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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “And just how did you get out?” Scorpius demanded.

  “I was carried out, as a child,” Sabrina said.

  Scorpius leaned forward. “Carried out by who?”

  “General, we do not have time for this,” Buckle said sharply.

  Scorpius glared at Buckle, then turned a cold eye to Sabrina. “It is said that Isambard Fawkes has hair as red as fire, and that each member of his family does possess hair more scarlet than the next.”

  Sabrina met Scorpius’s gaze with cool detachment. She had expected the interrogation.

  “That is enough, General Scorpius,” Buckle said. “We can discuss fairy tales and myths at a later date. Proceed, Lieutenant.”

  Sabrina slid her finger across the map of Los Angeles. “We disembark at the landing point: Melrose and La Brea Avenue. From here we travel due south on La Brea for about a mile, crossing the moon moat, a wide ditch apparently created by a big explosion on the day of The Storming. The Founders patrol this ditch with forgewalkers in sealed armor suits, and it would be best to avoid them. Once inside the ditch, we enter the sewer system here. We work our way through the old channel pipes to a large sewage-holding tank—long since abandoned—but which takes us under the walls of the city and one hatch away from the underground prison warren. I will be able to locate Balthazar and Andromeda’s cells once we are in there.”

  “Locate the cells? How? How do you know this?” Scorpius spluttered.

  Sabrina glanced at Buckle.

  “How she knows it is not important,” Buckle said.

  “It is important to me,” Scorpius shot back. “I have to trust this woman with my life and the lives of my men, not to mention the life of Andromeda Pollux, which is worth more than all of us put together.”

  “I’m no spy, damn it!” Sabrina blurted, then clamped her lips together. Her heart was pounding.

  “With all due respect, General Scorpius, that is enough,” Pluteus interjected. “The young officer remembers nothing more. She is the adopted child of Balthazar and we all trust her absolutely. That will have to be good enough for you.”

  Pluteus’s defense of her honor surprised Sabrina, though she concluded that it was due to his distaste for an Alchemist interrogating one of his own more than to his standing up for her and her mysteries, which also confounded him.

  Scorpius took a step back. “I and only I, Scorpius Carbon of the Alchemists, shall determine what is good enough for me.”

  “Sabrina, continue with the briefing,” Buckle ordered.

  Sabrina took a deep breath and ran her finger across her map. “Okay. Once we secure our people, we will move above ground and into the city. It is only a short distance to the main plaza, a big open area where the Pneumatic Zeppelin will lower the launch and evacuate us.”

  “March straight into the heart of the City of the Founders?” Scorpius sputtered. “This is your escape plan?”

  “Surprise is our main weapon, General,” Buckle said, tapping his hand on the table. “We shall be in and out before they know we are there.”

  “Bah!” Scorpius huffed, but he did not argue.

  “We have run out of time, gentlemen,” Buckle said. “Scorpius, you have been briefed on the battle plan, and you are either with us or you are not.”

  “The Alchemist Council has commanded me to assist you,” Scorpius replied. “I have no intention of failing to follow my orders.”

  “Good,” Buckle said. “Generals, see to your preparations. We shall join you presently.”

  Scorpius made a little bow. “Captain,” he said respectfully, then avoided Sabrina with his eyes as he turned and strode for the door. Pluteus gave Buckle a quick nod and followed Scorpius.

  “Chief Navigator, stay a moment, please,” Buckle said.

  “Of course, Captain,” Sabrina said, folding her map back into its case. She knew he had many questions for her, questions he could never ask.

  Buckle returned to his teacup and took a long sip. “It is strange,” he said. “We are only a few moments from our assault on the Founders’ city…but I feel quite subdued, as relaxed as a man about to slip into a warm bath. Perhaps after falling three thousand feet with a tangler nipping at my heels, running the gauntlet of the city doesn’t seem so dangerous in comparison.”

  “Perhaps,” Sabrina answered as she watched Buckle drink his tea and ruffle the silvery fur on the top of Kellie’s head with his free hand. She still could not quite get over her amazement that he was there, standing right in front of her, unhurt and in the flesh, after she and everyone else had given him up for dead not more than an hour before. She also noticed that his forehead was wrinkled in an uncharacteristically serious way.

  Buckle stepped to the dome window and looked out, folding his hands behind his back. The late afternoon clouds glowed, variously bright and dark. “Ours is a mysterious world,” Buckle said quietly. “Under every shadow lies a secret.”

  “Yes,” Sabrina said.

  Buckle turned to face her. “But there are a thousand secrets inside every soul.”

  Sabrina did not reply. She felt nervous. Had Buckle decided that she was untrustworthy? No one knew anything about her history, except Balthazar—and he didn’t know everything. And now that it was obvious she had a connection to the City of the Founders, would Buckle and the crew spurn her as a turncoat? She looked into Buckle’s blue eyes and found them soft and calm. She suddenly felt safe.

  “I have seen into your soul, Sabrina Serafim,” Buckle said. “And I shall always trust you.”

  DEAD RECKONING AND OBELISKS

  MAX WATCHED DE QUINCEY AS he rocked the rudder wheel back and forth in his hands, guiding the Pneumatic Zeppelin as she descended, countering a weak crosswind flowing in from the sea to the west, pushing at the airship’s starboard flank. He inched the rudder wheel to starboard, to press the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s nose back into line over old Hollywood. The huge zeppelin groaned comfortably as it leaned its colossal mass into the crosswind.

  De Quincey was a very good helmsman.

  “Light crosswind to starboard, evening sea breeze,” Welly announced. He was at the chief navigator’s station now. “Recalculating rate of drift.”

  “Aye,” Max replied. Welly looked like a hunchback, with his big brass oxygen cylinder strapped to his back, its bulky, glass-plated helmet pushed up on his head and its flexible tubes loose about his shoulders. Everyone in the gondola was wearing their oxygen equipment, including Max; she found the heavy gear quite cumbersome.

  Max took a slow, deep breath as she observed the ground through the glass nose dome of the gondola. The cityscape below was hidden beneath a gray fog that blanketed the entire Los Angeles basin. Ruins of office buildings and skyscrapers jutted above the fog bank’s surface in jagged clusters of rusting girders and crumbling masonry. One could not see the deadly layer of mustard gas from above. The alien mustard was dense, and it hugged the ground beneath the fog bank, rising to no more than thirty feet at the most, while the harmless sea fog swirled up to fifty feet higher above it.

  The fog bank came closer and closer as the Pneumatic Zeppelin descended. Their plunge into the misty depths and the City of the Founders was, by her calculation, no more than ten minutes away.

  No defenders had come up to meet them, nor had a shot been fired. No one had noticed them, as far as she could tell. The deadly fog bank surrounding the City of the Founders may have kept everyone and everything away—but perhaps it also made it nearly impossible to see anything coming.

  “Make sure you account for the added weight, navigator,” Max said. “And watch her trim. With thirty-one extra troopers and two robots aboard, we are notching up power for altitude and sluggish on the turn.”

  “Aye, Lieutenant,” Welly replied, checking two pocket watches clamped to a panel. Darius Banerji, the apprentice navigator, was now in the cockpit at the assistant’s station. Both Welly and Banerji bent low over their instruments and charts, constantly checking and updating their calculations
as they proceeded to position the Pneumatic Zeppelin over the exact point—one they could not see—that Sabrina Serafim had dotted on their maps.

  Welly peered into the leather-cushioned eyepiece of the binocular-shaped drift scope, which was built into the instrument panel, pointing straight down through the floor of the gondola. The drift scope’s magnification was set to match the ship’s altitude, and its lens, etched with a set of parallel black lines, allowed the navigator to measure the sideways motion of objects passing beneath the airship, and thus calculate the current rate of drift.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Welly said without looking up. “Fifteen seconds starboard, south by southwest.”

  “Fifteen seconds starboard,” Banerji repeated, his eyes on the daughter compass and a timing hourglass streaming with golden sand. “South by southwest. Aye.” He made fractional adjustments to the drift indicator by tweaking a series of small wooden knobs.

  Welly lifted his head up from the drift scope, his forehead pink from being pressed into the leather headrest. “Taking obelisk sextant reading,” he announced, lifting a complicated metal telescope seated in a maze of gears and dials to his eye. Other than the Big Green Soup of the Pacific to the west, and the snow-locked peak of Mount Wilson to the east, the only permanent landmarks the navigators had to work with were the gigantic Martian obelisks that loomed at many points on the horizon.

  Max watched Welly taking his obelisk reading. She felt a twinge of despair. It was the Martians who had dropped the obelisks, mountain-sized rectangular slabs of purplish stone that towered in the sky, many of them tall enough to split low-lying clouds as they passed overhead. Up close, they were uneven and craggy, hoary with ice, the unknown stone they were cut from more blue than purple. No man had ever been able to chisel, blast, or melt even the tiniest chip off one. It was said, in the Histories of Charlie W., that in the time before the obelisks, there was a wonderful, magical source of power called electricity, but the obelisks suffocated it. It was even said that, oddly, the obelisks were responsible for milk souring almost immediately after being drawn from a cow or goat, and this was the reason people now called it fastmilk, because you had to drink it right away.

  The obelisks made mankind hate the Martians, so Max hated the obelisks.

  Max watched Welly bring his obelisk sextant to bear on the Catalina Obelisk, looming very close to the south, triangulating its position against the Redlands Obelisk to the east and the Piru Obelisk to the northwest. Welly could take accurate sightings, pinpointing his position down to just a few meters.

  Max was upset—the fact that Martians were never supposed to get upset made her even more upset—and the fact that anyone who looked at her would see it made her angry. She knew her eyes were pulsing with a faint scarlet—she could see the liquid color reflecting in her goggles. She hated her eyes, her Martian eyes. She was a hybrid, and in the genetic milkshake she had inherited her father’s black alien eyes, which betrayed every passionate feeling with sudden parades of color. Her eyes had forced her to live a stoic life, an emotionally tepid existence, where she kept all others at arm’s length in order to keep her private feelings private. But now she could not find a way to stuff her anger down, not all the way down, at least.

  Max was indignant because Sabrina Serafim was joining Buckle on the Crankshaft rescue expedition. Max wasn’t jealous of Sabrina personally—the chief navigator was as capable as anyone to accompany Buckle—but she was piqued by Buckle’s complete, even careless, disregard for the regulations governing zeppelineers and ground operations. The captain of a Crankshaft airship was never to get involved in dangerous ground operations. The captain’s place was aboard the airship. And if the situation on the ground demanded the captain’s presence, then his second-in-command was required to take the helm. Never, ever, were both the captain and his first mate to be exposed off the ship in a hostile environment.

  Never.

  Max adored the rules and regulations of the sky-vessel tradition. One could even say that she was obsessed with them. Yet she understood that sometimes the rules had to be bent, depending upon circumstances. But what Buckle was doing was wrong. It endangered the ship. Sure, Max was an excellent pilot, but she wasn’t the best. Not like Romulus Buckle. Not like Sabrina Serafim.

  And right now, as the Pneumatic Zeppelin descended into the dense fog bank above the City of the Founders, they needed their best.

  Max saw the reddish glow in her goggles getting a shade brighter.

  The engine-order telegraph dinged with a puff of steam as Max swung the dial handle. “Ahead one-third,” she shouted into the chattertube.

  “Ahead one-third!” came the response from the engine room, along with the sister dial dinging into the identical position.

  Ahead one-third was slow. Very slow. Docking speed. But they were about to dip down into the fog bank and, safe from the eyes of any Founders’ sentinels, proceed the last two thousand yards hidden but flying blind. The navigators’ only reference to their position would be calculations according to their watches, maps, compass, and last known rate of drift.

  “Vent steambags, thirty percent, across the board,” Max ordered.

  “Venting steambags, thirty percent, slam bang, aye!” Nero Coulton answered, flipping master switches on the hydrogen board, which controlled both the gas cells and the steambags. Lift was first reduced by venting hot air, rather than bleeding off the hydrogen.

  Max felt the Pneumatic Zeppelin lose a hint of her lightness. She removed her sword from its hooks overhead and buckled the scabbard to her belt. The air cylinder on her back annoyed her. She peered down through the floor observation window: the gray mass of fog came closer and closer, its wavy undulations becoming less distinct as the character of the surface, a misty cloud, emerged, looking vaporous, ethereal, and damp. The tops of tall palm trees, frozen as fuzzy icicles, poked out of the miasma in irregular lines, still in place along the unseen boulevards below.

  “Thirty seconds to immersion!” Welly shouted in the chattertube.

  “Oxygen masks on!” Max shouted into her chattertube hood. “Oxygen masks on! Make sure you plug back into the chattertube line!” She double-checked her crew, making sure that De Quincey, Dunn, Welly, Banerji, Nero, and the assistant engineer, Geneva Bolling, pulled on their masks. She heard the rattle of the mask clasps as they were snapped, the squeak of the leather straps as they were tightened under chins, followed by the clink of the cylinder knobs being cranked open, hissing with compressed air.

  “Signals! Verify mask on!” Max said, twisting backward to look past the staircase into the rear corridor, where the door to the signals room was located. She saw the signals officer, Jacob Fitzroy, lean out of the signals room, his oxygen mask oddly large on his small face and head. He gave her an annoying thumbs up.

  “Verbal confirmation, if you please, Mister Fitzroy,” Max said.

  “Mask on, Lieutenant Max,” Fitzroy answered, his high voice soft inside his helmet.

  “Eyes up for floating mines!” Max shouted. She pulled her heavy oxygen mask over her head and tightened the straps before she plugged herself back into the power and chattertube lines.

  “Entering fog bank!” Welly yelled from inside his mask, his voice muffled, his breath misting the interior of the glass.

  “Engage boil,” Max ordered, her words dropping hollowly inside her helmet.

  “Boil engaged, aye,” Geneva Bolling responded at the engineering station, flipping the levers to activate the pressurized agitation rods inside the cockpit’s liquid-filled instruments, causing the bioluminescent creatures within to emit their soft green illumination.

  The vast ocean of fog rose up and swallowed the Pneumatic Zeppelin. To Max it seemed as if they had been sucked into a shadow, a swirling gray vault of nothingness. Her skin was suddenly damp and warmer, her goggles speckled with pinhead droplets of condensation. She could hear her heartbeat drumming in her ears; the oxygen mask and fog absorbed sound so efficiently that for a moment, s
he was concerned that the engines had stopped, so complete was the sudden silencing of the familiar drones of the propeller nacelles.

  Max’s eyes swung to the instrument panels where, in the eerie half darkness, the bioluminescent boil glowed moon green inside the chadburn dial, inclinometers, floating gyros, drift and deflection pointers, thermometers, thermohygrometers, winding clocks, compasses, barometers, and a vast array of tubes and cylinders.

  “Flying blind now,” Welly stated, a compass in one hand and a watch in the other.

  Max kept a close watch on her compass. “Maintaining course. Ballast, maintain forty-five feet altitude. We want to keep our feet out of the mustard.”

  “Forty-five feet and steady as she goes, aye,” Nero repeated.

  “Keep your eyes peeled for mines,” Max said. It was a useless order, she knew. The pea-soup fog would hide any floating mines until they were almost upon them, and the zeppelin was far too big and slow to avoid them even at docking speed. It would be up to the men positioned outside on the bow and flanks to deflect any mines. She started laboring to breathe—as if her air was becoming too thick—until she realized that she had not opened the oxygen lines to her helmet from her air canister on her back. She cranked the cylinder knob open, filling her mask with musty oxygen that smelled as old and dead as dinosaurs.

  A MINEFIELD CHAINED TO THE SKY

  “ALWAYS OUTSIDE THE AIRSHIP THESE days,” Ivan grumbled as he hooked his safety line to the bow-pulpit railing at the nose of the Pneumatic Zeppelin. The world was a gaping wall of gray mist that fell away into the void ahead of him. Mechanics were supposed to work inside the machine most of the time, weren’t they? Oh, well. He was warm enough, bundled up in his fur-lined coat, boots, and gloves, and the oxygen mask, designed for high altitudes, was insulated with dog fur. Besides, the ocean fog was warm. Warm but wet. The good thing was that tanglers weren’t supposed to like the fog. The bad thing was that nobody really knew what other sorts of unknown beasties might lurk in the permanent mists.