Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3)

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

“Our automaton,” Buckle answered.

  “It looks like one of the old ones, the ones the Atlanteans made,” Felix grumbled, scraping a bit of fat to the edge of his plate. “They don’t like them. If we make a deal for transit I’d suggest you leave the thing behind.”

  Buckle shook his head at a pang of disappointment; he’d hoped that the presence of the Atlantean robot would prove an icebreaker with the Atlanteans but apparently not. “The machine stays with us.”

  “Dig your own grave, then,” Felix grumbled. He glanced into the shadows and nodded. A woman emerged with a pistol at her side, the trigger cocked. She was squarish and middle-aged, probably of about the same age—thirtyish—as Felix, and of Asian descent. Her demeanor was serious and unpleasant, like a person who never smiled.

  “I don’t negotiate with a loaded pistol at my back,” Buckle said.

  “We all have our hands close to our pistols,” Felix answered, cutting what was left of his ham into impossibly tiny pieces, the knife blade squeaking on the ceramic platter. It was as if he wanted a reason to keep the sharp blade in his hand. “That’s how business gets done in Vera Cruz. If you don’t like it, you can take your leave.”

  “You have a submarine, yes?” Buckle asked.

  In went another bite of ham. Felix chewed and swallowed. “Perhaps. But if I did I would not be happy about taking on questionable cargoes when the current environment is as unfriendly as it is.”

  “We have no cargo,” Buckle said. “All we seek is passage to Atlantis.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Felix said with a false smile; several of his teeth were missing. “That takes a heap of silver on the barrelhead.”

  Romulus dropped his heavy leather coin purse on the table.

  Felix stopped chewing. His eyes flicked to the Asian woman and back to Buckle. He started chewing again. “The Crankshafts always have money. Few things are certain in life. But the Crankshafts always have money.”

  “Good merchants,” Buckle said.

  “Good pirates,” Felix countered.

  “Former pirates,” Buckle said.

  Felix nodded, then pointed his chin at the coin purse. “What’s in there?”

  “Two thousand in silver,” Buckle replied.

  “A lot of velvet,” Felix said, his brown eyes narrowing. “But it ain’t enough. You may have noticed that the Founders have seized the town. Just getting you out of port will be worth every halfpenny of that two thousand, if we even survive it, that is.”

  Buckle tossed another leather purse onto the table. “A thousand more in gold. That includes return fare.”

  Felix rested his hands on the table, his grease-streaked fork and knife gleaming in the firelight. “You want me to being you back to Vera Cruz now that it is crawling with Founders?”

  “No. Another location. Not far off.”

  Felix laid his knife and fork on the edges of his plate and nodded at the Asian woman. Buckle heard a click as she uncocked her pistol hammer. “This is Kishi,” Felix said. “My partner.”

  Buckle turned and nodded at Kishi. She gave him a smile so big and mean it surprised him.

  “We need to go and we need to go now,” Buckle said.

  Felix stood up, drained his nautilus mug and stuffed it into his coat pocket. “Very well. Three tickets to the bottom of the sea it is, then.”

  III

  THE SEAGREEN BARREL COMPANY

  With the Founders patrols everywhere, the journey back to the Vera Cruz wharf was quick, a hurried, snaking rush along gray-iced alleyways so narrow they were barely wider than Buckle’s shoulders. Occasionally he stepped over blanket-covered bodies, lumpy leper shadows underfoot, beggars alive or dead it was impossible to tell but in a sorry state most certainly, lying as they were on stones dense with frozen mold, garbage and corruption.

  They were losing the darkness; dawn approached rapidly—the Snow World dawn—the tumultuous pink glow of the eastern sky where the overcast heavens both muted and amplified the light. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was out there, keeping inside the sea mists two miles to the north, stationed for the rendezvous. Buckle’s brother by adoption, Ivan Gorky, was in command of the airship, assisted by the Imperial princess Valkyrie Smelt. Valkyrie was acting as chief engineering officer in the absence of Max.

  Part of Buckle recoiled at the idea of a foreign clan officer on his bridge, but Valkyrie was first rate: her bravery under fire as they boarded the Bellerophon had won over much of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s crew, her cool exterior notwithstanding.

  At the southeastern end of the docks they passed through a long row of large, decrepit buildings, several of which had burned down to blackened posts a long time ago, and arrived at the reinforced door of a large, ramshackle warehouse. Felix drew a set of skeleton keys and began opening three massive padlocks. A sign creaked overhead, the dawn sea breeze rocking it on its rusty hooks: flaking gold lettering read THE SEAGREEN BARREL COMPANY and painted over that in thick strokes of red paint was the word CONDEMNED.

  The padlocks clanked open and Buckle found himself descending a rickety stairwell into a large space reeking of tar, salt and rotting wood. Sunlight shot down through a broken skylight and gaps in the warping roof boards, riddling stacks of cobwebbed wooden barrels with gray shafts of light. Oily black harbor water gurgled in a forty-foot rectangular hole cut in the warehouse floor, lapping up against the teardrop-shaped conning tower of a small submarine.

  Two chairs with high wooden backs and red velvet cushions, expensive and most certainly stolen, sat beside the submarine. The first chair contained an old man with a liver-spotted face and stubbly white beard, his body little more than bony protrusions under his denim coveralls. In the second chair lounged a young woman in a blue and white striped sailor’s blouse. They were both smoking pipes, and the curls of smoke formed lazy wreaths in the air above the chairs. They jumped to their feet when they saw Felix, their heads spinning the tobacco smoke in little tornadoes.

  “Rachel! Husk! We are away!” Felix shouted. “With all speed!”

  “Aye, Captain!” Rachel replied, knocking the contents of her pipe into the water before hopping onto the conning tower ladder. The old man, Husk, clamped his pipe between his teeth and began untying the submarine’s mooring lines from their cleats.

  “I present to you the Dart,” Felix said without ceremony. “She’s a true submarine, small and fast. She’ll outrun the Founders tubs if necessary but stealth is her finest quality.”

  “She looks leaky to me,” Sabrina said.

  “And what does a sky dog know of sea boats, I ask?” Kishi growled.

  Buckle appraised the iron hull plates and rivets of the steam-powered Dart, being most impressed by her two big copper screws surrounded with what looked to be a half dozen smaller propellers. She looked to be about fifty feet long. The crew likely totaled little more than a half dozen. “I like the cut of her,” he said.

  Kishi smiled at him but this smile didn’t look mean.

  Buckle followed Felix up the Dart’s conning tower ladder to the small bridge. The main hatch was open and they clambered down another ladder into the dark interior of the boat. The stink of bioluminescent boil and stale seawater hit Buckle as his boots landed on the metal deck of the control room. He stepped aside as Sabrina descended behind him, followed by Welly wedging his way down with Penny strapped to his back.

  Buckle shivered at the idea of being submerged—even though the submarine was only halfway down. Dark seawater lapped at the bottoms of two large, oval window ports at the front of the cabin and Buckle felt as if he were looking out of the eyes of a great sea beast. Instruments of copper, brass and glass packed the control surfaces; Buckle recognized many of the gauges and dials—compass, chadburn, pitch pendulum, drift indicators, pressure tank indicators and on and on—the controls of a submarine were in many ways similar to those of a zeppelin.

  Kishi came down the ladder, closing the hatch and winding the wheel lock shut above her.

  “Vessel read
y for departure, Captain,” a voice rang down the chattertube.

  “Lines are away,” Kishi announced.

  “Dampers are open and boilers are being stoked, Captain,” Rachel announced from her post immediately to the port side of the helm wheel. “Minimum propulsion available in one minute.”

  “In one minute we take her down to ten,” Felix said.

  Rachel watched the red liquid in her pressure gauges rise, then turned her head to stare at Sabrina.

  “See something you like?” Sabrina asked.

  Stone faced, Rachel held her stare. She was pretty in the way a lioness was pretty, with a high forehead and the face that might belong to a noble. She looked to be a well-cooked mix of races, with wide-set eyes, a thick orb of densely curled reddish-brown hair and medium-brown skin. “And what trouble is this?” she asked Felix.

  “Well-paying trouble,” Felix replied.

  “We have negotiated a passage to Atlantis,” Sabrina said.

  “They won’t let you in with that thing,” Rachel said, flicking her eyes to Penny Dreadful as it dangled from Welly’s back.

  “You have to forgive Rachel here,” Felix said with a smile. “She only makes friends with money and wealthy widowers.”

  “It’s a pleasure, Rachel,” Buckle said with a nod.

  Rachel turned back to her dials. “Engines are ready, Captain.”

  “Take her down,” Felix ordered.

  Kishi and Rachel spun hand wheels and the hissing sound of escaping air filled the cabin. The Dart sank into the water which surged and bubbled up and over the glass portholes until the warehouse interior lifted away and all Buckle could see in the darkness was the shadowy outlines of the warehouse pier supports.

  Buckle’s stomach felt queasy. It was his first time in a submarine and he liked it.

  IV

  THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

  To Romulus Buckle, who had never seen the underside of the ocean before, the submarine’s slow glide beneath the surface of the Vera Cruz harbor was every bit a journey into another world.

  He enjoyed slipping through suspended darkness and streaming bubbles, the weak light playing across the rippling surface above, throwing undulating shadows across the rocky bottom. The hulls of ships towered against the quay wall and soft-looking pier timbers as if the world had been filled with water and flipped upside-down. He felt the body of the ocean around him, the liquid density of it pressing up against the glass and metals of the submarine, making everything creak and rattle. Water leaked in at various places, little dribbling streams skittering down the edge of a panel or dripping from an overhead pipe. But Felix and Kishi took little notice of the sea’s intrusions.

  The Dart advanced slowly at a speed of three knots. Ahead of them the harbor bottom sloped deeper into the shallow depths, cut in sharper angles by dredging, and the near transparent quality of the water deepened into a pleasant green-blue. The harbor floor, amidst its carpet of propeller-clipped seaweed, was a jumble of discarded ship-jetsam and hastily-tossed cargoes—barrels full of anyone’s guess—and had the appearance of an overgrown junkyard. There were no ships active on the surface—the Founders blockade had seen to that—and the water ceiling responded only to the breeze, washed by wind-ripples.

  Once clear of the docks, Felix clanged the chadburn handle, signaling the engine room. “All ahead half.”

  “All ahead half,” came the response on the chattertube.

  The bridge remained quiet for several minutes, the bioluminescent green boil instruments glowing in the sea shade. The Dart slowly navigated her way toward the harbor entrance where the seaweed lawns of the shallows fell away into the depths of the deep blue sea.

  “Lovely and quiet,” Sabrina said, pulling back her hood.

  “Nobody’s out,” Felix said, tapping his head at the temple. “None of ‘em are quite addled enough in the brain pan to try to run a Founders blockade.”

  “Or not being paid well enough to do it,” Buckle said.

  “Fair enough,” Felix replied. “There’s a Founders submersible lurking just outside the harbor, here, so we need to be damned cautious,”

  “I thought you could simply outrun him,” Sabrina said.

  “Aye, but I can’t outrun a torpedo,” Felix answered.

  “Do the Founders know where Atlantis is?” Welly asked.

  “Of course,” Felix said. “Most of it, anyway.”

  “How is it that you know the location of Atlantis, Captain Felix?” Buckle asked.

  Felix shook his head as he nursed the helm wheel in his big, rough hands. He took on a new aura on the bridge of the ship, looking taller: here he was the captain, ever-powerful and wise, compared to the shadowy, elusive man who haunted the back tables of the Sybaris. He and Kishi never took their eyes off of the windows or the green boil-lit instruments surrounding them. “Passed down from my father. But finding Atlantis isn’t the hard part when you live underwater. The getting in, well, there’s the rub. And Atlantis is far more than just one underwater city. There are seven main domes, one for each of their gens, or houses, and many of ‘em don’t get along. Now, let’s keep an eye out for that submersible.”

  Buckle nodded. The news of the Founders blockade hadn’t surprised him—he expected such tactics. The Atlanteans themselves were surely experiencing the particularly brutal version of diplomacy the Founders liked to practice, but such aggression should work in Buckle’s favor.

  The Grand Alliance sorely needed the Atlanteans as a partner, but that wasn’t the main reason Buckle was there. He was lying to himself if he thought he was there for any reason other than to rescue his lost sister Elizabeth. If Elizabeth was in Atlantis he would find her. And he would bring her home. The prophecy of Lady Andromeda, her warning that Elizabeth somehow was the key to winning the war, had taken root ever more strongly inside of him with each passing day. He felt strangely attached to Lady Andromeda, as if he could hear her voice operating within him, gently and insistently, alongside the voice of his own conscience. He had now fallen victim to a gray vagueness, to a sense of insecurity at what he was doing because he wasn’t certain of himself. And he knew that time would only make this condition worse. Perhaps it was for the better; his father, Admiral Balthazar, always said that certainty was the realm of fools and dead men.

  “The Founders boats are big, ugly brutes—we’ll see them coming long before they see us,” Felix said, craning his neck to peer up. “And they’re mostly surface runners, not true submarines, so odds are you’ll spot them overhead if you’re running at any depth at all.”

  “I didn’t know the Founders had submarines,” Sabrina said.

  It first struck Buckle as odd that Sabrina would not know if the Founders had undersea machines, but on further reflection he realized it wouldn’t be surprising if the secretive clan’s elite avoided discussing military secrets with their own children—and Sabrina had been little more than a child when she had left the city.

  “Not submarines, but submersibles,” Felix replied. “They’re not much more than modified ironclads. They can’t stay submerged for long. Their machines don’t hold a candle to the Atlantean submarines as far as elegance and efficiency goes, but there are more of them and they’re big—big old piston-jammers loaded with torpedoes.”

  “That sounds like the Founders to me,” Sabrina said softly. “Big and clumsy.”

  “And deadly,” Kishi added.

  The Dart cleared the harbor mouth where the sea floor tumbled down into murky dark blue depths below with the blue-green surface sparkling above. A silver mass of fish appeared like a tornado, swirling above the windows until, directly overhead, they turned black, their forms silhouetted against the surface light.

  A Dart crewman appeared on the bridge, his boots clanking across the deck grating, shoving his way between Welly and Penny Dreadful. The Dart probably ran with a crew of five or six, as far as Buckle could tell. “You called, Cap’n?” the man asked; the dozens of tools lining his coverall pockets g
ave him the look of a machinist.

  “Get in the belly pod, Marsh,” Felix said. “Dawn is a perfectly bad time to try to skim bottom to Atlantis. The Guardians will be out, active as rabbits and likely to latch on.”

  “Aye,” Marsh answered. “Dawn is sure as hell a perfectly bad time.” He hurried out.

  “Guardians?” Buckle asked.

  Felix nodded as he eased the helm wheel back and forth in his hands, keeping his submarine close along the contours of the seabed. “Trained octopi and other nasty Martian brutes. The Atlanteans have domesticated the beasties as best they can, trained them to patrol the reaches under the city. The handlers will keep them under control, if the handlers happen to be around. Otherwise the creatures, they’ll get ahold of yer boat and pull it apart. Don’t worry yourself, however—my crew knows how to handle the Guardians.”

  “All systems are good,” Kishi announced.

  “Stay on the bubble,” Felix said.

  “Aye,” Kishi replied.

  “And no sign of that Founders boat,” Felix said. “Hold yer breath. Nowhere to hide in this stretch.”

  “I was always under the impression that the Founders and the Atlanteans were trade partners and tight bedfellows in that sense,” Welly said. “I am surprised by the existence of the blockade.”

  “They’re both strange collections of bastards and there’s no love lost between them,” Felix replied. “But both need what the other has and they’re both greedy. They have always overlooked their differences to make way for trade. It is well known that the Founders clan cannot feed itself, locked up the way they are in that corrupted city surrounded by poison, and the Atlantean fishing fleets are a friend they cannot do without.”

  “So why bite the hand that feeds you?” Welly asked.

  “Why pay for it when you can control it yourself?” Buckle asked Welly.

  Kishi nodded. “It is no secret that the Founders are uncomfortable relying on someone else for a big chunk of their food supply; now they are moving to take control of the fishing fleets.”

  “And then there is the matter of Lombard,” Sabrina added.