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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Valentine did want to kill himself.

  “It is my duty to recover Mr. Valentine,” Max said. The old boilerman saw his looming discharge from the air service as a trip to the guillotine. He would receive a decent pension as a crippled zeppelineer, a good pension, but money was not the problem for the old salts—idleness was. Rough and tumble sorts who had made the airships their lives, often coming aboard as cadets or apprentices at the age of fourteen, often fell apart when suddenly banished, broken and dismayed, to the ground. The veterans did not know how to live in towns and, with no experience regimenting or regulating their own lives, they became melancholy and drank until they turned yellow and died.

  Dr. Lee shook his head. “No, it is not. Valentine is under my care and I’ll see to it. He’ll be easy to find. I’m sure he’s already soused in one of the Friendly Society taverns. I’ll send a citadel officer to collect him. Your responsibility is to get back into your sickbed.”

  Sickbed. The sound of the word turned Max’s stomach. She was sure she knew where Valentine was; he would be sucking beer in the taverns of the Roustabouts, the Friendly Society supporting the men and women of the sky engineering corps. Friendly Societies were tightly knit, lower-class collectives created to pool money to assist members in hard times and find homes for a small but endless stream of orphans. They were also rawboned drinking clubs where alcoholism was the norm and brawls tended to cap off each evening’s festivities. Each Friendly Society was based in one or more taverns, depending on the size of their membership rosters. The Roustabouts laid down their rum shillings at The Blonde Bastard and The Ophir. The older salts preferred The Ophir. “I am well able to get about,” Max pressed.

  A bemused smile lifted Dr. Lee’s face though it was betrayed by the concern in his brown eyes. “Ah, but I do not concur. And since I am the one who went to medical school my assessment wins.”

  Max glared at her feet. Below the cuffs of her warm gray woolen infirmary trousers she saw her glaring white feet, her feet the same color as the white painted floorboards except for the tips of the black stripes reaching nearly to her toes. They looked alien even to her.

  “Into bed, please,” Dr. Lee urged. “Let me assist you. Please don’t make me post a guard.”

  “I do not appreciate being sedated with morphine, Dr. Lee.”

  “It was necessary,” Dr. Lee replied. “You were having nightmares, Lieutenant. Violent thrashings in the night. You were tearing your stiches open and bleeding. Reopening a partially healed wound, especially one as messy as yours, is almost guaranteed to invite infection, whether one has Martian wonder blood or not. My choices were to sedate you or strap you down. And those still are my choices.”

  “I acquiesce to your authority, under protest,” Max said sharply, though she had no intention of remaining inside the infirmary once the coast was clear. Crimson flickered in Max’s goggles; seething undercurrents of anger. Where were her clothes? When Flora had opened the infirmary closet it was empty. There was a small wardrobe in the nurse’s office; surely her clothes were in there. “I want to be informed of my father’s condition.”

  “Balthazar is well,” Dr. Lee said. “It is as if all of this activity has improved his health. Ah, he thrives on difficult circumstances, I suppose.” Lee helped ease Max down onto her right side, adjusting the pillow as she winced. “Don’t worry. I’ll send a man after Mr. Valentine right away.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Lee,” Max said. “And may I trouble you for a glass of water?”

  “Of course. You must be parched. You must drink as much as you can.”

  Dr. Lee strode out of the room. As she listened to the clink of a brass jug on glass and the gurgle of water in the nurse’s office, Max devised her escape plan.

  XV

  THE OPHIR

  Martian cheeks became frostbitten easily. Even with a heavy green scarf wrapped round her face, the Snow World air had never felt colder on Max’s skin as she hurried through the darkness. Dr. Lee and Flora had kept a close watch on her until the long shadows of the purple evening, but a well-timed emergency—some unfortunate ground crewman’s arm had been crushed by a crate on the loading docks—sent them out to the airfield in the ambulance.

  Max had jumped out of bed and pieced together a harlequin’s set of clothes to put on over her heavy infirmary tunic—a cream-colored woolen sweater with a tea stain on the front, a mothballed green sentinel’s scarf and an old pair of men’s blue trousers, all lifted from the wardrobe in the nurse’s station. Max also took a spare pair of oversized boots and her toes floated in the soft, velvety interiors. Max’s own uniform wasn’t there—the ripped and blood-soaked clothes would have been discarded and her flying boots, weapons, and personal belongings probably transferred to her bedchamber in the citadel.

  Taking a large gray cloak—surely one of Dr. Lee’s due its expensive weave and silver buttons—Max had slipped out of the infirmary and made her way outside to the front gate. The cloak’s voluminous hood obscured her identity completely and she, wrapped up in her fur and wool togs like everyone else on this particularly frigid day, strolled out of the citadel gates unnoticed.

  Max now strode along the rambling streets of the Devil’s Punchbowl. Her back hurt, every inch of every cut aching, but she was more worried about her baggy-fitting, oddball-colored clothes attracting attention. All black was so much better. One could sink into the shadows in all black. She rejected her instinctive desire to hunch her back against the pains assailing it; she walked deliberately with her characteristic smoothness, her boots making no sound upon the cobblestones, passing ghostlike under the low-burning street lamps. She felt as if no one could see her, even if she brushed their shoulder in passing. Now that she was free of the sickbed she dared her wounds to slow her down, and somewhere inside of her that challenge was exhilarating.

  Max had also borrowed a pair of dog fur-lined gloves from the infirmary wardrobe; her striped hands needed to remain hidden along with the rest of her. It was dangerous for Martians to walk alone in the hardscrabble alleys of the west-end Punchbowl. The Crankshaft citizens distrusted Martians even though they knew their beloved Admiral Balthazar had adopted a half-Martian daughter. Most had never seen her. Max had always remained sheltered in the citadel as a matter of choice and as an adult she had spent her life aboard airships and not in the town. She never walked to the market to buy a greenhouse apple nor donned her best gown to attend a performance in playhouse alley. But the most unpredictable threat lay in the many foreigners who were always present in the Punchbowl taverns: traders and air merchantmen who loved the grog and the rough-and-tumble, men and women who easily lost their minds to bloodlust and the whims of the mob. And they hated Martians.

  Despite the chill and Max’s discomfort, it was a lovely evening and excellent to be outside. The still atmosphere hung crisp and snowflakes drifted down from the moonlit clouds, their silver edges catching the yellow gleam of the street lamps. Max’s breath misted inside her hood and flowed with her as she walked. She had to pick up her stride as she crossed the market square. Her stamina was on a shorter rope than she had expected. She forced her legs to pick up the pace but she paid a price for it. She felt her strength reserves, already near empty, draining away.

  Ahead of her, beyond the western edge of the square, she could already hear music, singing and shouting wafting from the streets of the Friendly Quarter. At least it wasn’t much further to Cornelius Valentine. The one-legged old salt, hobbling in to join the company of his Roustabouts at The Ophir, would have been encouraged to drown his sorrows. Free rotgut was irresistible to a man like Valentine who had probably bloodied his freshly amputated leg as he stumped down the cobblestones to get it. Yes, free grog. His comrade engineers would happily lay out their hard-earned shillings—those who had shillings—until he was under the table. His friends would continue to do so night after night, thinking they were easing his misery, but in reality easing his way to a befuddled, yellow-skinned, early death.
/>   Max coughed, a dry rattling hack. She hadn’t slaked her terrible thirst. While devising her devious escape from the infirmary she had forgotten to sip from the big cup Dr. Lee had brought her. She had not looked for anything to drink on her way out of the citadel. She thought about sucking on a handful of snow but that would only make her thirstier, and she was almost to the threshold of The Ophir as it was. She decided she would order a drink in the tavern but then she realized she didn’t have any money.

  Elusively hooded in a fancy, obviously stolen cloak, penniless, and hacking as if consumptive, she would fit right in with the Friendly Society.

  Turning the corner and heading onto a seedy side street, Max merged into a loose, milling crowd of people, arguing and smoking as they lingered outside the friendly society taverns and inns. Two men in rigger leathers raged at each other, poking fingers into chests. Brawls were frequent here. Balthazar had assigned a unit of the Punchbowl constabulary to patrol the Friendly Quarter—the officers with their dark blue piths were officially named “The Tavern Watch,” but on the streets they were better known as “the Truncheons” due to the liberal use of their nightsticks on inebriated zeppelineers. The Truncheons were notoriously corrupt. Max did not see one of their light blue uniforms anywhere among the crowd.

  Max disturbed hazes of listless tobacco smoke as she slipped through the crowds. The reek of the pipe irritated her unprotected eyes but it was far preferable to the other smells endemic to the place, notably rotting garbage and urine. She was in the midst of the worst elements of her own and foreign merchant aircrews, the villainy who inhabited the night, faces half lit by street lamps: Crankshaft marines jingling their purses, looking for vials of poppy tears, Spartak firemen looking to fight, Gallowglass skinners looking to steal, and local prostitutes, wrapped in their signature dirty red shawls, looking to earn. The frantic beat of the these desperate souls battered Max’s psyche, her Martian physiology absorbing the hum of physical anxiety generated by human beings when they packed together looking for stimulations both life affirming and destructive. War was coming and it made the urges worse. Deliver the best you can. Go out with the biggest bang you can.

  Ducking as deeply inside her hood as she could, Max maneuvered her oversized boots through a group of zeppelineers collected on the front stoop of The Ophir, her nose assaulted by the hot stink of rum rolling off their breaths. They didn’t give her a lopsided glance. Cloaked, anonymous people were a fixture in the Friendly Quarter: fugitives, crazies, and the snake-voiced sellers of Morgause weed, laudanum, poppy tears, peyote and the risky, powerful Martian hallucinogen called cassiderium, commonly known as “delirium” because it slowly destroyed the addict’s brain.

  Wide open, the doors of The Ophir sent a flood of lantern light into the street, casting the idlers in silhouettes and shivering the icy cobblestones with a coat of pumpkin orange. Max plunged into the light, squeezing between two burly women with the intricate hand tattoos of the Pale Traders. Whatever awful odors existed in the street were no match for the sour miasma of body sweat, stale beer, and ancient vomit The Ophir offered; Max would have sunk her head deeper into her hood if she could have, so repulsive was the smell at first contact.

  Max worked her slender form through walls of bodies of every imaginable size and shape, sidling around scattered tables and chairs as her boots skidded on spilled beer and bits of food. Again she worried about the expensive quality of Dr. Lee’s cloak with its fine Vaquero wool—but wealthy citizens often sent finely dressed servants on discreet missions into the Quarter. Regardless, she had to remain hidden or there would be trouble; most of The Ophir’s patrons tonight were foreigners—the outbreak of war had brought on a frenzy of trading from the northeastern clans who feared what the future might hold for any stockpiled goods they already had on hand. The local Crankshaft societies tended to meet at more sociable hours.

  Max sensed a faint coming on. She slowed to a stop, placing her hand on the back of a patron’s chair to steady herself, cautious that her gloved fingers not brush his back. Her eyes itched terribly. The vile, damned smoke. Her aqua vitae goggles sat in her pocket but there was no way she could use them here without drawing attention to her black-violet eyes. She focused her vision on the fire roaring in The Ophir’s massive stone fireplace where stuffed deer heads, antlers broken or ripped away, stared back at her from above the mantle. Her queasy lightheadedness lessened and she felt better for a moment— until she saw the stuffed head of a sabertooth beastie leering at her from the rafters.

  Max shuddered, her vision telescoping down the tunnel of her hood, unable to tear her gaze away from the dead glass eyes of the sabertooth. Coward. Squeezing her grip on the back of the chair, it took great effort to turn her back on the monster. She caught a whiff of antiseptic—her heart accelerated and cleared her mind, her senses sharpening up to a point where they actually hurt. Only one person would trail a sanitized smell among the scab-riddled carcasses packed into the tavern.

  Strength returned to Max, flowing, cascading, for she was now on the hunt. It was easy to follow the bright ammonia scent through the unwashed throng—she could almost see it—and before she knew it she had arrived at the bar alongside Cornelius Valentine.

  XVI

  THE FRIENDLY SOCIETY

  Max took a seat on the stool alongside Cornelius Valentine.

  “What’ll it be?” the barmaid asked, leaning towards her.

  Max kept her head down, sending the woman off with a wave of her black gloved hand.

  “You come in, you buy something, damned—” the barmaid said through gritted teeth. “Sell your cursed apothecaries outside!” She slapped the counter and moved away, responding to the call of another, paying, customer.

  Max peered sideways through her hair and around her hood at Valentine. Slumped forward, he had his hands around a half-empty tankard of ale sitting in a pool of beer and half-sunk penny farthings. Short white and brown hairs bristled on his head and surrounded his red ears. His jaw hung slack, his eyes unfocused, and he stank of blood and antiseptic. He was dead drunk or very close to it.

  “Valentine,” Max whispered.

  Valentine did not respond. Perhaps he had passed out with his eyes open.

  “Valentine!” Max shouted into his ear. There was no reason to whisper in the noisy tavern. And she wanted to leave.

  Valentine jerked and turned his head towards Max. “What do you want, woman?” he asked, slurring the words. “If you came to rob me, I have spent all of me paltry coins. If ye came to offer the bordello, I have spent all of me paltry coins.”

  “It is time to go,” Max said.

  Valentine narrowed his brutish eyebrows as he tried to focus his eyes on her. “I am not your eunuch, woman.” He grumbled.

  Max opened her hood, just a fraction, enough for only Valentine to see her face within.

  Valentine’s eyes shot wide. He shook his head. “Go away, Lieutenant,” he whispered.

  “No,” Max answered. “Come with me.”

  Valentine slapped his hand on the counter. Max felt droplets hit her chin. “You are not my officer anymore, you hear me?”

  “You are still a crewman of the Pneumatic Zeppelin and under my command,” Max said.

  “I quit,” Valentine moaned. “I quit before you drummed me out. No zeppelin can use a one-legged boilerman. Now leave me be and let me die in peace.”

  “Have you signed your discharge?” Max asked.

  “No.”

  “Then you are still my crew,” Max insisted. “Leave with me.”

  “Ha!” Valentine laughed bitterly. “I am out. Do you think that if I leave my mark on the discharge, which I cannot read as it is, makes any difference to the way things are? I am out. You go, Lieutenant!”

  Max lifted her hand to try to calm the rising volume of Valentine’s speech. A handful of patrons glanced their way, glassy-eyed, probably hoping to witness a fight. The Ophir was no place for a Martian, yes, but it was also no place for officers. “
Follow me out, crewman. Now.”

  “Leave me be,” Valentine hissed. “And stay out of my head. I cannot abide you knocking about in my head!”

  Max blinked. The man remembered when she had entered one of his dreams where he had recognized her as an intruder and awakened. The act had been unintentional, a weird function of her Martian side. “My intrusion into your dream state was unexpected and unfortunate and for that I apologize,” she said. It was unforgettable however, the dream’s misty scene—laden with the telltale elements of old memory, fuzzy at the edges, layered with emotion and grafted with elements and textures filtered through the always busily re-inventing subconscious mind—of a woman waving farewell to him as his airship lifted away from an airfield. Max leaned in closer, the edge of her hood touching Valentine’s cheek. “I am not leaving until you come with me.”

  “You are breathing on me.”

  Max leaned back. “I am not leaving unless you leave with me.”

  Valentine hunched his shoulders and stared straight forward. Max coughed, parched, her throat like sandpaper, crackling with an itch that made her choke and her eyes water. “May I trouble you for a sip of your beer?”

  Valentine stiffened. “If you promise to leave,” he grumbled, sliding the half-full beer mug across the counter, spilling a portion of it in one looping slosh.

  “Thank you,” Max whispered. She took the mug in both hands, lifted it inside her hood cave and swallowed all that was left of the bittersweet beer. Rum was her preference though she tended to eschew alcohol, but in that moment nothing had ever tasted better and it soothed her throat. Slightly dizzy, she placed the empty mug on the counter and slid it back to Valentine.

  “Leave … me … be,” Valentine snarled, pushing the mug away with one finger and sinking his head between his shoulders.