Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Her stomach warmed. She loved coming home. “Watchtowers in sight,” Sabrina announced. “Altitude five hundred feet and descending. Airspeed, thirty-one knots. Light crosswind from the south.”

  “Helm compensating for crosswind, aye,” Charles Mariner responded; the rudder wheel tocked once as he nudged it.

  “Splendid,” Buckle replied from his station behind Sabrina. “All ahead half.”

  Alison Lawrence cranked the chadburn dial. “All ahead half. Aye.”

  “All ahead half,” cried Faraday on the chattertube, the chadburn engineering dial dinging the bell as it clicked into position.

  Sabrina felt the Arabella begin to slow as she watched the brass dials of her airspeed mechanism and her altimeter winding down. “Airspeed slowing…twenty-five knots. Four hundred feet.”

  Something caught her eye over the mountains—a long, cigar-shaped shadow over the San Gabriel peaks, its outline silhouetted against the bright late-afternoon clouds. Sabrina flicked her magnifier lens into her scope and trained it on the hulking, familiar zeppelin. “Khartoum is on patrol, due south, high off the starboard bow.”

  “Very well, Navigator,” Buckle replied.

  Balthazar had invited all the clan ambassadors—with the exception of the Founders, of course—to his negotiating table in an emergency parley. But such an invitation was always a risk, as the debacle of the Palisades-Truce kidnappings had recently proved, and the big Crankshaft war zeppelins—the Khartoum, the Waterloo, and the pocket zeppelin Constantinople—were surely deployed at altitude in case an invitee tried to make a raid.

  The bridge had gone momentarily quiet under the drone of the propellers. Even the chattertube, its hood usually amplifying a constant prattle, was still. The brass-and-copper daughter-compass casing at Sabrina’s station rattled distractingly. “We shall need to apply a screwdriver to that, Welly,” she said.

  “Aye, Miss Serafim. Will do,” Welly answered.

  Sabrina glanced back at Buckle. He stood in the center of the Arabella’s crowded little bridge, his arms folded comfortably behind his back, Windermere and Wong hunched at the elevator station on his left hand, Mariner at the helm wheel at his back, and Alison Lawrence at the combined ballast and engineering station on his right.

  Buckle gave Sabrina one of his wry, handsome grins, and she smiled back. She wanted to ask him how his neck was feeling, but she knew he did not like to discuss any of his own physical ailments in front of the crew. “If you live long enough to die a grizzled old bear in your bed, Romulus,” Sabrina sometimes told him, “you will have no skin left but scars.”

  She turned to her altimeter, and the pain in her backside made her take a deep breath; her arse had taken a considerable beating when the kraken had dragged her across the roof.

  Sabrina suddenly felt even more uncomfortable. She had seen Ilsa Gallagher standing in the passageway of the Arabella, waiting for the officer’s meeting to end, waiting for them to leave, waiting to be alone with Buckle. Sabrina was well aware of the relationship Ilsa carried on with Buckle—the pretty, petite skinner could have the much-adored captain, strings free, apparently at her whim.

  Bollocks. Sour grapes and dirty rotten apples.

  Why did Buckle’s much-noticed romantic entanglements, which were relentless, suddenly bother her so?

  “Miss Frost,” Buckle said. “Send a message: ‘Two crew members critically injured. Request physician at the dock.’ Use the lamp.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Samantha Frost said. She was the Arabella’s gunnery officer, but now she was the acting signals crew person after the death of Martin Robinson. She moved from her hydrogen boards to the multihandled lamp and mirror controls of the signals station.

  “And tell them that one of the wounded is the Martian, Miss Frost,” Buckle added, stepping forward alongside Sabrina to snap out his telescope and raise it to his eye.

  “Three hundred feet altitude, Captain,” Sabrina said. “Twenty knots.”

  “Aye, Navigator,” Buckle replied, the sandy-brown whiskers of his scruffy beard glowing with reds and yellows in the dull sunlight.

  They were close enough now for Sabrina to see the flag signalman on the airfield tower, swinging his blue and red flags as he guided the Arabella in to her mooring hub.

  “Harbormaster signaling mooring tower five,” Sabrina announced.

  “Mooring tower five. Aye,” Buckle repeated under his breath.

  The northern outskirts of the Devil’s Punchbowl passed slowly under the Arabella’s port side—a bustling town of seven thousand people, with busy streets winding around the great rock outcroppings and guard gates, the air streaked by hundreds of drifting lines of forge and chimney smoke in every shade of black, gray, and white. Sabrina could make out the glimmering roofs of the greenhouses, their glass swept clean of coal dust, the long timbered tops of the merchant warehouses, and the squat brick octagons of the smithies. To the west, separated from the main town by a low ridge, stood the massive rubber factories, their rooftops lined with dozens of chimneys, all flooding every imaginable shade of black smoke into the sky, over gabled doorways glowing deep red with the heat of vulcanizing fires.

  The city walls still lay another half mile southward, anchored deeper within the jumble of stone bastions that had provided an excellent defensive position for the pirate clans who had built the original fortress, and for the Crankshaft clan who had taken it as their own.

  “One hundred feet altitude,” Sabrina said. “Fifteen knots.”

  “Maintain one hundred,” Buckle ordered.

  “Maintain one hundred. Aye,” Windermere repeated.

  At the heart of the rock formation loomed the citadel, a stone-and-timber complex ringed by high crenellated walls, from which the endless town roofs with coal-blackened shingles radiated outward along dozens of narrow, crooked streets. Atop the highest tower of the citadel flew the Crankshaft clan banner, with the scarlet lion rampant on a white field. The elders always said the lion was stained the color of Crankshaft blood.

  “Home, sweet home,” Sabrina said.

  UNDER THE DEVIL’S CHAIR

  THE CRANKSHAFT AIRFIELD LAY CRADLED in the wide space between the southern reaches of the town and the mountain foothills, forming its own city of mooring towers and monstrous hangars, with a busy population of ground crew. Watchtowers with mounted cannons stood at each corner of the airfield, connected by a high earthen wall crested with a palisade.

  Buckle felt an excitement surging inside him at the sight of the airfield—the Pneumatic Zeppelin was there, so close he could feel her. But he could not see her—not yet. A row of moored airships largely blocked the view of her at her repair dock. Hands held behind his back, the impatient Buckle looked out the starboard side of the nose dome at the dull gleam of a large brass cannon barrel, a twenty-four-pounder, its black mouth traversing with his airship as it passed. The cannon was perched on the Devil’s Chair, a high spur of rock overlooking the airfield, the watch crew cranking its revolving turret, tasked with keeping a bead on all new arrivals, regardless of what ensign they flew.

  The Tehachapi Blitz had made the Crankshafts an untrusting bunch.

  “Mooring tower five dead ahead, Captain,” Sabrina reported. “Crosswinds still negligible. Airspeed at ten knots.”

  “Aye, Navigator,” Buckle replied. The Arabella passed down the center of the airfield now, through canyons of mooring towers and docked zeppelins, all of them cranked down so hard on their hawser lines that their gondolas nearly touched the earth.

  Buckle turned to Windermere. “Descend to fifty feet.”

  “Fifty feet. Aye!” Windermere repeated.

  “Five knots,” Buckle said.

  “Five knots. Aye!” Lawrence repeated, swinging the chadburn to quarter full.

  The Arabella slipped down to fifty feet like a feather. Maneuvering the launch, even bent and dented, was a dream compared to the heaving and nudging required of a big sky vessel like the Pneumatic Zeppelin.


  “Take her in, Master of the Launch,” Buckle said to Windermere. “The bridge is yours.”

  Windermere strode forward. “Aye, Captain.”

  Buckle turned back to the nose window. Three thousand feet overhead, visible in the upper frames of the glass, he espied the sharklike silhouette of the great Crankshaft flagship, the Khartoum, steaming overhead, her bronze-cased propellers whirring slowly at half full, her three copper gondolas gleaming in the sunlight. The Khartoum was Admiral Balthazar’s airship, though Buckle was certain that Balthazar was not aboard her right now—her captain, Pandora Malebari, most likely commanding—for Balthazar would be in the thick of things on the ground.

  Buckle craned his neck, but he still could not get a decent look at the Pneumatic Zeppelin. He mollified himself by scanning the airships looming at each flank; most of them were clan tramps, but the fast Crankshaft clipper, the Ladybird, was also there, along with two of the long-distance armed traders, Peregrine and Avalon.

  Then, as the Arabella cleared the Ladybird, the massive, beautiful, cigar-shaped dun envelope of his own airship, the Pneumatic Zeppelin, came into view, moored to the repair dock where Buckle had left her three days before. Buckle’s heart drummed. She looked good, floating easy on her hawsers, her gasbags plumped to carry loaded shot lockers, brimming coal bunkers, and full water-ballast tanks. It looked as if the repairs to her main envelope were complete—he could see only one skinner on the roof, bent over a canvas seam. Though he could not make out his face, he guessed from the shape of him that it was probably Rudyard Tuck.

  There was still plenty of activity in the work stands of the repair dock under the Pneumatic Zeppelin; handfuls of ground crew were active in the shadows a few feet below her gondolas; victualing wagons and repair pallets crowded the access road of the refitting wharf, beneath. Buckle grimaced. Three weeks in repair dock, and they were still provisioning and banging his airship back into shape? He was itching to get his zeppelin airborne again.

  “Imperial ambassador’s rig to port, Captain,” Sabrina said. “The Briar Rose.”

  Buckle eyed the small Imperial airship with great interest—she was a corvette not much larger than the Arabella, the black iron cross adorning her gray envelope. Her design bore a striking resemblance to that of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, though with a sleeker envelope, a single teardrop gondola, and six driving propellers: she was built for speed. With the polished copper gleam of her gondola, and its fine glass windows, the Briar Rose was a stately craft. While most clan warships and traders were somewhat hodgepodge affairs, their gondolas and belly armor bolted together from whatever metals could be had in quantity at the time, the ambassadorial airships were usually uniform in materials—built to impress.

  Alongside the Briar Rose hulked the much rounder and less aerodynamic form of the Alchemists’ ambassadorial ship, the Pollux. Buckle had never seen an Alchemist airship before. The Alchemists were groundlings—one of the nonaviator clans—and they usually paid neutral clans for use of airships when they needed them. Buckle had heard of their ambassadorial ship, an oddity because it was one of the few sky vessels the Alchemists had made for themselves. The fact that it looked more like a geometric cluster of balloons than a zeppelin reflected the Alchemist desire to proceed slowly through the air, an element they distrusted.

  The Pollux’s round gondola glittered with layered metal cogs interlinked together like sheets of chain mail. It was a windowless, unendearing beast—the opposite of the Briar Rose. Dozens of sooty black chimney tubes protruded from the center of the roof, their heads angled away from the gold-painted balloons above, releasing small dribbles of white smoke as the crate grumbled on her hawsers.

  “Airship approaching!” the lookout’s voice rang down the chattertube from the observer’s nacelle. “Twelve o’clock high!”

  Buckle stepped alongside Welly and peered out the nose, scanning the sky with his bare eyes and finding the dark dot against the southern clouds before swinging up his telescope. The magnifying lens caught the zeppelin’s head-on oval silhouette; it was a long way off, perhaps fifteen miles, but from the looks of her smoke trail, she was coming hell-bent for leather, and she looked big.

  Buckle lowered his telescope and snapped it shut. “I cannot make out who it is, but they are late,” he muttered. Something about the size of the airship bothered him. Who was bringing a pistol to a tea party?

  “So are we,” Sabrina said, never taking her eyes off her altimeter.

  “But we are fashionably late,” Buckle replied, a little too jauntily for his own taste, he decided. His eye caught the gleam of the brass cannon on the Devil’s Chair, now a good distance behind their stern, being cranked upward—the new arrival had caught the eye of the watchdogs as well. Good.

  Tucked in against the much larger flank of the Pneumatic Zeppelin a tiny but familiar sky vessel floated, a Brineboilers yawl, the Beryllium, the copper sheathings of its gondola turned a dozen streaming shades of dark and light creamy green by the sea air of the western coast. The Brineboilers were more a chemists’ guild than a clan, the distillers of the bioluminescent boil, among other expensive concoctions. Their livelihood depended upon commerce, and their small green-oxidized airships, with their tapering white envelopes, were a common sight in the skies over the Snow World.

  A short distance beyond the Pneumatic Zeppelin, on the opposite side of the docking row, tight on its hawsers, floated the Cork, the ambassadorial corvette of the Gallowglasses, the most powerful inland clan, and secretive masters of many of the trade routes into the vast, mysterious American continent beyond the Eastern Pale. The aggressive, brawling personality of the Gallowglasses, who called themselves the Irish, was reflected in the appearance of the Cork; unkempt and strong, a big corvette constructed not for looks, but rather with a love of muscle and battle scars. Her once snow-white envelope, with its emerald-colored harp symbol, was mottled, stained, and dense with shot-hole patches. Of her two gondolas, both armored, pied in more types of metal than Buckle could count, the forward hull carried four cannon ports—that many cannons was unusual aboard such a small airship—while the rear engineering gondola, soot-stained and blackened, bulged with vents and chimneys that hinted at boilers far larger than a sky vessel that size would need. Even the propellers appeared outsize.

  Decorating the bow of the Cork’s lead gondola loomed a battered and worn but wonderfully carved figurehead—a fierce-looking woman with voluminous bare breasts, glaring at all enemies forward.

  “The nipples are too small,” Sabrina grumbled. “On a woman endowed in such a fashion—the nipples are far too small.”

  “My dear Lieutenant,” Buckle said. “On a woman endowed like that, who would care?”

  Windermere laughed out loud, but a glare from Sabrina caused him to cut it off abruptly.

  Buckle glanced back and forth across the airships and hangars. Key players were missing. The ambassadors of the Tinskins and Spartak were glaringly absent—they were two huge clans, rich both in airships and armaments—and their partnership could easily tip the balance of the impending war. The Tinskins were notoriously slippery. But the Russians of Spartak, difficult to negotiate with, were said to be forthright in their associations. Balthazar would have to find a way to bring Spartak into the alliance.

  “Fifty feet to mooring tower five, on the nose, Mister Windermere,” Sabrina announced. “Approaching at four knots.”

  “All stop,” Windermere said, cranking the chadburn dial. “Prepare to dock and down ship.”

  “All stop, aye!” came the engineering response down the chattertube, the bell dinging on the chadburn.

  The Arabella responded nicely, her maneuvering propellers a lazy, chopping whirl as she hedged forward.

  Soon they would be on the ground with Balthazar and the ambassadors, in the midst of their diplomatic maneuvering and distrust. In a way, Buckle did not want to land.

  HORATIO CRANKSHAFT

  BUCKLE AND SABRINA ACCOMPANIED NURSE Nightingale and four
stretcher bearers as they carried Max and Valentine’s litters down the Arabella’s loading ramp. Buckle could still taste Ilsa’s rum-warmed tongue in his mouth. He remembered Max’s cold lips trembling against his in the cave and felt vaguely guilty. The pleasant atmosphere was quickly erased by the acrid slap of the town air—laden with the smoke of wood and coal fires—and the relentless smell of Burbage tar, cordage, envelope canvas, and the chemical-garlic stench of fabric-stiffening dope permeating everything around the airship docks.

  Above them, the Arabella floated, the winched-down anchor lines securing her keel to the wooden structure of the repair dock; she was a battered sight, with her stern partially caved in, roof tangled with rigging debris, and the envelope flanks ripped and singed black by reaper’s breath. Repair crews were already clambering up onto the dock platforms, attaching their rope ladders and unloading fabric boles and belts loaded with tools. Mooring dock five, one of the three repair docks, was hemmed in on three sides by docked zeppelins, but if Buckle looked north, straight ahead, he could just see the tops of the citadel’s watchtowers over the boulders between the airfield and the town.

  Doctor Fogg, waiting at the bottom of the gangway with his ambulance wagon and its horse team, rushed forward to the litter. “What have we got?” Fogg asked. The stretcher bearers halted as Fogg lifted Valentine’s blanket and peered at his heavily bandaged leg.

  “Boilerman Cornelius Valentine. Femur and knee joint are shattered, Doctor,” Nightingale said. “Kraken got hold of him.”

  “Kraken?” Fogg muttered with a detached surprise. He pressed the back of his hand against Max’s forehead. She lay nestled under heavy blankets and a thick wool infirmary cap, looking content, asleep under her morphine, the definition between her stark-white skin and the gray stripes looking more ghastly out in the overcast sunlight. Buckle could not escape how much blood he had seen pour from her body.