Sabrina stepped alongside Buckle, her map in one gloved hand and her compass in the other. She pointed due south, straight down the middle of the old La Brea Boulevard. Pluteus signaled for the soldiers to advance at the ready; they moved forward in an arc with Scorpius and the Alchemist soldiers on the left flank. To Buckle, the soldiers looked as alien as the Owl, their human flesh locked inside their armored suits, their faces distorted and dark inside their helmet windows, dripping with condensation.
Wolfgang and the Owl took the lead, the Owl strutting in awkward chicken-prances: it started whistling, emitting high-pitched tones that echoed as they bounced back and forth, haunting in the dense fog. Wolfgang followed at the Owl’s heels, reading and adjusting dials on his instrument box.
Sabrina bumped into Buckle’s shoulder as they advanced in the pocket behind the troopers. She was trying to get her bearings on her map through her fogged and dripping visor, and seemed to be having only partial success. Kepler trailed at Buckle’s back, far enough behind that Buckle could only see him if he turned around—if Buckle had given it much thought, it would have made him uneasy.
They slogged across the dirty snow and ice for what seemed like an eternity, but by Buckle’s watch was only twenty minutes. Wolfgang and the Owl advanced, barely visible in the murk, flanked by Ballblasters on each side, the Owl rotating its head back and forth as it emitted its eerie little whistle every few seconds. The Crankshaft and Alchemist soldiers swayed as they walked, their musket barrels traversing the ground in front of them. There was so much debris along the sidewalks—the flotsam and jetsam of apocalypse: car hulks, fallen building facades, high snowbanks, and collapsed trees—that the group had to funnel into the middle of the street if the heavily armored troopers were going to move with any speed at all.
And the middle of nearly every street and alley had been cleared, making way for the omnipresent railway tracks that forked off in every direction to vanish into the mists.
A green street sign emerged from the fog, twisted and mangled, still dangling above the intersection: it read North La Brea.
“Moon moat ahead!” Sabrina shouted to Pluteus, her voice straining inside her helmet.
Pluteus nodded and peered at a watch strapped to his forearm armor.
The formation continued moving forward. To Buckle it felt as if the atmosphere suddenly got much colder. A low ridge appeared ahead, a frozen ripple in the ground spanning the street and stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions. The earth had been tossed up in a great swell here, the earthquake-like force that caused it having also obliterated the buildings that once spanned the ground. Buckle had heard of the moon moat: it was a mythical place, created by the shockwave of a monstrous Martian shockbomb dropped on downtown Los Angeles on the day of The Storming. Inside the moon moat, the mustard-gas-filled blast crater was a plain of pulverized and melted ruins—that is, until the Founders came.
Wolfgang, the Owl, and the leading Ballblasters easily climbed the low outer slope of the moon moat, and everyone else followed, picking their way around jagged outcroppings of concrete, rebar, and disjoined skeletons. Buckle saw an odd-looking little machine resting on the crest of the rise, out of place in the rubble: faded gold lettering that spelled Espresso was stamped on one side, but he had no idea what that word meant.
The inner slope of the ridge was a wash of loose shale, and although the angle was easy for Buckle to descend, it was a bit more of a chore for the heavily armored troopers, who scuffed and slid with considerable difficulty. The interior of the moon moat wasn’t very deep—the force of the blast seemed to have been directed horizontally—and from what he could see, it looked as if most everything inside it had been knocked flat and bludgeoned into crumbled heaps, with the exception of the newer railway lines, which ran through it at various angles.
The yellow fog was very thick here, and the dense concentration of toxic alien gas had corroded every surface: the ground, both snow and split concrete, was as pitted and pocked as a drought-stricken streambed. Still dissolving, everything smoldered and smoked. Sinkholes and depressions, both large and small, had formed in spots where the weakened earth had caved in, giving the surface a moonlike appearance—hence the name.
Growing up, Buckle had heard the tales told, the stories of the great moon moat that made the City of the Founders impenetrable, from both without and within. And now, as he strode into it, the place was surely as bizarre as the old stories had described.
Just how his navigator, Sabrina Serafim, had escaped the city, he would like to know.
The expedition advanced due south, although now there was no longer much of a street to follow. A gigantic black sphere—four stories high if it was a foot—emerged from the mist ahead. It was a Martian mustard sphere—a gigantic gas bomb. It was said that on the day of The Storming, the Martians had dropped fifty of the huge spheres in a ring around the downtown, rendering the city uninhabitable. The terrible mustard gas spewed in continuous streams from hundreds of taps lining the exterior of the spheres, which, like the one directly ahead, were still emitting the poison after more than three hundred years—still maintaining what had become the City of the Founders’ most effective defense.
Pluteus signaled for the unit to swing to the right of the sphere. Buckle eyed it as he passed. The thing was huge, even with the bottom fifth of it buried in the crater it had created when it hit the ground. The black metal skin had a sickly silvery sheen to it, perhaps from weathering, perhaps corroded by its own poison, but the metal was still smooth except where it was punctuated by the spigot funnels.
Buckle kept checking his watch as the group advanced. Twenty minutes of oxygen left. Eighteen minutes of oxygen left. He could see Sabrina and Pluteus, and the handful of troopers immediately in front of him, but all the others were no more than shadows moving in the murk, shadows that occasionally passed under vague hints of girders and walls. The Owl whistled again and again, its metallic cries making the place seem even more desolate. Buckle’s soul felt cold. If ever there was a land of the dead, he thought, this was it.
The members of the group instinctively pressed closer together. Buckle stayed glued to Sabrina, who had her head down, focused on her map almost every step of the way, and he sensed that Kepler had crept up closer to his back.
The Owl suddenly stopped and made a whirring sound. Wolfgang thrust his arm in the air, hand open. Everyone halted. The Ballblasters dropped to one knee and froze.
Sabrina, looking down at her map and compass, had not noticed Wolfgang’s signal. Buckle grasped her by the shoulder and yanked her to a stop. She turned her head and peered at him, her eyes dark inside her dripping visor. Buckle pointed at the Owl. Sabrina lowered her map into its case and slowly drew her pistol.
The silence left by the Owl’s sudden muteness was frightening. Buckle gripped his musket but there was nothing but fog to aim at. He pointed it between the backs of the two Ballblasters in front of him anyway, in the direction the Owl seemed to be looking. His faceplate was so sludged with dust and moisture he couldn’t see anything more. He could hear his breathing accelerate in his helmet, the sound mixing with the oxygen cylinder’s hiss and ping; he could even hear the rapid beating of his own heart. This was no place for an eagle-eyed aviator, damn it.
“All right,” Buckle whispered to himself, “don’t become completely worthless.” He took a deep breath and wiped his glove across the faceplate glass, managing to clear a streak he could see through.
The Owl released two small peeps and cocked its head back and forth as it scanned the mist. Steam puffed from its exhaust vents. It suddenly spun in one small, fast circle before stopping and peering in the same direction again. And then it held very, very still.
They had been stopped for perhaps forty-five seconds—no more than that—but to Buckle it was too long. Bad luck. Bad, bad luck. He held his watch up to the clearer section of his facemask to read it. Fifteen minutes of air left.
Buckle shared a grim
look with Pluteus. They couldn’t afford to sit still much longer, no matter what was out there directly ahead of them. Pluteus raised his hand to signal his men.
The Owl shrieked. Buckle nearly jumped out of his skin. The Owl’s echo bounced back. The Owl flung out one lanky arm and pointed. Wolfgang raised his head from his instrument box and pointed vigorously in the same direction.
Wolfgang tried to shout something at Pluteus, something that sounded distinctly like “Forgewalkers!”
The Crankshaft and Alchemist troopers raised their muskets and aimed at the wall of mustard-colored fog. The two troopers manning the pneumatic rifle swung it up onto its tripod and charged the breech with a loud snap of the metal bolt.
What cursed bad luck, Buckle thought.
And then everybody started shooting.
SKIRMISH IN THE MOON MOAT
WHEN THE FIRST BALLBLASTER’S BLACKBANG musket fired, the sound was muted, but the concussion of the shot slapped the side of Sabrina’s helmet. Her faceplate glittered as muzzle flashes erupted from the fog very close ahead, peppering the vapors with pops and slashes of swirling light.
How close that first Founders’ volley came to killing Sabrina was something she could calculate pretty well.
The musket ball punched a smoking hole through the map she was holding, slashing through the gap between her left arm and waist, taking a strip of her jacket sleeve with it, and slicing a shallow trough across her skin just inside the elbow. It delivered a sharp sting, but as the firefight broke loose she completely forgot about it.
Materializing out of the mist, lumbering into view like three upright rhinos, marched the armored Founders patrol. Aye, there were only three of them—at least that was all that Sabrina could see at the moment—but they were big, each over seven feet tall, encased in black-plated metal, and what little could be glimpsed beneath the armor crawled with spinning cogs and pressurized copper steam tubes so overheated that they glimmered red. At first glance, Sabrina thought the armored patrolmen were pure robots like Newton—the interiors of the helmets inside their large glass faceplates were so dark one could not see any faces—but they moved with a smoothness and intention that proved there were men inside the machines. Forgewalkers.
The forgewalkers advanced in crazy, sparkling haloes of light: their forearms belched fire as they blazed away with sets of blackbang-musket barrels built into the wrist plating. The Crankshaft and Alchemist musket balls, zipping through the mist in brilliant white phosphorous streaks, bounced off their armor in bright but ineffective showers of sparks.
Speaking of slowpoke Newton, they sure could have used him here.
The pneumatic rifle opened up, chack-a-chak, its flashing harpoons striking the lead forgewalker with enough force to stagger it. A small metal plate spun off the forgewalker’s abdomen in a burst of sparks. At least the pneumatic rifle was big enough to do some damage, Sabrina thought, and she felt a touch relieved.
A Ballblaster standing in front of Sabrina jerked, the visor of his helmet shattering in glittering glass fragments. He dropped like a stone, facedown on the decimated concrete. That was the horror of a battle inside the moon moat: even a grazing shot, if it managed to split open your visor, air cylinder, or any of the tubes in between, let the deadly mustard gas in.
From then on, you would live only as long as you could hold your breath.
Sabrina raised her pistol and aimed at the head of the leading Founders scout. He was close, within thirty feet. It was an easy shot. She pulled the trigger and the weapon responded with its familiar kick and puff of dark smoke. She saw her musket ball ricochet off the helmet with a harmless spurt of light.
Someone suddenly hooked her collar and yanked her from behind. It was Buckle, pulling her back, dragging her to the rear of the line. “Stay back!” Buckle shouted, his words barely reaching her over the din of the battle and the insulation in both of their helmets.
Sabrina didn’t want Buckle to save her. Damn it—he was always trying to save everybody. “I can take care of myself!” she screamed inside her helmet.
Buckle knocked his faceplate right up against hers. His face looked distorted through the wet, slurried glass. “Save it, Lieutenant!” Buckle yelled. “No matter what, we can’t lose you now!”
Once behind the second firing rank, Sabrina tore free of Buckle’s hands and fell, stumbling over an uneven bench of cracked earth, landing hard, the impact punching up her arms and into her shoulders as she caught herself with her hands. With a sideways glance, she glimpsed the ponderous, metal-sheathed boots of the forgewalkers slowly advancing, the weight of their machines pulverizing the crumbled concrete in gray puffs. Out of the corner of her eye she saw another member of the expedition fall—one of the Alchemist troopers.
Buckle had her in an instant, lifting her to her feet. “Are you hit?” he shouted. Even though the storm of noise, she could hear the fear in his voice.
“I’m okay!” Sabrina shouted back, and Buckle let her go.
Wolfgang and the Owl, hurrying back behind the line, joined them. “The old Owl, she sniffed them out, did she not? Of course she did!” Wolfgang enthused.
The riot of gunfire faded away with a few ragged shots, as every blackbang-musket battle did: close-quarter skirmishes opened with the muskets and pistols, which, taking too long to reload, were set aside in favor of swords and other weapons of muscle and steam. It was an eerie transition: to be caught in the middle of a furious musket barrage and then fall into a surging near silence as everyone drew swords and charged.
The forgewalkers kept coming, slowly advancing through the ghostly shrouds of yellow gas and black gunpowder smoke. Their gun cuffs, emptied of ammunition, were ejected to the ground; the armored sleeves snapped open and, in blasts of white steam, flipped up bladed wheels that started spinning like buzz saws.
“Fall back!” Pluteus ordered, with a wave of his arm. “Two firing lines! Reload!”
Fall back? Fall back to where? Sabrina thought. Backing up was no good. There wasn’t enough air left in their tanks to retreat. And besides—there was no place to retreat to. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was gone, already on her way to the rendezvous point, and the mustard stretched for miles in every direction. But what could Pluteus do? He had to keep his distance from the behemoth forgewalkers, hoping for a lucky shot. There was no way they were going to defeat these things hand to hand.
Sabrina holstered her empty pistol and drew her sword. She didn’t know why she did that, really—what use was her saber against the armored scouts? But she would feel better if she went down swinging…if it came to that.
It was so quiet. Why was the pneumatic rifle not firing?
“Blue blazes! Get that gun running!” Sabrina heard Pluteus scream. She whipped her head around to see the big rifle standing silent, its power plant steaming—the two Ballblasters manning the weapon working frantically to unjam the breech.
The pneumatic rifle, with its razor-edged harpoon projectiles, was their only chance. Sabrina raced toward it, sheathing her sword and drawing her knife from her belt as she ran. Buckle shouted something unintelligible at her back. She ignored him.
“Front rank, fire!” Pluteus ordered. The front rank of Ballblasters released a crisp volley.
“Second rank, fire!” Pluteus ordered. The second rank of Ballblasters and Alchemists fired.
A sideways glance confirmed for Sabrina that the musket volleys had failed. The forgewalkers came on, knives spinning. The Crankshaft line faltered.
“Go to the blades and hold ’em, boys!” Pluteus bellowed, charging to the front of the fray. “Hold ’em!”
Pluteus knew—they all knew—they had to buy the pneumatic gunners time to clear the breech. The Ballblasters drew their swords and dug in their heels.
Sabrina arrived alongside the Ballblaster gunner as he struggled at the rifle. Both of his gloves were smoking. She peered into the steaming breech and saw the mangled brass casing of a harpoon jammed inside it, along with the broken blade
of the gunner’s knife. The man had been clawing at the metal with his hands, scorching and shredding the fingers of his gloves.
“Stand aside!” Sabrina shrieked, her voice deafening inside her helmet, shoving the man away.
To her left, she could see the battle figures surging in the fog, the whirling outlines of the soldiers as they fought for their lives, slashing and jabbing at the seams of the enemy’s armor, while ducking the slicing whirl of blades.
Sabrina drove her knife blade into the gap between the cartridge and the breech wall, as far forward in the compartment as she could manage. It was difficult to see—damn the condensation inside her mask! With the tip of her blade wedged in, she began to quickly rock the knife forward and backward parallel to the flanks of the chamber. Pressure fore and aft was the way to clear a serious jam. The gunner had panicked, attempting to wedge his knife under the casing and pop it up, and had snapped the blade.
Sabrina glanced at the battle, just in time to see a forgewalker catch a Ballblaster in its buzz saw. Fragments of equipment and ragged metal slewed in all directions, just before the man’s oxygen tank exploded.
Something struck the barrel of the pneumatic rifle just in front of Sabrina’s face—maybe a blade fragment, or shrapnel, or a bullet, or a piece of armored-sheathed bone—and the eruption of sparks nearly blinded her, the concussion on the barrel stinging her hands. She gasped, blinking her eyes hard again and again, tasting blood, sucking in so much air that the supply seemed to slow, verging on suffocating her—but she never stopped working the blade.
The forgewalkers were closing in. She could feel the shudder of their footfalls shaking heavier in the ground.
The harpoon cartridge jiggled against the knife. Sabrina dug in deeper, her blade deforming the brass casing, seeking a notch to catch and push.
Sabrina glanced at the forgewalkers again. She saw Pluteus, stepping over the corpse of his dead comrade, wading in to the enemy with his heavy saber. The fury of his attack, the resounding crashes of his blade against the body of the steam-powered iron suit, actually made the man inside it take a few steps backward.
Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) Page 14