Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  The winged Martian folded his wings upon his back and gave Max a desultory look, a look made even more disdainful by the intensity of his large, brooding black eyes, which stood out under the high white forehead.

  Max knew who he was. The Gravedigger.

  The Gravedigger strode down the stairs to stop very close to her, ten inches taller than the crown of her head, his wings looming even higher. Max smelled him—it was an intense, unrecognizable scent that was still profoundly familiar.

  “You do not belong here,” the Gravedigger said in the language of the Martians, a language Max’s father had taught her as a child. The creature’s voice was deep but thin, the voice of a great being worn tired. He raised his right hand, the long fingers splayed.

  Max plunged into a void. Then the pain came, a deep, stabbing, unspeakable pain. But worse than the pain was the fear. She screamed as she had never screamed before.

  But in her ears she heard only a tiny whisper.

  THE IMMORTALITY EQUATION

  IT WAS STILL AND DARK in the main cavern as Buckle stood over the place where he had bandaged Max the night before, looking at a large pool of brilliant red blood suspended in the clear ice at his feet. He massaged his brow—his brain still ached from the blow Max had landed on him. Lucky that table leg was rotted, or she might have cleaved his skull. Exhaustion blurred his eyes, and he rubbed his fingers against them, the rough, cold leather of his gloves biting the soft skin of the lids.

  The cave was as hollow as a tomb, silent except for the sounds of dripping water at the mouth, where the stovepipe expelled its heat in small sizzles, the rock around it bare and trickling.

  The storm had died away entirely, taking every trace of the wind with it. Outside, an ambient light leaked into the dark-blue sky, signaling the coming of the dawn. Buckle sniffed. The cave was rich with the fetid reek of sabertooth feces; the ice was scored by their pacing claws, and a frozen trail of green blood spilled in a series of tight circles in the middle of the floor. His torch lay in a corner, nearly snapped in half at the handle.

  Buckle drew the flare gun and loaded a magnesium cartridge into the chamber, snapping it shut with a sharp click of metal.

  Then he heard Max. He probably sensed her more than heard her, a scant whisper through her parched lips, but he heard her.

  Romulus was the word, more the sigh of a ghost than a human sound.

  Buckle hurried back into the chamber of numbers, where the fire still burned in the potbellied stove, consuming the last orange embers of its fuel in a bed of white ash, pouring illumination into the room that seemed quite bright after the near darkness of the main cavern. The grating cast wavering shadows on the floor, warm shadows and light that played across the number-covered walls and the roof, and over Max’s white skin. The chamber seemed very small, and Max’s form very close, bundled on the floor where Buckle had lain with her in his arms all night. Her body had warmed enough to make him feel better, though it seemed that his body had exchanged its heat with hers, and now he felt cold and was glad for it. She was still, her heart and breathing regular, and seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep. But now and again she tensed. The morphine must have been wearing off—but with Martians, you could never tell.

  Buckle knelt beside Max, searching for a sign that she might be awake, that the sound he had heard had not been imagined. She looked small and fragile, her eyes closed, her black hair pillowed under her head, and though the fire and his body heat had warmed her, her black stripes remained a ghastly gray, her white skin featureless and slick as alabaster, her lips drained of color.

  “Max?” Buckle breathed.

  Max opened her eyes, blinking before she focused those deep, endless pools of violet blackness on him.

  “Drink a little,” Buckle said, collecting the canteen, full of cool meltwater, and carefully raising Max’s head to bring the metal canister to her lips. She took a few swallows, forcing it down her throat with tortured gulps.

  “Hello,” Buckle said, laying her head back on her fur, trying to be lighthearted, unable to suppress a grin. “Are you warm?”

  Max nodded. “Romulus,” she whispered again.

  Buckle placed his fingers on her cool lips. “No, just rest,” he said. “Unless you are in pain. Tell me if you are in pain.”

  Max shook her head a little, and winced.

  “Ah, do not move, girl,” Buckle said hastily. “I am going to give you some medicine.” He began unloading the syringe and morphine vials from the emergency pouch.

  “I would prefer you hold back on the morphine, Captain,” Max breathed, soft but clear.

  “No arguing with the doctor,” Buckle said, sawing off the nipple of the morphine vial and draining it into the syringe. He tapped the glass to free it of bubbles, then carefully drew Max’s arm from beneath the cover and sank the needle into her artery.

  “I submit a formal protest,” Max whispered, her voice paper thin.

  “Nice to have you back, Chief Engineer,” Buckle said, retracting the empty syringe and pressing the hole with a small wad of gauze. “How was your journey through the land of the dead?”

  “Dark, but not entirely unpleasant,” Max said.

  “Nice to hear it,” Buckle replied. “Though I personally have no intention of ever visiting the place.”

  “Of course Captain Buckle shall live forever,” Max breathed, then clamped her jaw, her body tensing.

  “Sleep. You need it.”

  Max’s eyes fluttered as the morphine swept through her, then refocused and scanned the walls of the cave. “Numbers,” she muttered. “Immense calculations. The infinity symbol appears many times.”

  “So it does. Enough with the mathematics. Sleep.”

  Max looked at Buckle that way she sometimes looked at him, a sort of intense, curious scrutiny that he always found slightly amusing. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “The one who lived here before, he or she sought to live forever.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The numbers are a Martian mystery. The immortality equation. Find the answer, and you discover the secret to eternal life.”

  “So the former occupant was a Martian?” Buckle asked.

  “Possibly. Either way, their efforts would have been in vain. The immortality equation is a dead end, a myth. It is unsolvable.”

  “Either way, it is of no concern to us,” Buckle said. “Get some sleep.” He dug around in the survival pouch for fresh bandages, but when he raised his eyes he saw that Max was already asleep, the coat lifting and falling evenly over her breast. He picked up the flare gun and quietly backed out of the chamber of numbers.

  Buckle strode through the cavern with his heart bounding; the world, the painful, uncaring, merciless world, held a hopefulness once again. He kicked through a new, thin snowdrift at the mouth and stepped outside into the preternatural light. He paused, listening. The air was cold, motionless, heavy, expectant. Sparrows, cardinals, and chickadees sang in the trees, a chorus chattering for the coming of the day. The dark clouds above, still glistening silver with the last traces of moonlight, began to glow pink in the creases of their endless ripples. Buckle could see the sweep of the snowy ridge before him as it led to a cliff and dropped away into a sprawling vista of snowbound mountains and sky. Behind him, a steep slope loomed, the near-vertical incline he and Max and Cronos had tumbled down the evening before.

  The snow in front of the cave entrance had been trampled by the pacing sabertooths. Ice droplets lay scattered about, frozen globs of saliva that had dripped from the bladed incisors.

  Buckle had escaped the sabertooths again, as he had once before. The damned beasties were always trying to make a meal of him.

  He strode forward, his boots swishing long troughs in the fresh snow, and made his way to the crest of the cliff. The air was cold in his lungs, sharp with the tang of pine. Not far below, though blocked from his view by a high ridge, lay the town of Tehachapi, where the Arabella was moored with her crew on the
night watch. Sabrina would be concerned about him by now, for he and Pinter had been scheduled to return before midnight. He did not know whether Sabrina would yet be aware of Max’s foray up the mountain as well, for the Martian must have slipped away without informing Sabrina, senior to her in rank, knowing she would not have permitted her to follow Buckle.

  Buckle raised the flare gun. A well-placed shot would send the burning arc high over the intervening ridge, and the lookouts would most surely see it framed against the dark sky.

  Buckle did not want the Arabella to come up this steep altitude, the small launch being vulnerable to the season’s sudden, violent storms, like the one that had sprung up the day before. But Max needed immediate help. His red flare would signal an emergency. Sabrina would send a rescue team up on horseback. Surely she would do that, for to try to bring the Arabella up to this height in the Bloodfreezer season would be far too risky a proposition, even for his gutsy chief navigator. Although he supposed that he would brazenly steam the Arabella up there if he were in her boots, but that was him—far too reckless. Surely the cool-headed, green-eyed Sabrina had better sense than he did, when it came to such choices.

  In his heart, though, he half hoped and half feared that she night not.

  Buckle aimed the flare gun and pulled the trigger. The pistol fired, kicking with its usual tonk, hurling the flare high into the sky. The cartridge burst, a bright-scarlet pop against the clouds, and arced on its little parachute, casting a haunting glow as it drifted over a wilderness still hidden in darkness.

  The Arabella’s lookouts would surely see that.

  Buckle watched the flare fall away, its last sputters of magnesium burning off as it descended beyond the long ridge, now more white than red. The vast world suddenly fell silent—even the prattling birds hushed, clamping their tiny breaths in their heaving breasts. They waited. Buckle knew what was coming. When it was cold enough and the rising sun was angled just the right way above the cloud cover, it would happen.

  The dawning bore.

  A spectacular wash of pink and purple swept across the heavens, rippling through the clouds in a breathtaking pastel wave of color. The entire cloud roof of the world flooded in a tidal wave from gray to brightening reds and pinks, and in the instant it took for the sky to flip to morning, every bird on the mountain burst into furious, elated song.

  The rare sight moved Romulus Buckle’s heart. Max was going to live. And he was going to carry her home.

  THE MAGNESIUM FLARE

  “FLARE SIGHTED, LIEUTENANT,” WELLINGTON SHOUTED from his station in the nose of the Arabella’s cockpit. “Northeast. Two points high off the starboard bow.”

  The lookouts shouted into the chattertubes at the same instant, instantly followed by the ringing of the ship’s bell on the weather deck.

  “No need to shout, Mister Wellington,” Sabrina said. “I am right behind you.” She felt an indescribable joy at the sight of the flare, a surge of anticipation that made her throat constrict and her hands clamp tight on the wooden instrument panels. The mountain, with its sweeping cliffs of snow and ice, no longer appeared too vast, inscrutable.

  “Aye, Lieutenant,” Welly replied, glancing back at her, smiling, his eyes gleaming with excitement. “My apologies, ma’am.”

  Sabrina was smiling, too. After four hours of searching, they had found Captain Buckle, his guide, and, hopefully, the missing Max, as well. “Helm, bring us to bear on the base of the arc.”

  “Aye, Lieutenant,” Charles Mariner replied, easing the rudder wheel over in his hands. Mariner, sallow-faced but husky, was the assistant helmsman aboard the Pneumatic Zeppelin. Most of the crew assigned to the launch were the assistants and apprentices aboard the mother airship.

  Sabrina leaned forward into the big glass nose bubble, with its arching cast-iron frames, brushing shoulders with Welly. She scanned the ridges and cliffs above, the snow glowing with the early blue illumination of the dawn. The Arabella was buzzing, alive with the sounds of crew members shouting back and forth and the rustle of bodies dashing up and down the companionways and ladders. She wanted to double up the lookouts, but she had already doubled them—if she tripled them, there would be no one left to drive the launch.

  The Arabella’s nose dipped, forced down by one of the mild downdrafts they had been fighting all the way up the mountain. Sabrina sensed the airship rotating slightly on her axis, rolling a hair over to port.

  “Downdraft, Lieutenant!” Mariner yelled, whirling the rudder wheel to starboard.

  “Compensating forward pitch, three degrees up bubble!” Ensign Wong, the elevatorman, cried, cranking his wheel over with considerably more effort than Mariner had needed for his.

  “I am getting tired of being shoved around,” Sabrina grumbled. She clicked the chadburn handle forward, from all ahead standard to all ahead full. “All ahead full!” she shouted into the chattertube.

  “All ahead full, aye!” came the reply from Danny Faraday in the engine room, the chadburn engineering dial clicking into place atop the piloting dial with an abrupt puff of steam.

  The propellers roared up to a pleasant whirl.

  The Arabella’s nose swung easily through the gulf of open air between her and the steep face of the mountain. Sabrina grinned to herself, both at the success of having located Buckle and at the elegant lightness of the Arabella, handling deft as a feather, despite the heaviness of the freezing air at altitude.

  “Back on original bearing, ma’am,” Mariner said.

  “Static inertia good, zero bubble!” Wong reported.

  “Very good, sky dogs,” Sabrina said. “I shall deliver a glowing report about all of you to the captain if we live through this.”

  Suddenly, the dawning bore, a meteorological phenomenon causing the light of daybreak to flood across the sky all at once, ripped through the clouds, roofing the world with a ceiling of flower-colored pinks and oranges.

  “The bore!” Welly gasped.

  “Eyes on the ground, Navigator,” Sabrina said. She had no time to regard the beauty of the rare atmospheric display; dangerous weather conditions caused such phenomena and, as her breath wreathed around her chin in dense issues of vapor, she was concerned about a precipitous drop in the temperature. She eyed the barometer glass—the quicksilver hung steady in its tube, but she was not convinced.

  Looking out at the sky, she studied the undertones of the atmosphere, the scud and colors of the altocumulus mackerel layer. Already, the morning sunlight was flooding down upon the world, pinking the silvery sea of clouds, pinking the nose-dome glass, as the sun, long lost behind the permanent overcast, rose unseen once again. The snowbound peaks and valleys sparkled in the soft light, each ridge and crest rippled with ragged lines of ice-sheathed pine and fir. Sabrina could just make out the towering black column of the Sequoia Obelisk, barely visible far to the north off the port forward quarter.

  She cleared her cold throat—it tasted of bitter coffee.

  “Lieutenant!” Welly shouted, lowering his telescope and pointing straight ahead, across a valley toward a long, narrow cliff set in the face of the mountain beyond. “I see the captain! On the mountain. Dead ahead.”

  “I am standing right beside you, Welly,” she said, wanting to screw her finger in her ear for effect. She raised her telescope and swept it along the cliff, quickly training it on the small black figure of a man standing in the snow, flashing a mirror at the airship. He fired another red flare, and Sabrina’s heart happily leapt into her throat with it.

  RESCUED, FOR NOW

  SABRINA WAS SHOCKED BY MAX’S ghastly appearance—her face looked so awfully pale and gaunt, tucked deep inside her black bearskin hood—as the crew hurried her stretcher up the nose loading ramp of the Arabella. She was relieved that they had rescued Buckle and Max, but that emotion was warped under anxiety. Despite Max’s wounds, Sabrina trusted enough in the famous Martian resilience to believe that her adopted sister would recover. But Romulus looked so stricken, so ashen-faced, hi
s hands and coat crusted with dried blood, as he approached her.

  “Damn you, Serafim,” Buckle said, drawing his usual self up and out of a well of haggard exhaustion, sounding both angry and relieved as he strode alongside Max’s litter. “This mountain is no place for a skinny little launch. Have you lost your mind?”

  It was always impressive, Sabrina thought, that Buckle could chide her, while at the same time thanking her profusely with his bright, expressive blue eyes—eyes that were also deeply wounded. “How is Max?” she asked.

  Buckle gripped Sabrina’s arm at the wrist, clenching it tightly with his bloodstained fingers as he followed the stretcher bearers up the ramp. “Sabertooths got her. But she shall pull through.” He leaned close to Sabrina’s ear and whispered quickly, “It was the Founders. The Founders raided us at Tehachapi—not the Imperials.”

  It was the Founders! Katzenjammer Smelt had been telling the truth. Sabrina slowed to a stop, as Buckle and the stretcher bearers carried Max up the gangway and into the Arabella’s hold. Buckle had given her a secret, another secret to store along with all the other things she kept hidden from the world.

  “Mister Lazlo!” Sabrina shouted.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” Lazlo, a thin, small fellow with a pleasant smile, replied immediately. As the junior rigger, he was responsible for the Arabella’s field-mooring crew.

  “Cast off lines and weigh sky anchor, on the quick!” Sabrina ordered, already marching up the ramp and striding into the Arabella. “We are getting the hell off this mountain.”

  “Aye, aye!” Lazlo replied.

  Sabrina hurried up into the cockpit, where Windermere and the bridge crew were at their stations. It was a bit warmer in the small piloting cabin, and freezing air streamed off her long leather coat.