Gatchina Palace (Гатчина). October 1908.
International politics, Alexei reflected while watching the autumn rain lash against Gatchina's armored glass, resembled too much an old steam boiler: if pressure rises and there are no relief valves, the metal simply explodes.
Baron Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, had just lit the fuse by announcing the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In the history books Alexei remembered from his other life, that was known as the Bosnian Crisis. But here, in the body of a four-year-old child, he felt it as a premature stress test for which the Russian Empire's foundations were not yet set. It was too soon. The cement was fresh.
The atmosphere in Nicholas II's private smoking room was suffocating, and not just from the tobacco. Smoke from Turkish cigarettes floated forming a dense grayish cloud over the heads of Russia's most powerful men. Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, the Tsar's uncle and supreme army chief, struck the mahogany table with a gloved fist, making the brandy glasses clink.
"It's a slap in the face of Orthodoxy!" the Grand Duke roared. His immense mustache vibrated with an almost theatrical martial indignation. "Vienna has betrayed us and spat on the extended hand. Izvolsky has been deceived like a rookie schoolboy on his first day of class. We must mobilize troops on the Galician border immediately! It's imperative to show the Kaiser and his Austrian lackeys that Russia kneels before no one!"
Nicholas II, seated before him, looked dizzy. The Tsar hated direct confrontation; his eyes revealed the internal torture of having to choose between national honor and dynastic survival.
Alexei, relegated to his usual corner on a Persian carpet, evaluated the situation while pretending to be absorbed in a wooden geographical puzzle. He was four years old. His physical reach was short, his legs were weak, but his access to information was absolute thanks to the incipient Romanov Network.
The previous night, his sister Tatiana had passed him an encrypted note, skillfully hidden inside a matryoshka doll they used to play. It was a transcribed summary of the Empress's private and anguished correspondence with her sister in Berlin. The message was clear and terrifying: "Kaiser Wilhelm II will support Austria in shining armor if Russia takes a false step." His sister had caught this information as if it were part of the game.
If Russia mobilized today, Germany would respond tomorrow. The Great War, World War I, would explode in 1908 instead of 1914.
And Russia would lose.
It would lose quickly, humiliatingly, and definitively. Without processed tungsten for cutting tools, without Stolypin's agrarian reform complete, without the modernized railway network. It would be the chaos of 1917, but advanced to 1909.
'We can't fight,' Alexei thought, fitting a wooden piece shaped like Crimea. 'The steel isn't ready. The army still marches with Napoleonic-era tactics toward modern machine gun fire. I need to cool this room before someone does something stupid.'
He stood up with effort and walked toward the large table where strategic maps were deployed, dragging his right leg slightly more than necessary.
"Uncle Nikolasha," Alexei said, gently tugging the sleeve of the gigantic Grand Duke's uniform.
The man turned, lowering his gaze from his nearly two meters of height like a siege tower looking at a peasant. The anger in his eyes softened a bit upon seeing the child.
"What is it, little one?"
"Are we going to fight the Germans?" Alexei asked. His voice had the perfect tremor, a mixture of curiosity and genuine fear.
"We're going to defend Russia's honor, Alexei," the Grand Duke responded, puffing out his chest and adjusting his medals. "Bad men must learn to respect us."
"But... my trains don't work," the child blurted out, dropping the phrase as if it were a broken toy.
The Grand Duke frowned, confused by the topic change.
"Your trains?"
"Yes. I played war with Professor Stanislav yesterday," Alexei lied fluently, pointing with his index finger at the map of Poland and Galicia spread on the table. "I wanted to take my little lead soldiers from Moscow to Warsaw to defend the castle. But the professor told me the tracks are... different. And there's no coal at the southern stations for the locomotives to eat so they can move."
Alexei asked for help with his gaze and, with the assistance of a suddenly attentive Nicholas II grateful for the distraction, climbed onto a chair. He put his small finger on the Warsaw railway hub.
"The professor did the numbers on the blackboard, Papa," Alexei said, looking directly into the Tsar's eyes, ignoring the giant beside him. "If we send all the soldiers now... they'll be stuck here. And here. Without food and cold. And the Germans have very fast trains that blow lots of smoke. They'll arrive before us."
That was a simplification translated into understandable language of a logistical report from the General Staff that Alexei had secretly read (stolen by little Anastasia from the War Minister's briefcase during a tea last week). The report catastrophically detailed how the Russian railway network would collapse under the weight of general mobilization in less than eighteen days.
Nicholas II looked at the map, then looked at his son, and finally fixed his gaze on his uncle. The silence in the room became heavy.
"Is that true, Nikolasha? Is the logistics so disastrous?"
The Grand Duke snorted, annoyed, but couldn't deny the technical reality before the sovereign.
"The quartermaster always complains and whines, Nicky. They're accountants, not warriors. The Russian soldier's spirit is what wins battles, not train schedules..."
"Spirit doesn't stop MG-08 machines, Uncle," Alexei interrupted.
He dropped the phrase, the specific model name of the German machine gun, something no child should know. But he immediately disguised it with a tone of macabre innocence.
"Those machines eat bullets very fast and spit fire. Professor Stanislav told me they make a lot of noise and that horses get easily scared by that sound, also, people fall quickly before those beasts."
Nicholas II's face visibly paled. The mention of superiority brought to his mind the ghosts of Manchuria. He remembered the humiliation against Japan, the reports of modern carnage where valor was useless against artillery.
"We can't risk another defeat, Nikolasha," the Tsar said. His voice gained a firmness born from the fear of losing everything. "Not for Bosnia. Not now. We're not ready."
The Grand Duke opened his mouth to protest, but closed it upon seeing the determination in his nephew's eyes. Russia swallowed its pride that afternoon. The crisis passed. Diplomat Izvolsky was humiliated in Europe's salons, but there was no war. There were no millions of dead.
Alexei got down from the chair and returned to his puzzle. He had bought time. Perhaps six more years... who knows.
. . . . . . .
December 1908. Neva Technical Solutions Office (Saint Petersburg).
Professor Stanislav seemed to have aged a decade in the last six months. The office, an anonymous apartment in the Vyborgsky industrial district, was filled with cheap tobacco smoke and tables covered with blueprints.
Alexei visited the place under the excuse of health walks to strengthen the lungs prescribed by court doctors. His personal guards stayed at the door, conveniently bribed with first-class vodka and the promise that the Tsarevich only wanted to see steam engines and toy trains.
"They've responded, Your Highness," Stanislav said, his voice hoarse from exhaustion. He slid a letter across the work table.
The paper was heavy, cream-colored, with an elegant London letterhead: H&A Holdings.
"A purchase offer?" Alexei asked, not deigning to touch the letter, as if it were contaminated.
"Hostile. Very hostile," Stanislav corrected, rubbing his temples. "They offer to buy all our engine design patents and light alloy formulas for an astronomical sum. An amount that would allow me to retire to the French Riviera tomorrow. But if we refuse... the letter subtly insinuates eternal litigation in international courts, commercial blockades to our suppliers, and a series of 'unfortunate accidents' at our facilities."
Alexei smiled.
"They're afraid," he diagnosed with satisfaction. "The Consortium is accustomed to playing chess against opponents who don't even know they're playing. We've registered the patents before them. We've broken their monopoly and now they're bleeding."
"But they have infinite resources, Your Highness. They're buying judges in Paris, London, and New York. They have banking on their side."
"Let them buy what they want," Alexei said disdainfully. "I don't care about money, Stanislav. I care about time. Every month they spend suing us in court is a month they don't control the technology. It's a war of attrition and we're on our home turf."
Alexei put his hand in his fur coat pocket and pulled out a small metallic object. He dropped it on the table. It was an industrial drill bit. Dark gray, heavy, with a matte shine.
"Tungsten?" the professor asked, his eyes opening with technical curiosity.
"High-speed steel," Alexei corrected. "The first sample successfully processed with Tyrnyauz mineral. Stolypin gave it to me yesterday in secret. We're already re-equipping the Tula weapons factory with cutting tools made from this material."
Alexei spun the drill bit on the table with a finger tap. The metallic sound was sharp.
"This doubles our artillery shell production speed. This allows us to turn cannons in half the time. While others spend money on English lawyers, we're building the industrial capacity to win the coming war."
"Your Highness... there's something else," Stanislav said, lowering his voice and looking toward the closed door, paranoid. "They're not just buying companies. They're buying... people."
"People?"
"Scientists. Engineers. Mathematicians. They're aggressively recruiting at German and Russian universities. Their agents offer salaries not even the Tsar could pay with all the Treasury's gold. They're taking the best brains. Igor Sikorsky received a formal offer last week to move to the United States and work in a private laboratory."
Sikorsky. The name hit Alexei. The father of helicopters and strategic heavy bombers.
Alexei felt a pang of real alarm, more than the threat of war. If the Consortium drained human talent, Russia's natural resources wouldn't matter. A country without brains is just a farm waiting to be conquered.
"Sikorsky stays," Alexei ordered, his tone admitting no reply. "Offer him unlimited funding for his Ilya Muromets project. Give him a complete hangar on Gatchina grounds if necessary. Tell him the Tsarevich wants to fly and that he'll be the one to build my wings."
"And if money isn't enough?"
"Then use patriotism. Or fear. Or vanity. They are a corporate predator without a flag, a money-making machine. We are the Motherland," Alexei said, getting down from the chair with difficulty. "And Stanislav... prepare a complete list. Mendeleev already died, unfortunately, but I want all his students. Vernadsky. Zhukovsky. Tsiolkovsky. We're going to nationalize Russian genius before the Consortium exports it like wheat."
. . . . . . .
January 1909.
The Romanov Network detected the first incursion within the secure perimeter.
It wasn't a guard who gave the alarm, but Tatiana. The Grand Duchess found one of the new maids photographing documents on Nicholas II's private desk with a tiny camera, hidden in a makeup case.
The curious thing was that the woman wasn't photographing state documents or secret treaties; she was photographing Alexei's childish drawings. The maps he painted with crayons, the machine schematics he left forgotten, and the mineral lists.
The maid was intercepted before leaving the west wing. Not by the Okhrana (Охрана), the usual secret police, but by Stolypin's personal agents, alerted by an anonymous note written by little Olga with her impeccable calligraphy.
Under intense interrogation, the woman confessed in tears. She didn't work for the Germans, nor for the socialist revolutionaries. She worked for an English man who called himself Valeri. A private consultant who paid in gold pounds sterling and who only asked obsessive questions about the Tsarevich and his pastimes.
"Valeri," Alexei murmured when Stolypin told him a censored, child-appropriate version of the story (a bad woman wanted to steal his drawings to sell them).
Valeri. A classic operative name.
"Uncle Pyotr," Alexei said that night, while the Prime Minister personally reviewed the palace's new security protocols. "Can we put new locks on the doors?"
"We'll put Cossack guards at your door day and night, Your Highness. No one will enter."
"No," Alexei said, shaking his head slowly. He looked at his own hands, small and fragile. "Guards can look the other way if they're given enough gold. I want my sisters to learn to shoot."
Stolypin blinked, completely surprised by the request. He stopped dead.
"The Grand Duchesses? Their Imperial Highnesses with firearms?"
"Yes. And me too," Alexei said, with absolute seriousness that contrasted with his silk pajamas. "Papa says times are dangerous. I want to be able to protect Mama if bad men come in again."
Stolypin looked at him for a long time. In that child's eyes he saw something that chilled his blood and, at the same time, gave him a strange hope for the Dynasty's future. He saw the iron will to survive at any cost.
"I'll speak with the regiment's shooting instructor first thing tomorrow, Your Highness," Stolypin conceded with a formal bow.
Alexei nodded, satisfied. If the world was going to try to kill them, the Romanovs would return fire.