Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Ivan saluted Buckle as he strode past in the crowd. “Nice to see you still alive, brother,” he said with a grin.

  “And you, brother,” Buckle said.

  “The amidships hatch is locked down, Captain,” Darcy announced as he tugged powerfully at the observer’s nacelle hatch. “It is locked.”

  “No matter,” Buckle replied. Even if the hatchways were thrown wide open, Buckle would not have used them. He would never give the defenders below the luxury of being able to predict the points where his attackers might penetrate. His boarders would cut their own entrances into the fabric roof and drop in via those, avoiding whatever traps the defenders had surely set underneath the hatchways.

  “Each division, fore and aft of the nacelle! Cut two doors on the spine, here and there!” Buckle ordered with points of his sword; hydroman Murray Collins, his face and pith helmet splattered with blood, tossed him a loaded pistol. Both Darcy and the engine officer, Elliot Yardbird, took up position with axes as their boarding groups collected around them.

  Buckle grinned at the overheated, blood-spattered faces. “We have them, lads and ladies. So shall we?” Buckle clamped his knife between his teeth and took a good grip on his pistol and saber. Buckle nodded at Darcy, who quickly chopped a large, square opening in the envelope skin.

  Buckle took a quick look down into the ragged rat hole, unfortunately dark compared to the incandescent evening sky. He glimpsed the bright trails of a few loose fireflies and the barely visible lines of a catwalk grating. There was no telling what might await him down in the shadows.

  Leaning forward, Buckle dropped in.

  SCUTTLED

  BUCKLE PLUNGED DOWN INTO THE Bellerophon with questions haunting the back of his mind. Why had the Founders defenders been locked out on the roof? Even with the access hatches screwed down, anyone with a cutlass or axe could hack a door into existence with a few deft strokes of the blade. It made no tactical sense: the structure of a zeppelin provided an excellent defense in depth; to order a last stand on the roof—the most exposed position—was almost criminal.

  Unless, unless, the captain had sacrificed part of the Bellerophon’s crew to buy himself time. If so, then their blood had purchased him a few precious minutes.

  Buckle landed like a cat on the grating, letting his knees absorb the impact of the eight-foot drop. He stayed low, coiled, advancing with pistol and sword so the crewmen following him did not land on his back. The catwalk was similar to the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s Eagle deck, with the great curved tops of the gasbags heaving quietly on both sides, their black humps laced with spidery stocking lattices.

  Visibility was rotten. It was difficult to see much of anything in the Bellerophon’s dark, hazy attic. The roof canvas had a barely perceptible glow—imparted by the last shreds of evening light—and intermittent buglights burned brightly here and there, leading away to a great distance down the catwalk, where occasional yellow streaks of stray fireflies corkscrewed between. Smoke and superheated steam had formed a fog under the roof, assaulting Buckle’s nose and eyes, rancid with the foulness of overheated iron and oil, powder smoke, and doped canvas consumed by fire. No doubt there was hydrogen in the mix as well.

  Buckle let the vile air hurt him, accepting the discomfort. He sensed that the catwalk was empty of defenders. He heard them in the darkness, racing away, their boots clanking down the labyrinth of stairwells and ladders below, dousing lanterns as they retreated.

  The Founders were not defending the center of their airship, a strange tactic considering how furiously they had battled on the roof. The height advantage meant everything in a boarding attempt—to lose the upper decks essentially meant losing the fight.

  Valkyrie was at Buckle’s back now, coughing, with more members of the boarding parties dropping in ahead and behind.

  Buckle pulled his knife from his teeth and sheathed it in his belt as he headed for the main stairwell landing. He needed to get down to the keel deck, where he could seize the piloting gondola and take control of the ship. Quickness was his greatest ally, for once his boarding party was winding down deep into the Bellerophon’s rib cage, they would surely be outnumbered by the Founders crew. He could not give the enemy time to reform and attack in force.

  Ivan, Yardbird, and their boarding division appeared from the murk ahead.

  “The bridge!” Buckle shouted. “We must make the bridge immediately!”

  “They have turned tail, Cap’n!” Ivan said with a rough cough, flushed, brandishing a pistol.

  “Stay together! Stay on me!” Buckle shouted.

  “Aye,” Ivan replied, his goggles reflecting a fire or lamp somewhere behind Buckle, aglow like an owl in a dark forest.

  “Hurrah!” Buckle shouted, racing down the stairwell, his boarders following him through the haze in a clatter of boots and jangling weapons. The interior of the Bellerophon was a hellish wreck, bashed apart by Russian cannonballs: stairs and catwalks were blown to pieces, their mangled metal gleaming in the flickering light of scattered fires; shorn ropes and rigging dangled at every turn, swinging in the scalding blasts from broken steam pipes and burst valves.

  Buckle arrived on a broad landing—the Bellerophon did not seem to possess a uniform Castle deck, but rather a complicated series of small catwalks—turned, and descended another long set of stairs to the Axial deck below. The air was much clearer here, the damage less extensive, and still—halfway down the zeppelin—not a single Founders crewman to be seen. Buckle paused, his eyes darting. The Founders should be swarming, leaping from cubbyholes and platforms with blades flashing, marines firing close-range pistol shots, a steampiper on the fly, something.

  Buckle could still hear the low racket of boots on the run across the decks beneath, and such abandonment was unnerving.

  To hell with it. If the Founders wanted to organize a last stand on the keel, where Buckle could assault them from above, then they had done no more than choose their place to die.

  Buckle advanced slowly on the next stairwell, taking a moment to regain his bearings and allow his boarders to reassemble behind him. The innards of the Bellerophon, her envelope infested with smoldering holes, breathed and groaned like the belly of a wounded monster that had swallowed them. Trickling patches of fire were all that were left of far larger conflagrations, beaten down by the fire hoses that now lay cast off on the deck, water sputtering from the nozzles and pouring through the gratings in glittering streams.

  The cannons of the Czarina had inflicted considerable damage upon the Bellerophon’s gasbags, which had been severely punctured, their rubber-stocking mechanisms stretched beyond capacity and in tension flux, quivering so violently that they emitted an odd, high-pitched hum.

  She was broken up, yes—but she was salvageable, still quite a prize.

  Buckle glanced back at his boarders as they followed at a crawl, looking back and forth, weapons gripped tightly, unsure of what sort of trap they might be charging into. Valkyrie’s cool blue eyes met his, and he thought he caught a victorious gleam in them. Buckle increased the rate of his stride. His boarding could not lose its momentum. A huge platform was just ahead, the top of a main stairwell leading down into the Bellerophon’s launch bay, a huge compartment just aft of the great airship’s beam.

  A sudden barrage of orders, delivered harshly, echoed up from the launch bay. With the cries came the sounds of axes slamming hard on wood, followed by the high-pitched pops of ropes snapping.

  “On me!” Buckle shouted as he sprinted down the Axial deck. It only took ten seconds to reach the platform rail overlooking the massive launch bay. Buckle saw the zeppelin’s cigar-shaped launch resting at her berth five stories below, her decks loaded with black-coated crew members, the wind and darkness of the night streaming under her exposed keel, her hull lit by lines of sparkling buglights.

  The launch bay suddenly echoed with the loud bang of metal levers and clamps snapping back. The launch dropped. She plunged silently, straight down, the wind making an eer
ie, unearthly sound as it roared up and over her envelope skin that fluttered emptily over unfilled hydrogen bags. The launch fell away from the warm-orange touch of the buglights, and took on the blue-gray glow of the moonlit night, darkening by degrees as it descended closer and closer to the earth.

  Buckle stared, bewildered. Had the Founders really abandoned the Bellerophon? Had they relinquished possession of a precious war zeppelin with no more than one sharp fight?

  “I’ll be damned, the devils gave her up!” Ivan said.

  “Captain!” someone shouted frantically from behind.

  Buckle spun around to see his boarders backing away from Daniel Povenmire, the machinist, who had just pulled a grievously black, round bomb out of the maintenance box where it had been stuffed, its fuse burning a soft crimson. Povenmire yanked the fuse out of the bomb casing and stomped the smoldering hemp under his boot.

  Faces whipped back to Buckle, all dawning with a grim realization. The colossal creaks and groans of Bellerophon now felt doomed.

  “They’ve scuttled her,” Valkyrie whispered softly, speaking in the way a sleepwalker might, as if from a dream, as if from not believing.

  “Lucky for us the cowards used slow burners,” Buckle said confidently, looking at his pocket watch. He had waltzed into a Founders trap—but the jaws had shut too slowly. “How long was left on that fuse, would you estimate, Mister Povenmire?”

  “Can’t be sure, Captain. Maybe two, two and a half minutes. Depends upon the quality of the hemp,” Povenmire answered quickly. “I’m no expert on Founders ordnance, sir.”

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” Buckle said, already on the move. “Or the Bellerophon will blow up and take us and the Pneumatic Zeppelin with it.”

  SHACKLED TO A DEAD MAN

  THE RACE BACK TO THE roof of the Bellerophon was a desperate scramble through a labyrinth of thickening smoke, steam, and fire. Buckle cursed at the twisted rails and missing staircase steps as he climbed, forcing his burning thigh muscles to propel his weight, his heart walloping in his chest, his face overheating, his lungs sucking in an assault of smoke—the choke was near overwhelming, but it would do not good for him to go tumbledown now. The damaged airship seemed to intentionally place her wrecked guts in the way, her loose ropes and wires tangling boots, loose blocks and tackle swinging to bash the skull, furious gushes of steam lashing the face, every inch ahead obscured by murk and darkness. Even the remaining buglights, hanging in diffused yellowish orbs, were fading into oblivion.

  Yet they were almost to the Eagle deck now, and Buckle could see the dim orange light of lanterns at the forward observation nacelle overhead. He blinked streaming water out of his eyes and stared at the jouncing back of the crewperson in front of him—it was Ilsa Gallagher, and a spatter of blood mottled the white bandolier that swept from her left shoulder to her right hip.

  “Almost home!” Buckle cried out over the rasping coughs and the boots ringing on the stairs. Buckle was the last man in the group, making sure no one was lost and left behind, while Valkyrie leapt like an antelope at the lead. She had just reached the now-brighter yellowish-orange observation nacelle. Crankshaft crewpersons knelt above on the roof, trying to leverage waffling firefly lanterns into the column of superheated smoke hurtling upward out of the broken glass, as from a locomotive chimney.

  At the nacelle platform, Valkyrie leapt to the ladder, swinging up and out. Ivan stepped aside, shoving each crew member up in turn, not needing to urge them to climb any faster than they already were. The rush slowed to an agonizing stop in the miasma of barely breathable, skillet-hot air. Buckle tossed aside his helmet, wiped the sweat running from his forehead, and peered at his watch. His people had made the climb to the roof in forty seconds.

  He had a minute and a half, maybe a few seconds more, before the Bellerophon blew. And that was if Povenmire had guessed correctly, and if there had not been bombs haphazardly lit all over the ship without any regard for uniformity of timing. Yet, Buckle thought as he shuffled forward in the line, jamming his watch back into the depths of his pocket, the Founders had proven so yellow that it was likely the bombers had waited until the last possible second to apply their matches to the fuses.

  Drowning in the smoke, Buckle stopped his breathing, letting his heart pound in his chest as it ached to cough the lungs clear. He reached the nacelle ladder and Ivan reached for him.

  “Captain!” Ivan yelled in the rushing air.

  “Your turn!” Buckle howled back, and the gasp of air his body forced him to take with the shout near doubled him over with hacking.

  Ivan grabbed Buckle by the collar of his coat and hauled him up the ladder after him. Waiting hands plunged into the pounding stream of heat and smoke and propelled Buckle up with such urgency that his boots barely touched the rungs. He fell free of the smoke column, stumbling into the cold, clear air, his lungs near freezing themselves solid as he gasped like a drowned man.

  “She has been scuttled! Bombs!” Buckle heard Valkyrie shout with a raspy hitch in her voice, back toward amidships. “Disengage and boom off! We are shackled to a dead man! Cut the lines! Just cut the lines!”

  The boarders leapt back across the gap to the flank ratlines and the wide, broad gray back of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, where Wellington and the boatswain, Aubrey, raced back and forth, chopping grappling lines with axes, and the second-wave crew was hastily drawing boom poles from their fastenings along the spine boards.

  Buckle staggered over bodies, fallen weapons, loose helmets, and pools of blood. His coughing subsided and his eyes grew accustomed to the silver incandescence of the moonlight spilling through the clouds—an illumination much brighter than the inside of the Bellerophon.

  “Captain!” Valkyrie shouted. “Time to go!”

  Buckle turned to see Valkyrie wave him toward the port side of the Bellerophon. For a moment he thought that they were the last two aboard, but then he noticed boilerman Rodney Winship and the marine Cartwright, desperately yanking at the gurney wire, which had been strung across the gap between grappling-cannon posts on each airship. There was a body in the gurney, a wounded crewman.

  Buckle raced along the roof with Valkyrie at his side, both dodging debris and strewn rigging. All the grappling lines but one had been cut, the crew members on the Pneumatic Zeppelin poised, boom poles in their hands, waiting for the gurney to pass.

  “Launch the gurney and boom off, damn your hides!” Buckle shouted, his singed lungs stabbing as he ran.

  “It’s no use, Captain!” Winship yelled, stepping back from the gurney. “The lines are fouled!”

  Buckle and Valkyrie arrived at the grappling-cannon post, Buckle tearing off his gloves as he tackled the Gordian knot of wires and rope at the base of the gurney. He felt the nudge of the booms pressing the Bellerophon to starboard, and heard the maneuvering propellers of the Pneumatic Zeppelin whirl up, the nacelles traversing to drive the airship away from the Bellerophon.

  “It be just a damned fogsucker, sir!” Cartwright said, furtively glancing at the boom poles, pressing the muzzle of his pistol to the gurney wire. “He is not worth the risk, I say! Let him burn!”

  Buckle saw the face of the man poking out of the burlap wrapping and leather bindings that secured him to the gurney—it was the strawberry-bearded Founders officer he had skewered, apparently still alive.

  Buckle shoved Cartwright’s pistol aside. “Go!” he shouted at Winship and Cartwright.

  Cartwright spun and sprinted down the envelope slope, leaping across to the Pneumatic Zeppelin.

  Winship hesitated. “He is near dead, sir! He is not worth the effort, sir!”

  “Abandon ship, Mister Winship,” Buckle snapped as he battled the dismaying tangle of wire and rope. “That is an order!”

  Winship dashed away.

  Buckle grunted, his eyes stinging, concentrating on pulling loose the contortions of the knot, denying himself his desperate need to look at his watch. Valkyrie stood across from him, looking over
the gurney, quickly tying something up.

  If Buckle had thought about it—if he had truly thought about it—he would have left the Founders man to die. But he was operating on instinct now, and his instinct would not allow him to abandon a wounded airman to a terrible fate.

  That and the damned Gentleman’s Rules.

  The gurney came loose. Buckle pulled on the baying line, hand over hand, and the gurney lurched out into the gap between the two sky vessels as the crewmen on the other side hauled it across. “Abandon ship, Princess—that is an order!”

  “Very well, Captain.” Valkyrie nodded and leapt down the slope, jumping across to the Pneumatic Zeppelin as the crew, their bodies dark silhouettes against her mountainous spine, pulled her aboard and shouted, urging their captain on. But if the Bellerophon popped now, they were just as dead as he.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin and the Bellerophon separated with a shuddering rumble, pulling apart as the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s propellers wound up to screeching roars and she backed off the doomed Bellerophon with a thunder of ripping rigging and splintering tack. Buckle saw a crack of night sky open between the towering airships. Bodies—at least a dozen—and debris that had tumbled into the crevasse now fell through the widening gap, their black forms plummeting down to the void of the earth beneath, the ground dotted with orange fires.

  As the massive zeppelins eased apart, the grappling cannon bent on its post, its line the only attachment left between the two vessels. Buckle grabbed the rope just as it snapped and held on, keeping the gurney suspended, though the weight of it began to drag him down the side. The Pneumatic Zeppelin crewmen hauled the gurney in, and Buckle released the rope as they secured it.

  Buckle scrambled back up to the Bellerophon’s spine, avoiding her envelope breaches and hatchways, which were now expelled scalding columns of smoke and steam.