Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “Of course.”

  Lee glanced back, as if to make certain Balthazar had departed, then motioned for Buckle to follow him ten paces beyond the iron lung, down the aisle from Max’s bed, as if he somehow also feared that she might overhear what he had to say. “I have some serious matters to discuss with you regarding the health of your father.”

  “Yes?” Buckle asked, dread creeping up his spine.

  “I must ask you some questions, questions you may find intrusive—but I claim physician’s prerogative in the asking. Of course, respond as you see fit.”

  “All right.”

  “Has your father told you anything of what happened to him while he was in the hands of the Founders? I have asked him, but he refuses to provide any details.”

  “He says they handled him reasonably well,” Buckle replied, but his original suspicion, that Balthazar’s story of his pleasant three-day imprisonment by the Founders was not the complete truth, surged back to haunt him.

  “Yes,” Lee said, trailing off, completely dissatisfied. “That is all he had said to me as well, and I have pressed him rather uncomfortably over it.”

  “Perhaps he is telling the truth,” Buckle offered, though for some reason he only half believed his own argument. “Perhaps they were only holding him for an ultimatum, as a bargaining chip.”

  “And how do you explain his worsening condition?”

  “The stress, perhaps.”

  “If stress has inflicted damage upon your father’s health, then he is suddenly a different man than the one I have known, lo this last twenty-odd years,” Lee grumbled.

  “I have noticed more tremors, more pronounced,” Buckle said.

  “What you are seeing is a result, not a precursor,” Lee said. “He experienced a terrible attack of convulsions last night while you were gone. The most unsettling episode I have seen thus far.”

  The dread flooded into Buckle’s abdomen, making his gut clench. “He spoke nothing of it to me.”

  Lee nodded. “No. But I am gravely concerned. I have done all that I can do for him, and I believe that whatever happened to him in the City of the Founders has severely aggravated his condition.”

  “Who knows about the event last night?”

  “Only your brother Ryder and your lead servant—Sibley, I believe his name is. They called me to Balthazar’s chamber at three twenty-two this morning.”

  “Three twenty-two? This seizure was violent enough to awaken both Ryder and Sibley in their rooms down the hall?”

  Lee shifted his weight uncomfortably. “Ah, no. There was someone with your father, in his bedchamber with him.”

  Buckle paused. Of course his father had taken a lover, though he had known nothing, suspected nothing, of it. Calypso had been dead for over a year now, and Balthazar was a man, a man finished with his mourning, a man of a physically ravenous nature. But this understanding did little to blunt the profound, if unreasonable, sense of betrayal Buckle felt in that instant. “Then there were three who witnessed his infirmity. Who was the third?”

  “I am afraid I cannot disclose her identity,” Lee answered with a whisper. “I am sure you understand—I must protect all confidentialities not directly concerning your father’s health. Rest assured, she is a respectable lady.”

  “Of course I understand.” Buckle nodded. He appreciated his father’s right to privacy. But he would find out. Ryder and Sibley would know who this woman was.

  TYRO AND THE IMPERIAL RAID

  WHISPERS. MAX HEARD VOICES IN the chamber of numbers. Many whispers. But she could not make out the words. There were many people in the little room with her, but she could not see them. Even Buckle was gone.

  There was music as well, faint and distant, waltzing music.

  She peered at the walls but the numbers remained blurry, as if protected behind foggy glass. She rubbed at them, but the charcoal smeared, leaving her fingers black.

  A fluttering buzz arrived at Max’s left ear. She turned to see a hummingbird hovering there, a pretty little fellow of emerald green with a ruby-red throat. He stared at her with his tiny black eyes, and the throbbing of his wings grew louder and louder, rising from a papery flutter to a heaving huff of machinery bellows that assaulted her ears.

  Max was not awake. But she was semiaware of that. She flowed, swimming in a morphine current under the surface of her consciousness, dragged down by the rhythmic lullaby of the iron lung as it breathed for Tyro…

  “We have taken hits!” Max shouted over the thunder of the propellers, quickly wrenching hydrogen-feed handles and shutting valve switches, taking in the readings of a hundred dials and gauge pointers all at once. “Hydrogen pressure critical! Compensating!”

  “Aye!” Captain Halifax shouted back. “Keep the Cleopatra out of the dirt, Engineer!”

  A fistful of grapeshot skidded past the gondola, a screaming swarm of phosphorus in the night.

  Tyro was at Max’s side, his eyes glittering orange in his goggles, tufts of his white-and-black hair poking out from beneath his flying helmet as he manhandled the ballast wheels.

  Reflections arced like prisms across Max’s goggles. She fought the urge to tear them off.

  The light inside the bridge was bright green with bioluminescent boil, while outside the sky was afire, a riot of Imperial flares spewing magnesium white past the windows. The thunder of Imperial cannons rolled through her ears.

  “There be the Pneumatic Zeppelin!” shouted Captain Halifax, cranking the chadburn dial back. “Half full! Hard a’port!”

  “Hard to port. Aye,” replied Lieutenant Romulus Buckle, the helmsman.

  The chadburn dinged as the engineers slowed the propellers of the small, quick Cleopatra.

  Halifax leaned closer in to the chattertube hood; he was a man of slight stature, but his bearing was that of a giant. “Gunnery, I want the guns double-shotted! Prepare to run a broadside through the target!”

  “Gunnery ready, Captain! Aye!” came the response from the gun deck.

  A massive explosion close to starboard lit up the world. A geyser of yellow flame and smoke erupted upward into the sky, blinding Max for an instant. An Imperial war zeppelin, caught defenseless at her moorings, had exploded in a mountainous ball of burning hydrogen.

  “Take that, you spiker bastards!” the assistant navigator, Sabrina, her red hair lit up by the flames, yelled from her station in the nose bubble.

  A strange stillness followed the titanic blast as the glowing red superstructure of the Imperial zeppelin crumpled to the earth. The Imperials were reloading their cannons. Consumed flares dropped, weak trickles of sparks plummeting from the sky.

  “Captain Halifax,” Buckle shouted from the helm. “The Imperials are stunned, sir. Let us take the Pneumatic Zeppelin as a prize!”

  “Steady as she goes, helm,” Halifax said before grimacing at Buckle; he was not fond of the young man’s overaggressive tendencies. “We are not here to risk boarding attempts, Lieutenant. We are here to blast them—blast them to hell!”

  The bridge shook with an ear-piercing crack, the air suddenly alive with spinning splinters of wood and shards of brass, copper, and glass. They were hit through a window.

  “Grapeshot! Hold fast!” Halifax yelled, blood seeping from a deep gash in his forehead; he reached above Buckle to crank shut the flow valve of a severed pipe spilling boil on the helm wheel.

  “The rudder is jammed!” Buckle shouted, straining at the wheel spokes. “I cannot budge her!”

  Max saw a red-hot grapeshot ball lodged in the gap between the rudder wheel and its housing post, making the wood around it smolder and blacken. Tyro was already there, sliding to his knees as he worked to pry the ball loose with his knife.

  That was when the world exploded.

  Max, blown backward against the engineering panels, dropped to the deck, bruised, bleeding, and stunned, disoriented in a haze of smoke and fire, the air thick with dust scented of wood and blackbang, haunted by the moans of a dying woman
. An enemy cannonball had struck the gondola low amidships on the beam, ripping a wide trough through the deck, and taking sections of the port and starboard bulkheads with it.

  Max crawled forward through the ghastly murk toward the wreck of the helm wheel, over pieces of burning timber and pieces of Captain Halifax. She glimpsed Buckle in the rapidly clearing air, lying on his back against the signals-cabin bulkhead, head raised, blinking over a gaping, sucking hole in the deck, where the snow-covered Imperial airfield swept by forty feet below.

  Max reached the blood-spattered planks at the edge of the hole, grasping at shorn copper tubes for support. She looked down just in time to see Tyro’s body hit the ground—he must have managed to hold on to the keel of the gondola for a few seconds—his mass slamming into the frozen airfield in a burst of snow and dirt clods. Tyro’s body lay motionless and broken, a black, crumpled figure on the white snow as the wounded Cleopatra, now heeling to starboard, passed over him and left him behind.

  A young woman with a bright-blue scarf waved at Max. She was chubby, with a pleasant but common face, standing on the snow-striped Tehachapi airfield—it did not look like Tehachapi, but Max knew that was what it was—peering up at the departing airship. She looked anxious, sad, and proud.

  Max watched the young woman as the zeppelin lifted away. The young woman waved until she became so small that she vanished.

  Max fell, swept back and forth in the confused currents of her mind, and succumbed to darkness.

  HOLLY CHURCHILL

  SABRINA LOOKED AT HERSELF IN the mirror of her room, half-dressed for the ball as she was, and not with an uncritical eye—with her best friend Holly Churchill at her side and being so encouraging, it was difficult to get a good read on her ensemble. As a woman in a rough profession, Sabrina rarely had time to preen. Yes, she was adamant about the feminine character of the aviator clothes she loved, with the soft leathers, cuffs, and fleurs-de-lis, but she was normally unmindful of her looks, pulling her hair up tightly under her bowler with pins, and applying no cosmetics beyond splashing her face with cold water. She did comb her hair before turning in after her watch on the Pneumatic Zeppelin, yes, but she usually did that by feel, often in near darkness, and rarely looked into the small cabin mirror over her washbasin.

  Still, her face in general pleased her, though she did not care for how suddenly her lips thinned out at the edges, making her mouth too serious. Of course, she had a love-hate relationship with the freckles on her nose and under her eyes, for though she considered them blemishes, they always seemed to be one of the characteristics that men loved about her appearance. She also thought that her elfish ears were awkwardly small, insufficient to hold back the locks tucked behind them.

  Sabrina peered harder at her reflection, backlit by the warm, dying light of the day pouring in through the window. She knew she was looking at herself differently this evening, for she wanted to look as elegant as she could possibly manage. Holly, also partially dressed, exuberant under her characteristic seriousness, was helping with the complicated, frilly undergarments, garters, bustle, and gown. Holly was a milliner, a ladies’ hatmaker—she had handcrafted Sabrina’s beautiful derby for her—and she had a superb eye for the fashionable.

  “Here we go,” Holly announced, pulling two earrings out of the carved jewelry box she had brought from her house. Sabrina’s jewelry collection was an utter failure, though Holly would never say so. Holly held the earrings in front of Sabrina’s earlobes, letting two teardrops of pale-green jade, inlaid with gold, dangle under her fingers. “What do you think? Do they not set off your eyes?”

  The earrings did look nice set against Sabrina’s red hair, a characteristic that Holly openly envied, her own hair being luxurious, but a rather common shade of sparrow brown. “Lovely,” Sabrina said.

  “Lovely?” Holly sighed, shaking her head. “Delightful is the proper word. Very posh.” Holly attached the jewels, each with a little jingle of the golden clasp playing in Sabrina’s ears.

  “You smell like marzipan,” Sabrina said, catching the aroma of the almond-sugar candy.

  “There is an entire box of it here that my mother made for us,” Holly replied. “And I know you do not like sweets, but I shall demand that you have some before we are finished.”

  “Yes. I do like your mother’s marzipan,” Sabrina said, though she hated marzipan. Holly knew that she hated marzipan. But Holly’s mother was the self-proclaimed marzipan mistress of the clan, and as such, no one could turn her confection down, pretentiously wrapped as it was in wax paper, and loaded into a little brass box.

  “Perfection,” Holly enthused, looking over Sabrina’s shoulder in the mirror. “With the dress it shall be perfection.”

  Holly grabbed a boar-hair brush and attacked Sabrina’s hair with long strokes; in her excitement, she was brushing far too vigorously, and Sabrina waited for the encounter with a tangle that would yank her head back. Sabrina was not used to someone else combing her hair, nor the feeling of her locks untethered at the back of her neck, the bountiful, silken, cascading slide of them against her skin. “Meagan is so excited about shipping with you,” Holly said. “And I must say I am rather thrilled by the prospect, as well.”

  Meagan was Holly’s younger sister, freshly graduated from the Crankshaft academy and assigned to the Pneumatic Zeppelin as an assistant signals officer to replace Martin Robinson, who had been lost to the kraken. “It is exciting for all of us,” Sabrina said.

  “It is quite an honor, is it not?” Holly enthused. “One’s first assignment being a first-rate airship, rather than a tramp or a scout. But she did graduate at the top of her class. She will be superb for you, I am certain of it.”

  “Of that I have no doubt,” Sabrina replied, oddly unhappy with any talk of zeppelins at the moment. Holly was not an aviator and Sabrina liked that, for it allowed their conversations to travel in any direction. If she could go one day without talking about navigation formulae…

  “Of course, I do not have to request that you look out for her,” Holly added.

  Sabrina would have nodded if Holly did not have her hair tightly grasped, raking her brush through a knot. She felt her stomach tighten—in a time of war no one was safe aboard a zeppelin, and Holly knew it. “We shall all watch out for her, dearest. Please do not worry about that.”

  “What an adventure.” Holly sighed, releasing Sabrina’s hair. Sabrina’s scalp ached from all the tugging. “Brushing is done. Now on to the dastardly corsets.” Holly, normally reserved, lost her mind for parties; she nearly fainted three times at her first Seasonal. The daughter of the clan mayor and possessor of a smoldering look, she regularly fended off collections of suitors. She certainly had no problem with corsets herself, for the voluptuousness of her pirate forebears had found full expression in her form; she was buxom, with an hourglass figure.

  How the serious and practical Holly might have come to accept the unkempt wooing of Ivan, Sabrina did not know. Sabrina loved Ivan, her adopted brother, but he did not seem to be anywhere near Holly’s type.

  Holly picked up a corset and folded it around Sabrina’s torso from behind. The bone ribbing jabbed at a thousand points and Sabrina chewed the inside of her cheek. She was so used to her zeppelineer togs, well buttoned but loose-fitting as they were, that the miserable suffocation of the cinching corset seemed a torture unworthy of the result. Holly brought the back of the corset together and yanked on the bottom strings, tightening them enough to pinch the kidneys.

  “Have your eye upon anyone special tonight?” Holly asked.

  “No, no one in particular,” Sabrina sighed, uttering both a truth and a lie. She did believe that she had no romantic inclinations toward anyone, but in her heart she knew that she wanted to look good, as good as she could possibly look, and for one man and one man only.

  “Really?” Holly replied slowly. Obviously Holly did not believe her either.

  “Things are far too complicated for a girl to embark on such shenanigans
,” Sabrina said, wincing at another jerk on the corset strings. “Fifteen-year-old debutantes have time for such dalliances, but I do not.”

  “Then why show up at all?”

  “Free alcohol.”

  Holy laughed, flashing her brilliant smile. “And what about young Wellington?” Now Holly was teasing. “He is so smitten with you, and he tells everyone how much so constantly.” Sabrina glared at Holly in the mirror. Holly was smart enough to know when to change the subject, but sometimes too stubborn to obey. She smiled, suddenly wistful. “Oh, sabertooth, you are so beautiful—there must be someone. There is always someone.”

  “Were you aware that the female sabertooth beastie only mates once, for life, and only after disemboweling all of her competitors?” Sabrina said.

  Holly rolled her eyes.

  “And of you, my darling?” Sabrina asked, wanting to avoid more scrutiny by her perceptive friend. “Have you a suitor whom you favor among your many beaus?”

  Sabrina expected Holly to laugh, so when her face shifted into melancholy, it surprised her. “I was waiting for one in particular—we had a date scheduled, but his zeppelin crashed and he stood me up—but then he never came to apologize and renew his efforts, to which I would have been receptive.”

  “He was in hospital for a while,” Sabrina said. Sometimes the importance of such details escaped Holly when it came to love affairs.

  “Yes—I have marzipan in my hair. Oh, dear,” Holly grumbled, snatching up the brush and jerking it in and out of a lock of her hair. “But I went to see Ivan—I called on him three times—every Monday, and he refused to see me. I was, I am, still desperately vexed by his behavior.”

  “Have…have you seen Ivan since his wounding?” Sabrina asked gently.

  “At a near distance, of course, once he was released from Doctor Lee’s care,” Holly replied, returning to the corset strings. “I attempted to approach him and he avoided me like the carbuncle plague.”