Nick ended up using more fuel than expected to keep on course. There was some steam leakage but it wasn’t too bad. All of which meant that he might have made it to Rzhev and back. Or, if he went all the way to Rzhev, he might run out of fuel or water before he could get back.
* * *
“I was forced to abort, General.” Nick shook his head. “Wind was awful and kept blowing me off course. But I did get a bit better than halfway and didn’t see the first sign of the Poles. No advancing troops, not in this direction.”
Izmailov turned to the mercenary sergeant. “Did your scouts see the entire army? This so-called ten-thousand-man army?”
“No,” Hampstead admitted. “My scouts saw the leading elements. About three thousand men. And that’s still more than my five hundred could face with any hope of victory.”
“How do you know it was the leading elements? Not the whole force?”
“The formation was spread out like a screening element. Why put a screening element out when there’s nothing to screen?”
The answer to that seemed obvious to Tim—to hide the fact that that was all you had. To bluff. Still, the sergeant’s point about the size of his force was well taken. Why bluff against a force of only five hundred men? Tim could think of two reasons. If the attacking force didn’t know how big the force in Rzhev was, they might try a bluff to get a force of a thousand or fifteen hundred to retreat and avoid a battle against an entrenched opponent. Two-to-one odds aren’t that great when the enemy is behind walls.
Or it could be that the bluff—if it was a bluff—was intended not for the sergeant but for . . . well, them. The relieving force. Tim looked over at the wagons holding Testbed and smiled.
General Izmailov was shaking his head. “There are a lot of reasons why you might arrange your troops in a pattern that will, at first sight, look like a screen . . .”
* * *
Though General Izmailov didn’t know it, the commander of the Polish invaders had not, in fact, formed his force into a screen. He had split his force into three columns of a thousand men to facilitate gleaning. The scout had spotted the center column and swung wide around it which had taken him right into the second column. He had assumed that the two columns were the ends of a large screening element but hadn’t checked.
* * *
There were four wagons in the dirigible contingent. One carried the dirigible while on the march—or served as a moving anchor for it, rather. The dirigible floated about fifteen feet above the wagon and was cranked down to ground level and tied down with spikes driven into the ground at night or in bad weather. That wagon also carried the pump that was used to compress hydrogen gas for the canisters. Another wagon carried equipment and materials for the production of hydrogen gas. A third carried equipment for field repairs and the fourth carried the repair crew. After the aborted trip, they spent two days worth of breaks on the march doing maintenance before they felt safe with the thing untethered again. General Izmailov was not pleased.
“I’m sorry, General,” Nick Ivanovich said. “But there is a reason we call the dirigible ‘Testbed.’ It’s an experimental design to test concepts in aviation.” The term “aviation” was English but Izmailov was familiar with it by now. “To the best of our knowledge, nothing quite like it has ever existed in this or any other history. The engines are handmade by Russian craftsman, as are the lift bladders, the wings.”
Nick hid a grin. The designer would hate him calling the control surfaces “wings.” They weren’t designed to provide lift, but control. In fact, they provided a bit of both. The “wings” acted as elevators at the tail of the dirigible. More were located between the gondola and the motors. They didn’t provide much lift, but by pointing the dirigible’s nose up or down, he could gain or lose a little altitude without having to dump ballast or gas. Or use the emergency tanks to refill the lift bladders.
“They were well made, but by people who had no way to do more than guess about the stresses they would face. It’s steam powered and if they had steam powered dirigibles up-time, we haven’t heard about it. That’s why they built it—to see.”
“So why don’t we have an improved version or one of the airplanes that the up-timers have?” Izmailov sounded impatient and gruff.
“Engines, sir. Ours are both heavy and weak They wouldn’t get a heavier-than-air craft off the ground. There is one engine in Russia that might lift an airplane off the ground. That engine is in the car Bernie Zeppi brought to Russia.” This wasn’t entirely true, as Nick well knew. The engines they had built for the dirigible would get an airplane off the ground just fine. It was the added weight of the water, the boiler and the steam recovery that had so far made down-time-built steam-powered heavier-than-air craft impossible. Without the recovery system, a steam powered aircraft would work fine for a few minutes before the water was all used up. Water weighed a lot.