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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Balthazar’s plan called for a small force to raid the Imperial stronghold and destroy as many of their airships as possible. It was not elegant and it was not pretty: it was march or die, to awe with the steel of fearlessness and determination, to bloody the Imperials or perish in the attempt.

  Buckle volunteered instantly.

  Max volunteered. Tyro volunteered. Sabrina volunteered. Balthazar prevented any more of his family from stepping forward after that. He had just lost Calypso and Elizabeth—sending four of the remaining eight children on a suicidal mission was all the great lion of a man could handle.

  The raid on the Imperials, led by Horatio Crankshaft, was a costly success. Two of the Imperials’ finest war zeppelins and a number of smaller airships had been blown to pieces at anchor, but nearly a third of the Crankshaft attackers had perished, including Buckle’s best friend, Sebastian Mitty, and the entire crew of the armed trader Zanzibar. Buckle, with his captain dead and his crew decimated, decided that rather than destroy the Imperial flagship, the Pneumatic Zeppelin, he would steal it. In this he succeeded, despite losing half of his company, and he brought the Pneumatic Zeppelin back to the Devil’s Punchbowl to great personal glory. Balthazar was miffed that Buckle had altered his battle orders, but the clan needed the warship desperately.

  Buckle was awarded the captaincy of his captured prize, the traditional honor that he vigorously demanded, and he chose the young but experienced Ivan, Sabrina, and Max—his brother and sisters—as his senior officers.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin was a family affair.

  THE OWL WHO COULD HOOT

  BUCKLE HURRIED ALONG THE KEEL corridor with Kepler—big and out of place as a beached whale at his shoulder—intrusively matching his every step. Kepler was gnawing on a piece of sausage—where he had gotten the sausage from, Buckle didn’t know, but the meat stank of garlic. Their boots rang heavily on the gratings, weighted down as they were with their brass oxygen cylinders and breastplate armor, and Kellie zigzagged just ahead, frustrated by their reduced speed.

  They swerved around the gunnery gondola’s magazine dumbwaiter shaft and entered the ready room, where Pluteus and his Ballblasters, sealed in armored suits from head to toe, were moving aft to assemble on the Arabella’s forward loading platform.

  Pluteus stepped up to Buckle, grinning widely inside the glass faceplate of his bulky helmet. He thrust a blackbang musket, primed and loaded, into Buckle’s hands. “Ready to die, Buckle?” he asked.

  “Never and always,” Buckle replied.

  The Crankshaft armor consisted of iron plates that the blacksmiths rounded off to deflect musket balls. Their full metal helmets looked ancient Greek in style, with cheek guards girding heavy glass faceplates. Pluteus’s helmet sported a tall red brush signifying his rank. The troopers were also weighed down with double sets of oxygen cylinders, and impressive arrays of gunnery belts, bandoliers, swords, and daggers. They didn’t seem to mind, however, watching the proceedings through the thick glass of their visors as they cradled their heavy blackbang muskets in the crooks of their metal-sheathed arms. Two of the Crankshaft troopers carried a portable pneumatic rifle, a large weapon that required a team to handle it.

  Sergeant Scully and Corporal Druxbury had large canvas satchels hooked to their belts; in each of the satchels was one sticky bomb, a heavy chunk of concentrated blackbang gunpowder, coated with a gluey stickum so it could be pressed against door locks and exploded. This was a prison break, after all; they were expecting to blast a few doors.

  Scorpius and his Alchemist soldiers were also ready on the platform, grouped closer to the nose of the Arabella as she rested at her berth inside the gigantic hangar. The Alchemists were more lightly armored than Pluteus’s troopers, but still formidable in elegant bronze breastplates and greaves that crawled with rotating gears. Their oxygen cylinders were far more ornate than those of the Crankshafts, and their helmets were smooth, polished sallets, like Newton’s head.

  Newton and the Owl stood off to one side as Wolfgang and Zwicky tinkered with them. Robots waiting patiently, Buckle supposed. The Owl was coming along, but it had been decided that Newton, too big, slow, and noisy to accompany the assault force, would remain aboard the Arabella and provide cover when they arrived at the evacuation point inside the city, which would probably have developed into a running gunfight, unless they were incredibly lucky.

  And luck had not been on Buckle’s side so far today. Or had it? Only the Oracle might know.

  Wolfgang grinned at Buckle as he approached. “Prepare to be dazzled, Captain,” he said as Zwicky handed him a wrench, “when you witness the finest Alchemist robots in action.”

  “You don’t say,” Buckle replied, scrutinizing the odd Owl. He could feel Kepler’s hot, garlicky-sausage-smelling breath on the back of his neck. He ignored it.

  “Quite a mechanical wonder, isn’t she? Pure crackerjack,” Wolfgang boasted, grinning even wider at Buckle’s focused attention. “I’ll be running her for the duration of this mission. Zwicky here—my faithful assistant and robotics apprentice extraordinaire—shall be running Newton.”

  “She?” Buckle asked.

  “Of course,” Wolfgang chuckled. “She, Captain. My beautiful Owl here, she’s got a truly female personality. Very stubborn.” He winked.

  The Owl was certainly a strange robot: the head resembled an owl’s because the face was dominated by two large eyelike saucers, concave bowls of circular canvas rings stitched into thousands of miniature cogs that held them taut. The metal head seemed designed to do little more than hold the eyes in place, though there was a small round opening in the area of the mouth. The Owl’s body looked like a mad scientist’s merging of a metal cheetah and a metal ostrich, long and lean, built for speed. It had two five-fingered hands that it casually flipped open and shut like a fan when it wasn’t occupied, and sometimes tapped at the glass window in its midriff, where steam surged in its belly.

  “I admit she takes a little getting used to, Captain,” Wolfgang stated emphatically, patting the Owl’s head. “But she’s a real peach.”

  Buckle couldn’t see any weapons on the Owl. “What’s she for?”

  “She’s a reconnaissance robot,” Zwicky said, clicking shut the access panel he’d just been tinkering inside. Zwicky’s personality was much more prickly than Wolfgang’s, although Buckle sensed it was more a nervous insecurity than true rudeness. “The Owl sees with sound, like a bat. She emits a distinct series of whistles, and when the sound waves bounce back she can ‘see’ them.”

  “Shouldn’t you call them ears, then?” Buckle asked.

  Zwicky screwed up his face as if he’d just bitten into a worm-packed lemon.

  Wolfgang laughed. “Well, technically, yes. But since she organizes the different echoes she sees into a map of what’s in front of her—she can, in her way, see sound. So we call them eyes.”

  “I see,” Buckle replied.

  Wolfgang laughed. “The Owl was developed for night operations. She will prove especially effective inside the fog.”

  “Robots ain’t worth the screws you put into ’em, if you ask me,” grumbled one of the Ballblasters, a sour-faced private named Moss, who was coaxing his messenger pigeon into a hermetically sealed canister at his waist.

  “Nobody asked you,” Zwicky snapped back. Wolfgang simply rolled his eyes.

  “Keep it down,” Buckle said, moving forward on the platform. Not many people liked the weird robots that the Alchemists were so fond of. As children, they all had been told wild stories of Alchemist machines going haywire and wiping out entire towns and villages, cracking open a hundred skulls before being stopped, and so on. The stories were probably all a bunch of poppycock: just a few of the many dark tales available to scare children with in the Snow World.

  “Captain! Up here!” Sabrina shouted, waving from the open loading hatch in the nose of the Arabella. She wore armor and oxygen equipment similar to his, and her map case hung at her hip alongside her pistol hol
ster.

  Buckle slipped around the Alchemist soldiers and strode up the wooden ramp to Sabrina. Kepler stayed with him step for step.

  “Fashionably late, as usual, Captain?” Sabrina asked.

  “Just attending to the affairs of state, my dear,” Buckle replied.

  Sabrina gave Buckle a bemused look before turning and shouting at the assembled crowd. “All aboard, people! And double- and triple-check your gas masks, because you won’t find any forgiveness from the mustard!”

  INTO THE MUSTARD

  BUCKLE, SABRINA, AND KEPLER DUCKED into the forward loading hatchway in the bow of the Arabella and headed down a wide ramp into the main cargo hold, a cylindrical chamber eighty feet long, twenty feet wide, and fifteen feet high. Once reaching the hold, Sabrina turned back to enter the elevated bridge located in the nose above the forward loading door. Buckle and Kepler followed Sabrina into the bridge, as the Crankshaft and Alchemist troopers streamed down the ramp and into the main hold behind them. There was no need to man the stations—the Arabella was going to be lowered thirty feet to the earth by the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s steam winches—but Sabrina could monitor their position from there.

  Buckle stepped up to the glass nose dome, folded his hands behind his back, tucking them under his oxygen cylinder, and peered into the empty wall of fog. He could tell that the Pneumatic Zeppelin was slowly descending, not only by the feeling of dampness he had in his bones but because the mist was getting darker and darker by degrees.

  The loading door under the cockpit thumped shut with a heavy wallop, followed by the sounds of the lock bolts slamming home. The expeditionary force was all aboard.

  Buckle glanced at Sabrina, who was already bent over the drift scope. “See anything?” he asked.

  “Vertical visibility is actually pretty good,” Sabrina replied. Buckle heard the gears of the drift scope clicking as she moved them back and forth. “Rotten-banana yellow down beneath, but pretty good. Fifty to sixty feet.” Heavy fog was impossible to see into horizontally, but fog banks were generally shallow, so the ground could often be glimpsed if you looked straight down into them. “Surface in sight. I have an intersection directly below. I can’t make out any road signs, but the street plan’s orientation matches Melrose and La Brea. I have no doubt that Max and Welly will plunk us down exactly where we are supposed to be, light as a feather in the drop.”

  Buckle also had complete faith in the dead reckoning skills of Max and Welly.

  Max’s cool voice rang down the cockpit chattertube hood, which was connected by umbilicals to the mother airship’s chattertube line. “Ready to disengage launch!” she shouted from the cockpit. “Disengage!”

  The Arabella jerked, making everyone bend at the knees a little—except perhaps the robots—as the launch swung out of its berth in the center of the zeppelin. The Pneumatic Zeppelin’s gigantic steam winches started grinding, and the Arabella’s control cables unspooled, smoothly lowering the launch.

  “Masks on! Air canisters on!” Max’s voice rattled through the chattertube, followed by the squeal of a bosun’s whistle.

  “Masks on! Air canisters on!” Sabrina shouted, sneaking one last glance down the drift scope before she pulled her helmet on.

  “Aye!” Buckle replied. He turned and strode into the cargo hold. “Masks on! Oxygen on!” he shouted. “We’re descending into the mustard!”

  The assault team had assembled amidships, ready to disembark from the main cargo doors, hemmed in by the launch’s innards of steam pipes, driving shafts, hydrogen tanks, and water-ballast tanks; the rigid superstructure was folded back like a huge accordion overhead, with the envelope skin and gas cells draped limply between each crease. Everyone turned to face Buckle when he shouted the order, including the Owl, which stared at him with its gigantic eyes. The hold filled with the sounds of dozens of oxygen cylinders hissing to life at once.

  Buckle pulled his helmet over his head and secured the leather straps of the gas mask, pulling them snug into their clasps with a few sharp tugs. He rotated the sealing dial on his chin and felt the rubber borders of the mask tighten around his forehead and under his chin. He reached to his left cheek and gave his air-hose knob a twist, filling his ears with the gush of pressurized air. One had to wear an oxygen mask above fifteen thousand feet of altitude, where the oxygen was too thin to breathe, but Buckle did not like the claustrophobic sensation of his head being pinched in a box, or having his vision impaired by the thick, muddled glass of the visor plate. Pilots relied on their eyesight for survival, to see what was coming before it was already upon them, and the murky masks felt unnatural, even dangerous. Goggles, with the clear lenses spit and polished enough to magnify the sky, were the zeppelineer’s eye gear of choice.

  Sabrina arrived at Buckle’s shoulder and they hurried forward to join the group, with Kepler, screwing on his helmet, at their heels. Buckle worked his way along the hull to the loading doors, keeping his musket pointed up as he brushed past the heavily armored Ballblasters and Alchemist soldiers.

  “Crackerjack!” Wolfgang gave a muffled shout from inside his helmet as Buckle nudged past him.

  Buckle nodded, pressing his shoulder up against the wooden frame of the amidships loading door. Kepler, bulling his way through behind him, jammed his considerable bulk in at his back. The space on the slender deck was tight for thirty-two people, most encased in heavy armor, and all wearing gas cylinders, plus two toe-treading robots.

  Buckle took a deep breath of the stale air inside his helmet. His heart raced, but his nerves were calm. His faceplate was fogged, but his mind was clear. The hiss and ping of his oxygen tank, the whooshes of his own breathing, the metallic pump of the cylinder behind, swam in his ears. The mask stank of sour sweat and damp leather. The hold lay in semidarkness, illuminated only by the shifting gray light seeping in through the skiff’s cocooned envelope, and he could not see much, sandwiched the way he was at the edge of the crowd.

  An Arabella crewman, two pistols stuffed into the bandolier strapped across his chest, his face lost inside the condensation on his faceplate, was perched on a step above the door, one hand on the drawbridge lever. Pluteus was in front of Buckle, sideways and facing the door, his armored shoulder and helmet gleaming a warm copper in the soft light. Wolfgang, crowded in against Buckle’s right shoulder with his head down, repeatedly swiped Buckle’s elbow as he wound a lever on a small, whirring metal box lined with dials and switches.

  Then they plopped into the mustard.

  The glowing yellow gas, heavier than air, poured in. It surged over the gunwales and flowed down in dense waterfalls that pooled on the deck and rose with frightening speed. Buckle felt a tiny but significant twinge of anxiety as the gas swamped the hold up to his waist, and then his chest, until it flooded up and over his facemask, submerging him and everything around him in a swirling undersea world of sickly brown-yellow, poison-colored murk.

  I hope my oxygen mask works, Buckle thought.

  FORGEWALKERS

  A LIGHT THUMP HIT THE bottoms of Buckle’s feet. The Arabella had landed. Nice work, Max, Buckle thought.

  The launch crewman at the loading door threw the latch aside with a dull whack and booted the drawbridge; it swung out in a wide flop, revealing a snowbound world of ruins, everything broken and collapsed, the gutted buildings looming like ghosts in the yellow mist. A land of poison.

  “Go!” Buckle shouted at the top of his lungs, trying to defeat the heavy, damp muffling effect of his mask. He charged down the ramp. His boots landed on a frozen street whose uneven concrete had been cracked by ice and earthquakes. Rusted-out automobiles with punched-in windshields, stripped down to mere chassis and broken springs, rested in clumps here and there; bones lay scattered in heaps between. Shadows loomed high and low in the mist, abandoned wrecks of the life that once bustled there, fronted by the stair-stepped remains of walls, and rows of frozen jacaranda and palm trees lining the boulevards.

  A big, twisted business sign was stil
l barely legible: Pink’s Hot Dogs.

  Buckle stepped forward, his musket at the ready. The fog was thick and absolutely still, obscuring everything beyond twenty feet but the biggest buildings. A set of railway tracks—intact, obviously built since The Storming—ran down the center of the street. There was a weird amber flickering in the mist that seemed to emanate from its depths. The musket felt very heavy. He did not carry a musket very often; he was partial to his pistols.

  Kepler came into view at Buckle’s side; Kepler’s musket looked much smaller in Kepler’s huge hands. Buckle looked back to see Sabrina behind him, a pistol ready in one hand as she fished her maps out of their case with the other. Pluteus and Scorpius had disembarked, leading their soldiers down the ramp in good order and fanning out to the south. Wolfgang moved into the lead, the Owl cocking its head back and forth as it walked alongside him.

  The wooden hull of the Arabella loomed in the mist, resting oddly along the street like a beached sea vessel, her dozens of thick lowering cables stretching upward and disappearing into the fog, where the huge shadow of the Pneumatic Zeppelin hovered forty feet overhead. The Arabella’s weather deck was lined with gas-masked crewmen—the deck could be employed as a rampart when the envelope was folded down—and Buckle saw the hulking Newton, Zwicky, Chief of the Boat Christopher Glantz, and a handful of musketeers positioned along its length to provide covering fire.

  Buckle raised his hand to signal Ensign Glantz. The Arabella’s drawbridge ramp cranked up and shut. The winch cables jerked taut and the Arabella lifted off, rising upward into the fog with a groan of straining rope and creaking bulkheads.

  Buckle peered at his pocket watch through the wet glass of his helmet visor. They had roughly forty minutes of usable oxygen in their cylinder tanks. Forty minutes to get inside the walls of the Founders’ city, or all that would be left of the expedition would be a stack of corpses and a somewhat confused robot.