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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  There was nothing but a wall of purplish blackness facing them now.

  Then, a slice of cloud-filled night, the gray clouds appearing bright compared to the light-sucking darkness of the Martian pillar, emerged on the left, slowly growing in size as the airship swung toward the edge of the obelisk.

  It was going to be close.

  And for a second, Sabrina thought they were going to make it.

  The bow of the Pneumatic Zeppelin skimmed past the cliff-like flank of the Catalina Obelisk.

  “I think we made it!” Nero shouted.

  “No!” Sabrina shouted. “Brace for impact!”

  Then came the awful sound, the sound of the airship’s starboard-side envelope skidding along the edge of the obelisk, the sound of ripping fabric, snapping ropes, and the weird, awful, rivet-popping screech of superstructure supports wrenching and shearing.

  “Collision!” Sabrina yelled.

  “If it clips off the stabilizer, we’ve had it!” Welly cried.

  The zeppelin was in contact with the obelisk for only a few moments, in actuality perhaps about three seconds, but to Sabrina it felt like an eternity. For those three seconds, the ship vibrated so violently it rattled her teeth and bones, and she feared it might come to pieces under her very feet.

  But the vibrating stopped. The airship had made it past the obelisk, floating free once again. But now she swung hard to port in a wide, unnerving yaw.

  Wong wrenched his elevator wheel back and forth, but it barely moved. “We have taken too much stabilizer damage, Captain,” he said. “I cannot keep her on an even keel for very long.”

  Sabrina and Nero tried to assist Wong, but it was no use—the elevator controls were mired in mud.

  The water. A cold shiver ran up Sabrina’s spine. She did not want to end up in the water.

  “Can we keep her airborne long enough to launch the Arabella?” Wong asked plaintively.

  “No,” Sabrina replied. “I am going to try to make for Catalina Island. Otherwise, we ditch in the sea.”

  UNFINISHED BUSINESS

  THE FEMALE STEAMPIPER HAD STUMBLED back, one hand clutching at the catwalk rail, the other under a smoldering hole low in her cuirass, over her lower rib cage. Blood ran in dark rivulets over her fingers, staining the silver stripe on her black pants below. Pain swam in her green eyes, but did nothing to unsettle the profound disdain he saw for him there.

  Buckle had lowered his sword.

  “Don’t make me finish the job for you, Captain,” Smelt had said.

  “I am taking her prisoner, Chancellor,” Buckle replied.

  Smelt holstered his pistol. “She will never talk. Finish her off.”

  Buckle had turned his back on Smelt and strode after the female steampiper, who was staggering toward the nose of the airship.

  “Surrender and I shall give you mercy,” Buckle had shouted.

  The female steampiper glanced back at him and continued her wounded shamble toward the bow. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was making a dramatic bank to port, and this made it difficult to walk along the catwalk if you weren’t used to it. Buckle followed her slowly, warily. She was moving toward the nose dome at the end of the Axial catwalk. The interior of the zeppelin was dark—most of the buglights having dropped and smashed in the chaos—and loose fireflies swirled in the black flood of wind currents, their yellow bodies shifting in waves as if it were snowing fire.

  The sky in front of the nose dome looked dark and uneven, as if they were flying into a wall. Buckle’s eyes blurred and he shook his head. The gray night sky appeared again, and he felt an odd sense of relief.

  Suddenly the Pneumatic Zeppelin lurched, throwing Buckle forward to his knees. The envelope skin to his right and above him, what he could see of it between the cells, was violently sheared open from fore to aft by some colossal object. It was as if a gigantic knife were slicing its way along the starboard flank of the airship. It sounded like they had flown into a monstrous waterfall: wires snapped, slicing away into the darkness with shrill whips; rivets fired out of their holes like bullets; the superstructure, shaking so violently that it wobbled the catwalk, moaned with the horrible shriek of bending metal.

  And then it was over as quickly as it had begun. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was loose and floating unhindered again, though Buckle, scrambling to his feet, could feel her drifting into an unhealthy yaw to port.

  Buckle peered at the damaged skin beyond the starboard hydrogen cells, where the gray night sky loomed beyond. How much more damage could his zeppelin take? He had to get to the bridge.

  “Your prisoner is escaping you, Captain Buckle!” Smelt shouted from behind.

  Buckle turned to see the female steampiper limping down the catwalk toward the nose dome, about two compartments ahead of him. He had taken off after her at a sprint, and now he had almost caught her before she reached it.

  The female steampiper hunched around the four-pounder bow-chaser cannon to open the round glass hatch and step out onto the bow pulpit. She stood still for a moment, surveying the chasm of sea and sky, before she turned to look at Buckle. Her face was in shadow, her form silhouetted against the gray night sky, her windswept red hair roiling about her head.

  “Wait!” Buckle shouted, slowing to a halt ten feet from her. He rammed his sword into its sheath with a leathery swish, hearing the clank of the hilt striking the brass mouth of the scabbard. “Surrender to me! You shall be returned home safely and unharmed! You have my word!”

  The steampiper let her gaze linger on Buckle for a moment. For the life of him, Buckle thought he was looking at Sabrina.

  The female steampiper turned her back to him.

  “Wait!” Buckle screamed, rushing forward.

  The woman clambered up the cannon turret, stepped up onto the top of the barbette, and threw herself into the void.

  Buckle leapt out into the battering wind of the pulpit in time to see her falling away toward the ocean. At the last moment, just before the Pneumatic Zeppelin blocked her from his view, he saw a parachute on the back of her cuirass burst open, a soft puff of white in the darkness.

  Buckle gripped the barbette rail as the wind thundered around him. He was overwhelmed by the darkness of sea and sky, and the irregular black mass of Catalina Island looming below. He felt dispirited, as if some desperately needed opportunity had just been lost.

  There was also a weird chill in his gut—what doppelgänger theory might explain why he had just battled a near-perfect double of Sabrina Serafim?

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin yawed to port with a terrifying looseness, fighting to stay under control, but foundering. They were probably going to have to ditch. Buckle ducked back into the nose port: he had to get to the bridge. He saw Smelt peering at him on the catwalk ahead, his monocle swirling with glimmers of the fireflies between them.

  “The cat lost his mouse, did he?” Smelt laughed. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Buckle did not answer.

  “And perhaps you should thank me for how well we Imperials construct our airships,” Smelt shouted. “Or we would all be dead by now.”

  Buckle reached the circular staircase and paused, against his better judgment, to glare at the Imperial chancellor. Why, of all the people in the world, Buckle grumbled in his mind, did it have to be Katzenjammer Smelt who had saved him? Buckle would have rather been chopped up in a propeller than owe anything to this vile blackguard.

  “You yellow-fingered thief,” Smelt said.

  Buckle grabbed the hilt of his sword, drawing it an inch before he stopped himself.

  Smelt’s impressive, hair-filled nostrils flared. He slid his hand down to the handle of his sword. “The day you draw your sword on me, boy, is the day your shoulders get lonely without your head.”

  Buckle gritted his teeth. He did not have time for this, this self-absorbed ruffling of feathers with Katzenjammer Smelt. He forced his blade back down in its scabbard—the click, as he drove it home, was humiliating—and hurried down the companionway.<
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  “The time will come, Romulus Buckle,” Smelt shouted after him. “You and I, Cranker, we have unfinished business, and that business shall be resolved at the point of a sword!”

  NO REST FOR THE WICKED

  WHEN ROMULUS BUCKLE ENTERED THE piloting gondola, he wondered how the Pneumatic Zeppelin could still be controlled given the wreckage he saw. The glass nose dome was shattered, and a strip of the gondola’s port side had been torn away in a long, jagged rip, as if a cannonball had raked across it, snapping away instrument panels and rendering banks of once-elegant instruments into grotesque metal spaghetti. The freezing wind howled in through the gap, swinging the buglights overhead, shaking the glowing green boil in its spheres and tubes.

  Kellie burst out of her cubby, whirling around Buckle’s knees as he hit the bottom of the companionway—she looked to be the only living thing there that wasn’t badly worn out. A Ballblaster and a crewmen still guarded the base of the staircase, gripping their muskets, looking exhausted; another crewman, sitting on the deck, his right arm soaked with blood, was being bandaged by Fitzroy; Welly and Nero stood at their stations, their faces slick, their eyes glassy with shock.

  Max spun from the engineering station. “Captain on the bridge,” she announced, a formality Buckle disliked; even though he had told her so, she still continued to do it.

  Balthazar, assisting Wong on the emergency elevator wheel, his face running with blood from a laceration high up on his head, gave Buckle a sour look. “You’ve got one hell of a mess on your hands here, son. And, by the way, the sky curses captains who don’t stay put on their bridge.”

  Buckle nodded, which was his way of ignoring Balthazar’s criticism, and stepped to the helm. Sabrina smiled grimly at his approach, her cheeks damp with perspiration despite the howling, cold air.

  “Do we need to relocate to the battle bridge?” Buckle asked. The airship had a secondary emergency bridge, located behind the engine room at the stern, where the crew could transfer control; it was rudimentary and almost blind, and only to be considered as a last option.

  “It would not help, Captain,” Max answered at his back. “Our flight-control systems and control surfaces are damaged. The Pneumatic Zeppelin has simply absorbed too much punishment to maintain equilibrium.”

  “She is not going to stay in the air much longer, Captain,” Sabrina said. “I am making way for Catalina Island, and initiated a slow descent at half full. I recommend an emergency mooring to effect repairs.”

  “Aye. I’ll take her from here, Navigator,” Buckle said, as he stepped to the helm wheel. De Quincey immediately released his grip on the spokes when Buckle clamped his hands down on them. Buckle gasped. The amount of effort it instantly took to hold the wheel in place surprised him: it nearly pulled him off balance before he had time to set his feet. “Catalina sounds like a good idea,” Buckle said, straining. He glanced back at De Quincey, who was soaked through with sweat.

  “You need a hand, Captain?” De Quincey asked.

  “Not at the moment, Mister De Quincey,” Buckle replied. “But stay close.”

  Sabrina cast a disapproving glance at the bloody wound on Buckle’s arm, as well as the bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head. “You are injured, sir.”

  “I appreciate your concern, Navigator,” Buckle said with a smile. “No rest for the wicked.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Sabrina replied. “Look out—she is extremely heavy to port, constantly wanting to fall out of level, and barely responding to commands.” She rubbed her arms as she stepped forward into the navigator’s chair, and Welly shifted aside.

  “How goes the fight up top?” Balthazar asked.

  “It looks like we sent them packing,” Buckle replied. He had seen the aftermath of the desperate battle along the keel corridor, the dead bodies of steampipers and his own crewmen scattered on the platforms and gratings, shrouded in drifting gunpowder smoke and mourned by legions of sparkling fireflies. Buckle had observed the carnage with a cold eye. The time for mourning would come later. “Pluteus and Ivan are overseeing deck sweeps in the search for stowaways and bombs. Hopefully we harried them so much they were unable to plant any explosives.”

  “Nicely done,” Balthazar said.

  “I hope you killed them all,” Nero grumbled. “Serves them right.”

  “One hundred and fifteen feet and descending,” Welly reported.

  Buckle watched the sweeping mass of Catalina Island, centered in the broken bull’s-eye of the nose dome, looming large in the glittering sea. He scrutinized the topography, looking for a wide slope to make his landing on. The zeppelin struggled to maintain its course, speed, and altitude, and the wheel in his hands, usually light, felt leaden. It was a royal strain just to keep the level bubbles on target as they wobbled in their glass arches.

  “Engineering, damage report,” Buckle asked.

  “We are screwed, aye,” Sabrina replied.

  “I would appreciate a little more detail than that.”

  “Almost every major system of the airship has been compromised, Captain,” Max said. “The skin is now too irregular to maintain balance or streamlining. Our drag exceeds maximum limits. We are lucky it is a calm night in the air—if we were to fly into even a stiff headwind, I fear the internal pressures would now tear the airship apart. We are running on three boilers with one, two, and three shut down. Water coolant is dangerously low and all water ballast, both the mains and reserves, has been jettisoned. Positive buoyancy is just above the line, and we have only thirty-three percent of hydrogen remaining in the reserve tanks.”

  “A real peach of a pinch,” Sabrina noted grimly.

  Buckle nodded. The hydrogen percentage was critical. Anything below 30 percent in the reserve tanks and they would not have enough lift to get off the ground again. And if anything went wrong with the emergency land mooring, a tricky maneuver even with a healthy airship, they might have to vent the existing hydrogen in the gasbags to prevent a crash fire. That would mean that all the hydrogen they’d have left was what was in those reserve tanks.

  “One hundred feet,” Sabrina said, her eyes buried in the drift scope at the navigator’s station.

  Max tapped a barometer cylinder and eyed the measurement lines painted on the glass. “We do not have the capacity to recover from our damages in flight. Not enough to make it over the mountains to home.”

  “In other words, yes, we’re screwed. Aye,” Buckle said, with a wink to Sabrina.

  “Catalina works for me,” Balthazar said. “I’ll take a hard thump in the arse over a cold bath any day of the week. We shall patch this old lady up and be on our way by morning.”

  Catalina Island.

  Buckle felt his heart sink in his chest. He, for all of his braggadocio, was not going to be able to get his zeppelin home without a perilous stop for repairs. Now he had to make an emergency mooring at night over unfamiliar terrain. Catalina Island was said to be uninhabited—no clan had officially claimed it—but it was known to be a secretive refuge for privateers, pirates, and fugitives, and the Atlanteans were rumored to have outliers operating in the vicinity. And if the Founders clan had decided to be there at some point, they would be there.

  “’Have the crew prepare for emergency field anchor,” Buckle said, eyeing the dark outline of Catalina against the dully sparkling ocean—it seemed much bigger now than it had just a minute ago.

  “Prepare for emergency field anchor!” Max shouted into her chattertube hood.

  “Eighty feet altitude,” Sabrina reported. “Speed, twenty-two knots. Crosswind of two knots, north by northeast.”

  Buckle shoved the rudder wheel around. Trying to bring a damaged zeppelin down in a decent hover was one hell of a trick. A flip of bright red caught his eye. It was a tendril of Sabrina’s hair, a loose curl dangling against her temple from beneath her bowler hat as she leaned over the drift scope at her station. Buckle fought an unsettled feeling in his stomach. Sabrina was the only person he had ever seen with ha
ir so red as that—until today. How could the Founders steampiper possess scarlet hair equally brilliant? More disturbingly, how could she bear such an uncanny resemblance to Sabrina that it would be difficult to believe them anything less than family, or indeed anything other than twin sisters?

  Both of them were even left-handed.

  Buckle was bound by oath never to ask another sibling orphan any questions about their past. This was Balthazar’s cardinal rule. But the Founders clan was fast becoming the Crankshaft clan’s greatest enemy. And it was obvious to Buckle that her nearly identical appearance to an elite officer of their steampiper corps proved that Sabrina’s connection to them ran far deeper than an unexplained familiarity with their city and its sewer systems suggested.

  The matter had to end here. He had a broken zeppelin to land.

  The matter had to end here. For now.

  FIREFLIES AND BURNING FUSES

  “DAMN THIS DISCOMBOBULATION!” IVAN GRUMBLED as he clambered up an access ladder between compartments four and five. His firefly lantern swung from his wrist hook, casting waves of orange illumination back and forth in the near darkness of gigantic rustling gas cells and creaking metal girders. They weren’t going make it home for days, his airship was a mess, and to top it all off, he was going to miss his first date with Holly Churchill.

  Holly had repeatedly thwarted Ivan’s courting, stating emphatically that she was not interested in such dalliances at this time in her life. It had taken him three months to persuade her to accept a date. He was completely taken with her, and in the most gentlemanly way. She wasn’t like the other Crankshaft clan girls. She was serious, intense, and did not smile easily—though when she did, she could melt the heart of an ogre. Her sandy-brown hair wasn’t the longest, and she wasn’t the most beautiful—though there was nothing wrong with her looks—but she possessed an incandescent sultriness, a magnetism that made men climb mountains and write songs, and hate any other poor fellow who might also throw his hat into her wide ring of suitors.