Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One)

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  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.

  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 and 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.”

  “Two degrees port, aye,” De Quincey repeated, nudging the rudder wheel a tock or two. He was a big man and taciturn, rarely speaking of his own accord. His black hair swept about his long, stern face where his deep-set eyes and chestnut-brown skin offered a somewhat sinister countenance until one recognized his gentle nature. Sabrina liked him.

  Buckle kept his eyes locked upon the rapidly approaching earth through the round observation window at his feet. Kellie circled the decking around the window, sniffing, tail wagging, anticipating high activity. “Keep your eyes peeled,” Buckle said.

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Sabrina replied, familiar with Buckle’s thousand-yard stare, the intense functioning of his mind’s eye just before the call to action. The maneuvering propellers responded to the drift controls and she felt the shift in their vibration ripple through her body.

  “Descending, ninety-eight feet per minute,” announced Welly.

  Sabrina eyed Welly as he leaned over the drift telescope, calculating their rate of drift, his pencil scratching furiously across his navigational maps, pinned to the dashboard. The kid could have easily rounded up, described the rate of descent as one hundred feet per minute, but he was striving to impress and that was fine.

  “Maintain dive,” Buckle said, sounding almost annoyed.

  “Boards steady, Cap’n. Aye,” Nero said. It was Nero’s job to bleed the hydrogen out of the cells at the correct rate to maintain the steady descent.

  Sabrina mumbled the words she often mumbled, even though afterward she always regretted mumbling them, but she was by nature something of a cynic. “We’re sitting ducks.”

  “Piece of cake,” Buckle responded absentmindedly, as he had many times before.

  “Sure, a real peach,” Sabrina answered. She peered down at the shattered landscape and then leaned over her navigation table to check her map. She tapped her derby at the brim, where a little copper arm with a magnifying glass swung out of its nest among the valves and tubes, its miniature gears whirring with steam power, and dropped in front of her right eye. The map was old and blurred, stained yellowish by exposure to the mustard, as many things that had survived The Storming were; enlargement was required to make out the smudged small print.

  Sabrina peered into the drift-telescope eyepiece affixed on the instrument panel in front of her. “Magnolia Boulevard intersection with Hollywood Way. One Three Four Freeway running east-west, due south. Right on target,” she announced, with more than a smidgeon of pride in her voice. “Welcome to the Boneyard.”

  THE BONEYARD

  THE PNEUMATIC ZEPPELIN DESCENDED INTO the heart of the sprawling valley once known as the San Fernando. Low brown foothills loomed to the south and east, their rough backs striped with rivers of snow and ice. Buckle sniffed. Despite hundreds of years, the place still stank of ash. He did not like this—going to ground when a cunning enemy like the Founders might be on the move. There was no easier target than an earthbound zeppelin. It was little more than a bounce, yes—Buckle would have his feet in the snow for only a minute or two—and the likelihood of the reclusive Founders being anywhere near the Boneyard was almost nonexistent, but a little needle of anxiety stabbed him nonetheless.

  Pluteus and his grunts had better be on time, on target, and ready for evacuation.

  Buckle clamped his teeth. Once Pluteus and his soldiers were aboard, they would be on their way to the City of the Founders, the most powerful clan’s fortified citadel, considered impenetrable to attack, on a desperate expedition to save their leader, Admiral Balthazar Crankshaft, from the clutches of the Founders, who had abducted him.

  It was also of no small matter that Balthazar was Buckle’s father by adoption, and really the only father Buckle had ever known.

  “Airship sighted!” the aft lookout’s voice rattled down the chattertube. “North northwest, five miles off the stern!”

  Buckle leapt to the stretch of open sky at the starboard gunwale, pulling his telescope from his hat and whipping it out to its maximum length. Looking back, he caught
the tiny black dot over the mountains with his bare eyes and trained the scope on it. The slipstream of passing wind dragged at the glass, making it difficult to see, but the bulky form of the magnified sky vessel suggested that she was a tramp, a trader guild steamer, and no threat to Buckle and his airship.

  “Tramp!” Sabrina shouted, peering through the powerful main telescope affixed in the nose dome. “Heading east.”

  “Aye!” Buckle shouted back into the gondola. Due east meant the tramp was probably on her way to sell her goods in Gallowglass territory. And judging from how she lumbered, her holds were packed, probably full of ivory, fish, and whale oil from the coast.

  Still, Buckle hated having a foreign airship of any kind at his back.

  Pluteus and his grunts had better be on time.

  Buckle looked down. As the Pneumatic Zeppelin descended to the earth, the blasted corpse of the Valley came into sudden, wince-inducing focus. The ground was a mess, a crumbled catastrophe of architectural ruin: endless miles of gutted buildings and abandoned suburbs collapsed down around themselves in a porcupine’s back of naked girders, walls, and chimneys. The street grid was still visible under the debris, making aerial navigation easy.

  But what made the place ghostly beyond description were the endless bones. The sea of bones. Ice-rimed skulls and rib cages, femurs and spines. Human bones, mostly, with surely some dog bones, cat bones, horse bones, bird bones, rat bones, possum bones, and squirrel bones mixed in.

  They called it the Boneyard.

  Unimaginative, but accurate.

  Scouts reported that skeletons still sat inside the caved-in cars, bony fingers still clutching the steering wheels. Frozen bones snapped under one’s boots with each step, the scouts said—an ocean of skeletons under the snow. Exposed bones were a pearly color, picked clean by crows, hawks, and vermin, the tattered remnants of their clothes long since carried off to line nests and burrows. An endless glut of rusted cars still lay locked in a traffic jam on both sides of the freeway, all heading northward; the tires had been an excellent source of salvaged rubber until exhausted only a few years before.

  No official clan lived in the valley now, even three hundred years later. There were still pools of heavy stinkum gas lurking about, squirting out of unused pipes or suddenly surging up from toilets and sewers. But that was not the real reason: it was simply too spooky to live in that snowy swamp of bones. Some people did live there. People who didn’t mind the horrors. People who stripped the cars and skeletons of valuables and traded the goods, all of them stained telltale yellow, with their fingers stained yellow, in the markets to the south.

  Scavengers. Yellow-fingered Scavengers.

  And Scavengers didn’t like visitors unless they were coming to buy.

  MAX THE MARTIAN

  MAX, THE CHIEF ENGINEER, HURRIED down the main keel corridor of the Pneumatic Zeppelin. She had just come from the boiler room, where furnace number two, affectionately known as Smoky, had “spit” a seven-inch iron rivet (launched by the sudden snap of an overheated metal plate, the rivet was fired like a bullet out of a gun, leaving a little round hole in the outer skin), and the boilermen had been forced to shut it down. It wasn’t a huge deal—the other five boilers could generate enough superheated steam to maintain the airship’s systems at their highest efficiency—but Max hated going into action with malfunctioning equipment. And that happened far too often for her tastes, she had to admit.

  Zeppelineering was not an exact science, by any stretch of the imagination.

  It was more of a juggling act.

  Max walked in the silent, gliding fashion of Martians, effortlessly, as if her hips were oiled, as if she were carried along by a friendly current of air. But she was not nearly as smooth as a regular Martian, because she was only half Martian. Her father had been a Martian, actually a descendant of Martian rebels, and her mother, bless her soul, was human. Humans and Martians found each other attractive and could mix if they wanted to, but this was rare, because there were only a few Martians. Since the time the aliens had arrived, the people of earth had called them Martians, even though it was clear they had come from much farther away than that. The aliens had never given up any information about themselves or where they had come from, and the few descendants of the survivors did not seem to know or remember.

  Max knew nothing of her Martian ancestors. Her mother and father were long dead. She was another one of Balthazar’s orphans, and as an alien she was fated to a lonely existence in the world. She had a brother, Tyro, who had been severely wounded in the Imperial Raid—he now lay in a coma, lost to her, perhaps forever.

  Max wasn’t Max’s real name. But the alien name her father gave her was so unpronounceable by humans that something else had to be used to refer to her. Her Martian name contained many sounds that a human voicebox could not reproduce, but went something like Kaa-speethththlojogga-rantan-(unintelligible)-skee-(unintelligible)-grtzama-klofgurt-(unintelligible) pivkthth-max. When the name was actually pronounced by a Martian, about the only thing any human heard clearly was the last bit, “max,” so everybody called her Max, including her mother.

  Martians were a beautiful, rare species, tallish and slender and graceful, but their appearance took a little getting used to if you had not grown up around one of them. The stripes on every Martian face, which tapered to points about the temples, cheeks, and throat, were always unique to the individual. Max was only half Martian, but the Martian genes dominated her appearance: her white skin and black stripes were quite pronounced, and she wore the aqueous-humor-filled goggles that the Martians always wore because their sensitive eyes were irritated by the dryness of the earth’s atmosphere. The clear, soothing water completely filled the goggles and made her hypnotically black eyes look bigger than they actually were.

  Max wore a black leather flying helmet of the old style; it lacked the excessive cog and valve trappings of the pilot’s, but its brass-tubing system for her goggles’ aqueous-humor reservoir gave it a streamlined flash, and lining the crest of the helmet were a series of oval metal lockets that housed the sensitive devices she used to tinker with the most delicate parts of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s vital systems.

  From underneath the helmet flowed the long black locks of Max’s hair, always unruly but sheer as silk, dropping to swirl about her shoulders. She wore a black turtleneck sweater under a knee-length, raven-black leather coat lined with ebony bear fur, black pants, and slim black boots that cupped just under her knees. All of the blackness in Max’s clothes accentuated the white quality of her face and the swirling black stripes at the edges of it. In a way, it made her more alien than she needed to be.

  But perhaps that was the point.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin was about to land in the Boneyard. Max wanted to be on the bridge, but she could not help trying to scrutinize every inch of girder, wire, pipe, bolt, and baggywrinkle along the long keel corridor that was the spine of the entire sky vessel, running nine hundred feet and nine inches from bow to stern. The huge hydrogen cells, twenty-eight of them in all, in fifteen compartments, loomed overhead, fabric cathedrals fourteen stories high, each strapped into position within a spider’s nest of girders, wires, catwalks, ladders, and blast panels, always groaning and grinding under the stresses placed on such a city-sized contraption in flight.

  Max’s sharp eye caught a tiny jet of steam issuing from under the Axial catwalk over her head. A small feeder pipe had burst, probably under the stress of the crash dive. Stress. Managing structural stress was a big part of the chief engineer’s job. Max was the master of a surgeon’s array of tools designed to measure the amounts of force being applied to every inch of wire, rope, fabric, and metal inside the Pneumatic Zeppelin. Countering the effects of altitude, windstorms, and temperature fluctuations was an intellectual battle. She constantly assessed hydrogen flows and steam and water pressures in miles upon miles of pipes and tubes: there was always a leak springing up somewhere as the rigid but supple airship frame constantly
shifted against the wind.

  And the engines. The engines! The Pneumatic Zeppelin’s six immense coal-black furnaces and boilers had been well built—her compliments to the Imperial clan’s shipbuilders—but there was always a fine line between stoking them up to maximum efficiency and actually blowing them up.

  As much as it pained the chief engineer, the feeder pipe would have to wait.

  Max arrived at the forward circular staircase that wheeled down into the piloting gondola. Descending two steps at a time, she was in a rush to jump into the revolving turret of the hammergun—a pneumatic cannon—slung under the gondola’s waist. The hammergun was not the chief engineer’s official battle station, but Max had claimed the honor early on and Buckle had not been inclined to fight her on it.

  Max alighted on the gondola deck behind Buckle, and with one smooth motion swung her body down into the hammergun turret. She attached her safety harness, plugged her headgear into the chattertube line, and wound the canister crank that opened up the hammergun’s operating valves. The cocoon of bronze pipes around her hissed and creaked with the rising pressure of the superheated air.

  “Nice you could make it for the show, Max,” Buckle said without looking back. She could hear the usual smile in his voice. “We have a skirmish looming, you know.”

  “I would like to chat with the hack who bought us a box of substandard boiler rivets,” Max replied, pressing forward the hammergun’s priming levers with a satisfying metal-on-metal chunk ka-chunk.

  “That would be Ivan,” Sabrina said.

  Max made a tiny, unconscious grimace. She didn’t care much for Chief Mechanic Ivan Gorky. But it would be amusing to watch him fuss when she chewed him out.