Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “No,” Buckle answered. He swung his glass south of the Muscovy stronghold to the two mortar ships as they lofted massive, phosphorus-coated bombs into the city. Where was their armed escort? Surely they had one. Then he found her, flying so low that her gondola was near skimming the treetops, inching along to the west of the mortar vessels; she was a sloop, small, sleek, and fast. “There you be, you slippery little rat,” Buckle said, then shouted, “Escort beyond the barges. Armed sloop low and in the hover.”

  Buckle scanned the earth, half-expecting a Founders armored train to be steaming up the old rails, its huge cannons far larger than any found on the weight-limited airships, but no locomotives steamed into view. “Keep an eye out for locomotive smoke, mates!” Buckle said.

  A glimmer of light on a distant ridge caught Buckle’s eye. He trained his lens upon it—fire burning in the trees, difficult to make out in the distance. But he recognized the long, oval shape of the flames: the wreck of a small airship. The Cartouche; somehow Buckle was sure it was the Cartouche. He glanced back at Valkyrie, who had her head down over her station. There was no point in telling her now. There would be time for sorrowful confirmations later.

  The mortar barges were easy pickings, but Buckle passed them up—he wanted the big fish. He was certain the two Founders war zeppelins had yet to see him; he still held the advantage of surprise. The slug-like fixed-carriage mortar barges posed no threat in the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s rear, though the Founders sloop commander, if brash enough, might make a run at her. The lookouts would keep an eye on that gnat.

  “Two hundred and fifty feet,” Sabrina reported.

  Windermere spun his elevator wheel back to its neutral position as the Pneumatic Zeppelin pulled out of her dive. “Leveling out to two hundred, aye.”

  The heavily forested ground flooded past below, splotched with white clearings. Buckle felt the zeppelin return to level in his stomach, her decks creaking and the girders overhead groaning, the canvas envelope rippling with the sharp snaps of a flag in a wicked wind.

  “Two hundred,” Sabrina announced.

  “Maintain speed and chase the bubble,” Buckle said softly. “Two degrees starboard.”

  “Two degrees starboard, aye,” De Quincey repeated, nudging the helm wheel.

  “Riggers, skinners, and snipers on the ratlines,” Buckle said. He could now hear the low, rumbling thumps of the mortar ships as they launched their horse-size bombs on the city.

  Suddenly Washington was at Buckle’s flank. “Captain Buckle, I demand a word.”

  “Impeccably bad timing, Ambassador,” Buckle said, hiding a sudden infuriation at having the squawking old Washington in his ear. “Please return to your cabin, sir.”

  “I shall not retire. I demand a word,” Washington pressed.

  “The sloop has seen us, Captain,” Wellington reported. “She is coming round!”

  “Stay the course,” Buckle answered. The sloop could not carry more than a few four-pounders, and the Pneumatic Zeppelin was well out of her range. “Prepare for up ship, rapid ascent.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Windermere said.

  “We are at war with no one, Captain Buckle,” Washington blurted.

  “We are engaged, sir!” Buckle snapped. “Now kindly retire from my bridge!”

  Washington’s eyes flashed. “Break off your attack immediately, Captain, or I shall relieve you of command!”

  The words shocked Buckle, though he did not show it. “Surely you jest, sir,” he said.

  AN ACT OF WAR

  A CLAN AMBASSADOR HAD NO real authority over a zeppelin captain in the field; the man was exasperated, indignant—and out of line. The bridge crew whirled their heads about to glare at Washington with hostile eyes; even Valkyrie looked on with disapproval.

  “You presume too much authority here, Ambassador,” Buckle said curtly.

  “Turn around,” Washington pressed. “Turn around, Captain, while we still have time to disengage.”

  “I shall not,” Buckle answered. “We are committed.”

  “Admiral Balthazar expressly forbade engagement with the Founders. If we are not attacked we must not attack. We must not provoke,” Washington continued, breathlessly.

  Buckle felt a nasty surge of fury beneath his skin. Who was Washington to need remind him of the words of his own father? “If Spartak is lost, then all is lost.”

  “The admiral’s orders are specific and binding. Turn back,” Washington ordered.

  “Leave my bridge this instant, sir,” Buckle said.

  “This is an act of war!” Washington exclaimed, his eyes wide, his face flushed a purple-tinged red. “You have no right to declare war on your own for the clan—no right!”

  “Corporal Nyland,” Buckle ordered. The corporal, a burly fellow who obviously relished being a marine, his brown eyes young over a great blond mustache and sparse but well-groomed muttonchops, jumped forward from his post at the stairwell.

  “Sir!” Nyland said.

  “The ambassador is confined to his quarters. Kindly remove him from my bridge,” Buckle said.

  “Yes, sir,” Corporal Nyland replied; he turned to Washington. “Let’s move along, sir. There’s a good fellow, sir.”

  Buckle turned his back on the damning gaze of Washington’s eyes as Nyland ushered him away. Forget Washington. He stepped forward into the nose bubble to scan the sky. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was now hurtling in full view between Muscovy and the startled crews on the mortar barges. The Founders sloop had swung her bow to the south, her engines straining for speed and altitude, her captain abandoning the fat barges as he took his ship on the run; it seemed the fellow lacked the brass balls necessary to take on the much larger Pneumatic Zeppelin. The sloop’s signal mirrors flashed at the war zeppelins high overhead, but Buckle doubted that the big ships would see the warning.

  “You should not expose the Imperial princess to such danger,” Washington shouted, grabbing at the railing as Nyland bulled him politely up the staircase. “Your duty is to carry her and me to negotiations with Spartak, not start your own private little war!”

  Valkyrie straightened up from the engineering boards, the lift of her chin lengthening her form. “Chief engineer is on her battle station, Captain,” she said.

  “Thank you, Chief Engineer,” Buckle replied, then turned and yanked down the viewing apparatus of the “giraffe,” a periscope containing a long series of mirrors that ran in a crooked tube all the way up to the zeppelin envelope’s domed nose window. The device lost a lot of light in the transmission of the reflections, the images usually soft and muddy and easily knocked out of alignment, but it gave the piloting crew a view of the sky above the bow envelope, which they otherwise could not see.

  Buckle turned the giraffe’s focus ring and found the three war zeppelins, their ellipsoidal silhouettes black against the gray sky, eleven hundred feet above and immediately in front of them. The two Founders airships still maintained their favorable positions on both sides of the Russian—which meant that they had not yet seen the sloop’s warning mirrors, nor come to realize a Crankshaft zeppelin was close at hand under their keels.

  “Speed?” Buckle asked.

  “Running at seventy-one knots, sir,” Sabrina replied. “I estimate the ships engaged above are running at forty.”

  “When we catch them, propulsion,” Buckle said to Valkyrie, “match their speed.”

  “Aye,” Valkyrie said.

  Buckle calculated his acceleration against the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s best rate of ascent; he wanted to pop up on the stern of the port-side Founders sky vessel, rake her from aft to fore with bow chaser and broadsides until she fell, and then, hopefully with some element of surprise still remaining—there was a good chance that the massive bulk of the Russian airship might block the view of the port-side zeppelin’s fate from her sister—swing behind the Russian and hammer the stern of the second Founders airship with another round of raking fire.

  The enemy rarely was kind enough t
o accommodate one’s battle plans, however.

  “Ready to up ship. Rapid vertical ascent,” Buckle ordered. He could smell the gunpowder now, the acrid cordite of the blackbang, and his mouth watered, he wanted to be in the dustup so badly.

  “Ready up ship! Rapid vertical ascent!” Sabrina repeated.

  “Ready up ship, aye,” Windermere replied.

  Buckle’s hands tingled as he squeezed the giraffe’s leather handgrips, trying to keep the overhead zeppelins in view as his vessel charged them from below. His shoulders ached with excitement, and he took deep, calming breaths that no one could see. He was not afraid, but a crew would pick up on a quivering word or twitch, any sign of a captain’s fear, and instantly be disheartened; they all knew that he, the dashing young Crankshaft captain, had never faced the likes of a real war zeppelin before, never mind three of them.

  Buckle was confident. As far as he was concerned, he already had the sloppy bastards by the throat. “Helm! One point to port,” he ordered.

  “Aye!” De Quincey shouted. “One point a’port!”

  Buckle leaned into the chattertube and shouted, “Number-five gun!”

  “Aye, Captain, number five!” came the response from Howard Hampton. He was posted at the envelope nose-dome hatch, just inside the Axial corridor and only a foot away from the giraffe periscope’s lens, and he was the only member of the bow-chaser gun crew who could hear orders on the chattertube. The other four gunners had run the long four-pounder out onto its turret on the bow pulpit and, despite the windscreens and iron barbette, would be near deafened by the torrents of wind.

  “Tell Mister Banerji he gets the first shot,” Buckle yelled. “But tell him to wait until we level out.”

  “First shot and level, aye Captain!” Hampton replied.

  Buckle leaned back to the giraffe’s eyepiece. He pressed his weight down into the bottoms of his boots, nailing his feet to the deck. “Chase the bubble on the way up, Mister Windermere,” he said. “I want a level firing platform when we arrive behind that Founders devil.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Windermere replied, stretching out his fingers as he kept his palms planted on the elevator wheel.

  “The mortar ships have pulled anchor and turned about off our port beam, sir,” Sabrina said. “Turned tail and run.”

  “Good,” Buckle answered. “Keep an eye out for that sloop. He might try to bounce us once we are engaged, but I doubt it.”

  The overhead silhouettes inched back into position inside Buckle’s eyepiece. “Up ship!” he shouted. “Rapid ascent!”

  “Up ship! Up ship!” Sabrina bellowed.

  “Up ship!” Windermere grunted, whirling the elevator wheel with every ounce of strength in his shoulders, his gloved hands slapping the spokes as he snatched them through swing after swing.

  Valkyrie stepped alongside Nero, slapping hydrogen feeder valves as he cranked his ballast wheels. The roar of water cascading from the scuppers joined the rumble of the engines and propellers and the resounding rattle and groan of the gigantic zeppelin as she catapulted up into the sky.

  Buckle held on to the giraffe periscope, lest the force of the ascent drive him to his knees. Everybody was half-bent, holding on to something. Kellie had already curled up inside her cubby, chin on the deck, looking a bit dismayed.

  “Three hundred and sixty feet,” Sabrina yelled, watching the spin of her bronze altimeter as the sky rushed downward outside the nose-dome window. “Rapid ascent of fifteen feet per second and accelerating.”

  “Piece of cake!” Buckle shouted at Sabrina over the din.

  “Just peachy!” Sabrina replied.

  THE BOW CHASER

  MIDSHIPMAN DARIUS BANERJI WAS THE captain of gun crew number five, in charge of the long four-pounder that served as the airship’s bow chaser. He crouched in the bow-pulpit gun turret, one hand gripping the lip of the iron barbette, the other on the brass cannon’s cascabel. A freezing torrent of wind pummeled Banerji and his three-member gun crew as the Pneumatic Zeppelin rocketed up into the sky. Banerji was a slight fellow, and in their exposed position, the rush of wind battered every inch of his heavy coat, threatening to tear away his helmet and goggles.

  It was quite something to be perched on the very nose of an airship on a rapid ascent; it was exhilarating, the sky enclosing them in a bottomless gray, as the dark shapes of the enemy war zeppelins grew larger and larger overhead, their gunnery gondolas spitting fire, their cannons shivering the air with deep-throated booms.

  “Stay crackerjack!” Banerji shouted at his gun crew, who nodded at him from their crouching positions, packed in the small spaces between the gun carriage and the pulpit rails, wrapped in sheepskin coats, their bright red puggarees flapping on their helmets. The sponger was the ship’s apprentice engineer, Lionel Garcia, a good friend of Banerji’s from the midshipman’s mess. The loader was the burly chief cook, Perriman Salisbury. The new man, the winder, was a mystery to Banerji, though his eyes looked steely enough; he was Adrian Pasternak, the new mechanic and the replacement for Henry Stuart, who had been killed by the kraken. Pasternak, strong looking, with burn scars on his forearms and throat, was reported to have been an excellent gunner aboard the Hood, the Crankshaft scout ship from which he had transferred, but Banerji relied little on prior reputation when it came to his gun crew.

  There was one more soul out on the bow with them, perched on the curving bowsprit platform on the port side: a marine, Robin Bogdanovitch, crouched with her hands over the flintlock of her long-barreled musket, ready to fire.

  Banerji glanced up. The zeppelins battling overhead were less than 250 feet away, and approaching fast. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was in position to tuck her nose right up the arse of the port-side airship. They might get a warm reception, a raking blast in return, if the Founders zeppelin had a stern gun. Banerji would ignore any stern chasers, no matter. Captain Buckle was going to land him point-blank on the enemy’s backside, and it was his job to fire a devastating rake.

  Banerji was terrified, his heart racing like a mad horse, tears welling in his eyes inside his goggles, but he knew that he was made of the stuff that stood fast in the face of danger; it was remarkably easy to do when other men were watching him, waiting for his decisions, their lives in his hands. “Steady, boys!” Banerji shouted. “Just a few moments, now!”

  Something else drove Banerji this day, burned inside him. He had failed Captain Buckle by allowing the saboteur to escape him. Failed his captain. It chewed up his gut every time he thought of it. But he would be damned if he neglected his duty again now. No matter what the Founders threw at his little garrison on the tip of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s nose, his shot was going to be perfect.

  Banerji glanced back and saw Howard Hampton, the powder boy—the captain had asked that he be addressed as a gunner’s mate—poised just inside the hatch of the towering glass-and-cast-iron nose window. Howard had his ear close to the chattertube hood and the brass pipe of the giraffe periscope neck beside it; he cradled a velvet-and-leather canister containing the next powder charge, which he had carried up from the forward magazine. He looked pale and frightened, but resolute.

  Banerji smiled at Howard. Howard’s eyes brightened and he smiled back. So far, things had gone swimmingly. The gun crew had arrived on their action station promptly, flung the chocks, tackle, and tompion aside, and run out the gun with by-the-numbers gusto. The long brass cannon was loaded, primed, and ready to fire—a single ball, for the four-pounder did not perform well double-shotted. Garcia, the sponger, had one hand clamped over the barrel’s touchhole so the wind could not suck out the fine-grained primer powder while he had his back to it, using his mass to shelter the slow match burning in its bucket. Perriman held a cannonball he had just rolled out of the shot locker, and Pasternak waited at the two winder wheels, one wheel for barrel elevation and depression, the other for turret traverse.

  They were just under the fighting airships now, within pistol shot, coming up shockingly fast, no more th
an fifteen seconds away. Banerji could see the rigging patterns on the undersides of the gondolas, and their next volleys of cannon fire were loud, casting slender rivers of black smoke streaming away overhead.

  Banerji doubted he would have to worry about aiming the six-foot-long barrel at all—he was certain that Captain Buckle would plant him straight on the keel line of the target, the perfect position for his dreaded raking shot, sending his three-inch cannonball, a cast-iron round spinning with burning phosphorus, rocketing through the length of the entire zeppelin at one thousand feet per second.

  A raking shot was your best bet to pop a zeppelin with a single bang. The cannonball, throwing sparks and phosphors as it glanced off catwalks and girders, created so many holes in the hydrogen gasbags, in one side and out the other, that it stood a good chance of defeating at least one of the self-sealing rubber stockings and releasing a sure-to-be-ignited geyser of hydrogen.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin lurched with a great heave, rapidly slowing her ascent, and the weightless sensation made Banerji feel like he might puke the beefsteak and cinnamon pancakes Cookie had made everyone for breakfast. The air was suddenly a flood of dark smoke, awash with the acrid stink of blackbang gunpowder and the eye-stinging issue of steam boilers and superheated oil. After a moment of choking, they were up and out of it.

  Banerji worried that somehow he was unprepared, even though he knew his gun was in perfect order. “Ready to fire!” he screamed as they humped up behind the mountainous white-brown-gray stern of the Founders war zeppelin, her five massive bronze propellers disemboweling the air with eardrum-splitting force.

  They were so close that, for an instant Banerji feared the tip of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s jib boom might be chopped away. But they leveled out clear above the screws, the harsh rush of the wind subsiding in his ears, and he was now staring into the stern window of the gigantic arse of the Founders zeppelin—the Industria was her name, clearly stenciled in silver across the stern arch board of her engineering gondola.