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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Ivan Gorky was also not present. That was not good. He would have dragged himself out to the ceremony if he could. Max had checked in on him twice in the infirmary, and she was quite worried about his condition, though Surgeon Fogg had repeatedly assured her that the chief mechanic would survive.

  It was strange, her newly intense concern for Ivan, for she had always mildly disliked him.

  A gentle wind rolled in from the sea, swept across the surface of the snow, and vanished. It was a time of solemn silence in the ceremony. Buffalos lowed in the distance. Twenty-two burning torches fluttered, gripped high in the hands of those who would soon apply them to the pyres where their fallen mates lay in repose.

  Twelve of the seventeen pyres were empty, representing the unrecovered bodies of eight Crankshaft and three Alchemist troopers left behind, and one crew person who had disappeared, either incinerated or gone overboard in the battle—not an uncommon occurrence on a sky vessel engaged in war. As far as actual corpses went, there were four Pneumatic Zeppelin crew members and one Alchemist atop their respective tombs.

  There were also five pyres set off to one side: the corpses of five dead steampipers. They were the enemy, yes, but they were soldiers, and they were being treated with respect. Captain Buckle had asked the steampiper prisoner if there were any special burial rites he wished to have performed for his fellows, but the sullen grenadier had not volunteered any suggestions.

  Max cleared her throat again. Buckle would soon deliver his mourning address, and she did not feel quite ready for it. She had to steel herself in a way no one else was aware of. She was half Martian, and Martians lived secret lives: under their cold, imperturbable interiors, they locked down souls driven by primitive emotions, souls capable of immense empathy, of pure love of the highest order, and also capable of the reddest haze of animalistic rage. Such extremes had to be kept in check, every second of every living day.

  But Max was highly sensitive to people and their needs, to who they were. Even if many of the crew were not much interested in befriending the half-breed zebe, the ice queen—a name she knew some called her—she could not help but be almost supernaturally aware of who they were beneath their own, unstriped skins. Of the dead zeppelineers, she, in the agony of loss, knew them all: Lieutenant Ignatius Dunn, the recently arrived chief elevatorman who was often distant and sullen, but good at his job; Amanda Ambrose, a bow rigger and one of the three excellent violin players on board; Cameron Beddoes, boilerman and a gentle brute, who had once protected Max from two bullies in the schoolyard when they were children; Christopher Glantz, hydro chief and chief of the boat on the Arabella, a father of three and a master of checkers. She closed her eyes. She knew them all, knew their dreams, knew their faces and their children, and she could not shake the feeling that she had failed them. She turned her head, but all she saw was the empty pyre of Edward Black, a selfless young daredevil rigger known to all as Blackie, who had disappeared in the fight with the steampipers.

  Max noticed a green glow floating in her goggles. She shut her eyes.

  She heard the crunch of boots as someone strode across the snow. She opened her eyes to see Buckle step up onto a small platform and pause there, taking a long look at his assembled crew. The hummingbirds flitted about the pyres, delivering their flashes of brilliant color—emerald greens, aquamarine blues, and blood scarlets—amidst the dull grays and whites of the pyres behind him. The flames on the torches rippled high in the stillness.

  “My fellow clansmen, crewmates, and soldiers,” Buckle began, his voice sounding clear as a bell on the open slope, “we gather here, on this distant island, to honor the fallen. These dead are our brothers and sisters. We remember their lives, we mourn their passing, and we bid them farewell as they embark into the great unknown. And we, the members of the Crankshaft clan, having fought shoulder to shoulder with the Alchemist clan, are honored now to lay our dead shoulder to shoulder alongside yours. May their sacrifice, their blood, show us the way to our own protection and salvation.”

  Buckle read every Crankshaft name aloud, ending with the traditional funerary words: “They are the bravest of the brave.”

  Scorpius came to the podium and solemnly read the names of the Alchemist dead. As was their tradition, he said nothing more. But he did give a gracious nod both to Balthazar and Pluteus before he stepped down.

  The stork-like Katzenjammer Smelt then took the stage, the silver spike on his helmet polished and gleaming, peering through his monocle at the assembly. Max thought it was odd for Smelt to wish to speak—he had very few friends here. “As the Chancellor of the Imperials,” Smelt said, “I wish to express my thanks to all of you for my rescue. I also wish to express my gratitude to your warriors who perished on the field of battle. Their names shall be added to the Imperial List of Heroes.” Smelt nodded and stepped back.

  Buckle gave Smelt a cold glance as he returned to the podium. “General Pluteus Brassballs, Commander of the Ballblasters, shall now deliver the ‘Old Salt’s Prayer to the Oracle,’” Buckle announced.

  Pluteus stepped forward, scanning the ranks for a moment before he spoke.

  “Farewell old salt, my dearest friend,

  Your soul returns to whence it came;

  But I weep not, for in the end,

  You and I shall meet again.”

  Pluteus lifted his right hand. The torchbearers stepped forward and applied their torches as one. The flames leapt to the kerosene-soaked wood, ripping along the lengths of the pyres in jagged strips before the constructions burst completely into flames.

  The torchbearers stepped back. Max bowed her head, as did everyone, observing the minute of silence. The pyres roared in the cold stillness, the yellow flames rising skyward in swirling columns up to twenty feet in height, lighting up the slopes of the island and casting so much heat that everyone’s cheeks turned ruddy—with the exception, Max was sure, of her own.

  Once the minute was over, Max lifted her head. She glanced back at the dark ellipsoidal mass of the Pneumatic Zeppelin two hundred yards to the south—far enough away to avoid any airborne embers—and when she turned her head back, she noticed a figure off by itself, through the wavering mirage of heat around the fires. It was the zookeeper, Osprey Fowler, crouched on a low rise just beyond. She was tending a small fire—a funeral pyre for a dead pigeon, one of hers, somehow killed in the chaos of the previous night. Max did not know how long Osprey had been out there on the periphery, hands clutched and on her knees, with her thick brown hair hanging forward over her face like a veil. Her aloneness in her own act of mourning suited the way she always was.

  Buckle stepped down from the podium, signaling the end of the ceremony. The crew relaxed from their state of attention slowly; they were exhausted and sad, and stared into the hypnotic undulations of the bonfires. Sabrina said that one could always see faces in the flames, but Max had never seen one. Perhaps her imagination was lacking.

  A musket blast boomed, close by and from behind. Everyone nearly jumped out of their skin, including Max, and it was difficult to startle a Martian. She and the entire assembly spun around as the echo of the gunshot bounced off the hills.

  There, holding a smoking musket as he stood atop a low ridge thirty yards away, was the ship’s cook, the dauntless Cookie, Perriman Salisbury. And, forty feet to his left, a buffalo staggered, uttered a wavering sigh, and collapsed. Max felt the thump of its drop in her boots.

  Salisbury glared at everybody. “What? The dead are ashes and my tears are ashes now! And the dead aren’t hungry anymore, right? But you all will be. And I’m the one who will have to listen to the whining if there’s no fresh meat for supper!”

  DAMAGE REPORT

  BUCKLE OPENED THE DOOR TO his quarters, and Kellie bounded in. He stopped. He had not seen the blasted remains of his cabin yet. Planks of the wooden ceiling had been ripped away by the explosion over the front compartments, exposing the bare metal supports of the Axial catwalk overhead; the upper section of the glass
nose dome was shattered all about the bow pulpit; but the lower half, which formed the leading wall of his chambers, was intact, though cracked here and there. Ribbons of torn skin fabric were draped over the furniture, along with jumbles of blasted wood, shards of glass, and twists of brass and iron. Kellie bounded onto the bed and sat, looking confused by the debris crowding her perch.

  Buckle walked in, bits of glass, wood, and metal scraping under his boots. He carried a buglight, but there was not much need for it yet—plenty of late-afternoon light still poured in through the window casements. It was six o’clock, an hour before dusk, and the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s repairs had brought her back to flying condition. He plunked the buglight on the pantry, and grabbed a surviving bottle of rum and a shot glass from his liquor cabinet. He carefully wiped a section of the Lion’s Table clear and planted the bottle and glass beside a captured steampiper helmet someone had placed there—probably Howard. The helmet, its brass plates and dark eye slits gleaming, still seemed to pose a threat. Buckle wondered if there might still be a head in it.

  Buckle could hear singing resounding through the zeppelin, the voices of the crew barely harmonious, but enthusiastic. The repair teams had finished their assignments at a feverish rate, and Buckle had given permission for the crew to throw a wake in the mess, their traditional celebration of the lives of the fallen. Extra grog rations were assigned, though not too much—just enough to warm their bellies. The crew still had to be reasonably sharp when they tried to get their wounded flying machine off the ground. But they needed a little cheer, Buckle reasoned, and their exhausted bodies and spirits would be the better for it. And they had good food: greasy steaks filled their plates, liberally sliced from Salisbury’s buffalo, skinned and gutted, sizzling over a busy fire as the cook’s smokejack rotated it on a spit one hundred paces east of the gunnery gondola.

  Buckle’s mouth watered—the smells of roasting meat wafted through his cabin, torturing his empty gut. But he had work to do. He ran his fingers across his dust-covered chart rack, selected a meteorological map, and unrolled it on the table—a difficult feat when one arm is in a sling. He plunked the rum bottle on one end, his top hat on the other, and checked the seasonal headwind pattern along the coast. He did not want his damaged airship heading into the wind on the way home, if he could help it.

  A rap sounded at his door.

  “Come in,” Buckle said.

  The heavy door opened with the scratch of glass. Max stepped in, holding her engineer’s logbook, an ornate tome with flat gears and cogs sunk into its leather cover. “I have the new repair-status reports you requested, Captain,” she said.

  “Ah, good,” Buckle replied.

  “It is unfortunate that your quarters have suffered such catastrophe.”

  “Add it to the damage report, if you must.” Buckle chuckled dryly.

  Max flipped open her logbook, drew forth the ink pen, and made a small notation on a page. Buckle laughed, but stopped when Max gave him a stern look. It was difficult to tell when she was serious and when she was not. But most of the time she was serious.

  Buckle uncorked the rum bottle with his teeth. “Care for a snort?” he asked, then spit the cork onto the pantry counter.

  “No, thank you, Captain,” Max answered. She rarely drank, though she could be coaxed into it on rare occasions.

  “Very well,” Buckle replied. He picked up the rum bottle, and the meteorological map, released from the weight, snapped into a tight curl. He poured a healthy two ounces into his glass, nodded to the steampiper helmet, and swallowed the rum. It squeezed down his throat and into his stomach with a harsh but pleasurable heat. Standard’s Irish rum. Damn good stuff. “All right, then, let’s hear it.”

  Max ran her finger across her handwritten columns in the logbook. “All major repairs are completed. Airship structure is fundamentally sound. Secondary team work is progressing well. Engines and boilers are intact. Propeller number one was damaged beyond repair, but all other nacelles are functioning. Gas cells one, two, three, sixteen, and seventeen were destroyed. Hydrogen reserves are dangerously low—thirty-one percent, but sufficient to get us airborne again. We can drain hydrogen from the Arabella’s reserve tanks if necessary.”

  “It will not be necessary,” Buckle said. Both he and Max knew that they would need the launch in flying shape, in case they could not get the Pneumatic Zeppelin off the ground. Once disengaged, the launch could be sent home with a small crew to bring back a properly equipped repair team.

  “Understood,” Max replied. “The damages to the envelope skin are extensive, both to the flanks and the nose, but the skinners assure me they sealed the breaches sufficiently for transit. I also made a roofwalk personally, and I concur.”

  “We will launch just after dusk, departing under the cover of night,” Buckle said.

  Max snapped her logbook shut and nodded. “I can say that we have a very high percentage chance of getting home.”

  Buckle wanted to fold his hands behind his back, but the sling on his right arm prevented that. “It was a very near thing,” he said.

  “Razor’s edge,” Max replied.

  Buckle smiled gently, aware of his great affection for his Martian engineer, and the deep empathy he felt for the lonely life she pretended did not affect her. “You and your crew have done a brilliant job. Good work.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” Max’s eyes glimmered blue in the aqueous humor: the colors of pride, of happiness.

  “I also wanted to thank you for your bravery up on the roof yesterday, when you protected me from the tanglers.”

  The blue tint faded from Max’s goggles. “I failed you, Captain.”

  Buckle shook his head. “Courage is courage. Courage against long odds is never diminished by the result. So I thank you, my brave, brave friend.”

  “You are welcome, Captain.” The goggles went blue again.

  Buckle stepped to his little pantry and collected another shot glass. “Have a drink with me, Lieutenant.”

  “I appreciate the gesture, Captain. But I should not.”

  Buckle planted the glass on the table beside his. “I am attempting an appropriate gesture of appreciation here. Well, how about I order you to have a drink with me, then?”

  Max cocked her head. “An order?”

  “Damned right, it is an order,” Buckle announced playfully as he poured. “And a heartfelt request.”

  Buckle lifted a brimming glass toward Max. She sighed and stepped forward, taking it in her long, white fingers.

  “And goggles up, please,” Buckle said.

  “Another order?” Max asked, almost shyly.

  “Another heartfelt request. I should like to see your eyes, Lieutenant. This means a lot to me.”

  Max reached up to her leather pilot helmet and flipped the lever that retracted the aqueous humor from the space between her eyes and the goggle lenses. She lifted the goggles up to their resting position on the crest of the helmet and wiped her wet eyes with her sleeve. She paused, and then did something that surprised Buckle slightly—she pulled her helmet off, her thick black hair swirling about her face and shoulders. It was an act of casual undress; she rarely did such a thing in his presence.

  “Goggles off, Captain, as requested,” Max said.

  Buckle smiled. Max had caught him off guard, and she knew it: a devious blue haunted her dark eyes. “Very well, then.” He raised his glass with his good hand and motioned for Max to step closer. “To the blood.”

  Max took a confident stride up to him. They hooked arms at the elbow, each drawing their hand back so their glass was poised just below their lips, their faces only inches apart. “To the blood,” Max said.

  “Aye,” Buckle said, his voice emerging in a husky whisper. Two zeppelineers who drank to the blood together were forever bound to sacrifice their lives for each other. Buckle had made this toast with Max before, as he had with several crewmates, but this time it was different—something crackled in the air between them lik
e a swarm of invisible bees. “To the blood.”

  Buckle threw back his rum, feeling Max’s slender elbow rotate in the crux of his arm as she did the same. When the arms came down, he found himself caught in her hypnotic alien eyes. What was this? Buckle could not move. Max’s breath, sweet with the rum, warmed his lips. He realized that her Martian heart, pressed up against his forearm, was pounding. Something demanded that he kiss her. He wanted to kiss her. But to do so meant to throw himself off a cliff, and into the depthless chasm of those bottomless black eyes that now danced with purple will-o’-the-wisps. He could not move.

  A rapping came from the door as it swung open with a scrape of wood and glass.

  Max jerked back. When she yanked her arm away from Buckle, she lost her grip on the shot glass; it spun to the floor and shattered. Buckle’s lips suddenly felt cold.

  Sabrina stared from the doorway, having shoved the door open for little Howard Hampton, cabin boy and gunner’s mate, to enter, proudly striding in with a tray of hot tea. “Howard made you some tea, Captain.”

  “Very good, lad,” Buckle said with a smile, flicking his eyes once to Max. “Place it on the table here, please.”

  Max pulled her hair back and yanked on her flying helmet. She lowered her goggles, flooding them with the aqueous humor. “I shall see to the next status report, Captain,” she announced, and strode for the door.

  “Very well, Max,” Buckle replied, watching Howard pour him a cup of dark tea.

  “This is much better for you than the rum, sir,” Howard said. “Especially with such a nasty chill in the air, sir.”

  “Aye, lad,” Buckle said, watching Max disappear out the door. He turned and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Aye.” There was something different about Howard now…something serious had crept into his blue eyes above the blackbang powder stains on his cheeks. He had witnessed war for the first time. The innocence was gone.