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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  The center forgewalker flung out his monstrous right arm, striking Pluteus full in the chest with a violent blast of sparks. The blow lifted Pluteus off the ground and launched him through the air; spinning, he disappeared into the fog.

  THWACK ’EM!

  BUCKLE KNEW THE SITUATION HAD gone from very bad to desperate in the last five seconds. Pluteus was gone, batted away like a doll and probably dead. Another Ballblaster and an Alchemist had been killed. And still the three forgewalkers came on, bladed arms flailing, scattering the hard-fighting survivors on the line. Buckle had his head down, reloading his musket as Sabrina worked on the jammed breech. His heart leapt into his throat. They needed something big. They needed to bust up the man-machines, or this mission was going to end in tragedy here and now.

  They needed grenades. Crankshafts did not use grenades. But Sergeant Scully and Corporal Druxbury both had satchels containing a sticky bomb apiece.

  A sticky bomb could blow a forgewalker into orbit.

  Buckle searched the mist for Scully and found him only a few yards to his right, having rallied a handful of troopers around the pneumatic rifle. Buckle charged up to Scully, planted his hand on his armored shoulder and shouted into the side of his helmet. “Sergeant! Sticky bombs! Now!”

  Scully jerked back, startled by Buckle’s sudden appearance, but Buckle saw a grim grin rip across his rough face. “Aye!” Scully said. He flipped open the bag on his belt and plunged in his gloved hand, lifting out a rectangular block of explosive with a loose, gluey fabric wrapping. He drew a dope-stiffened hemp fuse from his pocket and screwed it deep into the soft body of the bomb.

  Buckle glanced back at Sabrina and saw her eject the offending shell out of the breech with her blade. The glittering brass cartridge twirled in the air and bounced off the barrel. The gunners had the rifle firing before the shell hit the ground.

  The rapid punch of the pneumatic rifle rapped against Buckle’s helmet as the Ballblaster gunners brought the weapon to bear on the center forgewalker, hammering him with a steady stream of bladed bolts.

  “Thwack ’em!” Buckle screamed inside his helmet, spattering spit on the glass. With the rifle and sticky bombs now in the arsenal, he was suddenly berserk with hope.

  The gunners knew their business. They aimed their fire at one point on the forgewalker—the already compromised edge of the plating between breastplate and lower abdomen—and the man-machine staggered.

  “Musketeers! Wait for it!” Buckle yelled, drawing his pistol and holding his arm out in front of Scully’s huddle of Crankshaft troopers. “Wait for the armor to pop and then thwack the bastard!”

  The four Ballblasters, along with Kepler—who was still at Buckle’s back—raised their muskets as one, aiming at the soon-to-be vulnerable section of the forgewalker’s metal skin.

  The pneumatic rifle, with its high muzzle velocity and the tempered iron of its whirling harpoon bolts, was a powerful weapon. It only took a matter of seconds before the targeted point in the forgewalker’s armor, spewing sparks as it warped under the assault, came loose: a section of plate metal dropped away at the waist, exposing a patch of unprotected, red-hot steam tubes and underpadding.

  “Now!” Buckle screamed.

  Boom! Buckle, Kepler, and the four Ballblasters fired as one. Five streaks of white phosphorus zipped through the fog. The sixth man, the Ballblaster farthest to the right, had his musket explode in his hands, splitting open his helmet and killing him instantly; poor reloading, done in haste, was a death sentence with the unforgiving blackbang.

  The five musket balls and the barrage of pneumatic bolts did their job. They sheared through the exposed innards of the forgewalker’s midriff, which erupted in geysers of superheated water and a violent spewing of steam. The force of the blow knocked the man-machine sideways, nearly toppling him over. He stumbled for a few steps before the internal boiler, deprived of its water coolant, burped a bubble of flames and exploded, blowing the entire contraption to bits. Bits of shrapnel ricocheted off Buckle’s visor.

  The forgewalker, now a smoking birdcage of metal perched on two quivering legs, wobbled and fell over.

  “Victory!” screamed Wolfgang from somewhere behind Buckle.

  The two remaining forgewalkers converged upon the burning remains of their fallen fellow. Then, turning their faceless heads to the pneumatic rifle, they rushed it with all the speed their ponderous suits could muster. They came on with surprising haste, knocking aside any troopers within reach, advancing with an unrelenting fury on the Crankshaft position.

  The forgewalkers were only twenty feet away.

  The pneumatic rifle jammed again.

  Some victory, Buckle thought.

  “Sergeant!” Buckle shouted.

  “Aye!” Scully answered. He snapped open a tinderbox attached to his left wrist; the flint on the cap struck and a thin yellow flame danced above the back of his hand. He lit the sticky-bomb fuse, which ignited in a fast-burning skitter of red sparks.

  Everyone was backing up. The forgewalkers had covered the distance between them in what seemed like an instant. The Ballblaster gunners abandoned their post at the last second, throwing themselves aside just before one of the forgewalkers crushed the pneumatic rifle in a crunch of metal.

  Buckle pulled Sabrina back as Scully stepped forward and hurled the sticky bomb. The sticky bomb was a rare commodity, tricky and unstable at best, coated with a gluten-soaked fiber wrapping that allowed it to adhere to almost any vertical surface. The interiors of the canvas carrying satchels were soaked with their own gluten, and were the only thing sticky bombs couldn’t stick to. Legend had it that many a soldier who had tried to throw a sticky bomb discovered it stuck to his own hand, and thus unfortunately blew himself up in the effort.

  When Scully threw the sticky bomb, he threw it hard.

  The whirling sticky bomb struck one of the forgewalkers on the thigh of his right leg and stuck there, its burning fuse flipping back and forth on the metal. The driver halted and seemed confused, rotating his helmet back and forth as he peered down at his leg, and that hesitation sealed his fate. He plucked the bomb off his thigh armor with his metal glove and looked at it, then flung out his arm, palm down, but the sticky bomb didn’t drop. The driver tried to shake it off the hand, but the machine wasn’t capable of that kind of thrashing movement, delivering instead a dreadful, useless slow-motion wave.

  The other forgewalker had also stopped; seeing his partner’s predicament, he started backing away.

  “Get down!” Buckle screamed, nearly puncturing his own eardrums inside his helmet, and pulled Sabrina down to the crumbled ground with him.

  And then the sticky bomb exploded.

  The forgewalker vanished in a white explosion that bludgeoned the whole foggy world. When Buckle lifted his head, all that was left of the forgewalker was a smoking flower of metal, each petal long and jagged and still, burst open on the ground. Sabrina wriggled out from under his arm and started reloading her pistol.

  She didn’t need to bother. The last forgewalker—having taken a final swing at an Alchemist trooper, who ducked his spinning chopper—had already turned tail and was clomping away into the fog. There was a hitch in his gait; it suggested he had taken some damage from the detonations that had obliterated his fellows.

  There was a stunned pause as the Crankshafts and Alchemists, all bleeding from nicks delivered by either shrapnel or blade, caught their collective breath.

  “Captain Buckle!” Scorpius shouted.

  Buckle spun around and got his hands up just in time to catch the loaded musket Scorpius tossed to him.

  “Take the Owl and run that scout down!” Scorpius ordered. “Do whatever it takes to destroy him! Whatever it takes!”

  “Aye, General!” Buckle replied, and motioned for Wolfgang to follow him. “Wolfgang, you and the Owl are with me!”

  “Aye!” Wolfgang answered, twiddling his instrument box as the Owl fell in beside him.

  “Is Corporal Dr
uxbury still standing?” Buckle asked Scully.

  “Here, Captain!” Druxbury announced from the near murk, stepping into view.

  “You still have that sticky bomb, Corporal?” Buckle asked.

  “Aye, sir,” Druxbury said.

  “You’re with us,” Buckle said. “Let’s go! Go!”

  Wolfgang and the Owl were already on the hunt, the Owl uttering eerie chirps as it skittered forward, racing toward the point in the mist where the third Founders forgewalker had just vanished. Buckle caught up to them at a sprint with Druxbury at his heels—and Kepler at Druxbury’s heels.

  The murk thickened, closing in on Buckle until he seemed to be dashing down a tunnel of swirling mist; he could just make out the outline of Wolfgang’s back in the disrupted fog ahead, and he accelerated to keep up with him. The Owl continued to beep somewhere in front of Wolfgang, a bodiless echo in the miasma.

  They were running headlong and blind into the enemy’s nest.

  Who knew what booby traps awaited them in the mustard?

  But the job had to be done. And they were the ones to do it.

  CAPTAIN BUCKLE PULLS THE TRIGGER

  BUCKLE SUCKED AIR AS HE ran, his breath coming in loud gasps inside the jiggling weight of his helmet. The air-canister valve pinged as it pumped harder in response to the demand for oxygen, and with all of the noise, he could barely hear the chittering of the Owl up ahead in the fog.

  Buckle did not like the idea of draining his oxygen supply so rapidly, but they had to take down the last forgewalker. If he got away and warned the Founders of the rescue party’s existence, they were doomed. Scorpius, very aware of this, had sent his most fleet of foot to run the enemy down. Buckle, Wolfgang, and Kepler were only lightly armored, and the Owl was a gazelle. Corporal Druxbury was the only one burdened by the heavy Ballblaster war armor, and he trailed the group, stomping along, but that was the luck of the draw. Sometimes you just had to sweat it.

  Buckle shifted his musket from his left hand to his right. Through his bouncing, smeared visor, now streaming with condensation and spattered with dark spots of soil and blood, Wolfgang and the Owl looked like wraiths, shadows pulsing in the streaming murk. It was getting very dark.

  Buckle tripped over an outcropping of rough concrete and lost his balance, stumbling forward. A big hand—Kepler—caught him under the armpit just before he fell, righting him with a powerful yank. It was a friendly action made by a man who, with one wink from Scorpius, would be happy to blow Buckle’s head clean off instead.

  Scorpius. Scorpius had taken command now that Pluteus was most certainly dead. Was it right for an Alchemist to be in charge of the Crankshaft expedition? Buckle wondered. Should Buckle himself take command? No—he was an airship captain. He was not an infantry man. Scorpius was a no-nonsense old salt like Pluteus. Buckle decided to trust him. Considering the circumstances, he had no choice.

  Pluteus. His loss was immeasurable in its impact, beyond the agony it struck in Buckle’s heart. If they lost Pluteus in a failed attempt to recover Balthazar, essentially losing two of the Crankshaft clan’s three main chieftains in one fell swoop, the result would be crippling, if not ultimately catastrophic.

  It didn’t take long to catch up with the lumbering forgewalker, perhaps a minute. The Owl homed in on him, beeping with what seemed like excitement. The Owl and Wolfgang slowed their pace, allowing Buckle, Kepler, and Druxbury to pull up next to them. Buckle saw the hulking outline of the forgewalker just ahead, tromping as fast as he could go through the mustard, his iron boots shaking the earth with heavy metal clanks. They could easily stay on pace with the forgewalker now, maintaining a separation of about fifteen yards and still keeping his broad back in view.

  If the Founders man inside the robot skin knew they were there, he was ignoring them. He was concentrating on getting to where he needed to go—to sound the alarm. Normally a scout would carry homing pigeons and signal flares, but the mustard was no place for a living bird, and nobody was going to see a flare inside the fog bank. No, the driver had to get somewhere else to raise the alarm, to an outpost with a pneumatic-tube hub or a pigeon-coop tower. Or perhaps he had to make it to the very gates of the city itself. It was the sheer impermeability of the gas, the two-way blindness of the Founders defense, Buckle mused, that was going to save the Crankshaft expedition, even though they had been discovered.

  The forgewalker clambered up a low rise of blasted earth—the southern edge of the moon-moat crater.

  It was time to take him down, and take him down fast.

  Druxbury reached into his sticky-bomb satchel, but Buckle stayed his hand, shouting, “Wait, Corporal!” He did not want to expend their last explosive; it was likely they would need it to free Balthazar from his prison cell.

  Besides, Buckle had already seen their opportunity.

  The back of the forgewalker’s armor was scored black, damaged, popped open like a tin can: the driver had not been able to put enough distance between himself and the forgewalkers who had exploded, and the shrapnel had ripped away sections of his armored plating in an irregular, quilt-like pattern. The back of his helmet had been sheared off, revealing a bank of copper tubes and the dull gleam of glass. The glass was surely part of the shell of the driver’s self-contained life support system: all they had to do was crack the glass open.

  “Hold!” Buckle shouted inside his mask. Wolfgang heard him and stopped; he flipped a switch on his instrument box and the Owl halted as well. Kepler and Druxbury slowed to a stop and peered at Buckle as they gasped inside their muddied helmet visors.

  Buckle dashed a few steps up the slope to close the distance, then raised his musket, lining up his sight before the man-machine melted into the fog. He matched the bouncing jerk of the forgewalker’s steps, keeping his sight on the gleam of the glass inside the hole in the back of its metal skull.

  Just before he pulled the trigger, Buckle wondered whether he was too close. There was a mere fifteen feet between them. Fifteen feet. If that walking behemoth of steam and fire blew up, it might blow him up with it.

  Buckle pulled the trigger.

  The musket discharged in a yellow flash, its recoil bucking Buckle in the shoulder. He ducked his head under the smoke and saw the forgewalker stagger to a stop at the crest of the ridge. The driver lifted his metal-clad arms and pawed desperately at his machine’s iron skull, where geysers of oxygen and steam vented out into the swirling mist. There was no way for his metal fingers to plug the breach.

  The machine convulsed as the driver inside it died. The arms flailed, but each jerk came with less and less energy. The spewing air leaks cut off. The red-hot tubes went pink and then black. The forgewalker froze, one metal hand clawing at the sky, standing as cold and dead as a statue in the Martian mist.

  The Owl cocked its ungainly head and released a low, rattlesnake-tail rattle, as if it had just sighed.

  “Crackerjack shot, Captain Buckle!” Wolfgang shouted from inside his gas mask as he patted the Owl on the head. “Crackerjack shot!”

  Buckle lowered his smoking musket. He realized that his finger was still clamped around the depressed trigger with a pressure that made his knuckle tendons ache. He slowly lifted the finger free.

  He did not like having to do such things.

  THE HEART OF A MARTIAN ENGINEER

  MAX NUDGED THE RUDDER WHEEL under her fingertips as she watched the sea of gray mist drift slowly beneath the Pneumatic Zeppelin. She had taken the helm, not because De Quincey had bungled it—he was quite capable—but because she simply could not stand being idle. She brought the airship back up to one hundred feet, out of reach of both the mustard and the sky mines. She felt a relief at being in open air once again, albeit sandwiched between fog below and clouds above. It was late afternoon now, just after five o’clock, and the angled rays of the sun were brighter behind the thinner currents and edges of the clouds, washing the gray, overcast sky in glowing white rivers.

  Max kept one eye on her compass and one e
ye on Welly, who was bent over the drift scope with Apprentice Navigator Banerji tucked in close at his side. They were staying on course by carefully measuring their drift and direction against their own instrument settings and the shadows of the distant obelisks visible through the telescopes. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was barely moving, her chadburn set at dead slow. Countering her tendency to drift when at such a low speed was a complicated job, but the situation did have an advantage: the propeller and engine noise were so reduced that they were almost running silent. Their snail-like progress was timed so that they would arrive over the rendezvous point at the same moment the rescue expedition was scheduled to appear there. And sweet velocity, even the slowest kind, was much preferable to a fully stopped airship; hovering over a fixed position for any length of time was a constant battle, even in the lightest of winds.

  Max still wore her breathing mask, as did Welly and Kellie and every member of the zeppelin crew, for the mustard gas was heavy and slow to disperse, and pools of the deadly miasma still lurked in the lower decks of the Pneumatic Zeppelin. The gondola crew was fully plugged in, with their helmet breathing hoses screwed into the airship’s emergency oxygen lines, and their communication tubes connected to the chattertube system. And everyone aboard had their chattertube lines switched open. Max could hear the faint chorus of everyone breathing; it was as if they were all inside her helmet with her.

  “Two degrees starboard,” Welly said, his voice distant but distinct as it carried through the chattertube. “Drift correction.”

  “Two degrees, aye,” Max replied, her voice close and low in her own ears. Eyes on her compass, gyroscope, and direction finder, all aglow with frog-colored boil, she rolled the rudder wheel slightly to port and heard it make its familiar tock sound once as it turned. She stopped the wheel before the two-degree mark was reached, allowing for the zeppelin’s own momentum to carry it another half degree to the desired correction.