Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Buckle waited, hunching as the severe cold bit through his clothes and buffeted the flat of his axe blade, until all the ice team had made it up onto the envelope and secured their safety lines. “Two and three forward with me!” Buckle shouted. “Mister Darcy, take the remainder to the stern! We shall meet amidships!”

  “Aye, sir!” Darcy replied.

  “Have at it, choppers! And mind your blades!” Buckle howled.

  Darcy led his three ice cutters—skinner Hector Hudson, and riggers Ilsa Gallagher and Lansa Lazlo—along the envelope spine toward the stern, slipping and scrambling through the wind gusts. Buckle signaled for his two—skinner Carmen Steinway and the propulsion airman Blake—to accompany him forward to the bow. Buckle grabbed ahold of the stem of the forward grappling cannon, using it for support as he advanced, his boots skidding across layers of bumpy ice. It was a long scramble across the seventy-five feet of slick spine board and canvas to the crest of the nose, the wind exploding over and over again into their faces.

  A flash of lightning, terrifyingly close, ripped through the murk off the port beam, its reflection flashing across the ice coating the length of the airship. A burned-metal smell stung Buckle’s mouth and nostrils—electricity.

  Buckle and his axe team reached the crow’s-nest nacelle at the leading edge of the envelope, where the rounding of the nose fell away in a steep curve to the quivering bowsprit thirty feet below. “Top down! Top down!” Buckle shouted.

  Steinway and Blake rappelled down the flanks of the bow, heads ducked against the beating blizzard. Buckle raised his axe against the maniac wind, bringing it down with a fine glancing stroke, despite the waffling of the axe head. The force of the blow exploded the immature, thin ice at the point of impact, the mirrorlike fragments sucked away into the storm, while sending long, shivering cracks through the surrounding carapace. Buckle struggled to keep his feet. Clearing the roof of the new ice was the easy part; trying to keep one’s footing in the mess while swinging an axe was not.

  Buckle fought to keep a good grip on the axe handle. There was already a slick slip to it, and it shifted in his grip as he swung—a problem when the angle of the blade was the only difference between chipping away ice and gashing a hole in the fabric beneath it.

  Suddenly, the violent storm abated, the dark, churning surface of the blizzard falling away below as if the Arabella had just leapt up out of a stormy sea. The atmosphere was clear except for a gentle snowfall, the night sky above Buckle a high ceiling of lightning-shivered clouds that cast a ghastly, uneven illumination of silver and ultraviolet black. Buckle was nearly thrown from his feet as the Arabella, released from the clutches of the updraft, bounded forward, her engines and propellers roaring.

  Buckle gasped; it was now easy to breathe the painfully cold air, without the wind trying to suck his collapsing lungs free of it. The Arabella had burst up into a higher altitude of the storm, a hidden, twilit world with an atmosphere dramatically different than the layer of clouds below it. Visibility was much better, despite the falling snow—and the snow was falling, for the updraft had vanished with the storm.

  Buckle also felt the Arabella, despite her hydrogen bags filled beyond capacity, and her boilers on the red line, begin to founder.

  Get us the hell out of here, Sabrina, Buckle thought, and slammed his axe down again, splitting streams of ice that seemed to be re-forming as quickly as he cut them away. A forked bolt of lightning tore downward past the starboard side of the bow, perilously close, making Buckle’s skin itch and tingle.

  “Twelve thousand, four hundred, Captain!” Steinway yelled from her perch on the starboard flank below.

  Not high enough to require oxygen, but colder than hell.

  Buckle glanced backward, hoping to gain a glimpse of Darcy and his aft team despite the obscuring drifts of the snowfall. It was then that Buckle, from the corner of his eye, glimpsed a great shadow rise behind the stern, a hulking presence of a deeper shade than the dark, silk-silver murk about it, a hovering monstrosity equal to the size of the Arabella, its beating bat wings wider in their sweep than the length of the airship on either side, the nightmare body alive with a writhing mass of tentacle arms.

  Along with the shadow came a strange noise that instinctively made the stomach sour and the nerves ache, an ancient, nasty clicking.

  Steinway had spun around on her line and, espying the looming monstrosity above the stern, she screamed. “Kraken! The monster of monsters is upon us, Captain! It be the kraken!”

  THE KRAKEN

  THE KRAKEN DESCENDED, ITS HUGE wings beating, a flesh-and-blood nightmare shedding the unreality of myth, an alien beastie so ravenous that no aviator unfortunate enough to face one had ever come home alive. The fables described the kraken as a hunter of human sweetmeats, devouring entire crews in mere minutes, a pitiless crusher of airships.

  For an instant, all Buckle could do was stare. The kraken resembled a giant squid, reddish yellow in color, though the head was almost blue, nestled amidst countless muscle-bound tentacles, the tubular body long and sheathed in an armored carapace, crowned with a horn-lined frill—a triceratopian head. The four sweeping wings, bat-like with their translucent, veined flesh and the protuberance of the skeletal structure beneath, beat slowly but powerfully, each one leaving massive vortexes in the snowstorm, each one as big as the Arabella itself. Blue-white arcs of electricity crackled back and forth across the kraken’s skin.

  And the eyes—the beasties always had such terrible, glowing eyes. The kraken had seven of them—one huge, multichambered orb in the center of the head, and three smaller eyes aligned on each side. They were hypnotic, drenched with malevolence, and frightful in their intelligence.

  It had to be killed, and killed quickly. And all Romulus Buckle had in his hand as he hurled aside his safety line—a deadly hindrance now—and scrambled amidships with a heart firing like artillery…well, all he had was a blunt axe.

  It would have to do.

  “Lazlo! Raise the alarm!” Buckle screamed back at the rigger, who stood just ahead of the amidships nacelle, staring dumbfounded at the apparition ahead. “Alarm! And muskets!”

  “Aye, sir!” Lazlo shouted back, sliding into the observer’s nacelle to sound the emergency bell.

  Buckle suddenly found himself catapulted forward, the deck dipping down in front of him. The kraken was latching on to the envelope roof, drawing the weight of its monstrous lobster body onto the canvas and heaving the Arabella down at the stern.

  Buckle landed hard on his stomach, sliding a few feet on the treacherous ice before recovering his feet at the leading tips of the beastie’s tentacles, dozens of them, writhing on the deck, the suckers clamping on the envelope skin.

  He saw Darcy and Ilsa Gallagher trapped at the stern, chopping frantically at the sea of arms coiling back and forth around them. An overhead scream made Buckle snap his head up to the brilliantly lit sky of shimmering lightning and falling snow—Hector Hudson thrashed in midair as the tentacle that had just lifted him squeezed, then ripped him in half.

  Something exploded in Buckle’s brain.

  Buckle hurdled over tentacles, moving beneath dozens more that lashed back and forth in the darkness overhead. “Have at the monster, mates!” Buckle shouted into the teeth of the wind, and slammed his axe down upon the joint of a thick tentacle arm. The blade sank deep into the jellyfish muscle beneath, sending up gouts of yellow blood. The arm yanked back reflexively, nearly tearing the axe out of Buckle’s hands as it snapped away.

  Buckle howled. A murderous ecstasy ripped through him at the feel of the chop. He wanted to rage at the killing of Hudson—the kraken had committed the unforgivable, attacking his airship and its crew—but the strategist inside Buckle had already taken over. To win, he had to prevent the kraken from clamping down. To win, he and his crew, gnats against a lion, had to kill the beastie in a matter of seconds. The eyes. Take out the eyes. And then the eviscerating could begin.

  “The eyes!” Buckle
screamed as he leapt over a lashing tentacle, battling toward Darcy and Ilsa at the stern. “Chop the bloody eyes!”

  Darcy and Ilsa lay to, delivering vicious cuts to the kraken’s squishy flesh, but the beastie seemed unperturbed—it brought the upper half of dead Hudson’s torso to its mouth and jammed it into the fetid hole, a circle of overlapping hooked beaks, each snapping and grinding in its own motion, and slewed the remains of the poor fellow down its gullet.

  Once finished with its mastication, the kraken slid its bloodstained beaks back and forth across one another with an ear-numbing CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.

  Blake and Steinway were now at Buckle’s side, axes whirling, and Lazlo joined the battle line a moment later. They swung their axes back and forth, fending off the growing number of tentacles snapping in from every angle in the flashing light, throwing up waves of yellow blood wherever the blades sunk and bit. Slowly they worked their way forward to Darcy and Ilsa until they were only a half-dozen yards away. The Arabella groaned and shuddered, still sinking at the stern—the kraken had secured itself upon the rear of the airship now, its slithering arms constricting around the envelope, the suckered appendages pulling along its rippling length in great accordion-heaves of muscle, the great black wings, quivering overhead like death-ship sails, slowly folding down onto the long curve of its back.

  The kraken intended to stay for a while.

  Buckle broke through, hacking at an arm as thick as a tree trunk until ten feet of the end fell off and slithered away. He lunged toward Darcy and Ilsa. The canvas at his feet was awash in yellow blood, the jackline cable screwed in a jumble, its iron securing bolts having been separated from the superstructure girders beneath by the awesome force of the beastie’s suckering arm when it had snatched Hudson from the deck.

  An orange tentacle caught Ilsa by the boot and jerked, upending her; she lurched forward, hacking at the swaying appendage as it lifted her, carrying her to her doom.

  Buckle lunged for Ilsa, but his gloved hand missed, his fingers brushing the end of her puggaree as it dangled from the upside-down pith helmet. Ilsa dropped her axe, folded her body up, and popped her foot out of the tentacle-wrapped boot; she dropped free, landing hard on her back amidst a nest of writhing kraken arms at Buckle’s feet. He yanked the gasping, one-booted woman to her feet as Darcy parried a tentacle, its suckers festooned with an axe, alongside.

  “Are you in one piece, aviator?” Buckle shouted at Ilsa.

  “Yes! We won’t let the beastie get away, Cap’n!” Ilsa shouted, drawing a knife from her belt.

  “That’s the spirit, Gallagher!” Buckle yelled back, sidestepping a tentacle as it curved toward him from the murk. “Go for the eyes! The damned eyes!”

  The kraken suddenly withdrew a raft of tentacles and stacked them like lumber, one by one, down upon one another, forming a wall of beastie flesh as impenetrable as a portcullis between the zeppelineers and its face.

  It was as if the beastie had heard Buckle, understood his intent—but that was impossible.

  They needed muskets.

  “Back up amidships!” Buckle screamed, swinging his axe left and right. “Stay tight! Stay tight!” The group retreated slowly, Darcy, Ilsa, Lazlo, and Steinway, their picket fence of axes slashing under the writhing archways of tentacles in a twilit world of lightning. Splatters of hot, yellow kraken blood slopped the deck and stank of wine vinegar, melting the ice in irregular, steaming valleys.

  Suddenly a tentacle, a massive, snaking whip of sucker and quivering muscle, rolled in upon the little phalanx, knocking Buckle and Darcy to their knees, and nearly bashing Lazlo over the side, so great was the force of its collision; then the arm snapped away, and Steinway was gone.

  “Carmen!” Ilsa shrieked, but the poor skinner was out of reach, the beastie whipping her body back and forth high overhead.

  “You bloody devil!” Buckle bellowed, hewing at the writhing mass of tentacles in front of him as his crew did the same.

  The kraken, ignoring the vicious blows inflicted upon its arms, stuffed the screaming Steinway into its beaks and ripped the unfortunate woman to shreds, the last flails of her arms punctuated by a sparkling burst of boil and quicksilver.

  The kraken spit a blood-soaked boot onto the deck. The eyes, the seven iridescent bug eyes, peered down with cold calculation as it chomped and chewed. A flash of lightning lit the world white and blue, and the eyes reflected in hundreds of tiny prisms, in murderous rainbows.

  Fury throttled Buckle, banging the blood his brain, pumping adrenaline into his muscles as he swung his weapon. “On me!” he screamed, waving his arms. “On me, you ill-looking brute! You’ve got a big brain, do you?”

  The huge center eye swung to Buckle, watching him.

  “Know this—you shall die this day!” Buckle howled, raising his blood-slicked axe high. “You have slithered into your grave and here I stand, your bloody executioner!”

  Surprised by the theatricality of his words, Buckle felt like he was onstage in the devil’s theater. He was going to split open the kraken’s skull, chop the gooey brain out, and pickle it in a grog barrel for Doctor Fogg to inspect upon their return home.

  “Captain!” Sabrina shouted, appearing at Buckle’s flank with a blackbang pistol in each hand.

  “Good lass!” Buckle said, grabbing Sabrina’s offered pistol, whipping out his arm, and taking aim at the kraken’s biggest eye. He fired.

  The kraken, apparently well aware of a firearm’s effect, slammed its pinkish, armored eyelids shut. The ball struck the lid and ricocheted away in a corkscrew of sparks.

  Buckle hurled the spent pistol aside. “Down, Captain!” Sabrina shouted, yanking him, and shoving another pistol into his free hand. “Everyone, get down!”

  Buckle dropped to one knee, turning to see six crew members advancing in a ragged rank along the roof, each one recognizable to Buckle despite their faces being buried inside goggles and the grasshopperish oxygen masks. It was Faraday’s gondola ice team, along with the signalman Martin Robinson, the boilerman Cornelius Valentine, and the gunner’s mate Samantha Frost, armed with axes and muskets with bayonets gleaming from beneath the muzzles.

  “Aim!” Sabrina screamed into the wind, raising her pistol.

  The firing squad lifted their weapons.

  “The eyes! Target the eyes, musketeers!” Buckle yelled, ducking lower, yanking Ilsa and Darcy down by their collars on each side of him.

  “Fire!” Sabrina screamed.

  The six muskets and one pistol erupted in a ragged volley of booms, blackbang-powder clouds leaping from the flash of each barrel before streaming away in the darkness.

  Buckle snapped his head around to see the musket balls, each loaded with burning white phosphorus, zip through the snowy air and pelt the face of the kraken. But the great beastie clamped its armored lids shut again, flinging them open once the balls ricocheted away. Annoyed, the beastie ground its beaks from side to side with their awful CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.

  Guns were not going to do it.

  “To hell with the peashooters!” Buckle shouted, jamming his pistol in his belt and waving his axe above his head. “Form up a wedge and have at the blade!” And with a battle cry, Buckle raised his steel and charged the kraken.

  TENTACLES

  AS BUCKLE WADED INTO THE forest of lashing tentacles, each swing of the blade slicing satisfyingly deep into yielding jellyfish flesh, he found Sabrina and her reinforcements on his flanks, bayonets and hatchets flashing.

  “Who is driving the damned airship?” Buckle screamed at Sabrina.

  “Windermere. He is more than capable, Captain,” Sabrina answered, swinging her axe.

  “Ah, splendid!” Buckle shouted as he lay about with his axe, fending off the beastie’s slithering attempts to rope him and his mates as the wedge advanced.

  A man screamed overhead. Buckle looked up to see Cornelius Valentine, who had accompanied Sabrina up onto the roof, being lashed back and forth by a tentacle wrapped around his right le
g. A sickly snapping sound came as the bones broke apart, and Valentine’s body flopped at a disturbing angle.

  “Save that man!” Buckle shouted.

  Darcy, the closest to Valentine, was on him in an instant, severing the beastie’s arm with one massive swing of his axe.

  Valentine dropped to the deck, writhing in utter agony.

  Buckle heard a familiar bang, a large powder cartridge fired behind him, and a grappling hook whizzed over his head, a clawed projectile of spinning silver, trailing its rope behind.

  The kraken saw the flash of the grappling-cannon muzzle and instantly slammed its big eye shut; the grapnel slammed into the armored eyelid and spun away to port. The beastie tightened its grip on the envelope with a violent shudder of ripping canvas, snapping rigging, cracking ice, and the frightening groan of the bending girders beneath—while the six smaller eyes, remaining open, sought the source of the attack.

  Buckle glanced back to see Martin Robinson manning the forward grappling cannon, its oilskin wrappings hastily ripped aside and flapping as they dangled about its post. Samantha Frost, gunner’s mate, hunched close at Robinson’s side, was rapidly clearing the anchor chamber of the rope so she could load a second shot.

  A tree-size tentacle sailed through the air above Buckle, uncoiling in a whip of suckers and muscle, and the end of the huge arm snapped through the grappling cannon’s stock and into Robinson’s chest, launching him up and backward over the starboard side, and into oblivion. Frost stood motionless, in shock, her hands splayed over the twisted ruins of the grappling cannon, completely unscathed by the blow.

  Buckle turned his head forward, opening his mouth to urge his crew forward. But suddenly he could not breathe. He was locked in a great squeeze about his upper chest and neck. He tried to twist, to inhale, but the air was crushed out of him. A tentacle had dropped upon him from above, wrapping snakelike about his torso, and he could do nothing for it now; he was lifted into the air, the upside-down world a whirl of lightning and falling snow, a fallen lantern flashing as it rolled across the roof. His ribs, bending into his organs, pinned them into stasis. His muscles went limp, his mouth gaping, his vision shuddering to black.