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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “One of Balthazar’s daughters, eh?” The lantern man coughed. “If you were one of Balthazar’s daughters you’d have your own airship, wouldn’t ye?”

  “Do you want my gold or not?” Max replied.

  “Hold your horses,” the lantern man sighed and disappeared into the gondola.

  “Gallowglasses,” Valentine muttered. “Gallowglasses, Lieutenant? Give your money to someone else.”

  “I would appreciate it if you would remain silent, Mr. Valentine,” Max said.

  “That goes very much against me nature, Lieutenant,” Valentine whispered.

  “Nonetheless,” Max replied.

  They waited for several minutes, listening to the familiar whispers of the wind as they pressed the flanks of the docked airships. The mouthwatering smell of the Gallowglass stew, rich with beef, onions and potatoes, was thick on the air and had to be flowing from the Shenandoah’s galley. A dog barked somewhere in the town, an echoing, lonely sound. Max heard the regular scratch of the air constable’s whittling knife on the stick, a sound that bit through the air even though she was out of earshot. Max began to wonder if the Shenandoah’s night watchman had simply gone back to bed.

  Boots thumped across the corsair’s deck as two men appeared at the top of the gangway. The first was the lantern man, a small, thin fellow, and the other was a much rounder man, bigger and taller, with unkempt brown hair and a huge fur coat thrown over his underclothes.

  “What do you want?” the unkempt man asked, looking annoyed.

  “Are you the captain of this air vessel?” Max asked.

  “Aye. I am Captain Prisco, Ibsen Prisco, and this is the Shenandoah. And who might you be and what do you want? I don’t take kindly to desperate souls waking me up at ungodly hours unless they have a lot of money.”

  “I’m sure your man told you who I am,” Max responded. “And I am certain that you do most of your work at ungodly hours. I want to charter the Shenandoah for a voyage to Spartak. Two passengers departing at dawn. That is, if she is fast enough to get us there by noon of the following day.”

  “Oh, she’s fast enough,” Captain Prisco said, sniffing and peering at her through the weak, undulating glow of the lantern man’s buglight. “But it shall cost you. And as for who you are, well, people who appear in the night are rarely who they say they are anyway. But I don’t give a damn as long as your coins are in my pocket.”

  Max didn’t have a penny farthing on her. She threw back her hood. Prisco and the lantern man reacted with shock, followed by looks of disdain.

  “You be a Martian, eh? Here among us?” Captain Prisco said. “My word.”

  “Half-Martian, Captain Prisco. As I said, I am Max, the adopted daughter of Admiral Balthazar. I did not lug the treasure chest you’re going to ask for up here with me now but I assure you I can pay my way.”

  “The half-breed Martian daughter of Balthazar’s?” Prisco muttered. “I’ve heard of you and aye, surely you have the coin. You Crankshafts are genius merchants. I know you keep your coffers loaded with treasure, far more than any of the other clans might imagine.”

  “No zebes,” the lantern man hissed into Prisco’s ear, but the captain waved him off.

  “To Spartak at dawn, is it?” Captain Prisco asked.

  “And perhaps beyond that,” Max replied.

  “Ah. A destination far and the dangerous journey open-ended,” Prisco said, his eyes glowing with greed. “Expensive.”

  “Name your price. I have no time to quibble.”

  “Five hundred,” Prisco said matter-of-factly.

  “Five hundred gold?” Valentine spluttered. “Five hundred silvers would be excessive for a ride in this ballast balloon!”

  Max slapped her gloved hand over Valentine’s mouth. He glared at her, too drunk and startled to move. Not the most gracious muzzling but Max was worn out and her eyes ached terribly. “Done,” Max replied to Prisco. “We shall be here at dawn with the money. Bunker now if you must but be ready to go.”

  “Oh, we shall be ready,” Prisco said.

  Max removed her hand from Valentine’s face—he looked like he was about to explode, so badly did he wish to speak, but he held his tongue. “Lady Fortune save you if you are not,” Max said to Prisco, throwing her hood over her head and turning on her heel.

  “Lousy zebes,” the lantern man grumbled behind her.

  Max strode away with Valentine thumping along behind her, moving past the constable to descend the staircase. Her exhausted, half-healed state would make the walk back to the citadel an arduous one but it was the beginning of her return to Romulus Buckle and the Pneumatic Zeppelin, and that was fuel enough to drive her anywhere she needed to go.

  “Five hundred?” Valentine grumbled behind her. “Gold? Five hundred?”

  Max halted halfway down the stairs, Valentine almost blundering into her. Steadying herself by planting her hand on the wide, heavy rail, she closed her eyes. Her back hurt like the sabertooth had just slashed it open again; more streams of hot blood trickled down her cold skin and soaked into her shirt at the base of her spine. “Did you smell that Gallowglass stew?” she asked.

  Aye, how could I not?” Valentine replied. He rubbed his bewhiskered chin and the sound of his fingers on the stubble was loud and abrasive. “Reminded me how hungry I was.”

  “Get the recipe. The captain likes Gallowglass stew.”

  “Aye, Lieutenant.”

  XIX

  THE MIRROR

  Max stared at her face, her long, well-shaped face staring back at her from the mirror. She hated her face with its violet-black eyes—betrayers of emotion—and the black stripes tapering across her cheeks and forehead, stark against the white skin. A thin, light pink scar stood out in a small arc over her right eyebrow, the result of Romulus Buckle knocking her into a door jamb when they were children. Her reflection held motionless except for the flickering movement of the lantern’s candle flame in her pupils, trapped butterflies of fire.

  Setting her hairbrush aside, Max pulled on her leather flying helmet, drawing her goggles down onto her face and pressing the lens casings squarely against her cheekbones. She switched open the helmet’s reservoir valves, submerging her eyes in soft, soothing, aqueous humor.

  Her eyes looked bigger now, magnified slightly as they were by the liquid.

  Such alien eyes.

  She turned away from the Martian in the mirror.

  Max crossed her arms and stared at the wall. Two hours before dawn and she was fully dressed. She couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t due to Valentine’s snores rolling down the hallway from the guest bedchamber. It wasn’t due to a fear of being found after her infirmary breakout—she had sent word of her imminent departure to Balthazar via the butler and she knew her father would not stop her. It wasn’t due to the pain of her aggravated wounds. An anxious, nervous energy had driven her out of bed so many times she had let it win. It was surprising that, since the visit by the Gravedigger, she’d somehow buried her near-obsession with the immortality equation, lost the desire to think about it at all. Yet her brain churned, working furiously on other things like measuring her first-blush appraisal of Captain Prisco and the Shenandoah over and over.

  The thin pink-white scar.

  She wondered where Romulus Buckle and the Pneumatic Zeppelin were, worried about him and how difficult it might be to locate them in the Spartak Territory. She felt her heart accelerate of its own accord. She wanted him. She wanted Romulus Buckle so badly her body threatened to quiver. Damn the weaknesses of the Martian race. Max’s father had warned her of this uncontrollable biological compulsion even when she was a child. Martians selected a mate through a blind, physiological urge which left the brain at the mercy of the yearnings of the flesh. And, once the heart locked on, the mating choice would stick for life. In full-blooded Martians the linking was almost always mutual and thankfully so, for rejection was catastrophe. Max’s Martian half, she was now certain, had transfixed itself upon Romulus Buckle. But he was
human; his body did not recognize the alien chemical shower of her unspoken affection. He couldn’t feel it.

  But Max could say nothing. She could not expose herself in such a way. At least her human half gave her that modicum of control. Being his lieutenant, his second mate, his comrade-in-arms, provided her with the line she would never cross. If Buckle never turned to her, if he never offered her the kind of love she so desperately needed, she would go to her grave in loyal silence, unrequited, quietly angry with herself for the pathetic vulnerabilities of her bright red Martian blood.

  And the kiss, the kiss, delivered as she lay at death’s door in the Tehachapi mountain cave; it haunted her. She could explain it away: shock delirium, morphine-doped groping—and Romulus would never mention it, suspecting she would not remember and be embarrassed if it was revealed. But she remembered. It was a memory more alive than any other inside of her; the warmth of his mouth on her freezing lips, the tightness of his initial surprise followed by an open-lipped, willing response—a response which was an act of pity and accommodation—an allowance to a dying friend. But his intimate kindness had sealed her doom, for it stoked her smoldering Martian chemistry into an inferno. She had entered him, ever so slightly, with her quivering tongue, and the effect would have been the same had she been able to pour her entire body into his.

  Max crossed her arms tighter and turned to stare at another wall—anything but the damned mirror. Romulus was such a cad. Beautiful, warm and intelligent, but still a cad. He was a poor choice for her, she told herself.

  And yet she had chosen. Or, more accurately, her Martian heart had chosen for her.

  Max stood up and started pacing. Get the blood flowing. Shut the sleep-deprived confusions out of the head. She lifted her duffle bag from the bed but it was already well packed, heavy with extra outdoor clothes and boots plus a spare pistol and three sets of instrument calibration tools in wooden boxes. The hospital had transferred her sword and personal belongings to her room but there hadn’t been enough left of her shredded uniform to salvage the clothing. Her boots had been waiting for her, freshly polished, but she could still smell her own blood on them.

  The clothing borrowed from Dr. Lee and the infirmary lay neatly folded on the chair. She would have a servant return them.

  A small metal chest emblazoned with the Crankshaft treasury seal sat beside the duffel bag, sinking into the mattress, loaded with gold coins for Prisco.

  There was nothing to do.

  She couldn’t stand it.

  Was it possible that Valentine was snoring even louder? How could she hear him so distinctly with both her heavy oak door and his being shut?

  She took in a deep breath and looked around her bedchamber. It wasn’t like her to seek distraction and she didn’t know how to occupy her idle self. She hadn’t grown up in this room. She moved in here after Balthazar and the family had relocated to the Devil’s Punchbowl the year before, after the destruction of the stronghold at Tehachapi. The attack had been the Founders’ doing, of course, posing as Imperials, and the bombs had killed many Crankshaft citizens and crippled the air fleet.

  The family had lost Calypso, Balthazar’s wife and Max’s adopted mother, and her death had hurt Max so deeply she had no idea how to deal with it. So she buried the agonies over and over until they sank away into the oldest layers of sediment inside where they no longer tortured her. The others, her human brothers and sisters, wept openly and bled out their grief, but she did not. Sometimes she had caught them looking at her over Calypso’s funeral pyre, a familial indignity in their eyes at how she, alien-blooded or not, could be so tearless and cold.

  The way Martians handled tragedy, their external stoicism, “the stillness,” her father had called it, did not blunt emotion—it threw feelings into higher relief, in fact—but it accelerated recovery. But Max was a half-breed. Instead of burning her pains away the hybrid mechanism boiled them—and they threatened to explode when the crucible cracked.

  If she could let the Martian half of her swallow the human side whole, in there would be a sanctuary from the all the hurts of the world. But she also sensed on a much deeper level such an achievement would be a trap. For Martians felt everything even more intensely than humans—they were just better adapted creatures when it came to submerging their emotional responses.

  And Max had cried. She had done it alone and when such things were done alone one could, over time, almost convince oneself they had never happened at all, the brain being the poor, gullible witness it was. She hadn’t wept in her cabin aboard the Pneumatic Zeppelin; the ventilated ceilings offered little privacy and the wooden chamber partitions were light and thin. But she had found a place to cry herself almost into a faint, bawling for nearly half an hour—the amidships observation pod, built into the roof and well insulated with a lockable entry hatch, was a place where she would sometimes retire to enjoy isolation. That was where she hid and wept. And when it was over she had felt humiliated.

  And there was also Elizabeth. As Buckle’s natural sister she had always shown Max and her brother Tyro more warmth and affection than anyone else in the family with the exception of Balthazar and Calypso. Elizabeth was the most capable person Max had ever met. She was both sweet and powerful, blessed with an intellect and intuition she wielded with nuance and skill. They never spoke much but Elizabeth always seemed to sense when Max was sad, even as little girls, and she would hold her hand on the playground or at the dinner table. Tyro adored her, and, if she allowed herself the truth, so did Max. Elizabeth certainly had her flaws but they mattered little, even made her more likeable. Max would have suffered many more beatings in the schoolyard had Elizabeth not been there.

  When everyone thought Elizabeth had died along with Calypso in the Tehachapi raid, it was truly as if Max had lost a sister. The rumors that Elizabeth had not been killed but rather captured by the Founders infuriated Max. She would gladly risk her life in order to save Elizabeth.

  But first she wanted to kiss Romulus Buckle one more time.

  Max realized she was gazing at herself in the mirror. She nearly kicked it, wanting to destroy the alien thing in a shimmering, satisfying fall of broken glass. But she restrained herself. It seemed her entire life boiled down to an act of restraining herself.

  Max kicked the side of the bed, its legs skidding across the wooden floorboards until the frame clunked against the wall. The next thump of wood made Max think a bed slat had fallen. Then she realized it was a soft knocking on the door. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Flora Herzog,” came the voice from outside.

  “I do not require medical attention.”

  “Your father’s orders. He told me either you allow me to dress your wounds or you shall be escorted back to the infirmary.”

  No more infirmary. No more of Dr. Lee’s morphine needle. Max opened the door.

  Flora stepped in, smiling, carrying a tray heaped with bandage rolls, gauze, brown antiseptic bottles, an iodine vial and a tin of Fassbinders’ Penicillin Paste. “How are you feeling, Lieutenant?” she asked.

  “Well,” Max replied, not wanting to be touched. “Far too well to require such endless attentions.”

  Flora set her tray on the desk. “I heard a loud noise. Is everything all right?”

  “Yes. How could you hear anything over that snoring?”

  Flora offered a sad little smile. “All boilermen snore because the coal dust ruins their windpipes.” She glanced at the dark fireplace. “Why haven’t you lit up your hearth? It’s cold in here.”

  “I was about to leave and didn’t think it necessary,” Max said.

  “Very well—take off your shirt, please,” Flora asked as she unscrewed the antiseptic paste can.

  “You won’t need the antiseptic,” Max said. “The wounds have closed.”

  “I shall be the judge of what you need, Lieutenant,” Flora replied. “Shirt off.”

  Max unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, folding it neatly over the footboard of her
bed, which was now resting at a slight angle to the wall since she booted it.

  “What is that?” Flora asked.

  Max glanced down at the heavy wool infirmary tunic she had wrapped tightly around her upper body and knotted beneath her left armpit. Her purpose had been to maintain a good pressure on her wounds and allow them to reclose as well as sop up any bleeding. “A makeshift bandage,” she said. “I am certain it has been effective.”

  Sighing, Flora set the Fassbinders’ tin on the table, untying the knot and tossing the bloodstained tunic on the chair beside the table. The blood looked brown and dry—the pressure had worked, Max thought with a small sense of satisfaction.

  “Please turn around,” Flora said. “I need to look at you in the lantern light.”

  Max turned her back to the nurse—but now she was facing the mirror again—and she tightened her hands into fists.

  “You’re shivering,” Flora announced with worry. “We should really get the fire on in here.”

  “I like the cold,” Max said.

  “Lieutenant,” Flora started.

  “Get on with it, please,” Max said.

  “Very well,” Flora said with disapproval, leaning in to inspect Max’s back. “You’ve been bleeding quite a bit,” Flora said.

  “But the wounds are closed now, correct?”

  “You’ve been bleeding.”

  The gurgle of a small bottle was followed by the stink of iodine and it stung Max’s sensitive nostrils. Flora began working up and down Max’s back and shoulder with a cloth, dissolving the scabs as gently as she could. The cold and pain braced Max and made her feel stronger.

  “Much of the lengths of your wounds are closed but not all of them,” Flora said. “In many places you’ve popped your stitches the blood is barely congealed. We must do our best to prevent the gashes from reopening.”

  “It is but a small concern,” Max heard herself say, staring into the mirror again, looking without pleasure upon her stark white and black striped nakedness from the waist up. She rarely took time to look at her body. She did not want to be that body.