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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “See?” Felix grumbled as he stood up and wound an overhead wheel. “Soft bottom. No Rift.”

  Buckle peered up to see Penny Dreadful standing over him, its eyes glowing under the iron lashes, the glistening metal of its skin dimly reflecting green.

  “Are you alright, Captain Buckle?” Penny asked, and there sounded like genuine concern in its childish voice.

  “Yes.” Buckle answered, tasting blood in his mouth as he drew himself up onto one knee.

  “It seems we are lucky this day, Captain,” Penny said.

  “Luck?” Felix snorted. “Bah! I saved our skins. I did. I should have turned and ran but I did what you paid me for. And it’s taken a mighty chunk out of my profits.”

  A deep, metallic groan swept in and shook the Dart. Buckle gripped a water-dripping rail and hunched, expecting the bulkheads to collapse in upon them in one brutal, cold heave.

  “That’s not us,” Felix said. “The Founders boat. Implosion.”

  Buckle found Penny Dreadful pressed at his flank. Sabrina and Rachel assisted Gustey, who seemed to have recovered her senses enough to stand. A faint glow of aqua-colored sunlight rippled in the observation parlor hatchway. “Where do we go from here?” Buckle asked. His tongue dragged, stuck with salt.

  “There’s always options when one isn’t dead,” Felix said. “José! I want a report!” he shouted at two crew members cranking a watertight door shut at the far end of the passageway. One of them was Marsh.

  “Aye, Cap,” the other crewman responded, a dark brown fellow with a thick black mustache—he had to be José. “It ain’t good.”

  “You don’t say?” Felix barked. “Come with me.” He ducked into the observation parlor.

  Buckle followed Felix into the cabin, blinking at the ocean-filtered sunlight as it poured ever-so-softly from above. A dozen silver-white fractures laced the round porthole glass but it had not sprung a visible leak.

  “Your window has a lot of cracks in it,” Sabrina grumbled.

  Felix smiled and tapped the glass. “Purchased special from the Friars. Four inches thick. Lady Fortune is both a witch and an angel. The blast of the explosions wounded us, yes, but it also threw us clear of the chasm.”

  Buckle looked out into the ocean—a great expanse of sandy bottom, populated by large rocks and outcroppings of tall, dancing seaweed, undulated away as far as the eye could see. But what grabbed his attention was the sight of the Founders submarine, slowly sinking into the maw of the Rift, her stern spilt apart, spilling oil and debris. Another shriek of her bulkheads collapsing echoed through the depths. It was an awful thing to witness, the death of a huge sea machine.

  “Look at that,” Sabrina muttered at Buckle’s shoulder. “Look at that.”

  They stood in silence until the corpse of the submersible vanished into the crevasse. Buckle again saw the soft, glimmering lights of Atlantis beyond, thousands of lights surrounding a complex of domes glinting glass, gold, green and white. Despite the peril of their own situation the group needed this pause, gasping and dripping, the strangely intimate sounds of trickling water soothing their battered nervous systems.

  Rachel opened a medical cabinet and took a roll of gauze to wrap around Gustey’s head and ears.

  “My report is that we’re sunk, Cap,” José announced from the hatchway, glaring at Penny. He was a short fellow, a boilerman from the look of the sweaty flush of his skin and his soot-stained blue coveralls. His hands, streaked with coal dust and blood from a wound on his palm, were far too big for his short arms. Coughing, he sucked in lungfuls of air under his prodigious mustache as if the smoky cabin offered a vastly preferable atmosphere to what he had been breathing in the engine room.

  “Casualties?” Felix asked.

  “No more than a bump on the nob for Marsh,” José answered.

  “And damages?” Felix asked. “Give it to me straight.”

  “Straight is we’re dead in the water, old salt,” José said, glancing back at Marsh, who, rubbing a bloody spot on his head, watched them from the passageway. “Negative buoyancy and no power. Propulsion is inoperable. Port shaft is bent. Propeller packings leaking and aft bilge flooded. I purged the combustion systems to save the oxygen and kept the seawater out of the boilers. Pumps are no good.”

  Felix looked at Buckle. “By default I shall still get you to Atlantis, Captain. Kishi, muster the crew in the airlock and gear up. Help José prepare a sling for Gustey.”

  “Aye,” Kishi replied, ducking out of the hatchway with José.

  “Everyone into the corridor,” Felix said, turning to Buckle. “We are in sight of Atlantis, at the edge of the latifundium, so we continue the rest of the way in diving suits.” He tucked his chin into his chest and muttered. “I’ll have to pay for the Atlanteans to send a team to recover the Dart. The damned greedy fishmen will stick me for it. But they probably won’t risk it until the blockade is over. Damn it,” he added softly.

  “You have enough suits for everyone?” Buckle asked.

  “Yes,” Felix answered. “We use them for hunting expeditions. Wealthy sea merchants love underwater safaris. But we need to hurry. Follow me.”

  Felix screwed the observation hatch shut and led the group aft, down the passageway to an open deck hatch where a column of yellow-orange light shot up into the smoke-filled air. Felix swung down the ladder and Buckle followed, landing in a spacious chamber lit by three lanterns on hooks, a compartment dense with the smell of seawater and salt-saturated leather. Bulky copper diving helmets lined the bulkheads, their thick glass viewing ports glowing greenish orange in the lamplight. Leather-strapped sealskin diving suits, air tanks and scuffed weight belts hung in rows. A cylindrical iron chamber, half sunk in the deck, waited with its hatch swung open like a massive nautilus shell.

  Kishi, José, Marsh and the tall black female cook worked hastily amidst the gear, preparing air tanks and opening suits.

  “Captain!” Welly shouted from the top of the ladder hatch. “Automaton coming down!”

  “Aye,” Buckle replied, taking hold of Penny as Welly swung it down. Once again, Buckle was surprised at how light the robot was.

  “I can climb ladders on my own,” Penny complained.

  Buckle and Welly helped Gustey down the ladder as Sabrina and Rachel lowered her from above.

  “Over here, Captain,” Felix said. “Tonda will get you into your diving suits.” He pointed at the black cook as she pulled a diving suit open like a narwhal hide, its shoulder buckles attached to hooks so he could step into the heavy boots and have the suit drawn up around him to the neck. “There’s a waterproof satchel for your pistols and put your swords in as well,” Felix added. “The Atlanteans don’t allow anyone but their soldiers to have firearms inside the city. They’ll confiscate them. But you can keep your swords.”

  Buckle placed Penny on the deck and stepped into the diving suit. The weighted diving shoes were large enough to accommodate his boots and once he was in position Tonda yanked the squeaking suit up against his back and began stuffing his hands into the armholes. The suit was reasonably light, made of sealskin and doped canvas leather strappings; it smelled like every inch of it had been saturated by the sea, as if the materials, even left in a desert, would never completely dry out again. “I’ll carry Penny,” Buckle said to Welly, who was disappearing into another diving suit under Marsh’s supervision.

  “No need,” Penny said. “I am designed to function underwater.”

  “All Atlantean robots were made to walk on the ocean floor,” Felix said. “Quite the inventor’s dream, they were, to start with.”

  “She’s not dangerous,” Sabrina said, looking tentative as Rachel tugged, snapped and buckled her into a diving suit.

  “The Atlanteans won’t accept it,” Felix answered as he screwed his feet into his diving boots. “It’ll doom your negotiations before they even begin. Why risk it? I’ll pay you one hundred gold coins for it. I’ll keep it here and collect it once the Dart is salvaged.”<
br />
  Buckle shook his head. “Enough on that. The automaton is coming with us.” Penny Dreadful was so old and banged up he wondered if its shell was still waterproof. He half-suspected its ancient seals would fail under the pressure and the cold seawater pouring into its little onboard boiler would blow it to pieces, claiming it forever in the depths. Though that, in a way, Buckle suspected, would be a sort of return home.

  “Never say I didn’t try to take that Jonah off your hands,” Felix grumbled, now helping the one-armed Tonda secure the raft of leather fasteners running up and down Buckle’s torso and legs. Each expert tug of a strap squeezed Buckle a little tighter, the hug of the leather promising safety from the sea.

  “This is far too fine a mess for me.” Sabrina planted her chin on her diving suit collar, her green eyes bright, nervous as she watched Kishi seal her in. “Don’t you have another submarine? A little one? A lifeboat? Skiff?”

  “We walk from here, Lieutenant,” Buckle said with a grin. Chains rattled behind his ears as Gustey lowered a diving helmet onto his head.

  “Just peachy,” Sabrina replied, and she didn’t look happy about it.

  X

  THE LATIFUNDIUM

  Romulus Buckle, his head locked inside a copper diving helmet with windows of green glass, stepped out of the Dart’s flooded airlock and dropped into the freezing squeeze of the ocean. It wasn’t much of a drop—five feet to the sandy bottom—and the uncomfortable heaviness of his suit was replaced by a pleasant sensation of buoyancy held in check by the bulk of his boots and weight belt. The oxygen tanks and helmet felt familiar, similar as they were to a zeppelineer’s high altitude and poison gas equipment, though they were bulkier and more rigid in their construction. He gripped two weapons: a long-handled underwater spear and a small crossbow harpoon with a firing mechanism which combined tension and compressed air.

  The Atlantis Approaches were a dangerous place, Felix had said. The Guardians, nasty creatures, operated in loose platoons under the command of vile beasties called ‘gagools’. Kill the gagools first if you can, Felix had said. Kill the gagools first and your odds of survival increase exponentially. One can beg an Atlantean sentinel or herder for one’s life but not a gagool.

  The tan-colored bottom reflected the morning light but it all felt melancholy, surely the effect of the greenish glass of his helmet windows deflecting much of the light. He was also still in the shadow of the Dart’s belly. Bending as low as he could to clear the keel, he trudged out into the weak, undulating light, half-stumbling in slow motion as he learned how to move his boots over the bottom swells. It was humid inside his helmet and the faceplate trickled with condensation. The sounds of his breathing and the ping of the oxygen valves were oppressive but when he straightened up and saw the glorious green-blue-white play and sparkle of light and water on the surface he felt better.

  Buckle turned, slow and awkward, to join Sabrina, Welly, and Penny Dreadful, who were collecting under the guidance of Kishi. They looked like phantoms in a netherworld, faces ghoulish in the round green portals of their helmets, the interiors lit by tubes of bioluminescent boil. It was near impossible to tell who was inside each suit except for size. Penny Dreadful, wearing no gear of any kind, moved toward him, smoothly, half-gliding across the bottom, looking like it was at home. Its golden eyes had a buggish bulge to them, enlarged by translucent lenses which had dropped from the metal skull and sealed the sockets. The machine had transformed itself once it was in the water: a sheer metal webbing had unfolded from its hands and feet, turning them into flippers, and a shark-like dorsal fin now thrust up from a slot in its back.

  It took five more minutes for the remainder of the Dart’s crew to descend from the airlock, with Marsh and Rachel carrying Gustey between them on a basket stretcher. The last man out was Captain Felix. Once his boots hit bottom, Felix was on the move, leaning forward as he drove his legs, his boots sending up punches of dislodged sand. He jabbed his gloved finger forward as he passed Buckle, his face looking compressed and angry inside his helmet.

  Buckle swung around and hauled his boots across the sand, staying close to Felix and Kishi as they took the lead and humped toward the towering domes of Atlantis. Buckle could see all seven of the domes, one large one surrounded by six more of varying sizes, and they all pulsed with a mysterious white light.

  Buckle tested the unfamiliar balance of the spear in his hand. Felix had warned them to keep moving at all times and not to get spread out, for on foot they were likely to encounter the Guardians. If there was no Atlantean sentinel present with the Guardians—and apparently there often wasn’t—there would be a sharp fight to make their way through. The group numbered ten souls—not counting Penny Dreadful— and they were all well armed.

  Atlantis loomed closer slowly, very slowly. Buckle leaned into his stride, throwing one heavy boot ahead after the other, plodding through the resistance of the water. He stopped and glanced back at Sabrina, Welly, and Felix’s crew, a ragged line of shambling ogres, faces lost in glowing green orbs, blasting clouds of bubbles out of the tops of their skulls. Beyond the group, the wreck of the Dart fell away in the murk. From this distance she looked undamaged, sitting neatly on her keel on the sandy bottom. Forty yards beyond the Dart the great black maw of Neptune’s Rift loomed and Buckle could feel the gaping cold of its black seam. There was no trace of the Founder’s submarine. Swallowed up and gone.

  A fate the Dart had escaped by forty yards.

  But there were many more Founders boats. The underwater blockade continued in full force, the gargantuan black silhouettes of the Founders submersibles dark against the wavering columns of sunlight overhead, their propellers chopping the depths as they circled Atlantis in trails of black and gray bubbles.

  If the Founders were aware of the loss of their boat they did not respond to it. If they had noticed Buckle and the divers it seemed they didn’t care.

  Soon the open sandy bottom gave way to a high, waving seaweed forest, its mossy floor glowing with a beautiful green bioluminescence. Felix and Kishi led the group along a narrow trail through the seaweed, a path so overgrown the plants constantly threatened to tangle harpoons and lead-soled feet.

  After two hundred yards of hard slogging, the seaweed forest vanished and Buckle peered through his faceplate to see the sea floor spread wide and flat and take on the regimented, sectional appearance of farmland. Endless rows of tall, evenly-spaced plants with dark green stalks bobbed stiffly in the currents. Massive oyster beds, shrimp farms and phalanxes of lobster traps unfolded as far as the eye could see, well tended by Atlantean divers wearing tan suits and assisted by odd, centipede-like alien creatures, spotty orange-blue in color, which seemed to be weeding out dead and unwanted plants. The group reached an undersea road, its interlocking flat stones jarring to Buckle in their mathematical precision after he’d sweated his way through so much tangled flora and sand.

  One diver stopped her work and stared at them as they passed.

  In the distance Buckle saw the ruins of a great white and green metropolis emerging from a rise on the sea floor between them and the domes of Atlantis. He realized the drowned structures were of the ancient Roman style—the ruins of a once great city. That made no sense but Buckle didn’t care. His diving helmet echoed with resounding pings as he slogged, breathing harder and harder. Felix pressed the advance and it was work to keep up with him. Buckle glanced back, turning his entire torso to do so, and saw the group following with Penny Dreadful at their head, its machinery transformed into a streamlined form cutting through the water more smoothly than the humans in their bulky suits. Buckle swung around and threw his muscles into the plod forward.

  Felix suddenly halted. Buckle stopped alongside him. Felix delivered a hand signal to his crew, who quickly assembled a circular formation with Tonda hovering over Gustey on her hammock in the center. Sabrina and Welly took places alongside the Dart’s crew in the defensive wall.

  Buckle cursed the heat in his helmet and the sw
eat flowing into his eyes. He cursed the dribbling condensation, low quality of his window glass, though they were as about as effective as Crankshaft gas mask ports, no worse or better. He couldn’t see anything but seaweed waving in the green-blue murk. The weight of the sea now pressed down on top of him. He calmed himself through long, deep sucks of the ocean-cooled air from his tanks and felt his battle nerves kick in. The swirl of the water outside slowed down and his eyesight improved, piercing the shadows. He tightened his grip on his harpoon.

  The Guardians. It had to be the Guardians. Bring it on, Buckle thought. You’ll get the first blow. But I shall deliver the last.

  And when the first blow came, it came in a lightning flash of silver.

  XI

  THE GUARDIANS

  Something slashed through the middle of the group, whipping back and forth in silver whirls of knife-edged fins. There was more than one. It was some kind of fish, or eel, some kind of razorfish. Buckle spun around. He heard muffled shouts, people screaming into their helmets. Blood billowed into the water, nearly black but showing red in its thinner surges.

  “Kill it!” Buckle shouted into his helmet. The razorfish darted, too quick for the wallowing swipe of his harpoon. Don’t swing—jab. One of the divers crumpled forward, both gloved hands clutching at their inner thigh as blood erupted out of the diving suit in volcanic bursts.

  Sabrina. It was Sabrina. Horror slapped Buckle. In the next instant he realized it wasn’t her but a Dart crewperson—Sabrina was beside him, stabbing at the razorfish with her spear—the wounded unfortunate was José, who was about the same size.

  The two razorfish, perhaps six feet long apiece, zipped in and out of the circle, lashing their bodies back and forth like whips. Someone lost their spear and it drifted to the rocky bottom.

  Rachel’s weapon discharged, firing a weighted net that blossomed and caught one of the razorfish, thoroughly wrapping it up, and the creature sank, thrashing the rocks in the middle of the circle, quickly shredding the ropes dragging it down. Rachel surged forward with as much speed as the water allowed, planted her boot on the razorfish and plunged a long knife into its skull. The razorfish jerked and fell limp, its tail wobbling in the current.