Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  The back of his neck stung where the kraken had ripped him. A memory drifted into Buckle’s mind, a memory of himself as a boy, running with a dragonfire lantern clutched in his small hand, many years ago…

  Buckle heard footsteps behind him, soldiers’ boots on stone, and he turned.

  It was Balthazar, leading Katzenjammer Smelt apace. Both men smoked their pipes, and the gray tobacco smoke bearded them as they strode, the bowls glowing like red-hot bird’s nests whenever one of them took a pull.

  “Ah, Romulus, here you are,” Balthazar said. “We must talk.”

  “I suppose we must,” Buckle said, looking at Smelt as the firelight reflected in his monocle.

  Then Smelt smiled. It was not much of a smile as such things went, a sort of tight grimace with positive intent, but it was a smile.

  “Chancellor Smelt has made a kind effort to assist us,” Balthazar said. “He has most graciously offered that his daughter, Valkyrie, join the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s crew as acting chief engineer. She is of course familiar with the airship design, and she shall hold this position for the duration of the mission to Spartak, and until Max recovers.”

  Buckle looked hard at Smelt. If Valkyrie was an effective engineer, then it was not a bad proposal—on the surface. But was Buckle to have a stranger, a foreign officer, acting as his second mate, his third-in-command? One well-placed Founders cannonball could easily make the Imperial princess the acting captain of the Pneumatic Zeppelin. And could Smelt be inveigling his daughter aboard in order to improve his claim if he was still planning to demand the airship’s return to Imperial possession?

  “Thank you, Chancellor. I would be honored to have her aboard,” Buckle said. What else could he say? This was Balthazar’s decision, made without consulting him.

  Smelt nodded, clamping his pipe between his teeth. “She is highly experienced. She will prove herself the excellent officer that she is.”

  “Good,” Balthazar continued. “Romulus, you shall dock briefly in New Berlin and take aboard the Imperial diplomatic team, which shall accompany you to Muscovy.”

  “Very well,” Buckle nodded. He was trapped like a rat in a hole.

  Someone came running up the staircase behind, out of breath and gasping. Buckle, Balthazar, and Smelt spun around.

  It was Jacob Fitzroy, the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s young signals midshipman, and one of the officers of the night watch. His mouth was wide open, sucking air, his sweat-slicked face gleaming in the lamplight.

  Buckle’s entire body tensed. Something had happened on the airship. And it was bad.

  “Captain! Here you are, sir!” Fitzroy coughed as he stumbled up the last step.

  “Out with it, man!” Buckle snapped.

  “There was a saboteur, Captain—aboard the airship!” Fitzroy gasped.

  “What?” Balthazar shouted.

  Buckle’s heart lunged into his mouth. “Where? What was done?”

  “He was caught in the piloting gondola, but Mister De Quincey thinks he had not had time to do anything yet. We can’t find anything out of order, sir,” Fitzroy continued.

  “We may count ourselves lucky, then,” Balthazar muttered, grinding his teeth on his pipe.

  “Curse me straight to hell!” Buckle roared, though he actually felt a touch better, felt a touch calmed. But now the specter of well-hidden sabotage could be added to his mountain of worries. “And where is this saboteur now?”

  “He escaped, sir,” Fitzroy replied. “Toward town. The guard and the constabulary have been informed and are searching for him.”

  Damn it. More cursed bad luck. It would have been a capital revenge to get to interrogate the brute. “Who discovered him?” Buckle asked.

  “Mister Banerji, sir.”

  “I must get back to the ship,” Buckle said, heading for the stairs as Fitzroy fell in beside him. He cursed his decision to join the party. He should have been on the Pneumatic Zeppelin all along.

  “Dispatch rider approaching, on the fly!” shouted a guardsman from the main gate below. “Make way! Clear the road!”

  Buckle turned back and joined Balthazar and Smelt at the balcony rail. More shouts rang out in the courtyard as the guards hustled the lagging coachmen and footmen away from the gate. Buckle heard the horse approach up the road, its hooves thumping the tightly packed earth at a gallop.

  “Who goes there?” the master of the watch howled.

  The rider and horse burst in under the portcullis, the animal hitting the flagstones with a clatter of iron horseshoes.

  “Quentin Heath, rider from outpost Bengal!” the horseman shouted, out of breath, fighting his mount as it tried to wheel. The horse was exhausted, its body steaming in the torchlight, mouth and flanks streaming with foam, tongue dangling out of the side of its mouth. “I carry an urgent message for the council!”

  Buckle recognized Heath, though he would not have been able to recall his name—a small fellow, whose bandolier links glittered under the open flaps of his long duster riding coat, his face a shadow under the brim of a brown leather Akubra hat. Sending a dispatch rider rather than coded lantern signals—the pigeons did not fly at night—meant that the officer at the Bengal outpost considered the news a secret.

  “Ho, there, Quentin Heath!” Balthazar shouted down into the courtyard. “I am Balthazar! What news have you to report?”

  “Admiral, sir!” Heath saluted. “It is reported that the Brineboiler clan is under attack, sir!”

  Buckle’s heart jumped into his throat again. “Under attack from whom?” Balthazar asked.

  “The Founders, sir!” Heath shouted, reining in his laboring horse as it spun around in a slew of foam, its hooves scraping loud on the flagstones. “The Founders have attacked the Brineboilers!”

  Balthazar turned away from the balcony, his shoulders heaving as he struck his fist into the palm of his hand. “We are caught unprepared! Damn us to hell! While we sat here dancing, the Founders invasion has begun!”

  A MARTIAN NEVER LIES

  MAX HEARD DOCTOR LEE’S VOICE, low, speaking in the kindly way doctors do, and she realized she was in the citadel infirmary. She was aware of Buckle’s presence. He had not spoken, but she knew that Buckle was there—the one whom Lee was speaking to.

  “She is slowly coming around,” Lee said. “You may speak with her if you like, though I do not know if she will be able to respond.”

  “I only have a moment, Doctor,” Buckle said.

  Max fought to open her eyes; the lids fluttered, and her wide-open pupils stung at the soft flashes of pumpkin-colored lantern light. It was night. How long had she been unconscious? Her mind slipped away, wanting to drop off a cliff, but she clawed her way back. Sounds rushed in on her, loud in her ears: rustles of clothing, the scrape of a chair leg across the wooden floor, the hiss of the oil lanterns, the steady, metallic wheeze of her brother’s iron lung beside her. Her body, tight with drug-blunted pain, warned her that her wounds were extensive. She could still feel the awful punch of the sabertooth fangs in her flesh, the rip of the claws. She shuddered. She was cold despite the heavy wool hospital blankets on her. And she was thirsty.

  There was someone else in the room, Max sensed. A badly injured person, unconscious. She did not know who it was.

  A wooden chair creaked at Max’s bedside. She felt a hand, Buckle’s hand, slip around her cold fingers, gently bundling them in his warm flesh.

  “Hello, young lady,” Buckle whispered in her ear, so close that she could hear the moistness of his tongue in his mouth. “The sawbones tells me you are recovering nicely.”

  Buckle was troubled. Max could sense it in his voice, even if he was trying to hide it by being soothing. Something was very wrong. Her heart pounded inside the distant, faraway cavern of her body. She tried to force herself awake. Her eyes would not open again, but she felt her body twisting.

  “Whoa, take it easy, Max,” Buckle said, his hand squeezing hers. “Take it easy. It is all right. Everything is all right.”
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  “She is still in shock,” Lee’s voice echoed from across the room. “You may not get anything coherent from her quite yet. And it is time for her next dose of morphine.”

  Max heard the zip of the knife against the frail glass of the vial, the quick snap as the nipple broke off. She did not want the morphine. She wanted to be awake, no matter how much her wounds hurt her. She wanted to be awake long enough to see Buckle, to talk to him.

  “Max, can you hear me? I have to go,” Buckle said, releasing her hand. “I will check in on you as soon as I return. I brought you some presents.” She heard his clothing rustle as he stood, the soft clatter of small things on the bedside table. “I took the liberty of bringing a few items from your cabin, a hummingbird nest and a chrysalis—is this from Sequoia? I don’t know how you ever find the time to collect these things. They can help keep you occupied—you can study them while you convalesce. And there is a little gift from me as well. I made it myself.”

  Buckle was being calm, but he was in a terrible hurry.

  Max lifted her eyelids and held them open. For a moment, all she could make out were shadows and shapes in the nebulous orange haze of lantern light. To her left loomed the bolted hump of Tyro’s iron lung. Then the seams of the white-painted roof above her emerged into a set of soft vertical lines. She could not turn her head yet, but in the periphery of her vision she could see Buckle standing on her right. At the moment, his head was turned away toward Lee, and he had yet to notice that her eyes were open. He was dressed in his zeppelineer togs: his knee-high boots, the black trousers with the red stripe, his long leather coat with its double row of buttons, drawn in hard at the waist by his leather belt. He held his top hat, with its array of gears and gauges glittering in the lamplight, in his hand.

  “Captain,” Max whispered, her voice as weak and rough as if she had not spoken for a thousand years.

  Buckle knelt down beside her. “Max—you are awake! Can you hear me?”

  “What is happening?” she rasped. “Tell me.” She wanted to say more, but she could not organize it, nor move her concrete tongue again so soon.

  “Don’t talk, Max,” Buckle said gently. “Everything is fine.”

  Max felt Buckle grasp her hands. There was a nervousness in his touch. “Tell me the truth, Captain. You know Martians do not lie, and we can sense the lies of others. Tell me.”

  Buckle nodded. “The Founders have invaded Brineboiler territory. Balthazar has formed an alliance of clans against the Founders: us, the Alchemists, Imperials, Brineboilers, Gallowglasses, and, just barely, the Tinskins.”

  Max felt the stinging prick of a needle in the bend of her elbow, the heaviness of a morphine-filled vein. She realized that Doctor Lee was seated at her other side, and he was now withdrawing an empty syringe from her arm.

  Max’s eyes slammed shut and she fought them open again after two quivering blinks. “We need Spartak…the Steamweavers.”

  “I am on my way to Spartak. Ryder is off to negotiate with the Steamweavers.”

  Max wanted to be angry at herself but she could not muster it. Things were bad and here she lay useless in the infirmary, when the Pneumatic Zeppelin needed her most. She was only partially conscious now, being dragged away by the rhythmic lullaby of Tyro’s iron lung.

  “Get better. We need you,” Buckle said. “I have to go now.”

  “What happened to me?” Max asked.

  “You do not remember?” Buckle replied, sounding surprised.

  “I remember the sabertooth on my back,” Max said. “But no more.”

  “And nothing after that?” Buckle said. Max detected a hint of both relief and disappointment in his voice.

  “I do not remember,” Max whispered. She sensed the morphine torpor coming for her, and she allowed her eyelids to slip shut, surrendering to the void. She had lied. She remembered Buckle’s naked torso pressed to hers, his chest a hot boiler against her frozen skin. She remembered her trembling lips finding his and the surge of life that kiss had poured into her ravaged body.

  She remembered him kissing her back.

  She remembered everything.

  LADY ANDROMEDA’S CARRIAGE

  CURSING IMPATIENTLY UNDER HIS BREATH, Buckle shared a concerned glance with Sabrina beside him as their dark carriage rattled and bumped up the rough-hewn access road of the airfield. It seemed like it was taking forever to get to the Pneumatic Zeppelin. He felt trapped in the lightless compartment, rocking back and forth, assailed by the noise of creaking axles and copper-sheathed wheels, the coachman’s whip and pounding horse hooves. Fitzroy, Ivan, and Windermere crowded on the opposite bench, the latter two hastily dressed in their aviator togs, their faces pained by lovers’ farewells.

  The courtyard of the citadel had been a scene of controlled chaos: soldiers and servants shouting in the night as they dashed about in a near panic of swinging lanterns and torches, ambassadors and their aides shouting as they searched for the proper carriages in the lines, and their coachmen shouting out their passengers’ titles as they fought to control spooking horses. Buckle had seen Thaddeus Aleppo and his fellow Brineboiler rush past. Aleppo’s ruddy face was frantic, cold-slicked with tears; there was no knowing what they might find when they arrived home.

  Buckle’s gaze focused on Fitzroy. “You say the saboteur had no identifying markings, Mister Fitzroy? Are you sure?” Buckle had asked Fitzroy the same question four different ways since they had piled into the carriage, but he could not stop himself from asking it again.

  “No, Captain,” Fitzroy shouted back over the din. “But he was dressed pretty much all in black, according to Mister Banerji’s account. Mister De Quincey sent me off to find you on the spot, sir. Perhaps they found something later, sir.”

  Buckle nodded, noticing that Ivan held Holly’s whale-ivory-and-garnet cameo in his hands. “A grand token from your lady, Ivan?”

  “Yes,” Ivan replied.

  “It is quite a lovely gesture of affection,” Sabrina added.

  Ivan smiled a little. “Yes, it is, is it not? Holly even offered to provide me with a teardrop for my chemical experiment, but I will be damned if I had anything in which to collect it.”

  “I am sure you will make her cry quite often,” Sabrina said lightly. “You are far too difficult, after all.”

  Ivan nodded without protestation. He pulled the little wooden cardinal he had carved out of his pocket. “I forgot to give her my present. In the rush, I forgot to give it to her.”

  “It shall be a fine gift for her when you get back,” Sabrina said.

  The carriage hit a rough patch and groaned to a stop. Windermere hopped to the door and leapt out, holding it open. “There appears to be someone here waiting to see you, Captain,” he called back in.

  Collecting his sword, dismayed at the prospect of further delays, Buckle glared at Windermere as he stood outside the carriage door, backlit by falling snow and orange lantern light. “Someone? For the love of—Windy, be specific!”

  “It is an Alchemist general, Captain,” Windermere offered quietly.

  “Lady Andromeda must be here,” Sabrina whispered.

  “Aye,” Buckle replied, leveraging himself out onto the carriage steps and looking back at Sabrina. “Have Banerji show you exactly where the saboteur was when he found him. And see to the final preparations. I want to cast off before dawn.”

  “Aye,” Sabrina said.

  Buckle jumped to the ground. The air of the freshly fallen night met him with its harsh chill and coal fog, his boots crunching in a churned mess of ice, stiffening dope, soil, barrel dust, and mule manure—the perfume of every docked zeppelin. The repair dock in front of him was a lumber berth built twenty feet high, with the derricks and the huge mass of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s flank looming like a mountain above that. Swirling yellow buglights hung on every rope, while the machinist trench under the dock, busy with the mumbles and clatterings of the ground crews, glowed green from its massive glass boil tanks.

 
“Captain Buckle, sir!” a man shouted, not far on Buckle’s left. Buckle turned to see Sergeant Salgado and four marines, their scarlet jackets and red-puggareed pith helmets dusted with snow, marching up the access road with their duffel bags. They were newly assigned to the Pneumatic Zeppelin by Balthazar. Buckle knew Salgado; he was a good man.

  “Sergeant Salgado!” Buckle shouted. “Good to have the marines aboard!”

  “Glad to be here, sir!” Salgado shouted back with another salute.

  Buckle immediately turned to his right and strode toward a waiting carriage, where General Scorpius stood beside the door, his plumed helmet tucked under his arm, his ornate breastplate gleaming with the flicker of a hundred lanterns.

  “Greetings, Captain Buckle,” Scorpius said with a salute. “It seems we only meet under harsh circumstances.”

  “Aye, General Scorpius,” Buckle replied, tipping his hat. “I see they have promoted you to footman. Good show.”

  Scorpius did not crack a smile, nor had Buckle expected him to. He swung the carriage door open. “Please, Captain.”

  Buckle removed his top hat and ducked into the carriage. The interior was lit only by one small whale-oil lamp, whose small pool of light was abandoned in a sea of darkness after Scorpius slammed the door shut, nearly hammering Buckle in the arse with it.

  “Please, Captain Buckle, have a seat.” Andromeda’s hauntingly melodic voice came from the blackness behind the lantern. She was very close, due to the cramped confines of the compartment, but she was beyond the limited reach of the lamplight. “I am honored that you might give me a moment when things are so hectic.”

  Buckle swung onto the opposite bench, gripping his scabbard to keep it clear of his legs. The seat was luxuriously posh, made of velvet and silk, and the wood panels glittered with gold etchings and tortoise wax. Andromeda was riding in one of the princely carriages reserved for visiting dignitaries.