Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  The shadow of another sabertooth appeared alongside the first, looking straight in.

  Buckle needed to buy himself a few seconds—enough time to pick up Max and carry her into the little chamber—so he shouted the zeppelineer boarder’s cry of “Hurrah!” and attacked. He booted the fire in an explosion of swarming red embers and sent the burning log rolling along the floor toward the entrance of the cave, followed by the clattering iron pot. The burning wood and iron sizzled as they slid to a stop on the ice.

  The pacing sabertooth halted, glaring at the flaming log. Buckle rushed forward, swinging the torch, his pistol leveled. They saw the pistol, the damned clever beasties, lunging away into the storm just as he fired. The muzzle flash illuminated the cavern for one brilliant red instant, the contained crack of the shot walloping Buckle’s eardrums.

  Buckle jammed the pistol back into his belt, turning back from the hanging cloud of powder haze to leap the scattered remains of the fire and scramble to Max. Tossing the torch toward the side chamber, he gathered her in his arms, bundled her up in the parka and bear fur, and carried her into the secret chamber. Not trusting what was left of the heavy-timbered bedframe, he laid her down as gently as he could in the middle of the little floor, a floor that glimmered in the candlelight, as smooth as polished stone.

  He needed the survival kit.

  He needed the morphine.

  Drawing his empty pistol as he leapt through the doorway and picking up the torch on his way, Buckle was aware there were things slinking into the main chamber, things that were not made of stone.

  As Buckle skidded to a stop in the middle of the scattered remains of his fire, the icy floor studded with a thousand glowing orange embers, he swung around his sword and pistol to find one sabertooth, a massive brute coated with ice, its fangs at least a foot long from upper lip to tip, already creeping in under the overhang.

  Buckle could hear more roars piercing the wind outside. The pack was coming, collecting, preparing for the final rush.

  Buckle grabbed the survival pouch. The capped syringe, morphine vials, and Fassbinder’s jar were loose, lying on a gauze strip, and he scooped them inside the pouch as he rose, pointing the pistol at the sabertooth’s face. It paused, regarding him with its four malevolent green eyes, then slowly kept on coming.

  The devil, Buckle thought. How the hell could the beastie know the pistol was not loaded? The ruse was over, and he jammed the pistol back into his belt. He reached into the pouch and grabbed one of the musket cartridges.

  The sabertooth dashed forward. Buckle beat it back with a shove of the torch at its face. The hulking creature came so close he could smell the rotten-egg scent of its hot breath, shooting out of its nostrils in pumping columns of mist. The beastie scrambled back a few feet, snarling so vehemently that the walls of the room seemed to rattle.

  Two more beasties appeared at the cave entrance, gliding in with an ease of anticipation that was unnerving. Buckle bit off the top of the paper musket cartridge and dumped out the ball, the lead sphere landing with a little pop on the ice and rolling away. Buckle sidled slowly to the right, back toward the inner chamber, and the sabertooth veered to cut him off.

  Buckle lunged, and the big beastie lunged with him. Buckle swung the musket cartridge so that the blackbang powder spilled through the air in a wide arc between him and the sabertooth. He thrust the head of his torch into the black arch of gunpowder, which ignited with a loud, rippling flash.

  The sabertooth roared, a furious baritone howl, as it jumped back, cowering under the unexpected wall of fire that had just exploded in its face.

  Buckle dashed, biting the head off a second cartridge as he ran, tossing the ball and setting another crackling arc afire with a rearward swing of his torch, just as he ducked into the adjoining cave. He scrambled headlong into the chamber of numbers, and dove to the winding wheel. He yanked at the spokes, hauling the ancient iron device with its brass fittings around, hand over hand. The wheel creaked, rust spilling from the hole where its trunk pierced the wall; cogs creaked, thick and dull with mold and ice-locked oxidation, and the heavy iron door slid, closing the gap far too slowly, no matter that Buckle gave its course every ounce of strength his body could bear.

  Out in the main cavern, the indignant sabertooths roared, a mass of foul voices.

  Buckle snatched up the torch and tossed it out the doorway, hoping the fire would slow the beasties a bit. If he had enough time to crank the door shut, he could keep Max safe.

  If only he had the time.

  THE ISLAND IN THE STREAM

  MAX WALKED ALONG THE FOREST path. It was sunny, the sunlight beating down through the tall trees in pale gold-white columns framed by moving shadows as the branches swung in the light breeze. She felt warm and happy. The air was full of the rich, sweet smell of grass, pine, and heather.

  It was quiet. Her boots swished along the dirt trail. She was skipping. She was very young.

  She heard the low rush of a stream not far ahead, and the light tinkle of wind chimes.

  She was dreaming. She knew she was dreaming.

  And it was quite all right.

  Max lifted her chin to the sun, its brilliant white orb slipping past above the trees, stinging her eyes. The sun unbound the world, glorious in its heat, unleashing such greenness and luxurious smells.

  She was dying. She knew she was dying.

  And it was quite all right.

  She had saved Romulus Buckle. She had placed her body in between his body and death, and gladly accepted the result. Her life for his.

  He had done the same for her, before.

  It was sad, but quite all right.

  She almost floated as she walked now, and she arrived at the banks of the wide, slow-moving stream, where the dark, clear water danced with the gleams of mineral stones beneath, and slipped under tree-lined banks, the trees forming a canopy of shadows and bursts of light overhead.

  The wind chimes jingled, louder now. Max turned her head to see a small island in the center of the river, a sandy sanctuary where a small monastery sat, a white cross atop the dome. A set of silver wind chimes lolled languidly in the breeze as they hung above the front doors, both set wide open.

  The sunlight warmed Max’s face, and she stood still. She was alone. She was in no hurry.

  A memory came to her as if bidden, spilling into her awareness with the surety of the current sweeping past the toes of her boots. She was a child, running, running down the halls of Balthazar’s house in Tehachapi, running away from Buckle. There came the yank on her long hair, her head jerked back, and when she drove it forward, there was the low, sudden whack of the door frame against her skull, and a vague sensation of falling.

  The vision drifted away as if carried along by the water of the stream, and Max was left alone with the whispering leaves in the trees and the answering whisper of the sunlight dancing on the water, and the music of the wind chimes.

  Max heard the far-distant clop of horse’s hooves thundering across rough ground, approaching. A seeping cold at her back made her shiver. Clouds suddenly blocked out the sun, making the world a shade darker.

  The breeze died away and the wind chimes fell silent.

  Max was in no hurry.

  But the horsemen were.

  THE GOOD LIEUTENANT

  SABRINA SERAFIM STOOD ON THE weather deck of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s launch, the two-hundred-foot Arabella, eyeing the mountains surrounding the town of Tehachapi. It was two o’clock in the morning and the cloud-bound moonlight was odd, having just reappeared after the snowstorm, casting the snowy peaks with a translucent purplish light.

  Sabrina brushed a crust of snow off the rail in front of her. She liked the Arabella. The launch was light and highly maneuverable, but still robust enough to carry a four-pounder or two, if necessary. She rested easily on her mooring hawsers, alongside a pair of trader-guild tramps, ugly little merchant dirigibles.

  The town of Tehachapi to the north was picturesque, it
s cottages, with their busy chimneys and their windows glowing with the orange of the hearth fires within, nestled in the shallow valley.

  A dark pang crept into Sabrina’s heart. To the northwest loomed the bombed-out ruins of the old Crankshaft stronghold, blown near to smithereens by the Imperial Blitz the year before. A large stone cairn stood on a bluff nearby, its stones chiseled with the names of the dead.

  Including her adoptive mother, Calypso.

  But these were old pains. As the first lieutenant and chief navigator aboard the Pneumatic Zeppelin, and currently the acting captain of the Arabella, she had far more pressing concerns to deal with. Captain Buckle, scheduled to return by midnight, was long overdue. And she had decided to go after him.

  “Here, ma’am,” Lieutenant Andrew Windermere said, bringing Sabrina a steaming cup of coffee. He was wrapped in his thick gray bearskin, his eyes glowing in the buglit darkness on the Arabella’s deck.

  “Thank you, Mister Windermere,” Sabrina said, accepting the metal mug; the aroma cut through the woody outside air and made her mouth water. By the time she lifted the coffee to her lips, it was unfortunately cold—the steam draining the liquid of its heat in the frigid air—leaving only a very bitter, lukewarm, hastily prepared soup brimming with hard, black grounds.

  “It is lovely,” she said.

  “It is shite roasted on an open fire—beg your pardon, Lieutenant,” Windermere replied, taking a big sip from his mug.

  “Lovely shite, then,” Sabrina said, and shivered inside her wolf-fur coat. It was inordinately cold on the partially exposed weather deck of the moored Arabella, and as she listened to the rattle of the anchor chains through their capstans, she could only imagine how uncomfortable the cold was for the crew members on the envelope ratlines above, as they prepared to launch the little airship.

  “Envelope is swept,” Windermere reported. The snowstorm had forced the crew to sweep the snow off the fragile skin and spars as it collected throughout the night. “And sentries are in.”

  The crew dashed past Sabrina and Windermere in the lantern-lit darkness, boots plumping across the deck boards, coiling ropes and valving the hydrogen cells. The crew knew that the captain had not returned from the mountain by nightfall, as was planned. And now Sabrina deeply regretted giving him a few extra hours to make it back.

  “Mooring ropes are ready to be detached at your order, Lieutenant,” Windermere said. “Boilers are about two minutes shy, and after that we are ready to be away.”

  “Well done, Mister Windermere,” Sabrina replied, giving him a smile. Lieutenant Andrew Windermere, or Windy, as his crewmates called him, smiled back at her over his ruined coffee. His was a smile both stern and appealing, and he often used it. He was a tall, rail-thin man, twenty years of age, with a handsome, pleasant face, intelligent eyes, and a laugh like a donkey. His skin and eyes were a milk-chocolate brown, his hair short, black, and tightly curled—his family bloodline was heavy with something his mother described as Cajun. Nobody knew what Cajun was, but her dinner meats were dense with spices burned black.

  It was then that Sabrina wondered where Max was—she would normally have been in the thick of it, with the engineers. “Tell me, have you perchance seen the chief engineer?” Sabrina asked.

  Windermere shook his head. “No, ma’am, I have not.”

  “Very well. Prepare to cast off. I shall be on the bridge.”

  “Aye, Lieutenant,” Windermere said, jumping to assist a crew woman as she heaved a rope through a ratchet block. He was an excellent junior officer, just transferred to the Pneumatic Zeppelin, and promoted by Buckle from ensign to lieutenant. He was the chief elevatorman, replacing the late Ignatius Dunn. Buckle had also made him the acting master of the launch. Buckle had given Windermere a big role to fill—difficult for a new crewman who was not yet familiar with the Imperial-designed Pneumatic Zeppelin and her boisterous launch—but Buckle liked to vet his new officers early, overloading them without pity.

  Windermere did look a bit tired.

  Sabrina looked out into the night. The Arabella’s weather deck was open to the freezing air at her flanks, through the rigging-laced gaps between the fabric arches of the envelope skin overhead. The air was clear, and the cloud cover blanketed the pristine white snow with moonlight, while the rock-strewn world slumbered its ancient sleep. It was the kind of night in which men and women might feel their insignificance, and painfully so.

  Damn it, Romulus. Where are you?

  Over Sabrina’s head, the hydrogen cells rapidly inflated, hissing loudly through their wide-open supply valves, their tops pressing and creaking against the doped canvas skin, ribbing girders, and baggywrinkle-wrapped wires. The crew was hard at work at the winding wheels of the hawsers and anchors, planting their boots against the ballast tanks as they pushed. The airship bobbed, near imperceptibly, growing more buoyant. The buglight lanterns swung easily on their hooks, illuminating both sides of the deck at intervals of five yards.

  Sabrina was glad she had kept the crew aboard. The launch carried a standard complement of nineteen loyal souls, to be sure, but they tended to get scattered in the night if allowed to patronize local taverns. Tehachapi’s infamous watering hole, the Bloody Haunch, would have left them disoriented by song, fiddle, and rotgut—and impossible to collect quickly.

  Sabrina breathed in through her nose, trying to smell the intentions of the weather. Somewhere a dog barked, the familiar sound instantly muted by the overwhelming presence of the surrounding wilderness.

  Sabrina tossed the cold coffee over the side and strode down the wooden stairs of the companionway, the one known for wailing like a mad cat in heavy weather. She arrived in the long tubular main hold of the Arabella, her stern end a beehive of activity as the engine crew stoked the boilers, the open hatches flooding the hold with a furious red-orange glow.

  Danny Faraday, the lead engineer, gave Sabrina a coal-stained salute. “We shall be all fired up in a jiffy, ma’am!” he shouted.

  “Aye, Mister Faraday,” Sabrina replied, and hurried forward to the bridge. There, the sprawling banks of instruments glowed green with bioluminescent boil, standing out brilliantly against the blackness of the night outside the glass nose dome, a darkness broken only by the swirling gleam of two buglight lanterns that rocked back and forth as their lines were hauled back up into their coil barrels under the envelope’s bow pulpit.

  Caspar Wong and Charles Mariner were already at their stations at the elevator and rudder wheels, and Alison Lawrence, the ballast officer, turned to Sabrina as she entered. “Cells at ninety percent, ma’am,” she said.

  “Flood to one hundred,” Sabrina ordered, plunking the empty coffee mug on the chart table. “It is damnably cold.”

  “Aye, aye,” Lawrence responded, turning her valve wheels.

  “Has anyone seen Lieutenant Max?” Sabrina asked.

  “No, ma’am,” came the universal response.

  Sabrina’s sixth sense tingled. She suspected, perhaps even knew, that the newly unpredictable Martian female had popped off on her own and followed Buckle up the mountain. Sabrina had seen Max’s eyes flash green and disturbed inside her goggles when Buckle made his decision—in his typical fashion—to climb the dangerous heights alone, with only the wild-eyed mountain scout to accompany him.

  Sabrina heard footfalls moving quickly, coming toward the bridge from the main hold. She turned to find her assistant navigator, Ensign Wellington Bratt, dashing onto the bridge, near breathless, his face flushed, with Windermere and Lansa Lazlo, one of the riggers, close at his back. They were pulling a local man, dressed in thick sheepskins, with a leather slouch hat in his hand, along with them.

  “Lieutenant!” Welly shouted. “We have word on the captain!”

  “No need to shout, Mister Wellington,” Sabrina said calmly, as she turned about to face them, but the frightened look on Welly and Lazlo’s faces made her stomach grip hard.

  “Old Caruthers here, he owns the stable,” Welly said
hurriedly. “He says that Captain Buckle’s horse came back a few minutes ago, riderless.”

  Of course. Damn that reckless Romulus Buckle, Sabrina thought. “And there is no sign of the captain or his mountain man?”

  “Nothing,” Welly breathed.

  Sabrina looked at Windermere, whose face was pale. The fear that she had anticipated had materialized. Captain Buckle was in trouble. “Damnable curses! Master of the Launch—screw in the hawsers and cast off on the double quick.”

  “Aye!” Windermere replied, striding forward onto the bridge, barking orders.

  “What about me horses?” Caruthers snapped. He was a skinny stableman with a light brown beard, who reeked of manure, horse sweat, and hay, and when his breath hit Sabrina, it was vastly more vile than all the other stinks put together. “You sky dogs paid for only one! Yer captain only rented my black, and if he dies I want satisfaction!”

  “The captain’s horse,” Welly said. “The horse named Cronos that the captain was riding, it was badly clawed across the haunches. Caruthers says it is a sabertooth wound, says beastie wounds often get infected and the animal dies.”

  Sabrina drew in another breath through her nose, the kind of inhalation that reached the bottom of the lungs and was not so cold as air drawn in through the mouth. But it was not the air that chilled her nerves. If Buckle had gotten into a scrap with some sabertooths and lost his horse in the melee, then he was lucky if he was not already eaten and digested by now.

  “What does he mean, ‘horses’?” Sabrina asked. “The captain only took one.”

  “Your weird-eyed Martian took me other, me good mare,” Caruthers chomped. “But I ne’er trust no zebe, so I made her pay full price for her, and good thing, considerin’ she’s already in a beastie gut!”