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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  It was in times of crisis that Max did not mind spending every waking minute with her crewmates; she liked the communal energy when there was urgent business to be done. But Martians were solitary creatures, and under normal circumstances she preferred to be alone; when off duty, she often abandoned her cabin and her books, and clambered up into the crow’s nest to listen to the wind and be alone with her thoughts. The crew had found her there in the morning so often, curled up asleep in her heavy coat, that they had long ago started calling the topside observation nacelle “Max’s nest.”

  Max didn’t like it when a grinning crew member tapped her awake and she had to thank them, embarrassed, and slip down the companionway half-asleep and needing a hot, black shot of tea.

  “Clouds of gossamer, moonlight mysterious as beryl. Lovely night if it wasn’t adrift in cataclysmic peril,” came the whispered voice of Nero Coulton, the ballast-board operator.

  Max would have rolled her eyes if that was something Martians did. The crew was at battle stations and on survival helmets: talking was restricted to commands only. But Nero, the resident poet, knew exactly how much fluff he could get away with. Max wanted to chide him, but she did not. His little stanzas chipped away at the tension by amusing the crew, and he would only deliver one, carefully and poorly devised, per occasion.

  Nero was a short, round fellow whose poetry, although as annoying as a loose and rattling screw, was also comfortingly familiar. Nero believed himself to be a wordsmith; it was his sacred duty to stage poetry readings on the fourteenth day of each month. He held his performances in the captain’s quarters, drawn up to his full length in front of the glass nose dome, and the overly dramatic renditions of his epic rhymes could drag on for hours. Anyone who missed a reading without a good excuse inflicted monumental hurt upon the great poet. The result was that the crew made it a game, going to extraordinary lengths to discover new ways to excuse themselves from Nero’s events. Ivan once faked his own death, the news of his unexpected expiration after eating a bad sausage being grimly delivered just before the performance. Nero did not cancel the show but rather wallowed in the tragedy of the night, his maudlin soliloquies soaked with tears. The report of Ivan’s demise was retracted as an “unfortunate exaggeration of events” after the reading was over.

  Ivan appeared regularly in Nero’s poetics after that, thinly disguised as a buffoonish character called the Donkey of Moscow.

  Max heard crewman Arlington Bright sigh in his mask behind her, in response to Nero’s words: he was a rigger, and one of three crew members issued a musket and sword and assigned to the piloting gondola to repel boarders. Once you took into account the banks of instruments and chairs, the gondola only had limited space, so the three crewmen in portable oxygen gear plus Max, Kellie, Welly, Dunn, De Quincey, Banerji, Nero, and Assistant Engineer Geneva Bolling, not to mention Jacob Fitzroy in the cramped aft signals room, made for a full house. It was not a sardine can, but it was crowded.

  Kellie, her ears poking up out of her gas mask, was up against Max’s legs. The dog always came to her when Buckle and Sabrina were off the ship. The animal was like clockwork when it came to her preferences: Buckle was choice number one, Sabrina choice number two, and, although she had no idea why, Max was choice number three.

  The pneumatic tube terminal cha-thunked at Max’s left shoulder, ringing tube number four’s bell. Tube number four was the engine room. The pneumatic-tube messaging system aboard the airship operated on compressed air and partial vacuums, allowing messages too complicated for chattertubes to be zipped around the zeppelin at thirty-one feet per second. The four-inch copper pipelines connected every major compartment aboard the Pneumatic Zeppelin, their felt-capped copper capsules transporting handwritten messages from station to station.

  Max retrieved the capsule from the receiving-chamber hatch and flipped it open to retrieve the message within. It was a standard note from Elliot Yardbird, the engine officer, calculating the increased consumption of coal due to increased drag on the damaged skin of the zeppelin. Fuel consumption and bunkering were not a problem on this short trip, but it was Yardbird’s job to acknowledge such issues.

  Max checked her watch and compass. They should be passing over the outer walls of the city very soon. She returned her focus to the ocean of undulating mist below, scanning for any sign of the watchtowers that were said to once have existed there. Lore had it that the towers were once high enough for their cupolas to overlook the ceiling of ever-present fog, but that the Founders had decided to tear them down because they gave away the city’s location underneath.

  It was a good hiding place. Flying over it, one would never suspect that the largest city in the Snow World lay sprawled beneath that canopy of befouled air.

  The Founders and their city were a mystery; information about them came in scraps and dribbles from traders. The stories were often so embellished that one had to listen to them with a grain of salt. But professional merchants, the favored ones, were given permission to dock at the port of Del Rey, a walled-in airship and seagoing-vessel harbor where the Founders could trade goods without allowing outsiders access to the main city. Del Rey was rumored to be a rough place, characterized by the black-market villainy of the trader guilds, but it was also a vibrant exchange; it was said that ruthless merchants from every corner of the known world could make themselves rich there—if they lived through it.

  Still, Max wasn’t big on rumors. If the watchtowers existed, she would see them. And if they did, the Pneumatic Zeppelin was probably doomed. Given warning, the Founders would loose their infamous air armada, said to be more than a dozen warships led by two behemoth dreadnoughts that dwarfed even the Pneumatic Zeppelin. The Founders’ machines would rise up from their berths in the fog and reduce Max’s sky vessel to a burning cinder in a matter of minutes, if not less.

  But what of the dreadnoughts? Nobody had seen the Founders’ fabled fleet for one hundred years.

  Max sighed inside her mask and then became worried that the others might have heard it. Despite the tension of the moment, she felt a little tired, which was odd for her; Martians, even half-breeds, possessed tremendous stamina. Yes, it had been an exhausting day of fighting Scavengers and tanglers, and yes, sliding off the side of an airship at three thousand feet without a safety line had been stressful. But what had really knocked the wind out of her was the thought that Captain Buckle had been killed. The weight, the sheer, awful weight of despair she felt when his apparent death was reported, had surprised her. Was it that she had fought to defend her captain, prepared to sacrifice her own life in the effort, and still she had failed him?

  That was partly the reason. But there was more.

  Why Max had always felt so protective toward Buckle both bedeviled and befuddled her. They had both been adopted by Balthazar as youngsters, and Buckle had taunted Max and her younger brother, Tyro, because he didn’t like “the stinking zebras,” whom he blamed for the death of his parents. Buckle would come at them with fists swinging at the slightest provocation, forcing Balthazar and Calypso to separate them for long periods of time, which was difficult in the enclosed confines of a clan stronghold. At one point, when Buckle was eleven years old, he was sent to live with his uncle Horatio at the Devil’s Punchbowl outpost for one year, just to keep the domestic life in Balthazar’s house tolerable.

  Old Horatio managed to straighten Buckle out, because when he returned to the family he never raised his hand against Max or Tyro again. And as Buckle moved into young adulthood, he outgrew his anger, slowly developing into a gracious brother whose maturing gentlemanliness would become a hallmark of his character.

  And yet, through it all, even from the time when she was a very young girl, Max knew that she loved Romulus Buckle. Or, more accurately, she knew that she both loved and hated him. But she never allowed herself to explore her feelings toward him further; she was unwilling to accept what she might discover about herself if she did.

  As for Romulus Buckle himself
, well, after the terrible nights of the Tehachapi Blitz and the Imperial Raid, after he and Max had fought side by side and saved each other’s life in turn, she had sensed that something inside Buckle, something in the way he saw her, had changed. He had suddenly and intimately softened toward her. Perhaps it was that each of them had lost so much—Calypso, Elizabeth, Sebastian Mitty, and most of Tyro—that a profound connection forged through blood and pain was inevitable.

  Max and Buckle. Buckle and Max. The blood between them could not have been more different. But they were joined on some mysterious level, nonetheless.

  Max glanced at her sprawling instrument panel, where golden sand streamed through a large, boil-lit hourglass. She had measured the sand to run forty minutes—roughly the amount of time the Crankshaft expedition would have breathable air in their oxygen cylinders.

  The last grains of golden sand were falling.

  Buckle and company had better be out of the mustard by now.

  SPIDER TRAPS AND SEWER RATS

  BUCKLE DROPPED ABOUT SIX FEET down the manhole, out of the luminous yellow mustard and into the pitch black of the sewer tunnel. His boots smacked on wet concrete. The weight of his gear forced him to his knees—which he bruised considerably—and with a sharp grunt he lurched aside to avoid being squashed by Kepler, coming down right behind him.

  Buckle steadied himself with one hand against the slimy wall. Sabrina and two Ballblasters had already descended and were striking matches to light kerosene lanterns built into the crests of their helmets. The soft orange light glowed on the water-slicked walls and allowed Buckle to get his bearings. He hurried forward as more troopers dropped down the manhole behind him.

  Time was not on their side. The skirmish with the Founders scouts had slowed them down, and their exertions had rapidly drained the reserves in their oxygen tanks. Already Buckle had the impression that he was working harder to breathe—as if his air was already thinning—even though his cylinder gauge still reported two minutes remaining in its supply.

  Scorpius and Kepler stepped up beside Buckle; being a subterranean clan, the Alchemists also had lanterns installed in their helmets, but with an ingenious built-in tinderbox that ignited the kerosene wick internally, sparked by the rolling of a cog under the chin.

  “I don’t see any stinkum,” Buckle said to Sabrina. What he could see of the tunnel looked clear, and free of the yellow mist. “Are we good?”

  “I wouldn’t risk it yet,” Sabrina answered, neatly folding up her map with the care of a navigator. “Not if we don’t have to. Let’s move.”

  “Wait, Lieutenant. Let’s not get too spread out,” Scorpius cautioned.

  Sabrina halted, staring into the depthless black length of the tunnel ahead. Buckle could tell that she was agitated, itching to advance.

  Kepler planted his massive hand on Buckle’s shoulder and turned him around to face him. Startled, Buckle squinted; Kepler’s lamp was bright and the shadows inside his helmet hid his face. Kepler lit a match, a white sulfur flash that made Buckle squint even more. Kepler flipped open the glass door of Buckle’s helmet lamp and lit the wick. Another friendly act from his assassin, Buckle thought. Kepler clicked Buckle’s lamp door shut and snuffed the match between his gloved fingers.

  “Thanks,” Buckle said.

  Kepler nodded.

  The rest of the surviving Ballblasters—seventeen of the original twenty—had now dropped into the sewer tunnel with heavy armored clanks. Lighting their helmet lamps, they joined the seven remaining Alchemists and the Owl, which had leapt down the manhole with the surprising lightness of a bird. The last man to descend was Pluteus—yes, Pluteus—who had miraculously survived the titanic blow delivered to him by the robotic arm of the forgewalker. After the skirmish, the Ballblasters had charged into the fog and fished their beloved Pluteus out of a frozen snowbank. Brittle honeycombs of ice had collapsed sufficiently to break his fall; he was bruised and battered, his glass facemask cracked and sprayed on the inside with blood and snot, but he was very much alive.

  “That hurt like hell!” Pluteus announced as he landed inside the tunnel, grimacing with pain. “A good day to be alive!

  “We’ve got to move, people!” Sabrina shouted. “Move!”

  Sabrina set off down the sewer pipe with such a severe stride that Buckle, even with his much longer legs, had to work to keep up with her. The old sewer was a straight tube, at least as far as Buckle could see—the ghostly illumination of their helmet lamps melted away about twenty feet ahead. The floor was flat concrete, with water channels cut into the base of each wall, which didn’t seem to be very effective at draining away the disgusting slop they were splashing through. The arched ceiling dripped with moisture and dangling gobbets of transparent goo.

  They were at a near run. The metal-sheathed boots, armor, and equipment of the troopers, not to mention the Owl’s iron claws, rattled, jingled, and clanked. It sounded as if there were a horse and carriage coming down the sewer at Buckle’s heels. Well, stealth was not required at the moment, was it?

  Here and there Buckle thought he glimpsed translucent swirls of yellow mist fluttering in the air, visible only for an instant. Damned mustard.

  Buckle’s low-oxygen alarm went off. Inside each Crankshaft air canister was a little spring-mounted hammer, which tapped a bell when the tank’s pressure indicated less than one minute of air remaining—but they were notoriously inaccurate. He could have ten seconds worth of breathable air left. He heard Sabrina’s alarm go off, and within a few more seconds, the alarms in many of the Crankshaft troopers’ tanks started ringing.

  Buckle coughed. He found it difficult to catch his breath. He didn’t look at his oxygen gauge. He slowed his breathing even though his lungs screamed for more.

  “Hold on!” Sabrina shouted, her voice sounding muffled and far away over the jangling of the alarm bells.

  Laboring to breathe as he ran, Buckle’s vision narrowed—or was it just the fogging of his faceplate glass? The ceiling shimmered silver, fluttering. It was getting harder and harder to run…as if something was pushing him back.

  Sabrina suddenly stopped. Buckle bumped into her and nearly knocked her over. The entire group skidded to a halt behind them. Sabrina lifted her hands, jerked her chin straps loose, unclamped the oxygen mask, and yanked her helmet off her head. Her bright red hair flopped loose, bunched and soggy with sweat, the pale skin on her forehead and cheeks discolored with deep, pink depressions from the padding of the mask.

  Sabrina took a big breath. “Good for the goose, lads!” she announced, grinning widely, her mask dangling from its strap on her left shoulder.

  Buckle snatched at his bulky helmet, now an instrument of suffocation, detaching the leather cinching straps and wrenching it off over his head so hard he feared he might have taken a few strips of flesh with it. He guzzled great lungfuls of air—the atmosphere was wretched and it stunk of decay, but it was the sweetest air Buckle had ever tasted. And instead of being slapped by the cold, still air he expected, the skin on his perspiration-drenched face was met by a stiff lukewarm breeze coming from the tunnel ahead.

  Looking up as he gasped, Buckle’s eyes focused on a gargantuan cobweb stretching across the entire length of the arched ceiling, its silky mesh billowing back like a sail against the flowing air. The web strands shimmered in the lamplight, shivering with the struggles of a trapped moth beating its dull-brown wings against the ancient trap.

  “Is that how you knew there wasn’t any mustard here?” Buckle asked Sabrina. “The spiderwebs?”

  “I don’t know about moths and spiders,” Sabrina said. “But…” She pointed to one of the darkly shadowed concrete channels running along the wall. Buckle realized it was streaming haphazardly with something other than water; he stepped forward and peered down into the channel with the illumination of his lamp. It was flowing with naked-tailed vermin.

  “Rats,” Sabrina muttered loudly, still not accustomed to speaking outside of her helmet. “The place
is still filthy with rats.”

  THE CITY OF THE FOUNDERS

  “DISCARD ALL GAS EQUIPMENT!” PLUTEUS shouted through the howling wind in the darkness of the sewer tunnel. “There is no reason to lug it from here!”

  Buckle watched the Ballblasters and Alchemists unstrap their air cylinders, harnesses, hoses, and masks and drop them into the drainage channels, as hundreds of rats squealed indignantly below. Buckle cast aside his own heavy gear with little regret; although the equipment was expensive and it had kept him alive, they had been running at a jog for the last three minutes, and losing the sixty pounds of metal and rubber was a tremendous relief to his spine.

  Needing the lamplight, everyone kept their helmets on, faceplates open. The orange illumination jiggled frenetically as the helmets were buffeted by the fast-moving air.

  Sabrina was beside Buckle, her red hair floating about her head in the torrent of wind that had greatly increased in intensity in the last two hundred yards. Its blast was strong enough to make Buckle duck, and it battered his eardrums, which were accustomed to the tight insulation of his gas mask.

  The powerful air currents had scoured this section of the tunnel clean; there was no hope for spiderwebs to cling here, and the floor and ceiling were as dry as a desert. The source of the powerful outgoing draft, which carried the seaweed odor of ocean air, was unknown, but Buckle suspected it was a way for the Founders to keep the mustard from flowing in under their city.

  Sabrina stopped in front of a large metal hatch sunk into the tunnel wall. Its surface ran with horizontal rivers of flaky orange rust; it had the look of an ancient tomb door that had been sealed shut for eternity. She drew a crowbar from her jacket and rammed it into a lock over the hatch lever. “Give a hand, here!” she shouted.

  Buckle and Kepler stepped forward and placed their hands on the crowbar, ready to throw their backs into the yank.