Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Elizabeth was the key to everything.

  But Washington would never believe it.

  And Buckle knew Elizabeth would be in Atlantis. He knew it. “I can bring the Atlanteans to us, sir, and win the war in so doing.” As he spoke, he heard the rumble of horse hooves arriving on the ground below the gondola.

  “Such overconfidence is dangerous, Captain,” Washington countered, taking a deep breath. “Think of your position. With the Russians retreating north to Archangel, you are alone with the Founders coming up from the south. If you strand your airship over the sea, you cut yourself off, putting the Founders between you and home. I guarantee you the Founders shall take advantage of that mistake. The Atlanteans shall not rise to meet you, sir. You will be greeted by nothing but black ocean, and, once the Founders fleet surrounds you, it shall become your grave.”

  “I assure you I shall find a way,” Buckle said evenly. He could not tell Washington what Andromeda Pollux had told him, but he trusted Andromeda so much it actually frightened him. The recovery of Elizabeth was the paramount mission. Without her, according to Andromeda, the Grand Alliance would lose the war, and that would only be the beginning of the evil that would rise.

  Washington sighed, his anger dissolving, looking older and more haggard than he had when his face had been tense with argument. “So many things have happened before, Romulus—so many things you do not know. The world is not so cut and dried as you think.”

  “Captain?” Valkyrie leaned into the cabin doorway.

  “Yes,” Buckle replied. Valkyrie looked good, looked sharp. She had just learned of the destruction of the Cartouche and her brother’s death fifteen minutes before; Buckle had asked her, with all the sympathy a man could muster, if she might wish to spend some time alone in her cabin. She had refused him, stating that the Pneumatic Zeppelin required her chief engineer on the bridge, and she would do her mourning later. If she wanted to remain in the thick of it, Buckle would allow her to do so.

  “The Czarina has sent a mounted escort with a horse for the ambassador, sir,” Valkyrie said.

  “It is time for you to go, Ambassador,” Buckle said.

  Washington sighed, then offered Buckle his hand. Buckle shook it warmly. “Good luck to you, Captain,” Washington said.

  “And to you, sir,” Buckle replied. He had great respect for Washington. He was sorry to send him away like this.

  “Please follow me, Ambassador,” Valkyrie said. “And we shall be ready to be away in five minutes, Captain.”

  “Aye,” Buckle said.

  Washington followed Valkyrie out into the passageway. “A horse?” he grumbled. “It has been a hundred years since I have ridden a horse. My goodness.”

  Buckle placed his hand over his mouth and ran his fingers along his cheeks to the point of his whiskery chin. Kellie, Howard, and Penny Dreadful lifted their faces to him, the eyes of the boy and dog shining, alive with their own life force in the weak light, while the gold-yellow orbs of Penny Dreadful gleamed with power quite unhuman. “How are we doing in here, Howard?” Buckle asked.

  “Just fine, Cap’n,” Howard replied, sounding rather joyful that the tension in the air was gone. “Penny here, she knows some quite extraordinary word games, sir.”

  “She does, does she?” Buckle asked.

  “I am always good at learning things,” Penny Dreadful said, folding her hands in her lap with the light click of metal on metal.

  Kellie, released from her scratching, trotted out the door, brushing against Buckle’s knees as she passed. Buckle suddenly felt uneasy. Washington was right. It was insane to place all his eggs in one basket, a basket woven by a madman and carried by a somewhat-melted robot. He suddenly missed Max, having her at his side, always a paragon of objectivity, always ready with wise advice even if he did not want to hear it. “You are certain you can get us to Atlantis, Penny Dreadful?”

  “Oh, quite, Captain,” Penny Dreadful replied. “Please, do not worry.”

  “Have you been having any mechanical problems?” Buckle asked. “I do not know how long you lay in the crucible. Perhaps I should have my chief mechanic take a look at you.”

  “I feel extremely hale, thank you,” Penny Dreadful replied.

  “You were not functioning when we found you,” Buckle said.

  “I had shut myself down,” Penny Dreadful replied.

  “And why was that?”

  “Is it not obvious, Captain?”

  “Humor me,” Buckle replied. “I am not much used to conversing with machines.”

  “Because they were about to melt me,” Penny Dreadful said, something resembling a sob rising in her voice. “And I did not want it to hurt.”

  Hurt? Buckle thought. In what way could a machine feel hurt? “Ah, well, I am glad you are well, Miss Dreadful, and that we were able to rescue you from any hurt.”

  Penny Dreadful’s mouth formed an odd smile, and her eyes burned a little brighter. “And for saving my life I am eternally grateful, Captain Buckle. Be sure of that. Metal people never forget, you see.” She tapped her head with an iron finger in a childish fashion that Buckle found disturbing.

  “Very well, then,” Buckle replied. “How about I escort you out onto the bridge, and you can help my navigator find the hidden city of Atlantis?”

  “Oh, Captain,” Penny Dreadful said with a giggle, slipping off her chair and skipping past Buckle, her iron shoes clomping heavily across the deck. “Things are not hidden if you know where they are!”

  THE GRAVEDIGGER

  MAX AWAKENED, RELEASED FROM BUCKLE and sabertooths both. Her brain battled the morphine even in her sleep. It was late—she could tell by the brightness of the infirmary lanterns and the darkness of the window curtains. Tyro’s iron lung wheezed with its constant beat, and though she could not see Valentine, she sensed that he lay fast asleep in his bed.

  Max tried to move—tried to lift her head, an arm, a finger—and failed. Pain stabbed her neck and back. She ignored it.

  The infirmary nurse walked past, holding an empty syringe, its glass gleaming in the light of the lantern flames. She was a middle-aged woman with a bored face and little yellow flowers sewn into the collar of her medical smock.

  Max could not remember the woman’s name.

  She was suddenly frightened. Not for herself, but for Romulus Buckle. For the Pneumatic Zeppelin and her crew. Buckle had refused to tell her things, bad things. The airship and her crew were in mortal danger—she was sure of that. But there was more to fear. Something unknown, something even more terrifying than the prospect of war.

  Something slithering beneath the known world.

  She should be there, with them, guarding them.

  When she was small, she could remember standing in the snow in front of her parents’ house. Someone had killed a timber wolf, and the creature’s body lay in the back of a wagon. She and Tyro stared at the dead animal, having edged up to it until there were mere inches away from its face.

  The dead wolf stared at them with its lifeless yellow eyes, which were frozen open. Its mouth was open, too, the dark tongue lolling out over the jaw, framed by the rows of big, dirty, yellow teeth.

  The fangs frightened Max. The dead animal smelled awful, of old carrion and rancid blood. She wanted to retreat, but Tyro would have teased her. Tyro had reached into the mouth and grabbed the tongue. Max had never forgotten that moment.

  She closed her eyes, and she was in the chamber of numbers again. Her Martian unconscious, fueled by her dreams, had revisited the place and rebuilt it for her, piece by piece, carving brilliant details out of her murky memories, working the problem. The candle flickered on the table—she could smell its old, oily paraffin.

  The numbers would not leave her alone. The crowded formulae on the walls kept returning to her unbidden. Perhaps she had absorbed the mystery of it, the obsession, somehow, when she lay in the chamber, near death.

  Without willing it, she kept reviewing the calculations, flipping them upside dow
n, inside out, the morphine constantly dragging her in and out of her lines of thought, zigzagging her brain.

  She smelled burning wood and Fassbinder’s Penicillin Paste. The formulae shifted, transformed, evolved into something else. The caterpillar in the chrysalis broke free, a butterfly.

  Suddenly the never-ending flow of numbers stopped. It almost made sense. She was a hair’s breadth, a decimal point, from solving it. The immortality equation. She gasped, fearing that in the next moment the morphine would wash over her and she would lose track of the long line of winding calculations she had just done.

  She needed to record the numbers. Without them, she might never be able to find her way so close to the solution again.

  She reached for her pencil and paper. She had requested them at one point, and Doctor Lee had accommodated her, placing them on her bedside table.

  She lifted her arm and, shaking like a leaf, stretched her fingers toward the paper.

  And then she froze.

  Someone had arrived in the infirmary.

  Someone, or something.

  Heavy steps approached along the aisle. Max’s heart started pounding. Disinfectant-laden air rushed in and out of her nostrils. She strained against the limits of her vision, but she could not see what was coming.

  But she could sense him. Heavy as the end of time. Effortless as the fall of night.

  The pencil and papers flew off the table, as if struck away by an invisible arm, the papers falling to the floor like leaves, the pencil rolling away in a small, high-pitched trundle.

  The footsteps stopped. It was standing at the foot of her bed.

  Max peered down and saw him.

  The Gravedigger.

  It was he, his face barely visible in the darkness, but his form silhouetted in the lamplight, the tall, black-winged Martian who had met Max at the entrance to the Edifice of the Dead and refused her entry, cast her away.

  Max’s heartbeat almost choked her, it was racing so fast.

  Was she dead?

  The Gravedigger spoke, his voice weary, layered with warning, but without malice. Max felt his hot breath on her cheek, too—at least she thought it was his breath, even though he was seven feet away. That surprised her. She had always thought that the Gravedigger’s breath would be cold. “You are special, because you are one, and you are the other. Two minds live within you, two souls, two prisms with which to understand the universe.” He paused, and she saw a frightening blue glow rise in his black eyes. “You are too close. The answer you seek would bring you nothing but misery. Turn away from the equation and never return to it again. I have warned you.”

  Max’s vision fluttered as her pounding heart overtaxed her greatly weakened body. Her wounds burned like fire. Flinging her eyes wide open, she saw that the Gravedigger was gone.

  She did not know if he had ever really been there.

  Darkness squeezed out the light.

  She fainted.

  TO ATLANTIS

  THE PNEUMATIC ZEPPELIN HAD STOPPED, briefly, to allow the Imperial princess a moment to stand watch over the burned wreckage of the Cartouche, the tomb of her brother, Bismarck, and his Imperial crew.

  Buckle climbed down the rope ladder from the piloting gondola’s hull-access hatch. The zeppelin was terrain-moored on the sweeping flank of a mountain ridge, anchored twenty feet off the ground in rough territory, and a fresh breeze was making her strain at her hawsers.

  Buckle’s boots landed on hard-crusted snow and frozen grass; he immediately strode toward Valkyrie. She was about seventy-five yards away to the north, her slim figure clearly visible against the smoldering skeleton of the Cartouche, crumpled like a red-hot spider crushed under the heel of a giant boot.

  If the very world itself had been at peace that morning, there was no doubt that she was at war tonight. The colossal fires of Muscovy still raged far away to the northeast, still casting whirlwinds of fiery red embers high into the sky. Across the mountain ridges were scattered the burning pieces of the Bellerophon, the Industria, and the two Founders mortar barges. Only the ocean seemed untouched in its great, impenetrable blackness. And it was into that blackness Buckle knew he must now go. Far out there, somewhere, where sharks and sea-monster beasties roamed the depths, lay the fabled city of Atlantis. Elizabeth was in Atlantis, if old Shadrack was to be believed, and he would get there, if Penny Dreadful knew the impossible way in.

  Buckle had cast his lot with the asylum inmate and the defective robot.

  But if Elizabeth was in Atlantis, he had to find her.

  He had to.

  Buckle slowed to a stop ten feet behind Valkyrie and paused respectfully, one hand resting on the pommel of his sword and the other on the butt of his pistol.

  Valkyrie did not move, but she knew it was time to go.

  The armored trains and war fleets of the Founders were coming.

  Valkyrie glanced over her shoulder at Buckle and looked at him. Her eyes, silvered by the moonlight, were wet.

  Buckle removed his top hat. “Princess, if I may—I cannot describe to you our sadness at your loss of your brother and his crew. You are our crewmate, and we are now given to you as you are to us, through battle and blood, and the entire ship’s company offers its condolences.”

  Valkyrie did not respond immediately. She gazed down the snowbound mountain to where its ridges plunged into the sea. The ocean breeze rocked a handful of her fine blonde hairs that had escaped their pinnings back and forth about her cheek and neck. “This wind shall worry us as we try to make headway to the west,” she said.

  “Aye,” Buckle replied.

  The wind rose, spurring the fires as they slowly consumed themselves on the shattered wreckage of the Cartouche, their whitish-orange illumination slowly dying against the pale-silver moonlight.

  “I thank you and the crew for your sympathies, Captain,” Valkyrie said. “You are most kind.”

  Buckle nodded, then turned to face the sea as well. The cold wind hummed, giving voice to the void, bringing with it the thunder of the waves breaking upon the white-frothed, iridescent line of the beach. Sea lions barked to the north, far away. Ice-coated tree branches rubbed together, issuing a musical tinkle, joined by the occasional, fragile shattering of falling icicles.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin creaked louder on her ropes, the breeze fluttering her canvas with the sound of birds’ wings, whispering to Buckle that she was unhappy being earthbound and begging him to fly. Buckle heard it. So did Valkyrie.

  Valkyrie removed her right glove and knelt, picking up a handful of gray ashes from the snow; she let them stream through her stained fingers.

  “I can give you another minute,” Buckle said.

  “No,” Valkyrie whispered. She stood and turned to Buckle, drawn up to her full length, her beautiful face stern, her eyes dry. “I have said my good-byes, Captain. Thank you.” She placed her Crankshaft pith helmet with its red puggaree on her head. “Let us go and get your sister.”

  Buckle smiled grimly at Valkyrie, and for the first time, he saw her smile back—a smile cocooned in sadness, but an honest one.

  They strode back up the ridge to the Pneumatic Zeppelin, her huge ellipsoidal shape looming against the night clouds. She was running dark—with interior buglights and night lanterns only—so the Founders lookouts could not espy her from afar.

  “Please get the lead out, sirs,” Ivan urged impatiently from the base of the rope ladder. “Or have you forgotten about the fogsucker armada on its way?”

  “Just make sure my engines work, Mister Gorky,” Buckle replied.

  Ivan sighed, his metal arm and faceplate gleaming, his magnifying goggles making his eyes look overlarge and buggy through the glass. Buckle had asked Ivan, as they prepared to meet with the Russians, if he wished to accompany them—the Spartak clan was his original bloodline. Ivan had refused, saying that though his heart was Russian, he had no desire to shake hands with the bastards who had abandoned him on the streets of Archangel, where Balthazar, visiting
on a trade mission, had found him, a filthy infant in a basket, riddled with the carbuncle plague and left in the gutter to die.

  Ivan lifted his goggles and gave Valkyrie a respectable bow as she arrived under the ladder. “Princess, my sympathies,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mister Gorky,” Valkyrie answered. “You are most kind.”

  Buckle clambered up the rope ladder. When he entered the access hatch in the deck of the piloting gondola, he was nearly bowled over by Kellie, as she excitedly dashed about, and found himself at the metal feet of Penny Dreadful, her yellow eyes peering down at him, glowing with the reflection of the bioluminescent green boil.

  “Captain is aboard!” De Quincey shouted, looking back from the helm.

  “Up ship, if you please, Miss Serafim!” Buckle ordered as he climbed onto the deck and leaned back into the hatchway to offer his hand to Valkyrie. She took it, her long, ash-stained fingers wrapping securely around his as he swung her up.

  “All sentries aboard! Prepare to away!” Sabrina shouted into the chattertube hood. “Lift anchor!”

  Buckle hauled Ivan up the hatch and then strode to his station. Sabrina tipped her bowler to Buckle and returned to her position in the nose. The bridge was alive, boil glowing in every glass tube, sphere, bubble, and orb, imparting its familiar, otherworldly illumination.

  Buckle felt both ebullient and anxious, and let his crew carry out their familiar tasks without any need for his orders. Voices sounded from the ratlines above and the keel deck behind as the anchors were secured home, the mooring lines winched in and coiled into the rope wells, the marine sentries numbered and aboard, and the ballast and hydrogen wheels cranked and poised.