Ivan wanted to impress Holly, to open doors for her, to throw his jacket over puddles for her. He didn’t want to be his usual boorish self and screw this one up. In his spare time he had been carving a little present for her. He was an excellent whittler, good enough to be specific about the qualities of the wood he used, and he had spent many long hours sitting on a propeller casing, carving a cardinal for her. The bird was extravagant in its detail, in every feather and dent in its beak, and Ivan could feel the tight little weight of it in snug in the left-arm pocket of his leather jumpsuit.
Tonight they had a date. And he was going to stand her up.
But Holly would understand. Surely. A fellow really should be forgiven when his zeppelin is on fire.
Ivan liked to think about Holly. It made him feel hopeful, and he needed that feeling, especially now, when so many bad things had happened. He snatched the top rung of the ladder and jumped up onto the Axial deck’s forward catwalk, sliding the buglight handle off its hook and into his hand. The catwalk grating tilted down toward the nose—they were descending fast. He kept one hand on the railing—things were calm now, but the badly wounded airship could suddenly keel over again without warning, and he did not want to be catapulted off into the superstructure.
Ivan walked slowly toward the bow, peering through the hatchways ahead, swinging the buglight back and forth as he scanned each compartment and access hub, searching for the little black sphere of a steampiper bomb. If the fuse was lit, he would see the glow. He sniffed for the stink of burning hemp. He listened for the sharp hiss and pop of incinerating fibers. Other search teams shouted out, behind and below him, announcing compartments clear: their voices were muffled by the howling wind pouring in from the massive skin rents on both flanks, rippling and rattling every inch of everything inside the Pneumatic Zeppelin.
The strategy of the steampiper attack had been clear: some of the steampipers had been pure soldiers, armed with pistol and sword, but others were grenadiers, loaded down with bombs. If the attempt to capture the Pneumatic Zeppelin failed, then they were going to destroy it.
It would take only one small incendiary bomb, placed at the proper junction, to blow the entire airship and everyone aboard her into a million burning fragments.
And Ivan was sure that there was still a steampiper or two stowed away aboard the ship. He pursed his lips, his left hand moving to the handle of his pistol in its holster, strapped across his chest. Pushkin stuck his head out of his breast pocket, poking it around. Ivan clicked his tongue, which the wugglebat understood as “Go to sleep,” and Pushkin ducked back down. Ivan was not supposed to be on his own; the search teams had been dispersed in pairs, but he and his partner, a rigger named Arlington Bright, had decided to split up, to search more compartments at greater speed. Now he wasn’t sure whether he regretted his decision or not.
He should have brought Kellie with him, at least. Zeppelin dogs were trained to sniff out explosives. Some airships used potbellied pigs.
He should have brought the dog with him.
Something rattled on the Castle deck catwalk overhead. Ivan froze. He peered up into the darkness. Clutches of fireflies wheeled in the gaps between the gas cells. On one end of the catwalk, in the bow compartment, he saw a shadow…then he saw the flash of a tiny, flickering light.
It was a flame.
Ivan’s heart skipped a beat. No crew person would ever strike a match inside the zeppelin.
Ivan dropped to one knee and held his breath. He drew his pistol, but he had no shot though the grating. Setting the buglight on the catwalk, he crept to the companionway and rushed up the steps, two at a stride, trying to make his boots pat the metal stairs as quietly as possible. He wanted to move slowly, with stealth, but if a bomb fuse was about to be lit, he did not have any time.
Ivan reached the Castle deck catwalk and sprinted, aiming his pistol in front of him. The steampiper was there, ten paces ahead, crouched down. The man had removed his helmet, revealing a swirl of short-cropped strawberry-blond hair, and his back was crisscrossed with bandoliers full of bombs.
Ivan gripped the handle of his pistol. His heart pounded so hard the barrel shook. His shoulder ached, the result of a fall against the corner of a firebox, when the ship had lurched violently before. When he cocked the pistol hammer, the click sounded brutally loud in his hears, like somebody had dropped a saucepan.
Ivan saw the match, a tiny waver of white under the glowing pink of the hand cupped around it. The match suddenly burst in a fluttering spew of reddish sparks—a bomb fuse had been lit.
Ivan charged. “Hey! Snuff it, fogsucker!” he screamed.
The steampiper jumped to his feet, the lit match in one hand and the bomb in the other, its sputtering fuse casting a bright illumination onto his face from beneath, making it look ghostly. He was broad shouldered and stalwart, about twenty-five years of age, with pale skin.
“Snuff it!” Ivan howled. He was a mere five paces from the man now.
The steampiper cocked his head with a strange, unnerving smile.
Ivan’s finger tightened on the trigger. This fool was going to make him shoot.
The steampiper flicked the match at Ivan. The spinning flame whirled into Ivan’s face and he jerked aside, snatching the match out of the air and crushing it in the palm of his glove.
“Damn you!” Ivan yelled.
The steampiper grabbed for the pistol in his belt.
Ivan’s pistol boomed with a blast of smoke and muzzle flash.
The steampiper toppled backward, a smoking hole in the chest of his cuirass, landing flat on his back. His limp arms were flung over his head and the burning bomb rolled free, spinning and wobbling down the catwalk in a fishtail of sparks.
“Blue blazes!” Ivan shouted, hurdling over the steampiper as he scrambled after the bomb. The bomb was round, like a little cannonball, except for the fuse stem, and it rolled and clacked along the tilted grating at considerable speed.
A low howl rose in Ivan’s throat. He guessed that he might have three, maybe four seconds left on the fuse.
He guessed wrong.
THE PNEUMATIC ZEPPELIN LOSES HER FIGHT WITH GRAVITY
THE NEW EXPLOSION, A MONUMENTAL gut punch, shook the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s piloting gondola as if the airship were riding an earthquake. The night clouds lit up with a brilliant flash of yellow.
Everything shook violently.
Sabrina Serafim knew they were going down. Their chances of survival had gone from rotten to worse. She steadied her weight against her instrument panel, taking a good hold of her drift scope curtain, trying to continue taking altitude readings as the airship lunged, waffled, and then nosed down into another precarious descent.
“De Quincey!” Buckle shouted. De Quincey leapt forward to assist Buckle on the helm.
“Damn the Founders to hell!” Balthazar growled.
“All ahead flank!” Buckle yelled.
Max slammed the chadburn dial forward to all ahead flank. “All ahead flank! I need all the airspeed you have!” she shouted into the chattertube.
“All ahead flank, aye!” Elliot Yardbird’s voice returned on the chattertube, joined by the ring of the bell on the chadburn, as the sister needle swung into place.
“All hands! Emergency landing!” Buckle yelled. “Land if we’re lucky! Water if we’re not! Secure all boilers and brace yourselves!”
“Compartments one and two, all cells now reading zero pressure!” Nero shouted from the ballast station.
“Positive buoyancy can no longer be maintained,” Max said. “We are going down.”
“Prepare for emergency vent,” Buckle said, as the gondola swayed precariously.
Sabrina glanced back at the hydro boards. The hydrogen in the gasbags had to be dumped at the point of impact when you ditched. It was impossible for a hard landing on either earth or sea not to result in snapping superstructure girders, which caused both sparks and punctured gas cells: the perfect recipe for utter incineration.
Th
e thirty-odd percent of hydrogen left in the reserve tanks loomed large now, Sabrina realized. It would be all they had to try to get home with.
“Aye, preparing for emergency hydrogen vent!” Nero replied.
“Eighty feet and falling,” Sabrina said. She looked up at the horizon. Catalina was very close. The Pneumatic Zeppelin swooped toward the island at too great a rate of speed, but there was nothing for it. The airship was going down, and she had to be driven forward by her propellers for her stabilizers and rudder to function. At least there was no weather but a negligible crosswind. “Seventy feet.”
“Secure for emergency ditch!” Max ordered.
Sabrina lowered herself into her chair and buckled into her seat harness. Welly and Nero did the same. She glanced back into the gondola: beyond the greenish banks of boil-lit instruments, it was dark except for two swinging buglights, and one lone firefly making loops in the air over the hammergun turret. The Ballblasters and crewman had retreated into the map room, where they could use the harnesses on the seats; Max was at the engineering station, attaching her safety belt around her waist; Kellie was hidden, curled up in her alcove, as she was trained to do in a ditching drill; Balthazar stood alongside Wong, both of them in their harnesses.
But Buckle and De Quincey were not.
“Get your safeties on, helm!” Sabrina shouted.
De Quincey strapped on his harness.
Buckle did not move, grimacing at the helm, his feet set wide, bent at the knees with the strain of fighting the rudder wheel. “Yawing to port!” Buckle yelled, as he reached up and switched a propeller feathering handle. “Correcting! Landing bumpers down!”
“Landing bumpers down. Aye!” Nero replied, grabbing a large copper handle and cranking it furiously.
“Sixty feet altitude,” Welly said. “Two hundred and fifty feet to landfall. We are at thirty knots. Fifteen seconds to landfall.”
“We are coming in too fast,” Max announced. Leave it to Max to point out the gloomiest details.
“Tell it to gravity!” Buckle answered.
“Aye!” Max replied, though Sabrina could not tell whether she was being serious or not.
“Fifty feet altitude!” Welly reported.
Buckle slapped a set of spoiler levers above his head. “We’ll make the island, but it won’t be pretty.”
Sabrina turned back to her instrument board, the wind pouring in through the nose breach thundering in her ears. Outside she could see the sparkling black sea passing in a blur underneath, the dull-white mass of the large island, encased in snow, coming at them with what seemed like an even greater velocity. She eyed the altimeter needle on her instrument panel. “Forty feet altitude!” she yelled.
“Yawing to port again!” Buckle shouted. “Correcting!”
“Twenty-five knots airspeed!” Welly said. “Five seconds to landfall!”
“Altitude thirty feet!” Sabrina shouted.
“We are coming in too fast,” Max repeated stoically.
Max was right. But what was there to do for it now?
“Shut down all engines! Shut down all engines and raise propellers!” Buckle yelled into the chattertube, slapping the chadburn handle to all stop, ringing the bell.
“Shutting down boilers!” Yardbird answered. “Sealing fireboxes!” The chadburn bell jingled.
The view in Sabrina’s drift scope flashed from black to white. “Landfall!” Sabrina shouted. “Altitude twenty feet and the ground is rising fast!”
“Ballast! Emergency vent!” Buckle screamed.
“Emergency hydrogen vent, aye!” Nero responded, cranking open the master venting levers.
It was dangerous to vent when there were fires aboard. Most certainly, whatever had caused the explosion, a steampiper bomb or fiery ember, had left a fresh string of burning debris behind it. But Buckle had no choice at all.
“Fifteen feet!” Sabrina shouted.
“Brace for impact!” Buckle shouted.
Seeing nothing but a white blur through the nose dome, Sabrina buried her head in her arms. But instead of finding blackness under the eyelids, her life flashed before her eyes, sort of. Disjointed childhood memories. Screams in the night, echoing down elegant corridors of gray stone. Flickering blue lamps. Lifted from her bed by powerful hands and wrapped warmly in her blanket. The sour smell of tobacco and sweat leaking through to her nostrils. The sensation of being carried, carried, carried down corridors and stairwells and streets, and into a cold, damp, unseen unknown.
She had so many plans swimming in her head, so many futures engineered, such a desperate, bloody revenge to take…it would be a shame if it all ended here.
CATALINA ISLAND
ROMULUS BUCKLE, WITH HIS GONDOLA keel hurtling mere feet above the surface of the island, with hydrogen vented and engines shut down, worried that he may have done his job too well.
They had dropped like a stone.
The slopes of the island rose up toward them: a giant white hand about to strike.
“Ten feet! Twenty knots!” Sabrina shouted.
A hill passed on their right, so close that Buckle could make out the tussocks of dead grass and jumbles of stones on its great white flank. He held the rudder wheel tight, maintaining course down the throat of a shallow valley that ran between the large hill on the right and another on the left.
“Steady…steady, old girl,” Buckle whispered, watching his horizontal and vertical level bubbles inside their boil tubes. He had to keep the keel level. Striking the ground at an angle would split the airship to pieces. Even so, since he could no longer maneuver, they were at the mercy of the topography. Digging the nose of the gondola into a hidden hillock would collapse the superstructure like an accordion, and most surely crush the Arabella with it. Even if the Pneumatic Zeppelin somehow did not explode, the survivors would be stranded far from home, at the mercy of pirates and traders, not to mention any vengeful Founders who found them here.
“Keel is level!” Buckle yelled. “Slide, old girl! Slide!”
The nose wheel of the piloting gondola struck the ground with a brutal thump. In the same instant, the broken glass nose dome imploded with a bang. A high wall of snow and frozen earth fragments flew up in front of them. The airship bounced back into the air, three or four feet or so, hung for a second, and dropped again.
“All superstructure pneumatic joints maintaining integrity!” Max shouted.
When the gondola slammed down again, it stayed down, locked in an icy slide as the Pneumatic Zeppelin became a gigantic, shaking toboggan. A foaming wake of snow rolled out from both sides of the gondola nose. The ground was uneven, delivering tooth-rattling bumps. With the entire weight of the zeppelin perched on its three gondolas, the strains and stresses pushed every metal girder, screw, and bolt to its very limit. The rumbling racket rose immediately into a wall of noise that screwed into the eardrums and mule-kicked the brain.
The rudder wheel shook so violently that Buckle had to release his hands for fear of breaking his fingers. He saw dark blood all over the steering wheel pins, more of it soaking the entire length of the right sleeve of his coat.
The airship started to slow down, and once its forward momentum decreased, it rapidly decelerated to a halt, with a final abrupt jerk.
There was a weird silence. The last surviving buglight swung overhead, its handle creaking as it rubbed on its hook, its yellow light rocking back and forth.
“Are we dead or alive?” Sabrina asked. “I’ve lost track.”
SHIPWRECK
BUCKLE’S BOOTS CRUNCHED AS HE strode through the snow, big crunches accompanied by a pattering of smaller crunches, as Kellie followed at his heels. Dawn had almost arrived, breathing a warm pink into the lightening darkness. The Pneumatic Zeppelin loomed at Buckle’s left shoulder, a dark mountain anchored by a hundred hawsers to the frozen earth. Her huge gray envelope, swaths of her skin ripped wide open and gutted, hung listlessly over her superstructure ribs, like the skin of a starved animal. She sat at
the end of the half-mile-long channel of brown earth her gondolas had scraped through the snow as she skidded into the valley. She was listing badly to starboard, the huge crimson lion, symbol of the Crankshaft clan, sagging on her flank.
But her back was not broken. They could patch her up enough to at least get them home.
The world was still, almost unnervingly so, after all the raging wind and shuddering decks, but it also gave all sound a wonderful richness and vibrancy. The air resounded with the shouts of engineers and the sounds of hammering, sawing, mallets striking metal, and steam-powered rivet cranks. Skinners and riggers swarmed the wreck from without and within, with needles and long rolls of fabric patching, rapidly stretching, stitching, and gluing. The ship’s goat, Victoria, was tethered to the piloting gondola, where she chewed on what looked like a wad of paper; she gave Buckle a disdainful glance and looked away.
Buckle paused for a moment, watching the hydro men tend a line of fires on the far slope, melting snow in mess cauldrons to replenish the water ballast. He despised being grounded in such a fashion, his mighty airship now a beached whale, helpless, hemmed in on both sides by rock-strewn hills. Yes, the ship was snug in her temporary berth, lashed down by Max and her securing teams, and Pluteus’s troopers patrolled the perimeter, but he felt terribly exposed nonetheless. He also did not like the buffalo. The island swarmed with herds of the big, shaggy creatures, who apparently cared not one whit about zeppelins, often galumphing right up the hawsers, sniffing and snorting bolts of dense mist from curling nostrils, searching for anything vaguely edible with their dark brown eyes, looking as strange as any Martian beastie.
Snort, grunt, snort, the buffalo would say.
Buckle winced. His arm ached in the sling Nurse Nightingale had tucked it into, after the gentle-fingered Fogg has stitched up the nasty slash across his wrist. “What is it with you line officers?” Fogg had complained. “None of you can stay put. Balthazar and Lady Andromeda are the worst patients a surgeon could ever wish for. Everyone else has to go before them, even if they themselves are shot through and the others are stricken with no more than splinters and hangnails. I have a lot of wounded to attend to, and all of you, once you’re not watched, get up and stagger off. I don’t have any nursemaids. Frankly, I am considering tying all of you down!”
Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) Page 31
