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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Her water ballast dumped and gas cells bloated to near bursting, the now buoyant Pneumatic Zeppelin came out of her dive only inches above the mustard. The shuddering pressure in the steering wheels ceased, and Buckle and De Quincey eased the Pneumatic Zeppelin around, leveling out of her spin as she hurtled through the depthless fog.

  “Altitude recovering. Leveling out, Captain. Forty feet altitude. Airspeed ninety-two knots.” Sabrina said. “Current heading is roughly southeast.”

  The terrible pressure on the helm and elevators eased off. Max leapt back to her engineering station while Buckle stepped forward. De Quincey still had to lean on the rudder, pressing hard to starboard to counter a serious drag on the port flank. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was flying almost level, but she was flying blind and at breakneck speed, barreling through a void of fog, where the jagged remains of skyscrapers and transmission towers still lurked.

  And she was heading away from home.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin trembled with an unnerving slackness. Buckle scanned his instruments. He had lost an unknown number of hydrogen cells on his port flank, and the Pneumatic Zeppelin was dangerously out of equilibrium. Too much drag to port, too much lift to starboard. Max was already on it, manipulating her systems controls.

  “Altitude seventy feet and rising fast, Captain,” Sabrina announced.

  “Get her level, Mister Dunn! Zero bubble, if you please,” Buckle said.

  “Even out your hydrogen dispersal, Captain!” Smelt shouted.

  Buckle realized that Smelt was still on the deck; he glanced back at the chancellor at the bottom of the companionway stairwell. Smelt straightened his uniform tunic with a stiff tug at the hem.

  “Regain your equilibrium properly, damn it!” Smelt snapped.

  “Mister Banerji! Get the chancellor off my bridge,” Buckle shouted.

  “Aye, Captain!” Banerji replied.

  Smelt obeyed, turning to climb the circular staircase with Banerji at his heels. “Captain? You, Romulus Buckle, are captain of nothing,” he said. “You are the king of thieves, but you are the captain of nothing.”

  Banerji and Smelt disappeared up the stairs.

  “Well, you did steal his airship, after all,” Sabrina commented dryly.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin trembled. She felt loose, wobbling, unstable.

  “And today I may very well sink it,” Buckle replied.

  All of a sudden, the fog disappeared, or at least pulled back from the piloting gondola, to leave them stranded in the midst of a gaping hole in the fog bank. They were floating in the center of a large opening, like the eye of a hurricane, the walls of streaming fog whirlpooling around them. From the ground up to thirty feet, the mist was a band of dark yellow mustard; above that, the upper layer of gray sea fog soared another seventy feet.

  “We are in another hole!” Sabrina shouted as she peered down her drift scope. “They are controlling the fog! The Founders can open the fog up at will somehow!”

  “They have some sort of weather machine,” Max stated.

  “Impossible,” Buckle said, but his response lacked certainty.

  A boom resounded from below, followed by a high-pitched, shuddering rip that caterwauled past them very close to starboard.

  “Aw, criminy!” Welly cried.

  Buckle looked through the observation window at his feet, past Kellie—who had tucked herself into her cubbyhole under the instrument panel—and saw the dark, jumbled ruins of the old city below. And there, running directly beneath them, the huge black iron locomotive rocketed along the train tracks, the length of it lit up by lines of lanterns. The abandoned streets were crisscrossed with gleaming railway lines—the train could rapidly change course in any direction—and it had to be moving at least eighty miles an hour. The locomotive pulled a coal bunker and a long flatbed car, where, under the stream of white smokestack smoke, a dozen men in gas suits worked on an immense iron scaffold to reload the biggest cannon Buckle had ever seen. The cannon was a beast, no less than three feet across at the mouth of the smoldering muzzle, which was pointed straight up at them.

  “Enemy below!” Buckle shouted into the chattertube. “Directly below!”

  The Founders gunners had just missed the Pneumatic Zeppelin at point-blank range. They had probably taken a quick shot as soon as the fog gap opened, and the zeppelin, skidding along at ninety knots from its crash dive, may have crossed the sky faster than they could traverse their cannon barrel.

  “Helm, get us back in the fog! Elevators, emergency ascent! Up ship,” Buckle shouted.

  “Aye,” both De Quincey and Dunn replied.

  Altitude was the best defense against the cannon, but the Pneumatic Zeppelin was in no condition to make a fast ascent. Dunn spun the elevator wheel and the nose of the Pneumatic Zeppelin rose, but she was frighteningly sluggish.

  Buckle had to disappear back into the fog before the Founders could get off another shot.

  The hammergun uttered its familiar chunk-chunk-chunk, the turret vibrating the deck under Buckle’s feet. He looked down at the locomotive and saw the gunners ducking, as the cannon’s spinning darts ricocheted off the gun in violent staccatos of sparks.

  Keep their heads down, Geneva, Buckle thought. Good shooting.

  There was a last car on the Founders train, another flatbed with a fantastic device perched atop it, a large metal dish pointing up at the sky, its interior made up of interlocking rings of thick glass lenses, all glowing with a weird mother-of-pearl whiteness.

  The opening in the fog bank collapsed, the walls of mist surging back in like a tidal wave, instantly swallowing the Pneumatic Zeppelin in gray murk.

  “Ninety feet and rising,” Sabrina reported.

  A cannon shot ripped through the mist. Another near miss. At least the Founders gunners could not see them anymore.

  Buckle eyed his altimeter. The airship was ascending—with her ballast dumped, her hydrogen cells swollen, and her boilers roaring far beyond their safe capacity. She was nearly out of control—at least on the vertical plane—but nothing else mattered, as long as she was ascending.

  A voice crackled on the chattertube. “Captain! Engines are overheating, sir!”

  “Maintain speed,” Buckle responded. “Just a few seconds more.”

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin burst out of the top of the fog bank, nose high, like a whale breaching out of the ocean.

  “Hard to starboard and due west!” Buckle shouted, relieved to be in the open sky.

  De Quincey and Dunn spun the rudder and elevator wheels, whirling Buckle’s water compass to the west. The Pneumatic Zeppelin slowly leveled out and banked to the left, the night horizon now anchored by the floor of fog and ceiling of cloud. There was no telling how far the Founders defensive complex might extend northward under the fog bank, and Buckle did not want to run that gauntlet. Wheeling westward would take them out over the ocean and, hopefully, out of the reach of the Founders weapon systems.

  Max leaned into her chattertube hood. “Damage report, by sections,” she said. Voices responded, listing one emergency after another.

  Buckle scanned the fog, half expecting to see the behemoth crest of one of the legendary Founders dreadnoughts rising up to engage them, seeking to pop and burn their piddling zeppelin like a gnat, leaving nothing behind but a footnote in Founders history, and a forgotten wreck in the mustard.

  Bring it on, Buckle boasted to himself, planting his boots hard on the deck.

  The deck of the Pneumatic Zeppelin shuddered ominously.

  On second thought, perhaps not.

  WHIRLPOOLS IN THE SKY

  MAX’S DAMAGE REPORTS SOUNDED LIKE the eulogy for a zeppelin already gone down. “Gas cells sixteen and seventeen have exploded and compartment nine is on fire,” she said. “The firewalls prevented any explosions in the adjoining sections, but the stockingmen report cell eighteen in compartment ten is damaged and possibly venting. Ten’s primary valves have been sealed at the primary switching station. Fire teams are resp
onding on buglight. All decks have switched to buglight.”

  Buckle nodded. At least three of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s twenty-eight gas cells were out of commission: two destroyed and one venting. Buglight meant that the oil lanterns were doused shipwide, and the zookeeper was loading up special glass lanterns with fireflies—whose bioluminescence burned cold, and thus posed no threat in the presence of hydrogen leaks—and passing them out. The wounded, plowing airship, dragging, crippled in her lift, rammed forward by her overdriven propellers, was trying to roll to her left; De Quincey had to keep the rudder angled to maintain an even keel.

  Buckle watched the unbroken, wavy surface of the fog bank 250 feet below. It seemed so tranquil now, in the minute since they had broken the surface, but he had kicked the Founders’ bee’s nest beneath, and something more might well be coming up out of the fog after them.

  Buckle figured all he had to do was make it to the sea: once off the coast and out of range of the Founders cannons, he could turn north and make the long run for home.

  An area of the fog bank, perhaps two hundred yards in diameter, suddenly shimmered a weird blue, as if every one of the billions of moisture droplets inside it lit a tiny candle and set to dancing. The sparkling fog opened into a whirlpool, exposing the circular patch of earth at the bottom of its throat. And on the ground was a locomotive—the same one as before, or perhaps another, Buckle could not tell—its lanterns vibrating with speed, the smokestack belching smoke. The strange dish machine on the last car shimmered madly with its mother-of-pearl glow.

  And the huge cannon was pointing straight up at the Pneumatic Zeppelin.

  “Evasive maneuvers!” Buckle shouted.

  De Quincey spun the rudder wheel to the left, letting the damaged airship slide into the yaw to port as it wanted to, allowing a faster maneuver than the flying machine could normally make.

  The walls of the whirlpool shaft flashed.

  “They’re firing!” Sabrina yelled.

  Buckle gritted his teeth. “Dive!”

  Dunn whipped the elevator wheel around toward its full-dive position.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin trembled, trying to descend, but without her water ballast, she could not defeat the lighter-than-air hydrogen.

  “Emergency vent, forty percent,” Buckle said. “Crash dive.”

  “Crash dive, aye!” Nero shouted. “Emergency vent! Forty percent!” He frantically wound wheel after wheel on his hydrogen board, dumping 40 percent of the hydrogen from every gas cell on the airship.

  “Crash dive! All hands prepare for crash dive!” Max shouted into the chattertube. “Hang on!”

  The whistling Founders cannonball went wide, passing through the air where the nose of the Pneumatic Zeppelin had been not five seconds before, but close enough for its shockwave to buffet the envelope with a spattering rattle.

  Jettisoning hydrogen at a stupendous rate, the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s nose swung down as she slumped into an accelerating descent. This was what Buckle wanted. The higher he was, the easier he was to spot from the Founders’ tubular spyholes; if he was down low, just skimming the surface of the fog bank, then the Founders would have to open a hole right under him in order to see the ship. The rate of dive increased as more hydrogen was released; the superstructure, already compromised by holes, explosions, and fires, began to groan under the stresses of the vertical drop.

  The fog whirlpool sucked inward and disappeared in the usual blanket of gray.

  “The hole collapsed again,” Sabrina noted. “Looks like whatever they’re doing to part the fog, they can’t maintain it for long.”

  “Captain! Engine room!” The chattertube squawked with the voice of Elliot Yardbird, the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s engine officer. “Boilers are overheating, Captain!”

  Buckle had expected the message. “Maintain all ahead flank, Yardbird!” he replied. “Maintain speed!”

  “Aye, Captain!” came the response.

  “One hundred and thirty feet!” Sabrina reported.

  “Level out at one hundred feet,” Buckle said.

  Dunn wound the elevator wheel back to neutral.

  “Leveling out at one hundred, aye!” Nero responded, cranking valve wheels, slowly transferring hydrogen from the reserve tanks into the cells to arrest their descent.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin’s nose lifted as she came out of the dive and barreled along the ceiling of the fog bank, hurtling along at eighty-five knots, the prow of the piloting gondola nipping the upper tendrils of mist.

  “Ballast, what is the status of our hydrogen reserves?” Max asked.

  “Forty-five percent, all tanks, across the board, ma’am.” Nero replied.

  “Very well,” Max said.

  “Here we go!” Buckle shouted as he saw the fog swirl open about three hundred feet ahead. “Helm, hard to port!”

  “Hard to port, aye!” De Quincey swung the rudder wheel to port and the Pneumatic Zeppelin responded quickly enough to glide past the northern fringe of the whirlpool, which vanished after they passed.

  “Take us due south, Mister De Quincey,” Buckle said, watching the boil-lit water compass in the binnacle.

  Two firefly-filled lanterns were lowered from the keel above, the buglights slipping down their chains in silence, swinging in the slipstream, alive with the fluttering white-orange light cast from the abdomens of the fireflies swarming within.

  Buckle took ahold of the chadburn handle and dialed it back to all ahead full, ringing the bell. “Engineering, all ahead full,” he said into the chattertube.

  The chadburn bell rang as the sister dial swung to match the bridge dial. “All ahead full, Captain,” Elliot Yardbird’s concerned voice responded. “The boilers are severely overheating, sir. And our water coolant reserves are near empty.”

  Buckle understood the note of concern. They had dumped the blue-water ballast tanks, which were also used as the reserves to draw upon for boiler coolant. Overheated boilers could easily explode, and the engine crews, caught in eruptions of iron and superheated steam, rarely fared well.

  “Ensign Yardbird, shut down boilers one and three, and transfer their coolant to the remaining three,” Buckle ordered. “I repeat, shut down one and three. Reroute coolant to remaining three boilers.”

  “Shutting down engines one and three. Rerouting coolant. Aye, Cap’n,” Yardbird answered.

  Buckle cursed under his breath. Having to shut down boiler number two, Old Smoky, earlier now loomed large in their predicament.

  Welly glanced back at Buckle. “Lookouts report a hole opening, Captain,” he said. “Eight o’clock low.”

  Buckle stepped to the port gunwale and peered back toward the stern where the gaping maw of a new whirlpool spun about two hundred yards behind; as he had hoped, the Founders were expecting the Pneumatic Zeppelin to run inland for home, and not south to the sea.

  “It appears they have lost us, Captain,” Sabrina said.

  “It appears,” Buckle replied.

  “Fire control to bridge,” Ivan’s voice rattled down the chattertube. “My fire teams have no water pressure! We need a white water transfer immediately!”

  Buckle glanced at Max. Blue water, used for the fire system, was the designation for water ballast and boiler coolant; white water was clean water for drinking, cooking, and bathing; black water was the noxious stuff, those pipes being used for sewage, chemicals, and refuse flushing. They had dumped all of their blue water ballast, except what had been in the boilers at the time, leaving the overdriven engines dangerously dry after they had evaporated much of what was left in their boiler tanks. The fire system relied on the blue-water tanks as its reserves, but those were gone. White water could be transferred to the fire system but to do so—and maintain pressure with minimum bleed—would require a complicated series of valve deflections at the main switching station.

  “Reroute white water to the fire system, Max.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Max replied, already halfway up the companionway.

/>   “We have a lot of hot spots up here!” Ivan shouted on the chattertube. “I need more hands—all the hands I can get!”

  Buckle jumped to the chattertube hood. “Reserve fire teams report to compartment nine, on the double!” Lionel Garcia, the apprentice navigator—and reserve fire-team member—dashed up the staircase.

  Buckle wanted to punch a bulwark. He may have escaped the locomotive cannon and its fogsucking machine, but now he was limping along on three overheated boilers, holed and burning, low on hydrogen and fifty miles from home. And while the white-water reserves would douse the fires for a while, there was not a lot of it.

  They would make it, though. It would not be pretty, but they would make it.

  Sabrina glanced back from her station. “Captain, we are approximately ten minutes from the southern coast at current speed.”

  “First Lieutenant, you have the bridge,” Buckle said. “Once you reach Catalina, turn northwest and take us out over the Soup. We shall give the Founders a wide berth on our way home. I am going to lend the midshipmen a hand upstairs.”

  Sabrina stepped to the captain’s station as Welly took over the navigator’s chair. “Aye, Captain,” she said. “And please do not shut off any more of my boilers, thank you.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, my dear Serafim,” Buckle replied.

  FIRE AND WHITE WATER

  AS BUCKLE RACED UP THE iron staircase from the piloting gondola, he dreaded what he was about to find inside the envelope of the Pneumatic Zeppelin. The kind of damage they had taken was not the kind you could repair in flight. And draining two of the hot engine boilers of their water coolant—especially after they had been run above the red line for so long—was a good way to end up with a catastrophic explosion.

  It did not matter. He had to risk it.

  Fire aboard a hydrogen airship was always the first priority. The fire had to be put out. Then he could worry about boilers.

  Buckle leapt up into the keel corridor. He was immediately hit by gusts of hot wind, thick with swarms of swirling red embers, that rocked the buglights and whistled through the miles of wires and rigging. Water streamed down from above, weaving jerkily in the wind currents, as if it were raining somewhere up in the vast, vaulted darkness of the superstructure girders and gas cells. Overhead, above it all, the interior of the airship envelope glowed yellow and orange as it fluttered, reflecting the fires still burning within.