Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  In the last moment of consciousness, a consciousness of what seemed to be the end of his life, Buckle felt the monster’s suckers—somehow penetrating between his pith helmet and the collar of his greatcoat—latch on to the skin at the back of his neck and take hold.

  Then the kraken dropped him.

  Buckle, near blind and half-dead, was jolted back into coherence. The impact of the fall, soft with the give of the envelope skin, and hard with the slap of the ice and the unforgiving girder underneath, punched a shot of air into his chest. Sabrina was on him, her axe blade and goggles awash with yellow beastie blood, her bright red ringlets swinging around her head, her white teeth gritted.

  “Romulus, damn you!” Sabrina shouted as she tore at the tentacle binding his body. “Stay with the wedge, sir, damn you, with all due respect, sir!”

  Though his head swam, Buckle heard Sabrina’s words; with his lieutenants constantly saving his life—Max and now Sabrina—perhaps he should be more careful.

  Darcy was there, his mighty hands alongside Sabrina’s as they pulled the tentacle loose. The sucker that had latched onto the back of Buckle’s neck was torn free; he felt a disc of his skin rip away with it. Buckle wheezed, sucking in snow-filled air that near froze his lungs solid, but the pain reanimated him.

  Buckle forced himself to his knees, gasping over the hacked remains of the beastie tentacle that had been one squeeze away from killing him. The rancid ammonia reek of the beastie blood cleared his senses. He lurched to his feet and picked up his axe—it came up with a sticky snap, the blood-slushy haft already half frozen to the deck—and found himself alongside his crew, battling the weaving net of tentacles surrounding them. The kraken hunched forward, foot by foot, and with each heave the Arabella shuddered under Buckle’s feet.

  Sabrina, standing right in front of Buckle, dropped hard on her back, losing her axe, and was jerked away toward the kraken. A tentacle had secured Sabrina’s left leg from heel to thigh in loops, the reddish-purple muscles locked down despite her attempts to lurch forward and pry at them with her hands. The beastie had her.

  “Lieutenant!” Darcy howled, grasping, but the curling brawn of a beastie arm knocked him back into Buckle as he lunged.

  Sabrina’s helmet bounced away, her red hair bursting loose of its pinnings, swirling about her head like fire in the twilight, and she vanished into the beastie’s thicket of arms.

  Sabrina Serafim, having just saved the life of her captain, now only had mere seconds to live herself.

  CLICK, CLICK, CLICKETY-CLICK. The kraken sawed its beaks in anticipation.

  Buckle scrambled to his feet and charged.

  “Captain! Wait, sir!” Darcy howled as Buckle sprinted past him.

  A mistake to wait, Mister Darcy, Buckle thought. A mistake to charge as well. Buckle chose the better mistake.

  Swerving through tentacles, Buckle plunged into the forest of writhing whips and roots. He kept his axe tight against his body, ducking and weaving under the grasping suckers that sought to wrap him. He ran straight ahead—straight at the kraken. Buckle had attacked out of instinct—but he trusted his instinct to be right. The big-brained beastie would expect the zeppelineers to try to save their crewmate. The last thing the kraken might expect would be a sprint right down its gullet.

  Before he was even ready for it, Buckle found himself springing along a main appendage, launching in a great leap up and over the beastie’s wall of tentacles. He arrived, in midair, under the creature’s cheek, face-to-face with snapping jaws slathered with an awful mix of human blood and alien saliva.

  Buckle’s small, mortal eyes met the huge center eye of the monster, with its thousands of glittering chambers. The kraken saw Buckle—it saw him—and Buckle was suddenly aware of an unfathomable weight of centuries, of endless light-years of distance in the far reaches of space, of the weariness of eternity; he was hypnotized in the split second between his leap, his body in the air, axe raised high over his head, and the delivery of his blow.

  The middle eye slammed shut its massive, armored lid, but Buckle sailed past it, having launched his jump to the right. The three small eyes on the left side of the kraken’s head were still open; Buckle hewed his axe blade through two of them in one swing, rupturing them in guttering gouts of clear fluid. The eyelids slammed shut over the slashed orbs, but too late. The kraken recoiled, its tentacles wrenching the Arabella’s airframe, making girders shriek and bolts pop like gunshots. Buckle slammed into the side of the kraken’s head, losing his grip on his axe as it stuck fast in an eye socket. He grabbed ahold of the beastie’s bone-ridged brow, swinging over a nest of snaking arms.

  A tentacle had him, prying him loose. As Buckle’s hands tore free of the gelatinous flesh of the brow, he found himself suspended by a great anaconda coil of tentacle, wrapped around his waist. The kraken flung open its big eye as it dangled Buckle in front of it, the honeycombed lenses scrutinizing him, the beaks slewing back and forth below it.

  CLACK, CLACK, CLICK, CLACK, CLACK.

  The tentacle tightened about Buckle’s body, slowly lowering him into the horrible sawmill of the mouth, as if the beastie intended not only to consume him but to enjoy the agonies of his slow death.

  Buckle drew his pistol, jammed it into the center of the gigantic, multichambered eye, and pulled the trigger.

  The blackbang pistol boomed; the great eye collapsed, imploding, the chambers flickering between light and darkness, the eyelid blinking madly, sloshing-over iridescent fluid pouring out of the bullet hole, followed by streams of yellow blood.

  The kraken’s beaks stopped grinding and flung open in a death splay. The beastie clenched up, gurgling as it made a last, vain effort to draw sense from its riven brainpan, and then fell limp. The wavering forest of tentacles all dropped to the deck at once. The arm binding Buckle released him—he fell onto the envelope, landing in a pool of blood and eye plasma. He nearly slipped through a hole, which would have been unfortunate, for he would have plummeted five stories down to the Arabella’s weather deck, below.

  The beastie slid backward, slowly, but gaining speed, as the weight of the huge carapace dragged the corpse off the end of the stern.

  No brain stuffing for this kraken, Buckle thought as he staggered to his feet, sidestepping the streams of dead tentacles as they slithered away with their dead master. He saw the beastie’s face, the light in the center eye going black as its life was extinguished, a life he knew to be as old as the world.

  “Romulus!” Sabrina shouted.

  Buckle spun to see Sabrina, her leg still wrapped in the dead kraken’s tentacle, being dragged with it over the side.

  SKIES OF GLASS

  “COME INTO THE ATRIUM, MY dear Sabrina, please,” Sabrina heard her mother, Chelsea, ask in her dulcet voice, which reminded her of warm tea, strawberry jam, toy dogs, and amateur but well-acted theatrical productions. “Isambard has powered up the cloudbuster—you can come in and take some sun with me.”

  It was strange to Sabrina that such a memory would come as the dead kraken carried her off stern of the Arabella and into oblivion in the Bloodfreezer. Such things that leap into the mind of the doomed!

  Yet Sabrina had not given up. She still fought for life with all she had; having lost her axe, she hacked at the thick, rubbery tentacle with her knife. But she could only lean forward in lunges at the flesh that held her as it dragged her in a skittering slide across the roof, delivering jarring blows to her arse and spine at the hump of every girder.

  Her vision was a blur of flashing sky and tentacles.

  “Damned, wretched beastie!” she swore, barely aware that she was yelling. Her helmet had fallen away, taking her goggles with it. Her cheeks and ears were numb, and the wind cruelly whipped her scarlet hair about her face and eyes, half blinding her. She had slashed her shin several times as she stabbed at the tentacle, but that did not really matter.

  She knew that her crewmates were running after her, shouting and slipping across the ice, but the
y had no chance of reaching her in time. A vision appeared to her of her frozen body forever suspended in the dismal storm, a dead navigator turned to ice, never to fall to earth again.

  She was going over the side.

  And she had not gotten her revenge.

  But it was mostly all right. She had given her life to save Romulus Buckle.

  “Sabrina, please come in the atrium, dearest,” Chelsea asked again, her voice soft, deepened by a hint of annoyance. Chelsea was easily disappointed, a trait shared by many members of the Goethe family bloodline.

  “I am coming, Mother,” Sabrina replied, studying a yellow canary as she balanced the little bird on her finger. “I shall be in presently.”

  “We only get sun for four minutes, dear. I would suggest you should come in here now,” Chelsea said.

  Sabrina pursed her lips. She had been told that she was far too introspective for a seven-year-old girl, but she knew that her father loved how smart she was. And it was not a show: she liked to read the old books about all things—which thrilled her tutor, a stuffy crane with a gentle soul, named Edward Marter—fiction, mathematics, geography, and especially art, which was her father’s favorite subject. Yesterday she had drawn him a rather brilliant portrait of his horse, a strawberry roan named Barbarossa, and he had pinned it to the window sash in his office, where the soft sunlight made it glow.

  She peered at the canary, observing how it bobbed its head back and forth, feeling the sharp but comfortable clutch of its little talons as they played across her fingers. The massive crystal palace was full of thousands of canaries of every color and size, hopping to and fro in elaborate cast-iron birdhouses built for them long ago. The birds were necessary, her parents said, for the canaries were watched closely for any signs of distress, the birds being sensitive to trace amounts of the poison fog surrounding the city.

  Sabrina jiggled her finger; the little canary chirped at her, then almost reluctantly fluttered away. It was a “little rogue,” from one of the small colonies made up of canaries that had escaped their cages over the decades; they were allowed to live free inside the palace, sometimes splattering white guano on the nice table linens. But Sabrina liked the little rogues; she wondered if the birds in the cages envied them, or if they were even capable of it.

  Sabrina stood up from the rim of the gurgling fountain, where she had been sitting with her fauna sketchbook. It was full of her bird drawings—quite good ones—and one drawing of a chubby rat she had seen in an alley, which amused her father and disturbed her mother. Chelsea had suggested that the vermin sketch be destroyed, but Sabrina had not obeyed her; it was a good drawing, and Sabrina quite liked it. She sniffed, flattening out her white wool dress with the palms of her hands, looking down past the ends of the blue ribbons in her pigtails, over the little hump of her tummy to the polished toes of her black shoes, below. The company of the canary had proven an effective antidote to the undercurrent of nervousness that had been running through her all morning. She had observed her father and others whispering furtively in the hallways, large, dark figures of family members and friends she had known all her life, who had suddenly and inexplicably taken on a hint of menace—not in their actions toward her, which were as kind as usual, but in the darting of their eyes, in the clamp of their jaws, and in the way they hunkered in the shadows.

  The salty smell of the seawater splashing in the fountain was pungent in her nose, and she liked it—it was a nice accompaniment to the aroma of the roast beef being broiled by the cooks in the kitchens. Snorting air in and out of her nostrils, Sabrina tried to separate the scents of the seawater and roast beef, seeing if she could isolate which part of her nose detected salty and sweet. She caught a rancid whiff of bird guano, and it ruined her whole experiment.

  “Sabrina!” her mother cried, exasperated. “The beautiful sun!”

  Sabrina turned and took off at a skipping run. She was all alone in the grand gallery of the crystal palace, a small white dot in the midst of a sprawling architectural marvel. The palace was constructed of huge sheets of plate glass—the ceiling and walls all supported by frames and columns of black cast iron. The cast iron itself was ornate, fashioned to emulate vines, tree trunks, branches, hawks, owls, and gargoyles. Muted sunlight burst in through a few spots on the soot-covered glass roof, its pale yellows playing oddly in the blue-white illumination of the gas lamps, the beams gleaming on the pink-white marble floor. Five seawater fountains lined the middle of the hall, though three had fallen to mere dribbles—Sabrina liked to think there were little fish stuck in the pipes of the feeble ones.

  Sabrina hurried toward the archway of the atrium entrance, which was rich with the yellow glow of sunlight. She wanted to visit the sun, to feel its tender and stinging heat on the skin of her face, and she suddenly felt a bit frantic—she was furious with herself. Why had she not listened to her mother? If she missed out on sunbathing this week, she would have no one but herself to blame. Oh, such a sorry state of affairs. It was never good to have only oneself to blame.

  When Sabrina arrived in the atrium, she skidded to a stop right at the place where the shadow of the archway met the daylight pouring down on the floor from above. She loved stepping from shadow into light and back again, for such opposites of illumination rarely existed in a world of blue gas lamps and constant gray fog. She squinted; the overhead glass, washed clean by the servants, swam with liquid light. It was very bright sunshine.

  When Sabrina saw her mother, Chelsea, she caught her breath. Chelsea was a woman blessed with a tremulous beauty, and she never looked more beautiful than when she chose to bask in the golden sun. She lay draped on a couch in the center of the atrium, toying with a gold and garnet locket about her slender neck. Chelsea Goethe was trim and proper, an elite lady of the first class, but when she found the sunlight, the precious few minutes she could have of it once every week, there emerged from within her a being much more hedonistic, even careless. The couch was Chelsea’s favorite place to sun and therefore left empty by everyone else who visited the atrium, leaving her to lounge in its vast plunge of faded green velvet with red-striped pillows; and once sequestered there, warmed up, eyelids closed, Sabrina had learned she made an easy mark for her children’s requests.

  Chelsea smiled when she saw Sabrina. “Hello, my darling bird child. Scoot yourself in here or you shall regret missing the sunbeams, like you always do.”

  Sabrina stepped into the sunlight with one great dramatic stride. She blinked in the light, instantly feeling the sun roast the top of her head, and the warmth reflected up from the floor. She smelled heated glass, iron, and dust.

  “Come, sit with me,” Chelsea said, patting the couch.

  Sabrina stepped to her mother, a woman who was exactly what Sabrina wanted to be when she grew up. Chelsea was tall and graceful, the length of her body accentuated as she lay on her side, her shoes kicked off and her legs bared—she had pulled her skirt up to her thighs with her legs crossed, though the crossing did little to reduce the languidness of the effect. She propped herself up on one elbow as she looked at her daughter. Her shoulders, arms, and hands were small and fine, and her long blond hair was almost always pinned up at the base of the neck, though she liked to leave two small tendrils dangling in ringlets at the temples. Her eyes were dark blue and never missed a detail, though she often allowed small transgressions to pass, and her pale skin, unblemished as fresh goat’s milk poured from the morning bucket, glowed in the precious light of the sun.

  There were many people in the atrium that afternoon, but Sabrina only saw one, only remembered one.

  Sabrina dashed to the couch and hopped on the spot at her mother’s waist; they sat quietly, absorbing the sunlight together. Chelsea put her arm around Sabrina and closed her eyes. “Hmmm, this is the life, isn’t it, my dear?” she asked.

  “Hmmmm, yes,” Sabrina replied. “I am a sunbeam now.”

  Sabrina felt her mother’s chest shudder, the small breasts pressing against her back, as
Chelsea quietly laughed.

  “What is so funny, Mother?” Sabrina asked.

  “Just you, little one,” Chelsea said, sighing. “Just you.”

  “I wish Father was here,” Sabrina said, and when she spoke, she felt that odd feeling of uneasiness creeping into her insides again.

  “So do I. But there is an important meeting in the parliament today.”

  Sabrina nodded, kicking her feet a little, so they bounced off the padding of the couch. The top of her head was getting very hot. She loved the sun, but it always got the best of her in the end, leaving her toasted under her clothes. But the atrium days were special. Every Wednesday was a citizen holiday, when Isambard Fawkes had the cloudbuster machines part the fog and clouds above, allowing a spectacular column of sunlight to pour down upon the city. The miracle, the “pleasant four,” only lasted about four minutes before the capacities of the big cloud-busters were exhausted, their great hums dying away. The fog and clouds would roll back again in, swaddling the world once more in endless gray.

  A miniature locomotive train came chugging into the atrium along its elevated track, the tiny smokestack snorting little puffs of steam.

  “Oh, picnic time in the sun!” Chelsea enthused, though she did not move. For such a thin woman, she was a great lover of food.

  The small toy train, its flatbeds loaded down with decks of sliced roast beef, asparagus spears, Yorkshire pudding, strawberries, black toast, and butter, chugged up to a long banquet table and stopped there, its serving cars parked alongside waiting stacks of plates, utensils, lace napkins, and a bowl of sugary lemon punch. The atrium was full of tables, and the Wednesday sunlight picnic was a popular weekly event for the elites of the original Founders families in the palace.