by Various
Richard Ellis Preston, Jr. became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin: Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (2013), from 47North.
Visit his website at richardellisprestonjr.com.
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Novel: The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin: Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (excerpt) ••••
THE CHRONICLES OF THE PNEUMATIC ZEPPELIN: ROMULUS BUCKLE & THE CITY OF THE FOUNDERS
(excerpt)
by Richard Ellis Preston, Jr.
First published as The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin: Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (2013), by 47North
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PART ONE: FIRE, STEAM, AND HYDROGEN
I
THE MAGNIFICENT ROMULUS BUCKLE
ROMULUS BUCKLE was an airman, a zeppelin pilot, to be exact, or, to be less exact, in the local slang, a gasbag gremlin, a dirigible driver, a balloon goose, an air dog, or whatever moniker any lazybrat might cook up in his gin-stewed cerebellum. Cap’n Buckle, as most of his crew called him, was a tree-tall fellow, six feet and a couple of caterpillar lengths more if he was an inch, his cheeks and chin scruffed with whiskers the color of sand dunes, in ample quantities for a man of the ripe old age of eighteen. He was shot bolt-through with aviator dash, that legendary, heart-stirring dash: he laughed heartily and often, and his eyes, deep and glacier-water blue, made women swoon (all except for the beautiful Martian named Max, of course, who found him far too droll).
One might think Buckle was young to be in command of a sky vessel as dauntingly impressive as the Pneumatic Zeppelin—and he was—but he led a crew whose average age did not exceed twenty years by much, except for Max, of course. Nobody knew how old Max was and she was never in the mood for telling. But then, there was no “getting old” around the Snow World—the old California—in those days, not in the time of the Noxious Mustard (also referred to as stinkum if you were using gutter talk) and the Carbuncle Plague, with the nasty beasties a-lurkin’, Bloodfreezer storms, and the high-percentage risk of one’s blackbang musket exploding in one’s face every time one pulled the trigger. Politically, everything was complicated by the little wars, the “skirmishes,” with the clans almost always at odds with every other clan, their fears stoked by the shady trader guilds, which played everyone against each other for a halfpenny’s profit. Toss in roaming wolf packs of pirates and privateers to stir up the pot, and the entire situation became quite aggravated.
But, ah, the sky. The sky was the place to be as far as Buckle was concerned. It was no matter to him that zeppelineers were sitting ducks in their fragile steam clunkers that flew far too low, were notoriously difficult to bail out of, and were frighteningly susceptible to the catastrophic “pop” (steam engines, with their red-hot furnaces and boilers, did not really belong up in the sky inside giant fabric bags of flammable hydrogen, constantly battered and rattled around and shot at, not really).
Zeppelin pilots had a life expectancy of six months in a skirmish zone, one year in peacetime. But the second statistic was meaningless because all of the Snow World was a skirmish zone, always had been, at least since the day of The Storming (and nobody knew where that statistic had come from, anyway).
Buckle and his crew, members of the Crankshaft clan, had already lasted a year: a whole year since they had stolen the Pneumatic Zeppelin from the one-eyed Katzenjammer Smelt of the Imperial clan and made the spectacular airborne contraption their own. And like all the storied but doomed zeppelin captains and their crews, they took on a swaggering mythos that earthbound citizens would whisper about in awe, long after their heroes had been incinerated in midair somewhere over the Big Green Soup.
Zeppelineer swagger always started with the topper. Buckle’s hat was a masterpiece, a black felt John Bull swimming with moving parts, a mechanical menagerie of steam tubes, brass gears, gauges, and a mercury-filled barometer. He liked to tuck the brim low over his eyes and tap it when he was thinking.
Buckle’s long leather coat was lined with gray wolf fur, tanned a brown so dark it was nearly black, double-breasted with two rows of shining brass buttons on the chest. The coat was satisfyingly weathered, with a fur-tufted rip across the upper left shoulder, where a privateer’s musket ball had punched through the cockpit glass and grazed him five months before.
Leather belts, in their fashion and width, were measures of an aviator’s soul, and Buckle’s belt was wide and intentionally plain, tucking the coat in at the waist and providing a holster for his pistol. He also wore the common airman’s black trousers with a red stripe—though one rarely glimpsed them between the knee-length coat and his high leather boots.
The leather scabbard of Buckle’s saber hung from two gargoyle-headed pegs at his left shoulder, the two gold tassels on its hilt swinging with the gentle vibration of the airship. Swordsmanship was a necessary skill for all zeppelineers, for the scarceness of steam-powered weapons and the unreliability of all blackbang-powder firearms, single-shot as they were anyway, was such that combat often fell to hand-to-hand, and the well-weighted sabers were the Crankshaft gentleman’s (and gentlewoman’s) bonecutters of choice.
Thus appropriately clothed and furnished, Buckle loved standing at his post two paces before the helm. He often shunned his captain’s chair to plant his feet on the deck, and occasionally he would take the helm wheel himself, his hands resting on the brass sheathing burnished to a soft gleam by the hands of every pilot before. His spirit felt more alive when he was “plugged in,” his top hat connected to the pressurized steam system of the Pneumatic Zeppelin so its gears crawled, tubes hissed, and the barometer gurgled.
The Pneumatic Zeppelin’s bridge was a fantastic hive: within easy reach of each station loomed panel after panel of ornate levers, cranks, and knobs that spread out like a gigantic church organ, an elegant riot of vacuum tubes, steam switches, quicksilver instruments, brass gauges, and copper dials. The nose of the gondola was encased in a geometrically pleasing bubble of lead-glass panels framed by wrought iron, which provided the flight crew an expansive, if murky—the quality of glass was very poor at that time—view of the sky ahead. The glass was in fact so muddled that the crew often preferred to do sightings over the flank gunwales, which were open to the icy wind.
The forward section of the piloting gondola, the “cockpit,” contained seven stations, for the captain, navigator, assistant navigator, ballast operator, engineer, helmsman, and elevatorman. The chief navigator was Sabrina Serafim. Her assistant, Wellington “Welly” Bratt, sat on her immediate right. Beside Welly was Nero Colton, the ballast officer who operated the water and hydrogen boards (at the ripe old age of twenty, Nero was already monk-bald on the top of his pate). The engineering station, where Chief Engineer Max usually resided, was located aft of Nero. Immediately behind Buckle loomed the helm wheel, manned by Marcus De Quincey. At the portside window stood the equally impressive elevator wheel, and that station belonged to Lieutenant Ignatius Dunn. The last bridge post was located in the aft signals cabin, the little kingdom of Ensign Jacob Fitzroy.
The most colorful member of the bridge crew perched on a wooden stool alongside Buckle: the mutt, Kellie (short for Kellie of Kells), a wirehaired mishmash of many dogs from which a terrier ancestor had emerged primarily victorious, was enthusiasm itself packaged in blacksilver fur with blazes of white on the paws, chest, and muzzle. Her large, fox-like ears, pink on the interiors, stuck straight up through the little leather pilot helmet she wore, and her leather harness sported a few mechanical gizmos of her own.
As the proud mascot of the airship, Kellie resided in Buckle’s lap on long voyages, the two of them sharing an easy silence as the Snow World with its sky of never-ending clouds drifted past, while Buckle—on the surface an adventurer-soldier who exulted in action—relished periods of meditative quiet. Still, those moments were few and far between. His crew surely loved him because he treated them fairly
and well, but even more so because when Lady Fortune frowned, when the fastmilk had suddenly soured or the ship was on fire and the hydrogen threatened to explode and the enemy threatened to board, all eyes turned to Captain Buckle—and he always found a way out of the fix.
Like the fix they were heading hell-bent for leather into now.
Buckle shifted his weight back and forth to get the circulation in his feet flowing. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was approaching her destination and he was moments from shouting the order to perform a crash dive (“crash dive” was something of a misnomer where a lumbering zeppelin was concerned, but the term stuck nonetheless). They were descending into dangerous territory, and Buckle wanted to give any undesirables lurking below as little advance warning of their arrival as possible. A zeppelin was a big, fat, slow target to start with—no point in giving someone extra time to aim at it.
Buckle sucked in a breath of cold air to calm the flutter of nerves that always rose inside his chest just before they went into harm’s way, and he liked the hawk-like sharpening of his senses that followed. Time slowed for him. Things became almost painfully clear. He felt every tiny shift in the airship’s altitude and direction, knew every groan in the spars and decking, and was father to every shudder and shift in the propellers: his body was as much a part of the Pneumatic Zeppelin as her keel, and he knew her every ache and worry.
And he knew her. Yes, the Pneumatic Zeppelin was a rigid airship socked full of hydrogen cells, but she was such a magnificent machine that Buckle often could not escape the feeling that she was, somewhere deep inside, somehow alive. He spoke to her often, when they were alone. He felt that there was as much life in her as there was in a giant tree in the forest, a vibrant, hidden, ancient kind of life. He loved his ship, yes, his gargantuan dragon-daughter, who could be described as awesome, but not as beautiful. And, as the girlfriends—all lovely damsels of the Crankshaft clan—who had come and gone through Buckle’s life could attest, no flesh-and-blood female stood to do better than second best against the beloved airship that occupied his every thought and attention.
Such things were not unusual. This was the way of most zeppelin captains. But Romulus Buckle, who could be described as a sort of kind, unintentionally effective rake, left a particularly catastrophic romantic wake, because girls fell in love with him at first sight, only to be ousted from his affections by the air machine, which would never, could never, do him wrong.
Buckle cleared his throat. “Ahead two-thirds,” he shouted into the chattertube, grabbing the brass handle of the chadburn, the engine-order telegraph, cranking it forward on its dial to ring the bell and set the pointer to Ahead Two-Thirds. The chadburn emitted its normal puff of steam as the second identical pointer, controlled by the engineers in the engine gondola, swung into position parallel with the first.
“Ahead two-thirds, aye!” An engineer’s voice rang high and tinny from a chattertube hood, the ship’s voice-communication system.
“Fifteen degrees, down bubble,” Buckle ordered. “Down ship. Crash dive.”
“Crash dive, aye!” the elevatorman Dunn shouted, whirling the elevator wheel.
“Down ship. Fifteen degrees, down bubble, aye,” Chief Navigator Sabrina Serafim repeated. “Crash dive.”
“Vent hydrogen,” Buckle said. “Twenty percent across the board.”
“Venting twenty percent,” Nero replied, cranking over the copper wheels on his instrument panel.
“Ahoy! Ahoy! You greasy cloud rats!” Buckle shouted into the chattertube mouthpiece at his left elbow, his voice loud enough to overcome the howl of the wind passing the gondola and the hum of the maneuvering propellers behind. “Eleven o’clock low! Target in sight! Man your battle stations! I repeat—though don’t make me repeat it again—man your battle stations!”
They were about to embark on the most important mission of Buckle’s career.
And the most dangerous.
But first, they had to pick up some cargo.
II
THE PNEUMATIC ZEPPELIN
BUCKLE TOOK HOLD of the wooden handles on the forward gyroscope housing as the Pneumatic Zeppelin plunged into her stomach-lifting drop. In his mind’s eye he saw his huge airship swing down from the clouds, a razor-backed, torpedo-shaped monstrosity nine hundred feet long and one hundred and sixty feet in height, its fabric flanks fourteen stories high.
The sudden descent placed considerable stress on the airframe but, as always, Buckle’s airship handled it well: her thousands of yards of canvas skin rippled in thunderous snaps over the circular metal airframes, every girder groaning in its flexible joint. Everything was pinned to the keel, which shuddered, sending a dull vibration into the decks of her three streamlined gondolas, piloting, gunnery, and engineering, all tucked tightly in line underneath, nestled inside endless miles of rope rigging and antiboarding nets.
From below, Buckle’s ship looked like something of a shark, with the entire length of her underbelly encased in bronze and copper plates bolted and screwed together into a tight Frankenstein skin. Weight was always a concern for airships, so the metal plates were quite thin, but they provided an excellent defense from ground-fire “pottings.” The piloting gondola under the bow looked like a long, gold-copper pod, its glass-domed nose reflecting the weak orb of the sun now forever locked behind a permanent overcast. Under its belly was slung the pneumatic turret and the long barrel of its cannon.
The air vessel’s main cannons, housed in the gunnery gondola amidships, would have their muzzles showing, run out and ready to fire: ten firing ports lined the gun deck, five on each side, an ambitious number for a time when blackbang cannons—good ones that did not threaten to blow up both you and your entire tea party when you fired them—were rare and expensive. The Pneumatic Zeppelin carried five cannons—four twelve-pounders on the gun deck, plus a long, brass four-pounder in the bow—still a quite respectable set of artillery for any clan airship.
Between the backside of the gunnery gondola and the nose of the engineering gondola, the 150-foot-long hull of the Arabella, the launch, would be visible, tucked up inside the belly of the Pneumatic Zeppelin and slightly offset from the main keel.
At the stern of the sky vessel, under the shadows of the cruciform fins and rudder, the four main driving propellers whirled, four colossal razors slicing the sky, churning against the whistling updraft of the wind as they thrust the behemoth forward. Dozens of exhaust vents, tubes, and scuppers—the “Devil’s factory”—thrust straight out from the rear of the engineering gondola, snapping upward above the propellers like the legs of upturned spiders, spewing white steam, belching black smoke, and hissing water.
The Pneumatic Zeppelin was a machine of fire in a cold, cold world.
Slowly, evenly, Romulus Buckle descended, one with the Pneumatic Zeppelin, his mechanical monstrosity, a feather-light colossus, and as it came down it rotated slowly to port, casting a huge, equally rotating shadow on the blasted white landscape below.
III
SABRINA SERAFIM
CHIEF NAVIGATOR and First Mate Lieutenant Sabrina Serafim kept a careful eye on her instruments, measuring the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s altitude, pitch, and rate of descent. She occupied the forward portside chair in the nose of the cockpit, with Romulus Buckle’s station at her back and Assistant Navigator Wellington Bratt seated on her immediate right. Sabrina was a perfectly slender version of a full-grown wood nymph, with a graceful, narrow, elfin face, its tendency toward Asian angles softened by hints of baby fat, and nothing less than pretty. Her skin was pale with a yellow hint to the pigment, clear except for a light smattering of freckles on her nose, but the constant flow of cold air through the gondola always pinked her face—the exposed cheeks between her goggles and silk neck scarf—into a pleasant glow.
What was most striking about Sabrina in the physical sense was her bright red hair, which she kept long but wore pinned up under her derby hat, with the exception of two flaming locks that always escaped above each temple an
d dropped down to brush her cheekbones. Her jade-green eyes inside her goggles brimmed with perceptiveness—a sort of sixth or seventh sense if you like—that could be disarming at times. Her derby, like Buckle’s top hat, housed a stupendous contraption of gears, winder-cranks, and steam tubes, which puffed and rattled when she was plugged into the airship, which she was at the moment.
Sabrina dressed with drawing-room style, normally wearing leather gloves and a long, tapering leather coat lined with mink fur and sporting cuffed sleeves ringed with silver buttons; she loved fine details and had commissioned the best Crankshaft seamstress to embroider fine silver fleur-de-lis into the high collar and lapels. Under the coat she wore a white blouse with lace bunched at the throat. Her breeches were black with a red stripe like Buckle’s, though hers were jodhpurs, which flared at the hips and narrowed at the knees where they disappeared into midcalf boots in a fashionable tuck.
The stylish accoutrements notwithstanding, it was a bad idea to cross Sabrina Serafim.
Her nickname was not “Sabertooth” for nothing.
But no one called her that to her face: she didn’t like it.
Sabrina also owned a sword, a red-tasseled saber she kept slung across two old horse-head pegs above her head, and she knew how to use it—in spades. She was left-handed and that was an advantage in a battle of blades, for it tended to confuse an opponent.
A light crosswind kissed the Pneumatic Zeppelin with the bump of a butterfly’s wing; the titanic airship shuddered ever so slightly, so imperceptibly that no one aboard except the captain and chief navigator sensed the innocent tug of drag.
“Crosswind from the northwest, starboardside, Captain,” Sabrina said as she reached for a wooden-handled lever, slowly sweeping it sideways as she watched her drift-measuring dial, as intricate as an Austrian grandfather clock, wavering in front of her. “Adjusting for horizontal drift, helm. Two degrees to port.”