Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3)

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Gustey discarded her listening equipment and crouched beside her chair.

  Felix also crouched, clamping one hand around the helm wheel stanchion. “I would suggest that you all find something solid to grab ahold of,” he said. “But stay away from the bulkheads—the force of a depth charge blow against the hull will kill you.”

  Taking a firm grip on the periscope housing, Buckle knelt. Sabrina and Welly tucked in beside him. Penny Dreadful huddled with them, its eyes glowing in the dark.

  “I am quite frightened,” Penny Dreadful said.

  “As are we all, Penny,” Sabrina answered, patting the automaton’s metal shoulder.

  Everyone looked up at the piped ceiling, cringing, waiting. Water trickled and sprayed but the wetness of clothing and skin was forgotten now.

  “I hope somebody sold the Founders a nice set of duds,” Welly whispered, his voice hoarse.

  They listened and they waited. Time for Buckle became suspended in the wavering dark. He felt the approach of the unseen depth charges, fuses burning inside watertight barrels packed with explosives, falling upon them at great speed. A group of strange underwater creatures floated past the bridge windows, their near transparent, jelly-fleshed bodies glowing a faint purplish-red, propelling their fragile bodies by thrusting water out of dozens of tubular appendages. Buckle did not know if they were earth animals or alien transplants.

  The dull thud of an underwater detonation made Buckle tense, with Welly and Sabrina clutching alongside him, but the distance of it took the bite out of his apprehension. The Dart rocked gently, pressed down from above.

  “Too shallow,” Kishi muttered. “Maybe this captain thinks we didn’t have the brass.”

  “He’d never suspect we’re this deep,” Felix said.

  “There are two canisters,” Gustey said. “And they have probably dropped more. I’d suspect that first charge’s fuse detonated prematurely.”

  “Always the pessimist, Gustey,” Kishi said.

  An elephant—at least, that was what it felt like—landed on Buckle’s back and if he hadn’t been holding on to the periscope he would have been driven flat to the deck. In the wallop of sound and pressure that hit him, the bridge shuddered so violently that everything blurred. Metal screamed and braces twisted. Pipes burst, spraying water and steam. Instruments cracked, firing splinters of glass and fountains of green glowing boil.

  “Fire in the engine room!” a voice shouted from the chattertube.

  “Damn it to hell!” Felix roared, throwing himself to the chattertube hood. “Shut down all boilers! Shut them down!”

  “We’ve lost all internal pressure readings,” Rachel shouted as loose mercury wiggled across her instrument panel. “All gauges are shot.”

  “Stand fast,” Felix answered. “We’re either dead or we’re not.”

  “Fire extinguished,” the voice on the chattertube rang out.

  Felix leaned back into the hood. “Good show!”

  “Brace yourselves,” Gustey said, back on her headgear. “Two more coming down!”

  “We’ve got to move, Felix,” Kishi said, clicking her stopwatch, her face etched with fright. “They’ve got us on the hook, you hear me? We’ve got to move!”

  “We can’t move,” Felix snapped. “We sit here and take it. We take it.”

  Gustey placed her headgear aside and crept under the map table.

  “We’re between the devil and the deep now,” Felix muttered, eyes shining, looking up.

  Buckle took a good hold of the periscope housing. It was dripping with boil and now his hand glowed with little green rivers. Thick smoke crept onto the bridge, the result of the engine room fire, and made him and everyone else cough. Take it, Felix had said. Sit down and take it. Buckle grew angry. Iron coffins indeed.

  Another concussion hit them, more violent that the last. The force of its hammer blow through the deck slapped Buckle’s heels so hard it felt like his foot bones had separated from their ligaments. Knocked reeling through the spray of boil and debris, he grabbed ahold of Sabrina and she grabbed hold of him, both of them toppling into a heap.

  The second depth charge went off within two seconds of the first. There was nothing to do but cringe. A wooden cabinet near Buckle’s head splintered with a loud crack. Boiling steam rocketed from a dozen compromised pipes, churning the bridge atmosphere into a dense, choking fog.

  The sound of the depth charge echoed away and the submarine went still. But the quiet, with what it promised to bring with it again, was almost as loud as the explosions. “Blue blazes!” Buckle said as he rolled to his feet, slapping at his stinging ear. “Is everyone alright?”

  “Aye,” came the uneven response from Sabrina and Welly.

  “I am undamaged,” Penny Dreadful announced.

  Buckle looked at Felix; the man’s face was calm, his mouth working. At first Buckle thought Felix had gone into shock—and that was most disturbing—but then he realized the Dart’s captain was counting, maintaining some equation of time and distance in his head. “How many more, Gustey?” Felix asked.

  I don’t know, Felix,” Gustey replied. “I only heard the two before I took my gear off.”

  Felix leapt to the forward windows, peering upwards. “Quickly, very quickly, Gustey—I need to know exactly where that submersible is. Then get those earpieces off.”

  “Aye, Captain!” Gustey said, retaking her station and planting the mufflers on her ears.

  “Felix—” Kishi started in the dribbling silence.

  “Shhhh,” Felix said.

  Gustey cocked her head and closed her eyes, turning a direction finder dial in front of her. “He’s drifted forward, just forward of us by a league or a league and quarter,” Gustey answered. “Depth still holding at five hundred.”

  Another depth charge detonated off to starboard. The Dart reeled against the punch. Buckle and the others were thrown toward the port bulkhead. A voluminous gush of seawater burst down around the periscope housing, fresh with the fish-salt stink of the sea.

  Gustey screamed and threw off her headphones, gripping her ears. Blood rushed out between her fingers. She collapsed. Felix caught her before she hit the floor.

  “Gustey!” Felix shouted, lowering her gently. “You, scarlet,” he said, looking at Sabrina. “Hold her—keep her head off the deck!”

  Sabrina scrambled forward to cradle Gustey.

  “We’re flooding!” Kishi coughed as she reached for a set of wooden handles. “Engaging emergency pumps.”

  “No!” Felix howled, lunging through the smoke to peer at the engineering station instruments beside Rachel. “Don’t’ waste the pressure left in the boilers. Ready to blow tanks!” He jumped to the chattertube. “Torpedo room! Flood tubes one and two and ready to fire!”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” came the breathless response. “One and two!”

  Felix fired a grim-jawed smile at Kishi. “Shall we ride the monster, my dear?”

  The fear in Kishi’s face dropped away, replaced by a buccaneer’s grin. “That is the most romantic thing you have ever said to me.”

  VIII

  THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP

  The Dart’s metal heart boomed as Felix and Rachel wound two control wheels around, releasing pressurized air into the ballast tanks. The submarine responded, jumping upward into the darkness, rising at the nose so abruptly everyone had to grab hold of the nearest bolted-down object or risk sliding away.

  The wounded Dart heaved to port, threatening to roll over on her back. No matter. Buckle was relieved to be moving up.

  “Trim! Trim! Maintain even keel, damn it!” Felix ordered.

  Kishi, her neck reddening as she fought the stabilizer controls, made a sound like a choked-off guffaw. “Get over here and do it yourself, jackass! You keep this overinflated bitch from rolling!”

  “I’m docking your pay!” Felix replied, rather ineffectually.

  “I’ll dock your manhood with a gutting knife!” Kishi countered.

  “It
’s an asylum down here!” Sabrina yelled.

  The Dart lurched onto a more even keel, accelerating, hurtling upward as if shot out of a cannon. A harsh vibration rattled through the boat.

  “You’re doing a fine job, Kishi!” Buckle shouted. “Captain Felix, what’s the plan? You do have a plan, correct?”

  “We’re going to put a pair of torpedoes right up that Founders’ arse,” Felix said. “His stern observer will see us, he’ll try to run—blow his tanks, even—but we’ll get the angle on his tail before he can get that behemoth going.”

  “Doesn’t he have stern tubes?” Sabrina asked.

  “Won’t help him,” Felix replied. “Not at the speed we’re going. But we can’t stop our ascent. We’ll only get one shot at this. If we miss we’ll be stuck on the surface and he can sink us at his leisure.”

  “I do like being on the attack after all of this punishment, Captain,” Buckle said.

  “So do I,” Felix answered, slapping two levers shut above his head and leaning into the chattertube hood. “Torpedo room, on my mark—ready to fire!”

  “Ready to fire, aye!” came the hearty response.

  The Dart continued to rise, faster and faster, the upward rush against gravity making Buckle feel heavy on his feet. A blast of hot, coal-smelling air hit him, expressed from one valve or another, but it did clear the smoke out of his face.

  Hints of light fluttered on the windows and then the great green-blue sunlit surface of the iceberg-laden sea exploded into view. The brightness of it hurt Buckle’s dark-accustomed, smoke-irritated eyes and made him blink. But he would much prefer to die on the surface, with the light on his face, with decent air for a last breath.

  Three hundred feet above them, a huge black oval silhouette blocked the sparkling surface illumination. The Founders submarine, a spiny metal leviathan fluked and bristling with hatches and glass, amber-lit window ports, arrays of tubes belching streams of black, white, gray and clear bubbles, sat motionless in the ocean sky. The Dart was rising so tightly under the Founders’ stern Buckle began to worry they might collide with the enemy’s motionless propellers.

  The Dart continued to rocket up and up.

  “If we hit our mark and sink this bastard we buy ourselves time,” Felix said. “Once we breach the surface we’ll vent for air and submerge to periscope depth to effect repairs. All we have to do is get one shaft back on line. We’re inside the blockade area now. Atlantis isn’t much more than a thousand leagues ahead.”

  “They’ve seen us,” Rachel reported.

  In a sudden, cyclonic explosion of air bubbles, the Founders submarine began to ascend. The captain, realizing his situation, had blown her tanks.

  But the little Dart was much faster. Buckle watched through the mist-wreathed interior of the bridge as they rose behind the submersible’s two huge bronze propellers, both mottled light green and bigger than the Dart itself. The blades began to turn. Buckle saw two navy blue uniformed figures moving around inside the submersible’s stern observation window, located in a bulge on the keel twenty feet forward of the propellers.

  “Ready to fire!” Felix shouted into the chattertube.

  “We’re too close!” Kishi screamed.

  “No matter,” Felix said. “This is our only chance.”

  Buckle looked up. They were now tantalizingly close to the surface of the ocean and rising at such a speed that they would surely throw themselves into the air before coming back down again. The stern of the Founder’s submarine loomed squarely in front of the Dart, and no more than thirty feet away.

  Felix leaned into the chattertube hood. “Fire! Both tubes! Fire!”

  Buckle heard the buzz of propellers, the sudden wallop of compressed air, the scrape of long metal objects rattling out of metal tubes.

  “Fish away!” shouted the voice on the chattertube. “Numbers one and two away!”

  “We’re too damned close!” Kishi screamed.

  “Brace for impact!” Felix shouted.

  Buckle saw the torpedoes race through the water: long, dark tubes with flashing propellers, both striking the Founders submersible just above her screws. On impact the projectiles exploded in great flashes, the detonations throwing up gigantic, cathedral-like pressure bubbles filled with fire. The two propellers wrenched apart, swinging sideways as the stern section of the Founders boat split at the seams.

  The sound, the deep, horrible sound of the collapsing bulkheads was as if the ancient bed of the sea itself was ripping apart.

  “Victory!” Rachel howled.

  A concussive wall of roiling white bubbles rolled back into the Dart, cracking her bridge windows as it hurled her backwards. Buckle and everyone grabbed for handholds as the submarine tipped back almost on her tail, the deck shifting into a near vertical position under them. The force of the breakneck ascent kept Buckle pinned to the spot; he had some sense that the metal body of Penny Dreadful was under his boots, that he was standing on it.

  “Pressure hull compromised!” Rachel shouted. “We’re taking water in forward compartments one, two and three!”

  “Bilge pumps inoperative!” Kishi shouted. “You’ve killed us, Felix—you soddy bastard!”

  Small, tight jets of cold water shot into the bridge through the jagged fissures in the windows and a hundred other piping cracks, filling the cabin with spray. His eyes stinging with sea salt, Buckle felt the Dart breach the surface and launch into the air. For that moment the forces of gravity which had so sorely pressed him in the ascent suddenly released and he was weightless—floating, flying, with the cabin suddenly filled with brilliant sunlight, all of the people and objects suspended around him in whirling, glittering arcs of spray—until the submarine, captured once again by gravity, dropped, slamming into the water with bone-crushing force.

  Stunned, Buckle looked up from where he lay on the deck. He saw the shimmering light of the surface darken as sea flooded over the windows, sucking the Dart down. As they plummeted he shouted something—he never would remember what—at the wonderful, dappling surface light as it turned greener and blacker as they fell further and further away into the depths.

  “Hold on!” Felix shouted. “We’re going straight to the bottom!”

  It didn’t feel like a victory to Romulus Buckle.

  IX

  AN IRON COFFIN

  Buckle clawed his way to his feet, his vision blurred, the bridge a running cascade of seawater. Boil spilled into the flow everywhere, growing brighter and brighter as it streamed in the deepening darkness. The Dart waffled downwards, leading with her stern.

  “We’re descending into the Rift!” Kishi shouted. “Abandon ship!”

  “Belay that order!” Felix roared. “Hold fast!”

  “We’re doomed!” Kishi yelled. “We must detach the lifeboat now!”

  “There isn’t time!” Felix replied. “The blast threw us clear of the chasm. We’ll land on the sandy bottom, easy as you please. Hold fast!”

  “Damn you to hell if you’re wrong,” Rachel said.

  Kishi slid across the deck to assist Sabrina as she held Gustey “There’s no bottom here!” Kishi groaned. “We’re going into the Rift, I tell you!”

  “Show some faith, woman!” Felix howled.

  The starboard forward window cracked again under the renewed pressure, this time in a thousand spiderwebbing, glittering white fractures. More water sprayed in from a dozen new fissures.

  “Clear the bridge, damn it to hell!” Felix shouted, pointing to the rear hatch. “Clear the bridge!”

  Buckle lifted Gustey’s legs while Sabrina and Kishi, slipping on the tilted, wet deck, maneuvered her limp body through the hatchway.

  “Come on!” Felix hissed through clenched teeth as he fought the stabilizer controls. “Back on the bubble, little lady—that’s it!”

  The Dart righted somewhat on her keel, making the going easier on the deck. The starboard window cracked again, loudly, the sound of thick glass breaking. Pin-point streaks of water tur
ned into small torrents.

  “Get out!” Felix roared. “We’ve got to seal the hatch!”

  Buckle let go of Gustey’s legs, letting them trail along the grating as Kishi and Sabrina stumbled down the flickering passageway. He leaned back into the bridge as Rachel hurried out of the green-lit waterfalls and slid past him. “Welly!”

  “Coming, Captain!” came Welly’s reply as he emerged from the watery tumult, lugging Penny Dreadful with him.

  “You need not carry me, Ensign,” Penny said.

  “Leave the damn thing behind!” Felix shouted as he crowded behind Welly. “It’s a damned Jonah, it is!”

  “Damn your eyes, sir!” Buckle replied. “Move, Ensign! Move!”

  Once they had all piled into the passageway, Felix took hold of the hatch and pressed it against the rapidly growing torrent of water. “Lend a hand!” he shouted. “We must seal this hatch now, before the water overwhelms us!”

  Buckle and Welly threw their weight against the hatch. Slowly they forced it back against the monstrously dark fall of water. The Dart continued to level out, easing the weight of the water against the hatch, and they heaved it shut. Felix wound the locking wheel until the handle clanged against the end of its wind.

  Buckle felt relief but he knew one sealed door would not save them if the Dart was plummeting into the rift.

  A metallic boom deafened Buckle. The deck grating leapt up and slammed the wind out of him. Everyone dropped as if the strength had gone out of their legs, joining him in a heap.

  The Dart had hit bottom.

  Buckle blinked and lifted his head slightly to pull his front teeth out of the places they had sunk into his forearm. Smoke hung heavy and thick in the Dart passageway, the boil emergency lights casting a ghostly green illumination into the writhing haze. The roar of floods crashing into bulkheads was gone, replaced by the patter of dripping water and the rustling of the others as they struggled to rise. Buckle focused on the bright sheen of boil on his hand and sleeve; it smelled fishy.