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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  And then the world turned upside down.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin, and the Axial catwalk with it, suddenly rolled to port so violently that Buckle and the female steampiper, still locked together in battle, were nearly catapulted over the rail. To release a hand to stop one’s fall meant leaving one’s gut open to a stabbing thrust. So they fell together, twisting against the catwalk rail, and then down onto the ramp grating.

  The airship pitched forward with a deafening groan as it rolled even harder to port. The Axial deck catwalk dropped away, tilting and continuing to tilt, the angle becoming so dramatic that it seemed as if the massive zeppelin might end up flat on her side.

  Unseen crew members shouted and screamed under the noise, sounding far away.

  This is it, Buckle thought, as his boots clawed for purchase on the catwalk that was now slipping under him like a steep wall, his hands locked with those of the female steampiper, their heads and bodies thumping into each other, their legs thrashing, as they clutched the catwalk railing. If the Pneumatic Zeppelin locked into a roll, she would collapse and plummet into the sea.

  Buckle wrenched his sword arm back and forth, but the female steampiper held on. His back and elbows thumped into the catwalk rail supports, repeatedly knocking the air out of him. Buglights slipped from their hooks and fell in wobbling spirals alongside, bouncing off gas cells and tubes, shattering in exploding stars of escaping fireflies. The screams and groans of the airship’s superstructure, deafening in their cacophony, signaled that the entire construction was overburdened and about to fold.

  Romulus Buckle did not mind dying. He really did not, especially if he could take a few steampipers with him. He would prefer to live, of course, but what truly agonized him was the realization that he was about to lose his zeppelin and his crew. And he would never save Elizabeth.

  Well, they weren’t dead yet.

  But whatever had happened, it was up to Sabrina to pull their arse out of the fire.

  A PYRRHIC VICTORY

  ONLY A MARTIAN COULD HAVE made it to the piloting gondola with the speed Max did, as the Pneumatic Zeppelin heaved over on her side. Max bounded along angled decks and tilting staircases, crouching, leaping, pulling herself along the railings, as she negotiated her way down the keel.

  It looked as if the steampiper attack had been driven off, but Max, fresh from the fray, heart pounding, muscles twitching, nose full of the scent of blood, was in a battle frenzy. The calm center of her brain watched the war beast within her with both contempt and awe; the fight had been a near-run thing, yes, but—and here was the rub—the Founders had not attempted to destroy the Pneumatic Zeppelin, they had tried to seize it.

  Max dropped down the angled staircase of the piloting gondola and now, only a few feet from her engineering station, she was witnessing the end of her beloved airship.

  The gondola was badly damaged, the port flank partially ripped away and open to the sky, the elevator wheel entirely missing, the port side of the nose dome shattered. And the black, black ocean was looming large below.

  The bridge crew, splattered with glowing boil, fought to hold on as they struggled with levers and wheels that refused to respond. Nero and Garcia lay stunned under the ballast station. Sabrina and Welly wrenched at the emergency elevator wheel, and Balthazar, his forehead running with blood, red-faced with effort, was throwing his muscles in with De Quincey’s as they attempted to bull the rudder wheel back into line.

  Max vaulted the staircase rail and sprang through the air, grabbing hold of the ballast station bulkhead. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was almost lying on her side. The airship was not built to withstand the pressures now bending at her every girder and spar. The superstructure would soon collapse under its own weight, if the boilers did not first split loose of their securing rivets and roll to port like burning meteors, igniting the gas cells and blasting all of them to smithereens.

  And the black sea gaped below, a gigantic, bottomless coffin.

  Max planted her feet on the anchored station chair, avoiding the tilted deck.

  “Max!” Sabrina shouted, ducking away from the headbanging current of air roaring through the ruins of the portside bulkhead. “We lost propeller number one!”

  Max saw the chadburn shoved to all ahead flank. The engine-room sister dial on the chadburn had not moved in response—it still rested on all ahead full. Hopefully the engine-room crew was simply too busy to make the acknowledging ring on their end of the chadburn, rather than being incapacitated or dead.

  Even with all of her damage, with three boilers shut down, and without a main propeller, the Pneumatic Zeppelin was responding, inching back toward an even keel, but it was not the quick recovery that was needed to save them all.

  Sabrina knew this. “Hydrogen!” she screamed. “Maximum flood! Open all forward hydro tanks from compartments one through ten and all portside tanks! Maximum emergency flood!”

  “Aye!” Max shouted, almost hanging sideways from the instrument panel. She slapped up the forward master hydro lever on the hydrogen board, flooding the front ten compartments of the airship and the portside cells with every last cubic inch of hydrogen left in their main supply tanks.

  If any of those gas cells were punctured, if any were on fire, if flames somewhere licked a cracked feeder pipe, well, they would pop, vanishing from existence in one stupendous flash. That was the way so many airships disappeared, without a story or a trace for those left behind. They would live on only in the memories of the clan and perhaps in a children’s story or two about a ghost zeppelin with a Martian aboard.

  Max had never considered her own death. Not even when she had been in life-threatening situations before. The end was the end, was it not? It had simply never seemed to warrant much concern. But now, as she stared doom in the face once again, a painful emptiness surged inside her. An unwelcome yearning. She did not want to die. Not yet. She was not sure how, but something in her life was unfinished, unfulfilled. Max ordered her brain to snap out of it. Such worryings clouded the mind and dulled reaction.

  Max gritted her teeth as she helped Welly, unsteady and bloody, to his feet. In the pit of her stomach she could feel the zeppelin rolling upright, her nose beginning to rise. She glanced out the hole and was surprised how much closer the sea was now, its whitecaps visible as it rose up to meet them.

  “One hundred feet,” Welly shouted, lurching to the altimeter dial.

  Her bow flush full of hydrogen, the Pneumatic Zeppelin lifted her nose and rolled upright in a spine-crushing swing to the sky.

  “Good girl!” Welly cheered.

  The zeppelin ascended steadily, though her bank to port was not entirely nulled, and she shook with an unhealthy vibration.

  Max took a deep breath of cold sea air that salted her tongue. She could feel the terrible stress on the airframe bleeding away as the airship eased up and approached an even keel.

  Sabrina, unclenching her hands one at a time from the emergency elevator wheel to stretch out her cramped fingers, gave Max a worried smile. “We lost Dunn,” she said.

  “Yes,” Max replied. She had not known Ignatius Dunn very well. He had been new, a transfer from the Khartoum, and he had proved to be something of a loner. But he was a good elevatorman, and those were rare.

  “Nice to see a little sky,” Balthazar gasped, eyeing the dark horizon ahead, where the sky and water each filled half of the view. Kellie darted out of her cubby and circled Balthazar’s leg; he rubbed her head in an almost absentminded way, his blood-streaked face looking haggard.

  “I am having difficulty keeping her on her keel,” Sabrina said. “She still wants to roll over. We may have taken stabilizer damage when we lost the portside propeller.”

  “Rudder is barely responding, Captain,” De Quincey said.

  Max stepped to the engineering station and scrutinized her boil-lit system controls. Almost every needle and dial quivered on one red line or another. The deck shuddered again and again under her feet.

 
Sabrina gave Max a glance that Max instantly understood—they both doubted that the Pneumatic Zeppelin, in its current condition, would be able to make it home.

  DOPPELGÄNGER

  BLOOD WAS RUNNING INTO BUCKLE’S mouth. He was not sure where it was coming from. Perhaps he had bitten his tongue as he and the female steampiper gripped each other’s wrists, grunting as they tried to press their sword blades into each other’s knuckles, neck, or shoulder.

  Even if the catwalk wasn’t tilted anymore, things were not going well for Buckle.

  And the female steampiper was trying to head-butt him with her helmet, over and over again.

  That was where the blood came from, Buckle realized. She had just thumped him on the chin.

  “Damn your hide!” Buckle howled. “Quit it with the blasted helmet!” With the yanking of his head, Buckle felt dizzy, and the canted buglights still swinging on their rail hooks blurred and haloed in his eyes. The damned concussion from the explosion that had knocked him senseless earlier had not quite cleared out of his brainpan, and the whackwillies that clouded his senses now were also making him feel weak in the body.

  The wound across his sword arm was bleeding severely, drenching his sword hilt with sticky, warm blood, the loss of which was draining his strength.

  He spun loose of the female steampiper’s grip and shoved her away.

  Time was working against Buckle and his zeppelin—so, characteristically, he elected to attack. The voice of Gweneviere Gray marched through his brain: quick to the lunge, quick to the thrust, quick to the lunge. Watch every feint, every preference, know their move before they make it. The female steampiper backed up in front of him, parrying his blows, sparks flying, her sword floating in front of her like a cobra’s head. She was damned good, but he had noticed a flaw in her defensive technique, a dropping of her guard just before she went to the thrust, and he waited for it. He eased back, readying for the counterattack he knew would come.

  In the moment the female steampiper charged, Buckle saw her hand shift, lowering her guard. He struck, feinting low and whirling his blade upward, over her too-low defensive stroke, and caught her on the helmet, delivering a stunning blow with the pommel of his sword. The female steampiper staggered back, off balance, her sword now gripped vertically in front of her.

  Buckle slashed the flat of his blade across her wrist, knocking her sword arm aside. It was a brutal blow, aimed at the main nerve just below the base of the hand, shocking the sinews in her arm and numbing her fingers. He heard her grunt in pain inside her helmet.

  Buckle could have chopped her hand off there and then, but he was going for the capture. He wanted a prisoner, a member of the mysterious Founders clan to ask questions of. With a backhanded swing, he whipped his blade across hers, banging her sword out of her hand. The sword spun over the catwalk rail, descending into the gasbag vault in a whirl of silver flashes.

  She tried to lunge up into him, to drive that damned helmet into his forehead again. He drove his sword fist into the chest of her cuirass, heaving her sideways against the rail, and with his free hand he grabbed the back of her helmet and yanked it off her head.

  When the female steampiper spun around he saw her face, a beautiful, defiant face bordered by a wild, sweat-stuck shock of bright-red hair, a stunningly familiar face with a smattering of freckles about the nose, and pale-green, jade-colored eyes. It was the face of Sabrina Serafim—the same face, the hair just as fire red—a doppelgänger.

  Buckle gasped. The helmet dropped from his hand and clanged on the catwalk grating.

  The female steampiper bent low, reaching for a dagger in a sheath on her calf with her uninjured hand. Buckle slapped the blade away as she drew it, and it bounced off the catwalk. He brought the handle of his sword up under her chin, knocking her flat on her back.

  “Surrender, steampiper,” Buckle said as he stepped over her, the point of his sword poised at her throat, “and you shall be given mercy.”

  The steampiper glared at him. She had a long white scar that ran from under her left ear all the way across her cheekbone, to end in a curl under the corner of her left eye.

  Buckle saw her eyes flick to the near distance behind him. The other steampiper. He spun around.

  The male steampiper was there, not fifteen paces back, having clambered back up onto the catwalk. His helmet was missing, and his hair was also red, though nowhere near as vibrant in saturation as the woman’s; a neatly trimmed beard, orange and straw-colored, bedecked his sturdy, green-eyed face. And he had a pistol pointed straight at Buckle’s stomach.

  Romulus Buckle knew he was a dead man.

  A gunshot boomed, loud even over the wail of the wind.

  Buckle jerked, stunned that he had not felt the impact of the ball, nor seen the phosphorus streak, nor witnessed the belch of black smoke from the muzzle. He ducked his head down, searching his torso for the bullet hole, his hands held in front of him, fingers splayed.

  Buckle glanced up, confused.

  The male steampiper fell forward, dead.

  Buckle’s savior, Katzenjammer Smelt, stepped out of a companionway with a smoking pistol in one hand, another pistol in the other. “Taste some Imperial revenge, you bumptious fogsucker!” Smelt shouted, his monocle flashing over his left eye. He gave Buckle a hard look. “Consider my debt to you paid in full, Captain Romulus Buckle,” he said, fairly spitting the word “captain.”

  The female steampiper pulled herself to her feet beside Buckle. Smelt raised his second pistol and aimed it at her.

  “No, Smelt!” Buckle shouted. Too late.

  Smelt pulled the trigger. The pistol boomed, phosphorus flashed.

  Buckle heard the snap of punctured metal and a gasp of agony. He spun around in despair.

  THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  SABRINA STOOD IN THE CENTER of her ruined bridge, trying to figure out another method to get the Pneumatic Zeppelin under control again. “All ahead standard. Helm, give me a gentle turn to port.”

  Max rang the chadburn handle back. “All ahead standard!” she shouted into the chattertube.

  The chadburn sister dial swung into the same position, jangling the bell. “All ahead full, aye!” Elliot Yardbird responded from the engine room.

  At least the engineers were still alive.

  “The rudder is stiff, ma’am—barely responding,” De Quincey said, the helm wheel tocking oddly.

  “Aye,” Sabrina said. “Try a turn to starboard, then.”

  “I cannot keep the bubble on line; pitch is all out of alignment,” Ensign Caspar Wong said—he was the assistant elevatorman, and had just arrived on deck to take his post at the emergency wheel, his face black with gunpowder stains, and still overtalkative. “I cannot recover or maintain equilibrium properly.”

  “Well, I have no more water ballast, and barely enough hydro reserves remaining to float a frog,” Nero, just recovered from his head bump, grumbled.

  “Aye,” Sabrina said.

  “The damage reports shall be coming in momentarily,” Max said. “We shall better know what we are dealing with then.”

  “Two hundred feet and rising,” Welly reported, back over his drift scope and altimeter.

  “At least we have some altitude,” Sabrina said. “We shall have to crawl home, but we shall get there.”

  “Well done, First Lieutenant!” Balthazar cheered from the back of the gondola, as he helped Ensign Bolling up out of the hammergun turret.

  “Obelisk!” Nero shouted. “Obelisk to port! We are on a collision course!”

  Swerving into view from the left, and soon to be directly in front of them, loomed the massive pillar of the Catalina Obelisk, thrusting up from the Catalina channel, glowing a black purple across its uneven surface, darker than the clouds. It looked like a column designed to hold up the very heavens themselves.

  “Hard a starboard! Hard a starboard!” Sabrina shouted.

  De Quincey threw his entire weight into the rudder wheel, which spun once
around and abruptly shuddered to a stop. “The rudder is jammed on the starboard swing, Captain!”

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin, unresponsive to her helm—nose up, barely under control, and locked in an ascent—continued to drift to port, not away from the obelisk, but bearing into it with surprising speed.

  There was a moment of shock on the bridge as the battered crew stared, unbelieving, as they rode the unresponsive Pneumatic Zeppelin on a collision course with the Catalina Obelisk, its monstrous mass swallowing up more and more of the nose-dome window. Welly took an unconscious step backward.

  “Damn it! Hard a port! Hard a port!” Sabrina bellowed.

  “Hard a port!” De Quincey replied, whirling the rudder wheel.

  If the zeppelin could not turn to starboard, then Sabrina would go with the airship’s desire to nose to port and swing across the obstacle.

  The bow hedged to port, picking up speed as the wall of the obelisk swept past from left to right in front of them. But it looked like it was too late. The obelisk was too wide and too close.

  De Quincey pinned the rudder wheel, but there was little more he could do.

  “Come on! Come on!” Sabrina shouted. She fought the urge to throw her engines into reverse, to cavitate the propellers. The airship was so damaged and out of balance that such a desperate act would more likely swing them sideways into the obelisk, rather than slowing them enough to maneuver around it.

  “Brace for impact!” Max shouted. She leaned into the chattertube: “All hands! Brace for impact!”