen and the Dacha, they could make standard bolt-cutting and nut-cutting tools in the sizes needed, so the Gun Shop could cut the threads in the breech and the breechblock. But the sort of complex shaping necessary for the Welin would have to be done by hand. And it would take months for a single breech to be hand cut. They made do with an interrupted-screw. Cut the threads into the block and the breech, then grind down the threads so that the block could be slid into the breech and screwed a quarter turn to lock it in place. That meant they needed a longer block and more threads to hold the same amount of force and the metal they were using wasn’t as consistent in its strength as twentieth-century metals which—again—meant a longer, heavier block.