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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “Wolfgang, I know this is difficult for you, but you must be gracious,” Andromeda said.

  Wolfgang wound a device on his instrument box, instructing the Owl to lurch up against Andromeda’s door. “My apologies,” he muttered, sniffing.

  Buckle had not taken offense. Wolfgang was just about to execute a robot that he suspected was one of the best friends he had.

  The Owl rotated so that its back was pressed up against the door. Wolfgang tapped a few more controls, and it crouched forward a bit, so its spine angled more toward the ceiling. The considerable orange-red illumination leaking from the joints of its body burst out in a flood when Wolfgang unsnapped an access hatch on the lower half of its back. Inside the Owl, the miniature furnace hummed, red hot, the connecting boilers and steam pipes rattling with insane pressures of steam.

  Buckle peered over the Owl’s bulky head to make eye contact with Andromeda, who was now visible in the pulsing, pumpkin-colored light. “Cover yourself as best you can, Lady Andromeda,” he said.

  “I fully intend to escape this scrape with nary a scratch,” Andromeda said.

  There was a pause, both in their conversation and in the skirmish out in the corridor. Through the cell window Buckle saw Andromeda stride to the rear of her stone-walled cell. She flipped her wooden bunk over near the wall, topped the little cave with the feather mattress, and disappeared beneath it.

  Wolfgang moved his hands at a frantic pace inside the overheating innards of the Owl, flipping a set of switches in a series of metal clicks. “When a robot self-destructs, it is violent,” he whispered to Buckle. “I have made the blast as directional as I can, more upward into the door than anything else, but the impact of the explosion will be immense from all angles. It is hard to say what will happen—I have never actually done this before.”

  Buckle leaned in close, whispered. “Give me some odds.”

  Wolfgang looked up. “You mean that she…?” He glanced at Andromeda’s cell window.

  Buckle nodded.

  “Fifty-fifty.” Wolfgang barely breathed the uncertain numbers.

  “Fifty-fifty?” Buckle replied, chewing on it. “Not bad. Better than I usually get, I can tell you that.”

  “I might be being a tad overoptimistic,” Wolfgang muttered, unscrewing something. “I could bring the entire prison down on top of us with this.”

  Looking over the Owl and Wolfgang’s back, Buckle noticed that the dead-end wall of the copper corridor was etched with a scene of workers marching up a mine shaft toward the surface of an industrial city, faces upturned to a clear, cloudless sky where the sun, a fire-fringed copper disc, was emblazoned with the words The Gospel of Peace and Work.

  What an odd place for such a piece of art, Buckle thought.

  The boiler inside the Owl vibrated with a dangerous rattle, emitting a new level of heat that forced Buckle to step back. Wolfgang also moved back, staring at the Owl as if he had just signed its death sentence, which he had.

  “Just a few seconds now, Lady Andromeda,” Wolfgang shouted. “Hold your breath and cover your ears!”

  The Owl started shaking, forcing every bolt and screw to move in a way it was not designed to move. “So long, old friend,” Wolfgang said to the Owl. “Let’s go, Captain,” he urged, grabbing Buckle by the sleeve. “This is going to happen fast.”

  Buckle followed Wolfgang out of the copper corridor. With a last glance over his shoulder, Buckle saw the Owl vibrating to a blur, rivets popping, its internal steam valves, pressurized beyond the point of reason, bursting with tiny jets of screaming, superheated air.

  Buckle and Wolfgang emerged into the acrid haze of nostril-punching blackbang powder in the main corridor. A musket ball slammed into the wooden doorframe just above Buckle’s head, sending down a hail of burning splinters. They scrambled low as white-hot musket balls ripped through the fog around them.

  “Fuse is lit!” Buckle shouted—only he did not shout it. His mouth opened; his brain had already ordered the words. But the colossal explosion—a heart-stopping burp—concussed his vocal cords into stillness.

  A gigantic fist of fire grabbed Buckle and hurled him into the murk.

  HOPE AMIDST THE RUINS

  BUCKLE REGAINED HIS SENSES, FACEDOWN on the floor, as a blistering shockwave of hot smoke roared over him. Then came a weird, fluttering silence.

  A stream of pebbles trickled down from the ceiling, tapping on his legs. His mouth felt as if it was full of dry ashes; he coughed, as did everyone, their lungs struggling in the dust-laden air.

  “Who the hell set that off on my arse?” Pluteus shouted somewhere in the murk. “You damn well kicked the tar out of my line!”

  Buckle leveraged himself up onto his hands and knees, and then to his feet. When he turned around he saw the burning timbers of the copper corridor’s doorframe glowing in the smoke. He hurried toward it on unsteady legs—his back felt singed—and Wolfgang appeared beside him, thick with light-colored dust, his hat and goggles blown off, blood running from one nostril.

  “Too fast and too much, damn it!” Buckle rasped.

  “I have killed her!” Wolfgang wailed. “I have killed Lady Andromeda!”

  Buckle and Wolfgang stumbled forward over jagged debris, passing Ballblasters as they fanned out to reestablish their firing line across the main corridor. A loose canary exploded out of the smoke, hurtling past Buckle’s face in a furious flutter of yellow wings. After a few more strides, they arrived at the burning entrance of the copper corridor. The door was missing and an upside-down waterfall of black smoke poured up over the top of the doorframe, rising to the higher ceiling of the corridor. They charged inside.

  The copper corridor, the bottom half somewhat clear of smoke, seemed to be on fire. The ceiling, walls, and floor glowed with streams of volcanic color as the superheated metal smoldered like lava. Buckle could not see any flames in the munitions chamber, which was a good thing.

  “Lady Andromeda!” Scorpius, already back inside, shouted from the interior cell. “Lady Andromeda!”

  Buckle heard no response. He and Wolfgang scrambled down the corridor toward the gaping hole in the wall where the door with the combination lock had previously stood. Nothing was left of the Owl but twisted ribbons of metal half-sunk into the etched artwork of the dead-end wall. The cell door, or whatever warped skeleton of wood and copper was left of it, had been blown off its hinges and driven into the shattered stone of the ceiling overhead, dripping molten metal into a sizzling pool on the floor.

  Buckle stopped at the doorway. The inside of Andromeda’s cell was alive with a hundred splatters of fire, as if she had lit a hundred liquid candles. Irregular pieces of wood, copper, and stone, cut into shrapnel by the force of the blast, protruded from the walls at every angle.

  Scorpius and Kepler hunched over Andromeda’s hiding place, furiously tearing away the shredded mattress, which was laced in flames. The wooden bed beneath had folded into a mass of splinters, with three of its four legs blown clean off.

  “Lady Andromeda!” Scorpius yelled, distraught. “Please, Lady Andromeda!” When he lifted Andromeda from the floor, Buckle thought she was dead. Her body was corpse-limp, her arms and legs dangling, her angelic face paler than bone, making the red blood running from her nostrils and ears look black. Rips across her white tunic and trousers were soaked with blood where bits of shrapnel had bitten into her body.

  Scorpius, Kepler, and Wolfgang, racing over the shattered corpse of the Owl to assist, carefully laid Andromeda on a clear section of the floor. Yanking off one of his leather gloves, Scorpius pressed his fingers to the jugular at Andromeda’s neck, lowering his head.

  Buckle held his breath. The room danced in the wavering light of the burning debris, the flames gently crackling.

  Andromeda’s eyelids fluttered momentarily. Her right eyeball was startlingly bright red, full of blood in the white; blood ran from her ears, nose, and small shrapnel punctures above the hairline.

  Scorpius jerked his he
ad up, his eyes sparkling with a joy spiked with ferocity. “She lives! Lady Andromeda lives!”

  THE ADMIRAL’S SECRET

  COUGHING, SABRINA STUMBLED AROUND IN the blinding smoke. Ragged musket shots popped here and there from both directions, the incandescent balls ripping through the heavy air with an odd, bee-buzzing sound.

  She was looking for Balthazar. He had been standing right next to her when the blast occurred and now, despite her calls, he did not answer.

  She found him. He was lying just inside an adjoining corridor, convulsing, his head arched back.

  The blast had aggravated his hidden condition.

  Damn it to hell, she thought. Not now, Balthazar. Not now.

  Sabrina was on Balthazar in an instant, one hand gripping his right wrist, where the muscles beneath, taut as steel, shook. She dug around in her coat pocket until she found the cold glass vial of his medicine. She snapped off the lid, but every time she tried to bring it to his mouth his thrashings forced her back.

  Sergeant Scully barged forward out of the smoke, gripping a musket. “Lieutenant! The general wants to leave—” He saw Balthazar and stopped, staring.

  Secret or no secret, Sabrina was glad to see the sergeant. She needed his help. “Pin his arms down, Sergeant. Quickly!”

  “Aye!” Scully said, leaping forward to apply his strength to Balthazar’s flailing arms, grunting as it took all of his effort to press them down.

  “Hold him…hold him,” Sabrina said, pouring the gold liquid into Balthazar’s locked teeth, clamping her hand on his beard to keep him from twisting his head.

  “What happened, Lieutenant?” Scully asked. “Is the Admiral hit?”

  “No, he was not hit,” Sabrina answered, draining the last of the medicine into Balthazar’s mouth. As always, his shaking immediately subsided and he lay still, calm but senseless. “You must tell no one of this, Scully. Do you understand me? Tell no one.”

  Scully nodded. “Aye, lass. His secret is safe with me.”

  Sabrina managed a quick smile. She did not know much about Scully, but what she did, she approved of. “Help me get him up. We tell the others the blast knocked him out.”

  “Aye,” Scully said, grunting as he swung Balthazar to his feet. Balthazar was already coming around, rolling his head and muttering.

  Sabrina swung her small form under Balthazar’s opposite shoulder, and they struggled forward in the smoke. Occasional musket shots were fired, their phosphorous trails streaking through the heaving murk, but nobody could see anything. They stumbled over a body—a Ballblaster—and Sabrina feared they had suffered horrible casualties. But there was no way to tell in the haze. They headed northward, moving along the eastern wall, and found themselves staring down the muzzle of an Alchemist trooper’s musket.

  “Crankshaft, my dear fellow!” Sabrina shouted. “We are Crankshaft! The Admiral is wounded!”

  The Alchemist lowered his musket. They were now in the midst of Pluteus’s line as they prepared to back up, firing, taking their wounded with them. Scorpius carried Andromeda in his arms, cradling her as he would a baby, both of them shielded by Kepler. Katzenjammer Smelt stood tall beside them—and some fool had given him a pistol.

  “Balthazar!” Pluteus yelled. “Jackson! Reyes! Carry the Admiral with the wounded!”

  Two of the big Ballblasters swung their muskets onto their backs and rushed to take the weight of Balthazar off Scully and Sabrina’s shoulders.

  “Independent fire!” Pluteus shouted, then turned to Sabrina. “Your brother is still in Andromeda’s corridor,” he said, pointing to the burning doorway. The musketry was getting thicker once again. “Go get him. Tell him we are leaving!”

  WHO SAVES OLD SHADRACK?

  OVERHEATED AND SURROUNDED BY THE glow of fire-lit copper, Buckle stepped through a smoke-wreathed opening in the split and blistered bars of the ammunition cache and drew his sword. “Give me a long fuse, Corporal,” he said. “On the quick!”

  Druxbury dug his hand into a side pocket of the sticky-bomb satchel and produced a braided hemp fuse about two feet long. “Five minutes is the best I have, sir.”

  “Very good,” Buckle said.

  Sabrina hurried in, dodging the warped metal and rivers of fire. “Romulus! We are going!”

  “Just one more second,” Buckle replied, cutting a hole in a barrel with his sword. A steady stream of blackbang powder drained from the gash until Buckle jammed one end of the fuse into it, sinking it as deep as he could.

  “Balthazar has been injured,” Sabrina said.

  Buckle glanced at Sabrina, and she nodded at him, ever so slightly. Balthazar’s convulsions had appeared at a bad time. “Is it severe?”

  “No. I took care of him. The soldiers have him now.”

  Buckle cursed under his breath, picked up a burning wood splinter, and set it to the end of the fuse, which instantly caught in a flash, the flame slowly working its way back toward the barrel.

  “Now it is really time to go,” Buckle said, slapping Druxbury on the shoulder as they turned and ran.

  They charged out into the wafting murk of the corridor to find the Ballblasters and Pluteus near at hand. “About time! Stay with us, boy!” Pluteus growled.

  “I left a gift for the Founders,” Buckle announced, searching for Balthazar and finding him, open-eyed and coherent, but leaning heavily on two Ballblasters.

  Pluteus immediately understood. “How long is the fuse?”

  “About four minutes, now.”

  “Then we had better get moving,” Pluteus said. “Sergeant Scully! One volley to cool their heels and then double-quick to the front doors.”

  “Aye, General!” Scully replied. “Company, load!”

  “You! You!” The shaking, disembodied voice of old Shadrack pierced the dark haze on Buckle’s left. “I ask you: who saves old Shadrack?”

  Buckle and Sabrina peered at the wild-haired old man rattling the window bars of his cell, his eyes bugging, somehow even wider than before.

  “You there! Ho, angel!” Shadrack screamed, spittle flying. “You have come back for me! I know you have come back for me!”

  “Company draw ramrods!” Scully ordered. “Ram!”

  Buckle took an unconscious step toward old Shadrack, staring at him as he would a crazed animal in a cage.

  “Romulus—be careful,” Sabrina said.

  Shadrack thrust his arms through the window bars, wringing his skeletal hands. “Do not abandon me! I know! I know where the Moonchild hides! I know! Why? Because I am kindred. I, too, have kissed the iron teat, shot through and addled in the brainpan! I can save the Moonchild! But who saves old Shadrack? You! You! You!”

  “Company present!” Scully ordered. “Fire!”

  The Ballblasters released a musket volley into the void of smoke.

  “Fall back! On the double! Go!” Pluteus shouted.

  The Ballblasters and Alchemist troopers backed up around Buckle, then turned to jog toward the entrance ramp.

  “Romulus! Come on!” Sabrina shouted.

  Buckle tossed the master of the watch’s key ring to Shadrack. It was an impulse, but for the most part, Buckle didn’t want to be responsible for killing the harmless old jabberwock in the impending munitions blast he had devised.

  Sabrina grabbed Buckle by the arm and pulled him away. “What is wrong with you? Do you want to stay here? Let’s go!”

  The last Buckle saw of Shadrack, before he vanished in the smoky haze, was his toothless grin as he shook the bloodstained key ring in front of his eyes.

  “Who saves old Shadrack?” Shadrack howled ecstatically.

  THE WATCHTOWER

  MAX STARED INTO THE MUDDLED gray fog. Through her aqueous-humor-filled goggles, her oxygen-mask goggles, and the nose-dome glass, there was enough condensation and fluid distortion to trick and confound even her sharp eyes.

  There was nothing to see. Not yet, anyway. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was crawling slowly through the dense miasma, her navigators mainta
ining course by employing compass, gyroscope, and the art of mathematics. They were on a slow ascent, aiming to breach the surface of the fog bank before they arrived at the walls of the city. A clear view was necessary, for the rescue expedition would be sending up flares and messenger pigeons—and both would be impossible to locate if the airship was locked in the murk.

  Max’s ears, sealed inside the helmet with her, were full of the sounds of her own breathing and the whoosh-puff of the airship’s oxygen-pumping system. She could hear the ship’s company, too, on the chattertubes, exchanging information on altitude, bearings, and engine status. The farther away in the zeppelin the voices were, the tinnier and more indistinguishable they became.

  The large bridge gyroscope, mounted in its wooden frame and agleam with bioluminescent boil—as were the sea of glass-encased instruments surrounding Max—reassured her that the airship was riding perfectly on her keel. De Quincey and Dunn nudged their control wheels back and forth, their eyes on their compasses, pointers, and the bubbles in their inclinometer tubes. Welly and Banerji were hunched over the navigation stations in the nose, pencils scribbling, clutching pocket watches, counting foot and yard through calculations of airspeed and time.

  Max made her own calculations in her head—Martians were excellent at math—factoring in the compass heading on the binnacle and the hummingbird’s touch of drift she could feel in the decking. The survival of the rescue team and of her adoptive father, Balthazar, depended upon the Pneumatic Zeppelin arriving exactly at the pickup point, exactly on time—despite flying blind.

  Max noticed that her compass needle had hitched over one point to starboard. She opened her mouth to speak.

  “Drift correction, helm,” Welly’s voice rattled down the chattertube line and into her helmet. “One degree to port, if you please, Mister De Quincey.”

  “One degree to port, aye,” De Quincey replied.