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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Buckle shoved himself away from the snake’s-nest mass of tangler, parachute, and ropes. Something jerked him back. He reached down and found a rope wrapped around his ankle. He swung the razor edge of the repair needle to slash the line, kicked free, and pulled the reserve ripcord.

  The reserve parachute popped out perfectly, whiplashing Buckle back into a much slower descent. Stunned and adrift, he felt like he was floating as light as a bubble, after plummeting three thousand feet. The mountain loomed a hundred feet below. Beyond that, to the south, lay the massive Los Angeles basin, its dense clusters of tall buildings the only things visible above a great sea of yellow-brown fog.

  Beneath his boots Buckle saw the tangler, its body somersaulting end over end, until it slammed into the crest of the mountain ridge, disturbing the pristine snow with a whopping sploosh of blue-green innards.

  The mountain rose up at Buckle too quickly. The reserve chute had been deployed too low and late to give him much of a cushion: he was coming in far too fast for a decent landing. This was going to hurt. He tugged on the control lines waffling next to his ears, aiming to land on the open ridge where the thwacked tangler had plopped. He took deep breaths to rein in his pounding heart. He concentrated on the calm, reassuring sound of the air rippling across the parachute silk…rocking him like a baby. No need for concern. He’d find a big fat snowdrift to land on.

  Buckle peered up and caught a glimpse of the Pneumatic Zeppelin in the sky, high, high above. Sabrina, as first mate, would have taken command now. The airship was on course, southbound. She had not turned around. The mission was too critical to turn back for a dead man, even if it was the captain.

  Buckle glared at his boots as they swayed beneath him. It was his mission. He was supposed to rescue Balthazar. Now he was out of the picture, perhaps permanently, if luck didn’t go his way.

  The mountain crest rushed up to meet him in a dirty white wave of frozen bushes and snow. He swung past the towering letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign, each one stained a weird gray yellow, propped up with timbers, and pied with a patchworks of rusty metals. Actually, they now read as HOLL WOOD, because the tangler’s body had crashed down upon the Y, smashing it asunder in a blast of splinters, green copper tiles, and intestines.

  A shame, Buckle thought. He didn’t know what the sign was ever meant to be, but it was a grand navigational landmark. And it wasn’t so bad, coming down here in Hollywood Land. At least he knew where he was. Alchemist territory. Yes, the Crankshaft and Alchemist clans weren’t on the best of terms, but the animosity was fueled more by suspicion than any actual nose-to-nose conflict. The isolated and xenophobic clans rarely had much contact with each other, and most everyone was locked in a state of uneasy truce or on the verge of conflict with everyone else—except for the Crankshafts and Imperials, who were engaged in an off-and-on skirmish war. But the Gentleman’s Rules would apply to Buckle and the Alchemists, meaning the Alchemists would be required to feed a downed airman some soup and return him to his home clan unharmed.

  Ice-sheathed branches crackled at the soles of Buckle’s boots as he raised his knees to clear a bush-covered ridge. A huge snowdrift loomed in the ravine below. He yanked hard on his control line to reduce the parachute’s lift, and it ducked down. He stretched out his legs to catch the crest of the big, soft snow pile. He missed.

  Not so lucky today, Buckle thought—just before he slammed into the trunk of a tree.

  Everything went black.

  A gentle breeze whispered in Buckle’s ear. His eyelids fluttered, stung by the weak sunlight. His whole body ached, but he ignored that. He knew that he was lying on his back in the snow. He knew that he was lying on a mountain in Hollywood Land. He knew that the Alchemists had not found him yet. He knew that the Pneumatic Zeppelin was continuing on its mission without him.

  Buckle squinted until his eyes adjusted to the light, and focused them painfully on the cold gray sky. He pulled himself upright, his leather jacket squeaking against the dry snow, and sat motionless. The quiet stillness of the mountain was so absolute it seemed to demand that he make no sound of his own. His breath swirled around his face in vaporous puffs, but despite its coldness, the air seemed much warmer here than it was thousands of feet up on the roof of the Pneumatic Zeppelin.

  Something thrashed back and forth under the HOLL WOOD letters, which were only fifty feet away. Buckle reached for a pistol that was no longer there. The movement was coming from the tangler corpse: one leg convulsed erratically, churning up the sea of jade-colored guts steaming in the snow around it.

  The one amber eye glowed. The tangler’s massive head was broken—split wide open—and still the surviving orb held its devilish light. Buckle dragged himself to his feet. Every sinew and muscle felt bruised and weak. He whacked the release button at his sternum and the safety harness dropped away into the snow with a chunk, taking the reserve chute and its lines with it. Something dripped down his face and he wiped at it, the glove coming back streaked with slushy blue-green tangler blood; he realized that he must be coated with the noxious-smelling stuff from head to toe. Whatever.

  He needed a plan. Someplace to go. Lifting his goggles onto the top of his pith helmet, he stared up at the ruins of the Observatory, which were not more than a half mile away on the crest of the mountain: a large dome—said to house a magnificent telescope, and which served as the main stronghold of the Alchemist clan—towered at the center of the fortress-like structure.

  Considering that Buckle had landed smack dab in the middle of Alchemist territory, he was surprised that they hadn’t jumped all over him yet. He decided to make for the Observatory and let the Alchemists take him in according to the Gentlemen’s Rules. What else was he going to do? Walk home? After all, stranded zeppelineers were not uncommon. It should be easy, if awkward—unless he was labeled a spy. Then it could take a forever of negotiations and ransoms to get him home.

  Buckle set off at a brisk walk, gritting his teeth against the stringy pains running up and down the length of his body. He didn’t have far to go, and the Alchemist patrols would surely intercept him before he reached the Observatory, anyway. He drew his pocket watch out of his coat—thankful it was still ticking after all of the hits he had taken—and flipped the brass cover open to check the time. He turned the winder round and round between his thumb and forefinger, as he always did when he was nervous about something.

  THE OBSERVATORY

  IT TOOK BUCKLE ABOUT TWENTY minutes to slog his way across the snowbound slopes to the approaches to the Observatory. Soon he was crossing a wide-open field in front of the building. There were no signs of activity, no footprints in the snow, no sentries to challenge him. But several times he thought he heard a breech hammer snick, perhaps cocked by Alchemist musketeers with trigger fingers poised, hidden in the ruined outbuildings at the edges of the park.

  His heart skipped a beat, but he kept on slogging.

  Showing fear would get him nowhere. The Alchemists were a mysterious bunch who bolted together hulking machines in their work bays under the mountains, and they didn’t like strangers. Buckle knew that much about them.

  As Buckle neared the Observatory, a cream-colored art deco castle capped with a telescope dome, he saw something he had never noticed from the air: a six-pointed spire, perhaps forty feet in height, with a bronze astrolabe perched at its zenith, thrusting skyward from the center of the lawn. The hexagonal spire was battered and chipped—its original white surface stained a mottled yellow—but its basic form had survived remarkably well. Three towering figures in long cloaks, each nine feet tall, were sculpted into the vertical recesses of the spire’s angles.

  At first Buckle assumed that the impressive block was one of the old monuments from the time when the Founders clan was master of all of the stronghold colonies. The figures would represent the Three Founders, two men and one woman, brilliant scientist-engineers, who had been the architects of the new civilization and Founders’ city. Legend had it that a fourth Founde
r, aghast at the rise of the steam machines, had wandered off into the wilderness and never returned. The fourth Founder was mostly forgotten, if he had ever truly existed, though he did pop up as the Old Hermit Monk, a rather nasty character in a fairy tale Buckle’s mother occasionally read to him. But was this truly an old Founder’s statue? It was unthinkable that the Alchemists—who had never been a proper colony clan anyway, much like the Crankshafts—would allow such a thing to remain standing in their own front yard.

  Buckle answered his own question as he circled the spire. A total of six human figures had been chiseled into the sides of the monument. This was not a Founders statue. It was something else. But the six stone men whose names were inscribed at their statue’s feet—Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Hipparchus, Herschel, Newton—had been lost to history, at least any history Romulus Buckle was aware of.

  Buckle gazed at the spire, folding his hands behind his back in a casual fashion, even though his shoulders ached. He didn’t feel like pausing and gazing, but he knew he was being watched. He could smell horses. But still no one had challenged him. Was he going to have to stride up to the front door of the Observatory and rattle the knocker? Apparently so. Well, if that was what the Alchemists wanted, then that was what he was going to do…

  Buckle heard something coming up behind him, something wheezing and puffing and winding and grinding, something with footsteps so heavy they split the ice with sharp cracks and shook the ground under his boots.

  WOLFGANG RAMSTEIN AND HIS ROBOT

  BUCKLE SPUN ON HIS HEEL to see an armored robot stomping toward him. It was nine feet tall, a hulking brute of a machine encased in iron armadillo plates. A breastplate of grinding cogs and gears covered a turbine spinning inside the chest cavity. Oval windows of heavy lead glass lined the sides of the rib cage, revealing compartments churning with steam, boiling water, and fire. The head, a smooth copper dome with two horizontal slits for eyeholes, which glowed a superheated red, had eight brass vent tubes—four on each side—releasing intermittent bursts of hissing steam. The clodhopper legs, thick as tree stumps, swiveled in well-oiled ball sockets at the hips. The right arm had a gigantic metal hand, while the left arm was equipped with a round battery of cannon barrels circling the wrist.

  The Alchemists were famous for building robots of fantastic configurations, but Buckle had never seen one before. He could outrun the massive machine but…where would he go?

  Surely the Alchemists were familiar with the Gentleman’s Rules.

  The robot approached more rapidly than Buckle expected, its iron boots belting the earth with thud, thud, thuds that bounced the loose snow with each footfall. It halted when it was toe-to-toe with him; great sighs of steam shot out of its vent tubes and then petered out.

  Buckle swallowed so hard he almost choked himself. His nostrils and the back of his throat were stinging from the pungent stink of hot metal and sizzling whale-oil lubricant. The motionless robot loomed, its inner turbine still whirring, its eye slits alive with the reflections of the fire and heated air within.

  Buckle got the odd impression that the behemoth was trying to hypnotize him.

  “You didn’t run!” a voice boomed from Buckle’s right. “And it was a crackerjack good thing you didn’t! Crackerjack!”

  Buckle snapped a look to his right. A young, thin man roughly equal to his height and age was approaching. He wore a brown leather motorcycle cap festooned with eyewear, a long white double-breasted coat, and dark-brown boots agleam with rows of polished buckles. Long leather gloves encased his hands nearly up to the elbows, and both forearms were crowded with straps loaded with unusual devices. He held some sort of little-box invention studded with winding handles and gears.

  “I suspect I could have outrun your little friend, here,” Buckle said, trying to sound calm.

  “Ha!” the young Alchemist huffed as he arrived alongside the robot. “You run, you get incinerated. A simple formula with an inevitable result.” The young Alchemist’s face lit up with a lopsided but enthusiastic smile from beneath his thick mustache. He had ruddy skin that looked scrubbed and healthy, and friendly olive eyes set deep under his bushy eyebrows. His dense russet-colored hair jutted out in every direction from beneath his cap, which accommodated a forest of different goggles and lenses, each and every one designed to swing smoothly into position in front of his eyes with the tap of a lever.

  “The proof is always in the proverbial pudding!” the young Alchemist shouted. He twisted a number of switches on the control box he held, and it issued a series of odd noises. “Let’s have an exhibition, shall we?”

  The robot jerked its shoulders back with a clank, its chest turbine accelerating as it heaved out its left arm, which was the one cuffed with the circular ring of small blackbang cannons. The arm straightened, locked, adjusted its aim slightly, and fired a thundering volley in a volcano of black smoke. Buckle instinctively ducked. The echo of the blast boomed across the mountains. He heard a resounding crack and turned to see a tall tree fifty yards away collapsing into a fire-ringed hole in its trunk. It toppled in a crash of splintering wood and a shattering of the ice that had long encased it.

  The robot swung its smoking arm back to its hip and swiveled its head, attentively watching the young Alchemist.

  “Crackerjack!” The young Alchemist chuckled. “Impressive! Am I right? Of course I am right. Eight portable cannons, self-loading, fired singly or in salvo. Explosive rounds. And that’s just for starters.”

  “Impressive,” Buckle said. It was what this fellow obviously wanted to hear. And it was impressive. He paused, trying to cook up a decent story. He could say he was a Crankshaft ambassador on a diplomatic mission, and needed assistance to return to his home territory. But ambassadors never traveled alone—and not by parachute. And if the Alchemists smelled a lie in his story he would be clapped in irons as a spy.

  “Look…” Buckle began, uncertain of what he might say next.

  “So,” the Alchemist blurted, interrupting, “you’re a Cranker, are you?”

  “Crankshaft. Yes,” Buckle replied.

  “And the Pneumatic Zeppelin is your gunship,” the young Alchemist stated, grinning wickedly.

  “It is. Yes,” Buckle answered, uncertain.

  “That was a colossal scrape you had with that tangler,” the young Alchemist continued, affectionately patting the robot’s massive iron hip with his gloved hand as he spoke. “Knocked you off your gasbag and still you survived. The odds on squeaking out of that fix still breathing would have to be astronomical, yes?”

  Buckle’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”

  The Alchemist pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then pointed them at the sky. “Always watching, Cranker. Watching. We have big eyes down here: telescopes of tremendous proportions and magnifying capacities. We observe, study patterns, collect information.”

  “Information on who?” Buckle asked.

  The Alchemist’s face soured for a moment—a blabbermouth who suddenly realized he was spilling secrets—and then the grin reappeared. “Hummingbirds and butterflies, of course. I’ve said too much, really. I always talk too much. All nonsense. Such a bore, I am. My goodness, you are quite sticky.”

  Buckle was beginning to think that the truth was the best chance to extricate himself from this mess. “Look, I desperately need to get back aboard my airship.”

  “Ah, that may be a problem,” the Alchemist said. “They seem to have sailed away without you.”

  Buckle looked up at the sky. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was now a tiny silver dot high above the ruins of Los Angeles. “If they knew I was alive they would come back. I could order them to come back. Do you have any way to signal them? You must have a way.”

  “Order them back?” The young Alchemist asked, cocking his head.

  “I am Romulus Buckle, captain of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, and I must speak with your clan leaders on a matter of utmost importance, which affects us all.”

  The young Al
chemist’s eyes lit up and he smiled like the cat who caught the mouse. “Captain!” the young Alchemist repeated. “Well, I’ll be carbuncled. A Crankshaft airship captain plunked down here among us. And I was supposed to let my robot squash you, as if you were just some cast-off ballast rat!” He laughed and thrust out his hand, and when Buckle took it, he shook vigorously. “Captain Romulus Buckle, let me properly introduce myself—I am Wolfgang Copernicus Ramstein, and this is my robot, Newton. Welcome to Hollywood.”

  THE ALCHEMISTS ARE FRIENDLY?

  IF THE ALCHEMISTS WERE A friendly bunch, the only one who showed it was Wolfgang. Buckle stood before Altair Pollux, an altogether pudgy little lemon of a fellow who, pacing back and forth with his hands folded behind his back, his round belly thrusting out of his long white coat, frowned a hundred different ways as he pondered his visitor’s fate. Altair had become the temporary leader of the Alchemists since the disappearance of his aunt, Andromeda Pollux, who had been abducted along with Balthazar and the Imperial clan leader, Katzenjammer Smelt, at the Palisades Truce. As far as first impressions went, Altair struck one as very bald, very bitter, very egotistical, very untrustworthy, and very stupid.

  Altair stopped and glared at Buckle for the fifteenth time. “And what am I supposed to do with you?” he asked for the fifteenth time.

  Buckle gave Altair his easy smile to hide his annoyance with the pompous little lazybrat. “I propose that you believe what I have told you, because it is the truth,” he said, removing his pith helmet and tucking it under his arm. “And the circumstances of our situation are both dire and immediate.”

  Altair rolled his vapid blue eyes up to the ceiling and sighed in an oh-it’s-so-bothersome way.