* * *
“I’m going with you.”
Nick Ivanovich looked over at the young lieutenant. “So General Izmailov told me. That’s why I’m pulling two of the four hydrogen tanks. We’ll also be taking less ballast water and less fuel.” Nick wasn’t happy with the situation but he rather liked Tim, one of the more innovative young officers in the Russian army. And young was the word. Tim might be seventeen, but he looked closer to fourteen. “Bernie Zeppi said once that the glamour of flying would get to almost anybody. But it’s dangerous up there. A dirigible is a balancing act. Look there . . .” He pointed. “Those are the lift bladders. They pull the dirigible up but not by a constant amount. There are several factors involved. At night, for instance, the hydrogen gets cooler and loses some buoyancy. Flying one of these things is more like horsemanship than you’d think.”
“A matter of feel and instinct, rather than science, you’re saying.”
“Right. If you gauge it wrong, you’re likely to crash. Fortunately, you’ll probably have more time to react than you would falling off a horse. On the other hand, Testbed here has as much surface area as a three-masted schooner has sails.” Well, not really, Nick admitted silently, but it doesn’t have a hull in the water holding it in place either. “So a sudden change in the wind and we can be a hundred yards away from where we want to be before I can even start to compensate. If we are facing into the wind, or close to it, the engines are enough to move us through the air. But if the wind is from the sides, the wind wins. If it rains on this thing, the weight of the water means even with all the ballast overboard and the bladders at capacity, we don’t have enough lift. We had to drop the radiator more than once in tests at the Dacha and the aerodrome where they are working on the big one. We haven’t had to drop the engines or the boiler yet but it’s rigged to be able to.”
Nick went on to explain about the various controls. The fifty-pound weight that didn’t seem like that much till you realized that it could be moved from the tip to the tail of the dirigible to adjust its balance and angle of attack. That not only the wings, but the engines at their ends rotated as much as thirty degrees, to provide last minute thrust up or down for takeoff and landing. Especially landing. The steam engines could reverse thrust with the turning of a lever, so Testbed didn’t need variable pitch propellers. It was all a bit intimidating.
Chapter 54
Rshev, on the Volga River
“It is a beautiful sight,” Tim said. “Banners flying . . .” He paused a moment, then sighed. “A beautiful sight, noble and glorious. But at the Kremlin in the war games they treated pike units as fortified. Not easy to overrun. Colonel Khilkov didn’t think much of the war games.” In a way, this was like one of those war games, an eagle’s eye view. Tim had played a lot of them, and suddenly, as he watched, he could see the little model units on the field below. He remembered one of the games—an unofficial game—when one of his fellow students had had a bit too much to drink and ordered cavalry to attack undispersed pike units. You were supposed to hit them with cannon first, to break up their formation. And he remembered those cavalry pieces being removed from the board. Ivan had stood, held up one arm, wobbled a bit, lifted the arm again and proclaimed “But, I died bravely!” They had all laughed. Suddenly it didn’t seem funny at all.
“Colonel Khilkov thinks the Poles will break when faced with a cavalry charge . . . and General Izmailov didn’t seem to agree.”
“You’re sounding a bit, ah, concerned there, Tim.” Nick peered though his telescope toward the Polish forces.
Tim nodded. “Colonel Khilkov is . . . a bit difficult.”
The Polish forces didn’t flee. Three thousand Russian cavalry faced a wall of about two thousand Polish infantry, armed with pikes and muskets, as well as the Polish cavalry. The infantry stood in ranks and waited. Then they lowered their pikes and the Russian cavalry charge ran headlong into a porcupine made of men. Then the Poles fired. It was unlikely that the volley killed many men, but it was enough to shatter the Russian formation.
Then it was the Polish cavalry’s turn. They were outnumbered but they were fighting a scattered unit. Colonel Khilkov tried to rally his men and almost managed it. But the Polish infantry had slowly—as infantry must—advanced while the Polish cavalry had been cutting its way through the Russians. Once their own cavalry was mostly clear, the Polish infantry opened fire again.
“It’s all over, mostly,” Nick said. There was, it seemed to Tim, a coldness in Nick’s voice he had not noticed before. “We’d better head back to General Izmailov and tell him.”