Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “Waiting on hawsers and anchor, Lieutenant,” Windermere said. “Launch is at the ready, ma’am.”

  “Very good,” Sabrina replied. Mariner, the helmsman, knew enough to step aside as Sabrina immediately took hold of the rudder wheel herself. She could hear the chains rattling under the deck as the steam-powered capstans hauled the sky anchor up against the cathead.

  “If I may, Lieutenant,” Windermere began, “inquire about the captain and the second mate?”

  Every face shifted toward Sabrina.

  “The second mate has been badly injured by beasties,” Sabrina said. “The captain appears only to have suffered a few scratches.” Sabrina was speaking of Buckle’s body, not the pain she had seen in his eyes.

  Windermere and the crew turned their faces forward, worried and grim.

  “Lines away!” Lazlo’s voice boomed up the chattertube. “Anchor secure!”

  “About damned time,” Sabrina muttered. “Up ship. Like a feather, Miss Lawrence. Ten percent hydro, ten feet altitude.”

  “Ten percent, ten feet, aye, ma’am,” Alison Lawrence, the Arabella’s ballast officer, replied.

  “No crosswind or downdrafts in the windsocks,” Welly announced.

  The Arabella rose with a soft creak and a sigh of canvas, floating ten feet into the air.

  Sabrina slapped the chadburn handle back, dinging the bell and leaning through its puffing steam to the chattertube hood. “Engineering. Quarter reverse.”

  “Quarter reverse, aye!” Faraday answered on the speaking tube. The engineering pointer on the chadburn swung to match the first.

  The propellers at the stern eased up into a whirl—with the odd, chopping sound they made when in reverse—and the Arabella backed away from the lip of the towering cliff where Sabrina had parked the nose.

  “Coming around to port, one hundred and eighty degrees,” Sabrina announced, as she carefully rotated the helm wheel, swinging the Arabella to the left. Ensign Wong cranked his wheel back and forth to keep the launch’s keel level in the turn. Although they were now away from the cliff face, this was a tricky maneuver even in still air. Downdrafts were sudden and perilous this tight against a mountain.

  “We are away, Lieutenant—clear of the cliff,” Windermere said, steadying his tall form against the whirl of the airship by gripping a set of pipes overhead. “Twenty-two souls aboard. And a bang-up job of tucking the launch in, if I may say, Lieutenant.”

  It was a bang-up job. A damned excellent bang-up job. Sabrina had nudged the nose of the Arabella against the edge of the snowy cliff, a thing impossible to do if there was any wind at all. “Piece of cake, as the captain would say,” she replied.

  Windermere placed his hand on the binnacle, gently, in a new-fatherish but nonpossessive manner. “The Arabella is one spry eagle, aye.”

  “Aye, a fine little wart she is,” Sabrina replied, leveraging her balance as the launch swung around on a gentle 180-degree curve, watching the passing mountain through the less-than-perfect nose glass.

  Windermere grinned, his eyes glittering, then he turned them to the barometer. “We are fortunate that the weather has held as long as it has.”

  “I am not trusting that steady glass,” Sabrina said. “The weather is unnatural.”

  “The lookouts are reporting sporadic refraction to the north,” Windermere added.

  Sabrina nodded. Refraction was a land mirage, a disruption of the lens of the air, caused by superfreezing air passing over the warmer earth; it often heralded an abrupt change in the weather. She clicked the chadburn to neutral and swung the wheel, zeroing out the turn so the Arabella’s nose pointed down the slopes toward Tehachapi. She eyed the water compass until the floating needle held secure over the SW. “Bearing due southwest.”

  “Due southwest, aye,” Welly repeated.

  Sabrina stepped back from the wheel. Mariner immediately moved forward to take the station. “I am going to check in on Lieutenant Max. The bridge is yours, Mister Windermere. Go to all ahead full and get us off this mountain as fast as you can.”

  “With pleasure, ma’am,” Windermere replied. He gave Sabrina a crisp salute, which was unnecessary, but he always saluted anyway.

  Tapping the brim of her bowler in response to Windermere, Sabrina exited the bridge, pulling off her mink-lined gloves and folding them into her belt. She emerged into the main hold, where Faraday urged on his engine crew with gruff curses, their shovels scraping the coal bunkers as red light swirled out of the open hatches of the fireboxes. Sabrina could feel the heat of the fires on her face, and she was seventy feet away.

  Cornelius Valentine, one of the older boilermen and a crusty customer, had come forward to check the coal-bunker trim. He doffed his cap at Sabrina with his coal-stained fingers. “Ma’am,” he said gruffly.

  “Mister Valentine,” Sabrina replied. She clambered up the companionway and turned into the narrow port-side passageway, which ran along the inner hull of the Arabella. On her left ran a series of hatchways, and on the right was the port bulwark, thick with bracings, sloping upward with the contours of the hull. Oil lanterns lit the gloom with pools of light; she passed through them as her boots creaked on the wooden deck. Sabrina shivered, feeling both strangely terrible and good. She was worried about Max and about Buckle, but relieved that they were both lucky enough to still be breathing, considering what kind of beasties they had run into. And Buckle’s whispered words…If he had proven the Founders responsible for the blitz on the Tehachapi stronghold, then the Founders had been attempting to set the major clans against one another, laying the groundwork for their invasion for at least a year. And, incalculably important to Buckle himself, the Founders were the ones who had kidnapped Elizabeth.

  War was coming, and she would surely be provided the opportunity to cross swords with the Founders again.

  Her heart drummed in her chest.

  Sabrina passed Shelley Nightingale, the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s nurse assigned to the Arabella, in the passageway. She carried a metal tray with an empty vial of morphine, a stack of bloodstained bandages, a near-full bottle of rum, and brown-sugar cubes for a missing cup of tea.

  “How is she doing, Shelley?” Sabrina asked.

  “As well as can be expected, Lieutenant,” Shelley replied, careful to balance her tray. Blood, bright, sparkling Martian blood, drained out of the bandages and pooled on the flat metal. “Martians are tougher than shoe leather, I must say.”

  Sabrina nodded as she passed Shelley and stepped into the low hatchway of the Arabella’s sick bay.

  The tiny medical cabin was barely more than a closet lit by one lantern; two bunk beds hung against the forward bulkhead, and a large medicine cabinet left little extra space for the chair and table between. Buckle was sitting in the chair, holding Max’s hand, which was startlingly white, in his; her bare right arm, black-striped and slender, draped across the brown blankets of the lower bunk, looked like the limb of a skeleton.

  Sabrina stepped in, swaying her hip away from the reedy little table where a wet, empty rum glass sat alongside a cup of vapor-drifting tea and Buckle’s scabbard. It smelled like a sick bay: the rotten apple and molasses aroma of morphine clung to the air, along with the eye-stinging waft of iodine, disinfectant, and Fassbinder’s Penicillin Paste, all underpinning the sharp stink of the oil lantern. Sabrina peered at Max’s face as she lay on the pillow, her black hair flung back in a dark halo about her head, her eyes still and shut.

  “Hello, Navigator,” Buckle whispered.

  Sabrina swung her eyes to Buckle. He looked up at her with his gentle smile. His cerulean-blue eyes shone at her. But even with all his fortitude, she could see the tightness of the skin on his face, the dark tinges beneath his eyes.

  “How is she?” Sabrina asked.

  “Sorely sliced. Those beasties did a job on her, I am afraid. Once we get her back to Fogg and Lee, they shall patch her up properly. Fogg knows a little about Martian insides, or so he says.”

  “Fogg
will zip her up tidily, aye,” Sabrina whispered. She cleared her throat as quietly as she could. She found it difficult to speak without her voice rasping. She was worried about Max, yes—but it was the pain flowing from Buckle that haunted her, chewed her up. Sabrina had always been protective of Buckle, but now, since she had witnessed the intimate moment between him and Max in his quarters, when she had seen the hungry, enraptured glow in Max’s eyes, she ached for something more. She wanted to snatch him up and swallow him in her arms, to press her mouth against his, to let him pour his agony into her body, to absorb his pain like a sponge.

  But Sabrina could not act on this desire. She could never act on this desire. She cleared her throat again, softly.

  Buckle lifted his free hand to Sabrina, and she took it. It was encrusted with dried blood, but she enjoyed the warmth of his skin and the strength of his fingers as they tightened around hers.

  “She saved my life, Sabrina,” Buckle whispered.

  “I know,” Sabrina answered. Something darkened the light between her and Buckle. Had the lantern with its restless flame shifted? “She has always been fond of you—in her way, of course—though for the life of me I cannot understand why.” Fond—interesting choice of a word, Sabrina told herself. One thing about Buckle—he was quite the romancer, but blind and dumb as an earthworm when it came to the accelerated heartthrobs of the female species. Max was in love with him, and he had not the slightest inkling of it.

  “All the damn time she is saving my hide,” Buckle whispered, returning his gaze to Max. It hurt Sabrina to have him move his eyes from her; she was caught by a surprising twinge of jealousy toward Max—an illogical desire to trade places with her, despite her wounds.

  Buckle released his hold on Sabrina’s hand. Her fingers felt abandoned. He reached into his pocket, and when he opened his hand, Sabrina saw a silver Founders collar pip sitting in the middle of his bloodstained palm.

  Her nerves tingled. “The evidence, eh?” she whispered. “The devils.”

  “Aye,” Buckle replied, looking at the pip. “And they must have Elizabeth.” He tucked the phoenix back into his pocket and returned his gaze to Max.

  The lantern rocked lightly on its peg. The hull creaked with a low groan.

  “The wind is up,” Buckle said.

  “I was certain we would get something, despite no sign of weather,” Sabrina replied. “I do not like refraction sightings and air heavy as an obelisk. We are running fast, bearing southwest, descending southwest as fast as the topography will allow.”

  Buckle tucked Max’s exposed arm back under the covers and checked the cinches on the leather straps securing her to the bunk. “I’ll come to the bridge.”

  “Stay here. I’ll go,” Sabrina said.

  Buckle stood up so quickly he startled Sabrina, so much taller he was than she, his shoulders blocking the light from the lantern.

  “Romulus…,” Sabrina continued. “You need not…”

  Buckle’s face was inches away from hers, his breath, pulsing easily between his slightly parted lips, warm from a recent shot of uncut grog. The lantern behind him imparted reddish tinges to the edges of his sandy beard, and along the sharp line of his jaw. His eyes were hidden in hollows of shadow, untouched by the light, but she knew he was looking at her—he was looking at her.

  Buckle sighed—it was a soft, quaking, vulnerable sound—and then he sucked in a great breath of air. He wrapped his arms around her, drawing her body tight against his in a gentle hug. She stood stiff for a moment, struck with delighted surprise, and then gripped him fervently, her cheek pressed against the brass buttons on his chest. She closed her eyes, smelling cold leather and the sweet copper of Max’s dried blood. Buckle’s arms were strong, but she also felt a quiver in them, a shaking of the overstrained fibers.

  She wanted the moment to go on forever.

  Was she even breathing?

  It was then that she heard the sharp creak of the deck and bulwarks as the propellers, suddenly rising to a higher pitch in their incessant drone, shoved the airship forward at a harsher rate, increasing the rip of the wind across the envelope and through the rigging.

  Buckle and Sabrina disengaged and jumped toward the hatch, Buckle grabbing his saber from the table. In the same moment, the sound of the ship’s bell clanged loudly in its belfry on the weather deck above, sounding the alarm.

  Martin Robinson, the young assistant signals officer, jumped in through the hatch, the whites of his eyes wide against his dark-brown skin. “Storm approaching, Captain! Lookouts say she’s a bad one!”

  THE TALE OF THE BAROMETER

  BUCKLE FELT A TOUCH OF weightlessness and the downward tilt of the deck under his feet as he, Sabrina, and Robinson raced along the lantern-lit passageways leading back to the Arabella’s bridge. Windermere was on the fast descent: the first instinct of a zeppelineer pilot when faced with an oncoming storm was to try to fly under it. Buckle shook off a wave of lightheadedness—exhaustion. Between the sabertooths and Max’s condition, sleep had been a rare commodity. What is this? he scolded himself, stowing his weaknesses away. Captains never tire. Never.

  As they burst onto the bridge, Windermere spun to face them and threw a finger at the starboard sky. “Off the starboard beam, Captain! I have never seen anything like it!”

  Buckle looked to his right to see a wall of black, a towering wave of dark, churning clouds, fast approaching, blocking out the horizon and the sky.

  “Engines are all ahead flank, sir,” Windermere reported. “We have battened down, and storm lanterns are lit. I initiated descent to one hundred, but she looks to be a ground hugger—I do not think we can get under this one.”

  Buckle glanced at the plummeting quicksilver in the barometer. Sabrina’s worries about the weather had proven prophetic. They were in a world of trouble now. “Level out and maintain altitude. Zero bubble.”

  “Aye, aye!” came the chorus of shouts from the bridge crew, driving wheels and ballast wheels spinning.

  “You are correct, Mister Windermere,” Buckle said as the deck swung up under their feet. “There is no getting under a blizzard.” He felt his stomach tighten. He had been caught in a blizzard once before, when he had been the navigator aboard the Crankshaft trader Bromhead, and it had nearly been the end of both him and the entire crew.

  “Altitude holding at two hundred seventy-five,” Sabrina reported from the navigator’s station. “Bearing, west-southwest.”

  “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Buckle muttered, folding his hands behind his back and setting his feet. The Arabella was roaring down the mountain, pushed beyond her maximum steam, furnaces roaring, driving propellers throbbing—but it was not going to be enough. The storm was going to catch them. And the only way for a zeppelin crew to be certain of surviving a winter storm was…to not let it catch them.

  Sabrina had rolled the dice, bringing the Arabella up the mountain to rescue Buckle and Max, and she had rolled snake eyes.

  “Take us up; emergency ascent,” Buckle said. “If we cannot fly under this devil, then we shall fly over it.”

  “Up ship! Emergency ascent!” Windermere howled, both to the bridge and into the chattertube, as Elevatorman Wong heaved his elevator wheel.

  “Valving hydro to one hundred and five percent. Dumping blue ballast,” Alison Lawrence shouted as she cranked the wheels on the ballast board. The Arabella surged upward, her decks trembling.

  Buckle eyed the approaching storm, so much closer now that it startled him. They could not fly under the blizzard, and any attempt to ground or moor would only result in the Arabella being torn to pieces on the earth. Reaching for altitude was risky when he stood no chance of topping the storm clouds before they hit, but he needed the height; the superfreezing air was heavy, robbing an airship of buoyancy, not to mention the icing that would plague her. Engines and extra hydrogen valving could compensate to a point, but the vertical face of the blizzard was immense, the thunderheads perhaps a mile high. If the A
rabella was to stand a chance, she needed all the altitude she could get.

  “Four hundred feet, sir, and climbing,” Sabrina reported.

  “Clear the weather deck,” Buckle ordered.

  “Weather deck clear, Captain,” Windermere said, having just taken the elevator wheel from Wong; he craned his neck back to catch glimpses of the storm as it approached from starboard.

  “Eyes up, Mister Windermere,” Buckle said calmly. “Watch the bubble, like a good gentleman.”

  Windermere snapped his face back to port and held it there. “Aye, Captain. My apologies, sir.”

  Buckle stared straight ahead, through the clear sky in front of the nose, at the jagged sweep of the mountain slopes as they zigzagged to the valley far below. He did not need to look to starboard to see the storm coming, perpendicular to the starboard beam, for its sweeping black mass was already advancing into his peripheral vision.

  “Five hundred feet,” Sabrina reported.

  “Cells at one hundred and five percent capacity, sir,” Lawrence said.

  “Valve to one hundred and ten, Miss Lawrence,” Buckle said. “And continue valving to maintain buoyancy.” That kind of pressure risked blowing a bag, he knew, but to hell with it—he needed altitude.

  “One hundred and ten. Aye, Captain!” Lawrence replied.

  It was imperative that Buckle swing the Arabella hard a’starboard, leading with her nose to meet the teeth of the maelstrom, rather than being caught broadside, corkscrewed, and ripped apart. But every yard he purchased that brought him farther southwest off the mountain might prove precious at a critical moment. Buckle stood still, his hands clamped together behind his back, sensing a fast-rising tension gripping his crew.

  “Stand fast, mates,” Buckle said. “Hold your course.” He could smell the storm coming now. He knew that smell, knew it from his years living on the mountain, that burned-metal, moist, churned-atmosphere, cold freshness that always preceded the most brutal blizzards.