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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  No!” howled the Vicar, advancing with sword and pistol. “Do not let them escape or your backs will bleed for it!” The blue-coated mass of sailors behind him lunged forward, threatening to overrun what was left of the Atlantean defense.

  Penny Dreadful jumped forward to meet the Vicar, her streamlined body slicing through the water, arms whirling, blades flashing.

  “Damned machines!” the Vicar bellowed without breaking stride. He pointed his pistol at Penny Dreadful’s chest, point blank, and fired.

  The concussion of the weapon blast in the enclosed space bludgeoned Sabrina’s ears. The belch of black smoke from the muzzle seemed to lift Penny Dreadful, blowing her small metal form out of the water and hurling it between Buckle and an Atlantean soldier; she crashed into a black-curtained bulkhead and tumbled into the water.

  “Penny!” Sabrina screamed, rushing toward the bubbling water where the automaton had disappeared.

  “Go!” one of the three remaining Atlantean soldiers ordered. “Go! We shall hold them! Go!”

  Buckle had already run to Penny and lifted her out of the water. A dense black powder burn covered Penny’s chest. Her eyes had gone black but, much to Sabrina’s relief, they fluttered to life again, as bright and golden as ever.

  “Stop them, damn you!” the Vicar boomed. “Sabrina!” He strode at her through the surging water, yanking another pistol from his belt. “Come to me, child,” he urged. “Come to me and I shall return to you to your family. I am your beloved uncle!”

  Sabrina snatched her dagger from her belt with her bloody fingers. In one smooth motion, a motion practiced a thousand times in the back room of Marter’s shop in Refugio, she hurled the knife at the Vicar’s head. The blade flashed in the aether light as it spun. The Vicar uttered the first hissing fricative of a curse before the dagger buried itself between his eyes. He fell backwards with a great splash.

  The Founders paused, their swords and pikes wavering. Both of their officers were down.

  “Do not let the Keeper escape!” Odessa shrieked, hauling herself up from the water, gripping the bloody stump of her left arm, her face so white she looked like a fire-haired ghost, her light brown freckles looking like black specks of rot. “Capture him and Isambard shall make you rich!”

  “Make it quick!” Horatus bellowed as he stood at the blue hatchway. Two Praetorians and Cicero had already vanished into the passageway and Buckle was on his way in, carrying Penny.

  Sabrina pulled Welly into the hatchway and with her last glimpse back she saw Odessa glaring after her with the ominous coldness of a gallows tree.

  XLIII

  HOW LONG CAN BUCKLE HOLD HIS BREATH?

  The last man to lunge through the blue hatchway was a Praetorian, helmet missing, his arms running with blood, though whether it was his blood or someone else’s Buckle could not tell. The last Atlantean in the Black Atrium, a red-cloaked soldier, turned his back to them and shouted “Seal the hatch!”

  Horatus and the female Praetorian were already pressing the oval hatch shut, having the advantage of the waist-high water current flowing with them.

  Outside, the Atlantean soldier screamed in agony and the sound was abruptly cut off. A Founder’s pike thrust through the gap between the hatch and the jamb, the razor-sharp blade screeching against the bulkhead. Buckle grabbed the pike just below the blade and hauled it back. Horatus chopped the wooden shaft clean through with a downward cut of his sword.

  Buckle joined the others as they forced the hatch shut, snapping the wooden pike shaft in the process. Horatus grabbed the door locking wheel, winding it around and around. The seawater, now dammed, began to rise at an alarming rate.

  “There shouldn’t be water coming in here,” Horatus said. “A seal must have failed.” He snapped a locking lever into place and the hatch sealed with a hiss of air and a clank of bolts.

  “Are you well, Captain?” Penny asked. She looked up at Buckle from where she stood between Cicero and Sabrina, her emotionless, golden copper eyes glowing, her body submerged up to the shoulders in the swirling water. Her blood-smeared blades retracted into their arm sheaths with a slippery click.

  “I am well, Penny.” Buckle said.

  “I am most relieved,” Penny sighed.

  “Let’s go,” Horatus ordered, wading down the corridor. “Hurry! If the emergency hatches seal before we can escape we shall drown!”

  The two Praetorians grabbed Cicero and carried him after Horatus.

  “You heard the man,” Buckle said to Sabrina and Welly. “Let’s move.”

  “Our best chance is the maintenance shafts,” Horatus shouted back. “We cannot risk running into the Founders in the main corridors. And there is a way to get to the First Consul’s emergency pod from here.”

  They splashed along the long passageway, the dark water surging above their waists and the luminiferous aether tubes glowing brightly overhead. Buckle kept moving, driving his muscles through the resistance of the water, but the increasing depth slowed him down and made his legs advance in slow motion. By the time they had traversed one hundred yards down the passageway Penny had entirely submerged though he could see the dim glow of her eyes just below the surface.

  “How much farther?” Buckle asked.

  Horatus stopped. “Too far.” He looked to the two Praetorians. “The passage has been flooded either through breach or defensive stratagem. Give them your breathers!”

  Without hesitation the Praetorians unsnapped the sleek, cylindrical breathing devices from the fronts of their breastplates and handed them out. Cicero received one while Sabrina was given the other.

  Horatus dropped his helmet in the water and pressed his breather into Buckle’s hands. “Bite down on this and don’t release and you’ll be able to breathe,” he said, flipping a mouthpiece out of the breather.

  “What about my Ensign?” Buckle asked, looking at Welly, who, looked battered and doomed.

  “We can’t leave a man behind!” Sabrina snapped.

  “It is unfortunate,” Horatus replied. “But the senior officers must survive to protect the Keeper.”

  “What about you and your men?” Buckle asked, feeling his boots lift off the floor, now treading water.

  “We are trained to hold our breaths for a very long time, Captain,” Horatus said, inhaling and exhaling deeply. “What must be done is done. The Keeper is the only life here that matters. When we reach the end of this passageway we shall descend through a hatchway to a lower deck and then up again. Stay close.” Horatus turned, and he was swimming now, his head visible in the claustrophobic two-foot gap between the water and the passageway ceiling where the aether tubes pulsed, radiating warmth.

  Buckle kicked and swam, shoving Sabrina’s hand aside as she tried to offer her breather to Welly, who was pushing it away.

  “Never!” Welly said.

  “Take mine,” Buckle ordered, thrusting his breather into Welly’s hand. “Take mine, Wellington!”

  “Sir,” Welly began.

  “That’s an order, damn it!” Buckle snapped.

  Welly reluctantly took the breather and pressed it to his mouth.

  “Romulus,” Sabrina began.

  “Enough!” Buckle replied. He couldn’t see Penny but he was sure she was standing just below him. “Don’t fall behind! Swim!”

  Sabrina and Welly ducked their heads and set off after the others. Buckle sucked in a long draught of air and plunged under the surface. The water swallowed him in icy darkness, snapping shut over the top of his head. The passageway, now a weird underwater world illuminated yellow-green by the aether tubes, seemed to go on forever. He saw the indistinct forms of Horatus, Cicero, and the two Praetorians swimming away, propelling their bodies with long, expert strokes, their breathers ejecting bursts of bubbles. The gloves and boots of the soldiers had sprouted webbing which further added to their speed. Cicero undulated his rotund body like a porpoise—freed of his weight by the water he was stunningly agile, like a walrus.

  Pe
nny Dreadful, striding on the deck directly beneath Buckle, moved with him. Buckle’s mother had taught him to swim in the mountain lakes where he had been raised. But now, in the strong currents with his boots as heavy as lead, he felt like he was moving impossibly slow despite the energy expended by his strokes.

  Buckle concentrated on swimming. Already his lungs requested another breath of air. He figured that first urge would pass, that he would overcome it and travel a good distance before the need attacked him again.

  Within twenty seconds the group reached an open hatchway in the deck. Horatus, Cicero, and the Praetorians dove down into it, followed by Sabrina and Welly. Buckle swam for his life. He reached the hatchway and pulled himself down the ladder to the lower deck, hearing Penny’s metal shoes clank down the ladder behind him. He planted his feet on the rail and pushed off after Sabrina and Welly, propelling himself down another long passageway.

  Still, Buckle was falling further and further behind. The others became more shadow-like and distant in the disturbed currents and wobbling aether light. His chest began to ache and burn. He had no experience in holding his breath. Was water leaking in through his lips? He clamped his mouth tight. The strokes of his arms, the kicks of his legs, now consumed the last wisps of oxygen in his lungs. He saw air bubbles crowd the ceiling, tantalizing as they gathered in sparkling bunches around the aether tubes, but he knew it was impossible to try to breathe them in.

  Keep swimming. You can breathe later. It’s not far.

  And yet he slowed even more. The water grew heavier, thicker. He was spending more energy to stop himself from sinking than he was swimming.

  A set of metal fingers clamped around Buckle’s left hand. Suddenly he was surging through the water at great speed. Penny Dreadful was towing him. She ran along the deck, her metal shoes clunking with deep, weird echoes on the grating.

  Buckle’s stomach muscles jerked. His lungs burned as if a torch had been jammed inside them. His vision tunneled. In his last moments of failing consciousness he had the distinct impression of being flushed through a tube of yellow-green iron on the bottom of the ocean. The gagools caught him as he emerged, tearing out his insides, prying his mouth open with their fangs so they could vomit a great, agonizing blast of saltwater into his lungs and the black edges of nothingness would bleed in until the light was gone.

  Keep swimming, he berated himself. Instead, he thrashed. His left hand struck a bulkhead and he veered to starboard. He was disoriented now, upside-down or sideways. The pressure of movement stopped and he was drifting. Penny’s grip on his hand was gone. His mouth flung open of its own accord, an ancient, undeniable urge, his body mechanically attempting to save itself by breathing no matter the consequences suspected by the higher mind. He managed to slam his mouth shut again.

  But now his throat was full of salt.

  There had been one time before when he had nearly drowned, high in the wintery Tehachapi mountains, wading into a deep bend of a creek to rescue a fledgling duck. But that time the water had been freezing, numbing him to pain, slowly pulling him down, until his father had jumped in and saved him.

  He was floating and it was pleasant. The water felt warmer, the aether light soft, and he was glad that Sabrina and Welly would find a way home. But what of Elizabeth? Rage seized him. Elizabeth. How could he depart while Elizabeth was in chains? He was the only one she had. The only savior.

  Buckle willed his arms to move, to swim again, but they refused. Blackness surged in upon him in its final rush, cold, and heavy. He took the breath. His mouth opened. But he could not—his lips were shut—a metal shield clamped over them, tight and sharp and no amount of frantic twisting could shake it loose.

  Buckle flung his eyes open and saw Penny’s face immediately in front of his, her amber irises in their copper orbits looking into his bursting eyes. He looked into her and saw the little girl looking back at him, a little girl who had hold of him and wasn’t going to let go.

  Buckle’s sight went dark. He wanted to shout at Penny. Drowning was preferable to suffocation. Let me breathe. I don’t care what happens. Let me breathe.

  Suddenly, as if Penny heard him, her metal hand released its grip. His mouth opened and someone clamped his jaw down on an object and his lungs took in a hurricane-force suck of cool air.

  Buckle gasped so hard he wondered if his organs might burst with the effort. If this was drowning he welcomed it. But it was not. It was a curved, soft object in his mouth that tasted of rubber, leather and the tang of another human’s saliva. As the oxygen blasted though his body and reanimated his brain he realized that he was being towed again, hauled along by a strong hand on his collar—the hand of Horatus—and Penny clung alongside him, keeping the breather pressed into his mouth.

  Horatus had come back for him.

  That was surprising.

  XLIV

  THE UNDERNEATH

  “You insufferable fogsucking harlot!” Cicero snarled.

  Gasping on the passageway deck, Buckle saw Cicero wipe a trickle of blood from a superficial cut over his jugular vein and peer at the little red smudge on his fingertip. “I’d like to have you know, Captain—this scarlet Lieutenant of yours—she had a knife to my throat!”

  “You wouldn’t have gone back for my Captain otherwise,” Sabrina said.

  Buckle sat up and spat the breather out of his mouth. His chest hurt and he was gagging up seawater but he was alive. Penny knelt beside him, holding his hand. They were in another narrow passageway but this one wasn’t flooded.

  Horatus, his armor dripping, leaned against a square hatch as he worked the hippocampus-shaped buttons a combination cylinder. The Praetorians stood behind him, swords drawn. Sabrina and Welly stood off to the right, Sabrina sheathing her knife and smiling.

  “It gave you no right to make a hostage out of me,” Cicero grumbled. “Like it or not, my survival is the only priority. You slowed our escape. You made Horatus go back.”

  “You may well owe the Captain your life before this day is over,” Sabrina replied, moving to help Buckle stand.

  “Losses are to be expected,” Horatus said.

  Buckle got up on his feet with the assistance of Sabrina and Penny Dreadful; he blinked, unsteady, somewhat dizzy.

  “Can you fight, Captain?” Sabrina asked.

  “Send a dozen steampipers my way,” Buckle replied, coughing up salty seawater. “Piece of cake, Lieutenant.”

  Horatus finished entering the code and spun the cylindrical lock mechanism. Buckle heard tumblers rattle. The hatch popped open with a slash of bright light and a burst of stale, warm air rich with the smells of burning wood and all manner of sour, boiled and braised seafood.

  “We are entering the Underneath,” Horatus said. “Move quickly along the catwalk to the far hatchway.” And with that he swung outside with Cicero and the two Praetorians at his heels.

  Buckle stepped through the hatchway and was immediately struck by a sense of vertigo; his boots rested on the grating of a catwalk suspended in an artificial sky. He stood five stories above a Roman-style metropolis which appeared to occupy the entire base of the Atlantean dome. Thousands of tightly packed terra-cotta rooftops lined a narrow, geometrically precise street grid and larger columned buildings dominated the squares, the walls of the stupendous chamber soaring in ribbed girders of copper and brass. Lines of white and gray smoke from cooking fires threaded upward and collected in vent holes drilled in the massive, shallow dome above him, its surface painted to look like a wide blue sky with towering white clouds, depthless and almost three-dimensional in its skilled application. At the apex of the sky dome rested a brilliant sun constructed from spiraling luminiferous aether tubes, providing a glowing, almost natural light for the residents.

  And the residents were out in force, the streets and squares overflowing with crowds of men and women in white togas, clutching their children, all looking up in a multicolored sea of faces fifty feet below. Buckle could sense their apprehension, feel the movem
ent of the atmosphere as they breathed in and out as one frightened mass.

  The two Praetorians quickly resealed the hatch.

  “Let’s move!” Horatus hissed as he strode along the catwalk. Buckle followed with the group, their boots clanking on the metal grating and echoing ominously across the huge, silent space.

  “Look!” Someone shouted from the street below, “It is Horatus, Commander of the Praetorians!”

  The weight of so many focused eyes made Buckle’s skin crawl. The people looked haggard but clean. They were the workers, the underclass of Atlantis, the sea-farmers, fishermen, carpenters, ironworkers, potters, and nursemaids who provided the nobility with the power to wrest a kingdom from the sea. Though their clothes were different, they surely resembled, in their simple clothes and worn faces, the citizens of the Crankshaft territory.

  “Ho, Praetorians!” A white-bearded man with a gray toga shouted from below. “What has happened? We have felt disturbances! And our sea-farmers report Founders submarines on the attack!”

  Horatus stopped and leaned over the rail. “Fear not, Galba!” he shouted with confidence. “Yes, a battle has been engaged with the Founders but they are being roundly repulsed, I assure you!”

  “Then why have the watertight doors been closed?” Galba yelled back, angry. “There are rumors that the dome is flooding and yet our escape hatches have been sealed!”

  “You are safe!” Horatus shouted.

  “Then why do you run, drenched and dripping?” Galba pressed. “And why do you have one of the monster machines in your company? And a scarlet!”

  “We are looking after the safety of the Keeper of the Aether!” Horatus responded. “And now I must see to that. You and your families are safe! I give you my word!”

  Horatus turned and hurried after the group. Buckle had no idea whether the people below were safe or not, whether Horatus was lying to them or not. A low grumble of voices rose in the air to join the hollow clanking of their boots as they rushed along the catwalk.