Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One)

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “Yes. Excellent work. Carry on,” Buckle said as he passed through the main gunnery deck and into the aft umbilical access corridor, where Kellie was waiting at the hatch.

  Buckle popped the hatch and stepped out onto the aft umbilical ramp. The Pneumatic Zeppelin had leveled out and a lack of crosswinds left the ramp steady and flat. Kellie took off at a run. Buckle followed, passing under the long keel of the Arabella launch.

  Heading toward the stern beyond the Arabella, the umbilical ramp passed between the two big blurs of the aft maneuvering propellers, both identical to the forward maneuvering propellers. Seventy-five feet ahead, Kellie was already waiting at the nose hatch of the engineering gondola.

  Buckle did not need to glance back toward the bow to know that the Pneumatic Zeppelin was climbing to clear the Santa Monica Mountains. His view to the rear, past the engineering gondola and the smoking, steaming Devil’s Factory at the stern, was of the sprawling, snowbound San Fernando Valley and the San Gabriel Mountains to the north; many miles beyond that, to the northeast, the Crankshaft clan’s stronghold stood secure in the rocky citadel of the Devil’s Punchbowl.

  Home.

  Odds were he and his crew would never see home again.

  CRAZY IVAN

  AS BUCKLE SWUNG INTO THE engineering gondola through the nose umbilical hatch, Kellie jumping in through his legs, he heard shouting over the din of the driving machines.

  “I oughtta skewer you, you mudlarking Russian berserker!” Pluteus Brassballs bellowed in his gruff baritone.

  “Try it! You should be thanking me! You should!” was Ivan Gorky’s response, his voice shriller but defiant.

  “You nearly blew my head clean off!” Pluteus charged.

  “Ungrateful wretch, ah, General, sir!” Ivan cried.

  Exactly what Buckle had been afraid of…

  The access corridor in the nose of the engineering gondola was very short—not more than five feet—a narrow hallway lined with metal tubes: Buckle cleared it in one stride.

  Please don’t spit on him, Ivan, Buckle was thinking. Please don’t spit on Pluteus.

  Buckle emerged onto the main propulsion deck, ducking under the teeth of a rotating cog wheel as the skunk-reek of hot oil, both whale and synthetic, slapped him, encouraging his nostrils and eyes to close of their own accord. The chamber was blazing hot, despite four ventilation ports in the nose that admitted a constant stream of freezing wind—the engineers and mechanics alternately broiled and froze, but they were used to it.

  The press of heavy machinery at every angle, much of it moving, made the large gondola feel claustrophobic. But despite its cluttered nature, it was a beautifully designed art deco cavern, where the gigantic propeller shafts whirred in a sea of metal interlocking gears, accompanied by hammering banks of giant pistons whose whir and concussion assaulted the ears; legions of copper tubes rattled with pressurized steam as hundreds of levers and wheels routed it into different systems of the airship. This gondola could be more accurately described as the propulsion-control room, for the actual engine room, with its boilers and furnaces, was installed inside the body of the zeppelin on the main deck above.

  Buckle strode down the shaft alley to find Ivan, chief mechanic and ship’s inventor, his eyes wild, toe-to-toe with an angry General Pluteus Brassballs and his twenty angry troopers. The Ballblasters were big fellows, wrapped in heavy fur-lined coats of the same white-tan color and gripping blackbang muskets. Several of them had a pigeon or a hawk, heads hooded and bobbing, tethered on their shoulders.

  The six members of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s engineering and mechanic crew present had sidled up beside Ivan, their grimy fists balling up for a fight.

  Buckle jumped between Ivan and Pluteus. “Ho, there!” he said. “I thought we were all on the same side!”

  “So did I, Romulus!” Pluteus snarled. “But your man here, this lazybrat Russian of yours, he fired his pistol so close to my head that if I hadn’t veered I’d be earless on one side! I’m dang near deaf now as it is!”

  Buckle saw that Pluteus, big, stocky, and muscled to wrestle a bear, was rubbing his left ear and cheek, which were stained black by gunpowder.

  “I saved you!” Ivan shouted, waving his arms, “I thwacked a Scav who was about to blast you in the backside! You should kiss my feet!”

  Ivan had a little pet wugglebat, one of the few Martian beasties that was harmless, and the only one that was downright cute. Ivan had named his chattering pet Pushkin, and the loyal creature was always poking its furry head out of the left breast pocket of his jumpsuit. Pushkin, disturbed by his owner’s shouting, had now popped out of the pocket and clambered up onto Ivan’s shoulder, chattering like a chipmunk—which it did resemble, its six legs and bat-like wings notwithstanding.

  Colonies of wugglebats often lived inside the cavernous envelopes of zeppelins. The Pneumatic Zeppelin had its own colony, and Ivan was gruffly protective of them.

  “All right! All right!” Buckle said, turning his attention to the highly agitated Ivan Gorky. “Ivan, you have got to cool down.”

  Ivan, a man of average height, with a lanky frame and narrow face, stopped waving his arms and froze, his dark-blue eyes locked on to Buckle’s. One could never tell how Crazy Ivan might react to anything. Ivan’s mouth began to work, his thin lips screwing over his teeth until his beet-red face faded back to its normal pallor. He jammed his hands into the hip pockets of his oil-stained leather jumpsuit, which sported pockets everywhere: pockets full of hammers, wrenches, tweezers, and countless other devices. His pistol was now tucked into a bandolier strapped across his chest. On top of his head he wore an ushanka, a Russian winter hat, with the earflaps always dangling. His ushanka was bare of instruments except for two pairs of goggles, one for regular protection and one for magnification, though it was strange when he wore the magnifiers, because they tripled the size of his eyes and made him look like an owl. Ivan wore the magnifier goggles often, far more than was necessary. Buckle was certain he did this to annoy people who were bothering him, and it worked for the most part.

  Ivan now yanked down his magnifier goggles, so his enlarged blue eyes loomed unsettlingly huge on his face. If he thought that his bug eyes were going to dismay Pluteus Brassballs, he was dead wrong. “If this earthworm wants to duel me, Cap’n, I’ll meet him on the roof,” Ivan snapped.

  Buckle rolled his eyes. The roof was the very top of an airship, and, under churning skies, the precarious ice-slicked fabric was the setting for many famous duels. Buckle grabbed Ivan by the shoulders. “That is it, Ivan. No roof. Get out of here. Go to your cabin and cool off, you got me? There will be no duels today.”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” Ivan grumbled, scratching Pushkin’s head with his finger. Pushkin stretched his neck and hopped from paw to paw to paw, which is what wugglebats do when you rub them. The Ballblaster troopers and the engineers melted away from the scene: chances of the confrontation escalating had dropped to zero once the ship’s captain arrived on deck. Ivan turned and headed for the circular staircase, firing a sullen glare at Pluteus before climbing up and out of sight.

  PLUTEUS BRASSBALLS AND HIS BALLBLASTERS

  “LUCKILY FOR THAT SURLY GALLINIPPER he is a decent mechanic,” Pluteus grumbled, “or he would not be worth an ounce of his ballast.”

  Buckle grinned, shaking Pluteus’s hand. “Good to see you, Pluteus.”

  “Good to see you, kid,” Pluteus replied warmly, slapping Buckle on the shoulder with such a smack that it stung the skin beneath the leather. “Talk loudly. Gorky blew out my ear!” Pluteus stuck his finger in his right ear and cranked his lantern jaw open in an attempt to silence the bells jangling in the battered eardrum. He had a rectangular face, like a bull, with small, piercing eyes made even smaller in appearance by his high forehead and a scalp nearly devoid of hair. A long, thick white scar ran up his neck like a tree branch, forking out in several directions under his right eye.

  “Sounds to me like he saved your worthless hide,” B
uckle replied.

  “By accident!” Pluteus said with a wave of his hand. “When that gangway ramp came down, he was swinging that peashooter of his real wild, his legs jimmying around like somebody put a tangler in his pants. I am lucky he didn’t blow my head clean off.”

  “He is a tad excitable,” Buckle said, noticing that his engineers were still tense, their eyes darting up from their stations and casting daggers at the troopers, who, having removed their bulky gas-collection cylinders from their backs, had immediately found various ways to relax in the busy atmosphere of the gondola; they stretched and lounged as they stuffed pipes with tobacco and fed strips of meat to the reconnaissance hawks and packets of grain to the messenger pigeons.

  “Why were you not wearing your gas masks?” Buckle asked Pluteus. In stinkum zones the troopers usually wore iron helmets equipped with built-in gas masks. Today, with the exception of their metal breastplates, they looked like light-cavalrymen, in long sheepskin coats crisscrossed with leather bandoliers packed with blackbang cartridges, fabric-covered pith helmets, jodhpurs, and knee-high leather boots that laced from toe to top.

  “What?” Pluteus shouted, pointing at his ear.

  “Why weren’t you wearing your gas masks?” Buckle shouted.

  “Heavy armor is not worth the weight when your life depends on moving fast,” Pluteus answered, removing his thick leather gloves. “As for stinkum in the San Fernando Valley, bah. You’re not going to find any now unless you fall into a well.” Pluteus tamped tobacco into a large pipe he drew from one of his shoulder pockets, and then shot Buckle a serious look.

  “Follow me, please. This way,” Buckle said, leading Pluteus down a short ladder into the underside observer’s nacelle, a bullet-shaped compartment under the engineering gondola with a glass section in the floor. Buckle and Pluteus each took a seat in a padded observer’s chair as snow-streaked, softly undulating foothills swept past beneath them. The zeppelin, heading southwest, was rapidly gaining height to pass over the Santa Monica Mountains.

  Kellie carefully climbed down the ladder. There was hardly a place on the entire airship that the dog hadn’t figured out how to get into.

  “That’s one crazy dog,” Pluteus commented as Kellie hopped down from the last rung of the ladder and hopped up into Buckle’s lap.

  “Not as crazy as my mechanics,” Buckle said, patting Kellie’s head.

  Pluteus’s gray eyes shifted into seriousness. “Tell me that we are on our way to rescue Balthazar,” he said, scratching a match on his boot sole, then puffing at his pipe with it. The smoke was instantly sucked away by cold streams of air passing through the flank observation slots.

  “We are,” Buckle said.

  “Or we die trying,” Pluteus said, puffing at his pipe again.

  “Or we die trying.”

  Pluteus’s narrow eyes narrowed even more—he was by nature quite a suspicious sort. “Who aboard knows about the mission?”

  “My entire crew.”

  Pluteus’s eyes narrowed to the point of disappearing. “Loose lips sink airships, my boy.”

  “Not in my crew,” Buckle answered evenly. “You know that.”

  After a brow furrowing, Pluteus’s eyes opened up a bit. “Where is Balthazar?”

  “In the City of the Founders.”

  Pluteus’s eyes sprang wide open. He stopped working on his pipe for a moment, then clamped the stem between his teeth and took a deep pull. “Treacherous fogsuckers,” he whispered.

  That was it. Admiral Balthazar Crankshaft, the leader of the Crankshaft clan, a man whose beard was shot through with white, who had made it into his fifties in a world where few ever reached their thirties, had been brazenly kidnapped by the Founders clan three days before.

  It had been a real coup, a real piece of work, a real plot of skullduggery.

  For many years the clan ambassadors had been working toward the Palisades Truce, a ceasefire agreement between the Crankshafts, Spartaks, Gallowglasses, Tinskins, Imperials, Alchemists, and secretive Founders, who had been the holdout until the last round of negotiations. With the Founders on board, the thrilled ambassadors called a meeting of all the clan leaders at the abandoned Palladium Stronghold in the mountains of the Pacific Palisades. Balthazar Crankshaft and the other clan leaders arrived to discover the Founders negotiators, led by a figure known only as the Vicar, cloaked in red hoods, which they refused to remove. The first round of talks went nowhere. In the late hours of the second night, after a hard fight with the small contingents of bodyguards who had accompanied the leaders, an unknown group of assailants abducted Balthazar and several other clan chiefs. No one knew who had carried out this diabolical act, for the Vicar had apparently been kidnapped as well.

  At dawn, the messenger pigeons filled the gray skies. The remaining clan lieutenants gripped their swords and remained tight-lipped, violently suspicious of each other, unwilling to break the news to their own people until they had figured out how to proceed.

  Spies were everywhere.

  Loose lips sink airships.

  Clans needed strong leaders to survive, leaders who often held many secrets—and when a clan leader fell, it was assumed that clan was now vulnerable.

  As a victim of treachery, and without Balthazar, the Crankshaft clan council moved quickly, bunkering their airship fleet and recalling Pluteus Ballblaster from the field. Balthazar’s brother, Horatio, temporarily took the reins of power.

  They were at war. But who had abducted Balthazar? The Crankshaft clan did not know who the enemy was.

  Until, on the next evening, the message from Aphrodite arrived.

  A MESSAGE FROM APHRODITE

  (by Messenger Pigeon, of Course)

  APHRODITE WAS A CODE NAME. No one knew his or her identity. He or she was a spy inside the City of the Founders who supplied information to Balthazar Crankshaft and Balthazar Crankshaft only. Balthazar had never told anyone about Aphrodite. The Crankshaft clan council only learned of Aphrodite’s existence through a carrier pigeon message Aphrodite sent to them two days after Balthazar was kidnapped.

  The message, once unwrapped from the pigeon’s bony leg, read as follows:

  Founders abducted BZar. Rescue possible if immediate, before BZar murdered or relocated. Inside City. La Brea Prison Warren. Underground. East wing. Main Corridor. Cell 24.

  Aphrodite

  Buckle had seen the actual letter, scribbled on a scrap of stinkum-yellowed parchment that had once been a cover page for a novel entitled Moby-Dick, shown to him by Balthazar’s near-frantic lieutenants, hands shaking, at the clan stronghold in the Devil’s Punchbowl. A rescue plan was rapidly formulated, a near suicidal mission: an assault on the City of the Founders itself.

  Buckle instantly volunteered himself and the Pneumatic Zeppelin, prepared to die in order to rescue Balthazar Crankshaft, his adopted father and the greatest hero of the Crankshaft clan.

  “We’re going in hot as fire pokers, then,” Pluteus said, with a little charge in his voice.

  “They won’t be expecting it,” Buckle replied. He felt a little strange as he started to explain the council’s attack plan to Pluteus, who was the clan’s undisputed master of infantry strategy and tactics. Pluteus was Balthazar’s cousin by blood, and the two men, along with Balthazar’s brother, Horatio, were the old lions of the Crankshaft clan. “We plan to drop the assault team outside the perimeter walls,” Buckle continued. “We know a way in from there, following old sewers straight in to the back door of their subterranean prison.”

  Buckle saw Pluteus’s eyes flash, though his face remained calm. “Who knows the way in?” he asked pointedly.

  Buckle set his jaw. Pluteus had every right to wonder who amongst the Crankshafts might possess such intimate knowledge of the Founders’ city and its underground. “I cannot say.”

  Pluteus narrowed his eyes at Buckle. “I do not trust this Aphrodite,” he snapped.

  “It is not Aphrodite.”

  Pluteus took a deep breath, mov
ing on. “We’ll need our heavy gear,” he said. Buckle saw Pluteus’s mind racing behind his eyes, tackling the logistics of the brazen attack plan.

  “All of your equipment is on board. Phoebe made sure everything was in order before we left.” Pheobe was Pluteus’s supply officer.

  Pluteus nodded, staring straight at Buckle without looking at him.

  “The Pneumatic Zeppelin will come over the wall to evacuate the team once we have Balthazar,” Buckle said, feeling a tiny shiver crackle up his spine. Flying his airship over the fortified City of the Founders at rooftop height was so insane it might just work. “The fog should provide sufficient cover.”

  “The Founders,” Pluteus grumbled, puffing his pipe, watching the snowcapped peaks drift under the floor window. “Of course it was them.”

  “And they were supposed to be the most virtuous of us all,” Buckle said quietly.

  “Ha! Perhaps in the beginning—but not anymore, lad,” Pluteus said with a cynical chuckle that sounded like it stung his throat. “The original three might have been visionaries, but they’re long gone, moldering in the grave. What we are stuck with now is their inbred, watered-down descendants, all lazybrats, skulkers, and blackhearted defectives. The good blood has gone rancid and their empire is lost. Treachery is their milk and honey, and they’re obsessed with conquering us all.”

  Pluteus paused, taking another pull from his pipe. Buckle listened to the drone of the engines at full power, the whup-whupping of the propellers not far behind the gondola, the grind of the huge turbine shafts spinning a few feet over their heads. His stomach tightened: he felt unsettled, as if he had just eaten a bad apple. If Aphrodite was proved correct and the Founders had abducted Balthazar, then the Founders had committed an act of war. And the Crankshaft clan was already weary of such tensions, having been on the brink of war with the Imperials for the last year. “It was not supposed to be this way,” Buckle said, and sighed. “This is not the world the three Founders intended.”