January 10, 1912. 9:00 AM.
Non-Ferrous Metal Foundry, Putilov Industrial Complex. Vyborgsky District, Saint Petersburg.
The air inside Hall 4 wasn't breathed in any normal sense of the word, and there was a bitter irony in that, it was chewed, like an invisible substance with physical weight, like a soup you could feel on your tongue. It had texture. It had mass. And it had a taste that clung and refused to leave: sweet at first, then metallic, with a thread of bitterness that any trained chemist would have recognized as dangerously seductive.
It was the unmistakable, characteristic flavor of lead vapor.
To any competent doctor of the era, those who had read the British studies on industrial poisoning, those who had seen the mortality figures from the Leadville mines in Colorado or the white-paint factories of London, that smell was a medical omen as clear as blood in a cough. It meant saturnine colic that twisted men's intestines until they screamed for morphine. It meant gums that turned slate-blue, a symptom so characteristic that the ancient Romans had already noted it. It meant progressive tremors in the hands, memory loss, personality changes, and finally a slow but inevitable madness that turned productive workers into human shadows drooling in asylums.
But to Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, standing on the elevated observation walkway, an iron structure bolted to the wall at 16 feet (5 meters) above the floor, protected by thick double-pane safety glass panels manufactured in Belgium, that toxic scent was the intoxicating perfume of industrial independence.
The paradoxes of progress, yes.
Below, on the foundry floor stretching out like a landscape from Dante's Inferno, the spectacle was simultaneously hellish and utterly captivating to any engineering mind. Hall 4 was a cavernous space, 98 feet wide by 196 feet long (30 meters by 60 meters), with a vaulted ceiling of riveted steel beams reaching 39 feet (12 meters) at its highest point, designed specifically to handle molten metals at temperatures that could melt human flesh in seconds.
Men in thick leather aprons treated with alum, leather that still bore burns and dark stains from previous splashes, and protective goggles with smoked green glass manipulated giant crucibles the size of wine barrels. The crucibles, made from refractory graphite imported from Germany at a premium price, hung from steel chains as thick as a human arm, suspended from overhead gantry cranes running on ceiling rails.
The liquid metal inside those crucibles, a carefully calculated alloy of seventy parts lead, fifteen tin, ten antimony, and five copper, gleamed with a gray, heavy luster under the yellow light of arc lamps. It flowed like lazy mercury when poured, moving with that characteristic density of heavy metals, into the prepared sand molds that would define the final shape of the bearings.
"Babbitt metal." Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky's voice cut through Alexei's thoughts. The young aeronautical engineer, barely twenty-three years old but already recognized as one of the sharpest aviation minds in all of Europe, stood beside the Tsarevich with his arms crossed in a posture that screamed contained frustration.
His voice carried none of the usual enthusiasm he showed when talking about lift coefficients or wing design innovations. It sounded resigned, almost somber, like an artist forced to paint with mud when he was used to working with fine oils.
"Locomotive steam technology from the 1890s, Your Highness. Isaac Babbitt patented it in the United States nearly twenty years ago for railroad axle bearings." Sikorsky gestured toward the molds with a motion bordering on contempt. "It's heavy. It's soft as warm butter. It wears down if you look at it wrong. The alloy has a low melting point, only 464 degrees Fahrenheit (240 degrees Celsius), which means in high-temperature applications it tends to flow plastically." He paused, adjusting the round glasses that constantly slid down his nose. "It's grandfather technology, Your Highness. Everything a modern engineer should avoid."
"But it works, Igor." Alexei replied without taking his eyes off the fascinating silver flow of molten metal now filling a mold in the shape of a cylindrical bearing. "And what is infinitely more important in our current situation: it's ours. Entirely ours."
Alexei tapped the safety glass gently with his knuckle, the sound coming back dull.
"We don't depend on a specific factory in Schweinfurt, Germany, that produces the finest ball bearings in the world. We don't depend on the high-alloy chrome-nickel steel the British sell us at inflated prices and can ration whenever it suits them politically. We don't depend on machining tolerances of four-tenths of a thousandth of an inch (0.01 millimeters) that require Swiss lathes costing a fortune."
Alexei turned to look directly at Sikorsky, those eyes of his, always seeming too old for his boyish face, fixed and intent.
"The lead is ours, Igor. Completely, absolutely ours. The Urals are literally full of galena. We have mines in Salair, in Ridder, in Nerchisk. We could produce a thousand tons a month if necessary. The tin comes from our own mines in Transbaikalia. The antimony from Racha. The copper from Dzhezkazgan. The entire supply chain sits inside our borders."
The young aeronautical engineer ran a hand through his light brown hair, a gesture of frustration Alexei had learned to recognize. Sikorsky dreamed of duralumin eagles carving through the sky, of light and powerful engines that defied gravity with mathematical grace. And Alexei, the Tsarevich who somehow understood engineering better than men with decades of experience, was forcing him to build mechanical oxen out of cast iron.
"I understand the politics, Your Highness." Sikorsky exhaled deeply. "But as an engineer, I must point out the technical consequences. The Western embargo on precision ball bearings killed the high-performance engine design we had on the drawing boards entirely."
He moved to a side table where several technical blueprints were spread out, held at the corners by metal weights to keep them from rolling up. His fingers traced lines on the drawings as he spoke.
"To compensate for the inherent friction in these Babbitt metal plain bearings, which is roughly four times greater than a well-lubricated ball bearing, Stanislav had to design that... that monstrosity of an oil pump." He pointed to a diagram of what looked more like an industrial water pump than an engine component. "It's a positive-displacement gear pump the size of a watermelon. We force the lubricant, high-viscosity mineral oil at 60 pounds per square inch (4.1 bar) of pressure, directly between the sliding surfaces of the crankshaft and the bearings. Only that way do we create a hydrodynamic film thick enough so that metal never directly touches metal."
Sikorsky shook his head.
"But that monstrous pressure requires massive reinforcement. The engine block had to be completely redesigned, cast in thicker gray iron with additional reinforcing ribs to withstand not only the combustion pressure in the cylinders but also the hydraulic pressure of the lubrication system. We added nearly 44 pounds (20 kilograms) of iron in structural reinforcements alone." He pulled out another blueprint showing a side-by-side comparison. "The final result is the Neva-3B engine you saw running in the trucks. It produces the same 120 horsepower as the original design with imported bearings. But it weighs forty percent more. 926 pounds instead of 661 (420 kilograms instead of 300). The power-to-weight ratio dropped from 0.40 to 0.28 horsepower per kilogram."
Sikorsky looked at Alexei with something close to professional despair.
"If I put that engine in an airplane, Your Highness, it will literally be an iron brick with propellers. It will never get off the ground. Or if it does manage to get airborne, it will fly like a piano thrown off a cliff: very quickly downward."
"Then we won't do that yet." Alexei decided with that quiet firmness his subordinates had learned meant the discussion was over. "We're not building racing planes this winter, Igor. We're not designing aerobatic fighters or long-range aircraft. Not yet."
He walked along the metal walkway, his boots ringing on the steel grating.
"We're going to build pack mules."
"Mules?" Sikorsky blinked.
"We'll put this heavy but reliable engine in the Russo-Balt trucks. In agricultural tractors for the countryside. In stationary generators. In water pumps for irrigation. In shunting locomotives for rail yards." Alexei counted applications on his fingers. "Russia doesn't need to run gracefully yet, Igor. First it needs to learn to haul heavy loads reliably."
He stopped, resting his hands on the walkway railing, looking down where a foreman with a thunderclap voice was shouting orders in thick Ukrainian dialect for a team of workers to skim the floating dross from a crucible using long steel ladles.
"Listen carefully, Igor, because I know this hurts you professionally." Alexei spoke without turning, his voice quieter now. "You want aerodynamic elegance. You want mathematical perfection. You want to build machines that make French engineers weep with admiration at the Paris Air Salon. I understand that. I want that too."
He finally turned to face his chief engineer.
"But our enemies and their partners have declared a war of economic suffocation against us. They don't want to destroy us militarily, at least not yet. They want our factories to grind to a halt for lack of 'perfect' imported components. They want us dependent on their supply chains, their inflated prices, their goodwill. If we play their game by their rules, we lose inevitably. They'll strangle us slowly." Alexei pointed toward the crude Neva-3B engine being noisily assembled on a test bench at the far end of the hall, surrounded by mechanics with heavy tools. "That engine you see there is objectively ugly by any refined engineering standard. It vibrates like a minor earthquake. It spits black smoke visible for miles. It sounds like an icebreaker forcing its way through the frozen Volga. But it has three virtues worth more than all the elegance in the world."
He raised one finger.
"First... it works. At 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 30 degrees Celsius). In sandstorms. In the spring mud of Siberia. It works."
A second finger. "Second... it's repairable in the field. If that engine breaks down in the middle of Siberian nowhere, three days from the nearest village, a blacksmith with basic tools can re-cast a Babbitt bearing using an iron ladle, an improvised crucible, and a campfire. No specialized workshop needed. No micrometer tolerances required."
A third finger.
"Third... it is completely Russian. Every component, every gram of material, every manufacturing process is under our absolute control. We cannot be blackmailed. We cannot be blockaded. We are independent."
Alexei lowered his hand.
"Reliable. Rugged. Russian. That is the holy trinity of survival engineering on our land."
Sikorsky stared at the engine on the test bench for a long moment. His face showed an internal struggle between the professional pride of an engineer who demands perfection and the understanding of a strategist who sees the full picture. Slowly, very slowly, he was beginning to grasp the brutal but inescapable logic of the Tsarevich.
This wasn't engineering designed to impress at a Paris air salon, with champagne and aristocrats applauding elegance. It was engineering designed to survive in real mud, on endless steppes, in an empire that measured distances in weeks of travel and where the word "remote" carried meanings that Western Europeans could not begin to imagine.
"I understand the logic on the ground, Your Highness." Sikorsky finally conceded, nodding slowly. "For surface applications, vehicles and stationary machinery, your argument holds. We can build an army of reliable machines." He paused, and when he continued, his voice carried a new note. "But you promised me the sky, Your Highness. You brought me here with promises of unlimited resources to conquer the air. How am I supposed to lift the Ilya Muromets, the four-engine heavy bomber we've designed, or the new fighters on the drawing boards, with these lead anchors hanging off the wings? The math simply doesn't work. Weight kills lift on everything we've planned."
Alexei smiled. It was a small but genuine smile. He knew he had to give the frustrated genius an exit, a concrete technical hope, a light at the end of the tunnel, or he'd lose him to creative depression or, worse, to bribery offers from foreign agents trying to recruit Russian talent.
"There is a way to compensate for the excess weight of a heavy engine in aerial applications, Igor. It's a fairly simple equation, really."
"Which?" Sikorsky leaned forward, his professional interest reigniting immediately.
"If the machine's heart is unavoidably heavy, then its skeleton must be proportionally light." Alexei spoke as if explaining an obvious mathematical axiom. "Simple Newtonian physics. Reducing structural mass to compensate for increased propulsive mass."
Sikorsky frowned, processing.
"Forget pine and fir wood for fuselage structures. Forget Irish linen fabric for control surfaces. Forget even the tubular steel we now use for the main spars."
"Are you suggesting... aluminum?" Sikorsky asked, skepticism evident in every syllable. "Your Highness, with all due respect, duralumin, the copper-hardened aluminum alloy Alfred Wilm developed in Germany, is little more than an expensive metallurgical curiosity at this point. It's notoriously difficult to work with, it requires special riveting techniques, and it's as scarce as gold." He gestured toward the smoking stacks of the plant's coal-fired thermal station, visible through the hall's high windows. "Russia currently produces less than 11 short tons (10 metric tons) of primary aluminum per year, Your Highness. Barely enough to make decorative utensils and a few experimental components. To produce aluminum at scale we need massive quantities of cheap electricity for the Hall-Héroult process, electrolysis of molten alumina. We're talking about 20,000 kilowatt-hours per ton of aluminum."
Sikorsky shook his head.
"And our current power plants burn Cardiff coal imported from Wales. If we try to scale aluminum production to build aircraft, someone will simply drive up the price of British coal to prohibitive levels, or convince the Welsh miners' unions to call a 'spontaneous' strike that cuts off supply. They'll leave us literally in the dark. Total industrial blackout."
There it was. The next critical link in the chain of dependencies.
Alexei visualized the industrial infrastructure map in his mind, that mental diagram he kept constantly updated with every new piece of intelligence. According to informants, those behind Anglo-Russian Mining & Metallurgical Corp. controlled the critical chemical patents for modern industrial processes. They controlled German and Swiss precision machinery. And through their connections with British coal companies and the banks financing electrical grids, they indirectly controlled the energy supply to Russia's major cities, including Saint Petersburg.
If Alexei wanted abundant, cheap aluminum to build lightweight aircraft, and if he wanted genuine strategic independence for his entire manufacturing base, he needed to break the fatal addiction to foreign coal.
"Forget coal entirely, Igor." Alexei said with a coolness that sent a chill through the engineer despite the foundry heat. "Coal is the past. Coal is chains. Coal is dependency."
"Then what do we burn to generate electricity?" Sikorsky asked, genuinely puzzled. "Wood? Peat? Both have terrible energy densities and would produce ridiculous amounts of ash."
"We don't burn anything at all." Alexei replied. "We're going to tame water. We're going to harness gravity. We're going to look ahead."
Alexei adjusted the collar of his wool coat. The sharp smell of lead was beginning to give him a throbbing headache behind his eyes, that pressure sensation he recognized as the first signs of mild intoxication.
"Tomorrow morning, first thing, we're going to meet with Engineer Graftio at his office. Genrikh Graftio, the hydroelectric specialist. We're going to discuss the construction of a large-scale hydroelectric dam, Igor. A true giant. And I promise you on my honor that when it's running, you'll have so much cheap aluminum you can build solid aluminum armored aircraft if that's what you want."
Sikorsky blinked several times, his engineering brain struggling to process the implications.
"A large-scale hydroelectric dam? Now? In the middle of an economic crisis? With the Imperial treasury already strained by all the other ongoing projects? Your Highness, the capital cost would be astronomical. We're talking millions of rubles. Decades of construction. Displacement of populations. Massive excavation."
"Exactly. That's why we start now, not later." Alexei nodded. "Great infrastructure isn't built when it's convenient, Igor. It's built when it's necessary, and it's finished when it has long since become urgently critical."
He looked down at the workers coughing through the smoke as they poured another ladle of molten metal. Their faces, visible between columns of toxic steam, showed the exhaustion of men working twelve-hour shifts breathing poison.
"And one more thing, Igor. Something important." Alexei pointed to the workers with a gesture that swept across the entire hall. "That smoke you see. The lead vapor. The metallic fumes. All of it is poison that accumulates. I've read the most recent medical reports from the British Medical Society and German industrial hospitals."
"It's the unavoidable price of modern industry, Your Highness." Sikorsky replied in a tone suggesting he had accepted this as an immutable fact. "Progress always has human costs. The workers know that when they take the job."
"No." Alexei cut in with a firmness that made Sikorsky straighten instinctively. "That's the price of negligence and greed, not of progress. Real progress means finding ways to advance without needlessly sacrificing your own people."
He turned to look directly at Sikorsky.
"Talk to Stanislav this afternoon. I want industrial air extractors, large-capacity centrifugal fans with ducts carrying the vapors upward and out of the building, installed in this hall before the end of this month. And respirator masks for every worker handling molten metals. Masks with activated carbon filters, not those useless rags they wear now."
"That will cost-".
"I don't care what it costs." Alexei interrupted. "If my men fall sick with lead poisoning, if their brains are slowly destroyed until they can't remember simple procedures, if their hands shake too badly to hold tools, then they can't build my engines efficiently. Illness reduces productivity. Health increases output. Genuine efficiency requires clean lungs and functioning minds."
He started walking toward the walkway exit.
"Besides, it's the right thing to do. And I will not build Russia's future on the avoidable graves of Russian workers. There is enough unavoidable death in the world without adding criminal negligence to the list."
Alexei paused at the door leading to the staircase.
"Come on, Igor. We have a meeting with Engineer Graftio tomorrow morning, and you need to prepare preliminary calculations on how much electrical power we'll need for industrial-scale aluminum production. The future doesn't wait."
He stopped, drawing in a breath of the cleaner air from the outer corridor.
"Besides, out here it smells like the Neva River instead of a foundry from hell. I know which one I prefer."
. . . . .
[Nemryz: If you've enjoyed this story and want to read ahead, I have more chapters available on my patreon.com/Nemryz. Your support helps me continue writing this novel and AU. Thank you for reading!
I have a question, I'm not sure if you guys can answer it. I don't really know what Power Stones are for, but I'm really grateful that you give them to me. Can you tell me what they are for? Are they something important?]