Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Ivan’s eyes widened. “Perhaps, just a hair. Who knows? But it was not necessary.”

  “Yes, it did improve burning efficiency,” Valkyrie offered. “I do know the best way to operate Imperial-built engine systems, Captain.”

  “Our chief engineer Max would be hurt if you were known to be more wizardly with her engines than she is,” Buckle said, rolling up the chart and plunking it home in its leather case with a hollow thunk.

  “She has done an excellent job with her systems, Captain, but there is always room for improvement,” Valkyrie said.

  “Yes,” Buckle mused. “You are the chief engineer, of course, but perhaps it is best to leave things as they are, do you not agree?”

  Valkyrie nodded, her blue eyes looking through him, not appearing in the least bit ruffled. Buckle wondered if she had any intention of obeying him at all.

  “Captain Buckle!” Sabrina shouted. “New Berlin in sight, one point off the starboard bow, sir!”

  Drawing his telescope from his hat, Buckle hurried up into the nose alongside Sabrina.

  “New Berlin, dead ahead!” the lookout’s voice rattled down the chattertube from the crow’s nest.

  Buckle felt a pang of annoyance as he looked forward, catching the distant patch of light gray against the greens, browns, and whites of the mountains before he lifted his glass to his eye. The barrelman—the forward lookout—should have seen the city before Sabrina did. Through the telescope lens, the dot of New Berlin leapt closer, a light-colored, sprawling mass of buildings built into the side of a mountain and resting atop a cliff. It was a grand, well-designed city, a proud Founders-built colony long ago, before the Founders’ empire had fallen apart.

  “Half full,” Buckle ordered.

  “Half full. Aye, Captain,” Valkyrie repeated, cranking the chadburn and dinging the bell.

  The propellers lowered their throaty roar, and Buckle felt the Pneumatic Zeppelin slow down as he glanced back at the helm. “We shall swing around the city to the north, Mister De Quincey. The airfield is on the north side.”

  “Aye, aye,” De Quincey replied.

  “Ambassador on the bridge!” the marine, a far-too-earnest corporal named Nyland, announced unnecessarily. Buckle glanced back to see the elderly Rutherford Washington exit the stairs onto the deck, wearing his fine white suit with its red ambassadorial sash and cummerbund.

  “We are approaching New Berlin, Ambassador,” Buckle said warmly, covering up his lack of enthusiasm at having another idler on his deck.

  Washington nodded with his usual gravity and sidestepped to the observer’s chair at the rear of the gondola. At least the old lion had sense enough to stay out of the way.

  “Captain,” Sabrina said, and the odd tone of her voice made Buckle whip around. She had just lowered her telescope a hair beneath her green eyes, which were now beset with a quizzical, worried look as they mirrored the sunlight reflecting off the mountains of ice, and then jerked the glass back up again.

  “What is it, Navigator?” Buckle asked.

  “Captain,” Sabrina replied, her voice low and serious, “the Founders are here.”

  “What?”

  “An airship moored at the airfield. The closest one to the city. The silver phoenix, sir,” Sabrina whispered.

  Buckle raised his telescope. There was no doubting Sabrina’s sharp eyes, but he had to see it for himself. He caught sight of the Founders phoenix on the flank of a pocket zeppelin moored among the Imperial airships on their terraced airfield.

  “It surely is,” Buckle muttered. The Founders in New Berlin? Buckle had never heard of a Founders airship appearing outside their own city for the last fifty years—except, of course, to bomb Tehachapi and crash on a sabertooth-infested mountain. “Do you count more than one?”

  “No,” Sabrina said, scanning the airfield with her telescope. “Only the one, as far as I can tell.”

  “Damned unsettling,” Buckle muttered.

  “What do you make of it?” Sabrina asked in a whisper. Welly had his telescope up beside her, uttering a soft whistle.

  “The Imperials are negotiating with the Founders at the same time they are making alliances with us, it appears,” Buckle said.

  Suddenly Washington was tight on Buckle’s shoulder, smelling of pipe smoke and the pine needles his suit had been packed in, peering hard through the window, snorting through his nostrils.

  “You say the Founders are in New Berlin?” Washington asked.

  “Aye, Ambassador,” Buckle replied. He glanced back at Valkyrie; she stood at the engineering station, looking forward with her usual calmness. He could not tell if she was yet aware of the Founders sighting or not.

  “Unprecedented,” Washington grumbled. “Inconceivable. Unsettling.”

  “Founders airship sighted!” the lookout cried down the chattertube, late again. “Founders airship sighted in the New Berlin docks!” Buckle closed his eyes for a moment and grimaced. He would bawl out the two weak-eyed barrelmen later.

  “What are the fogsuckers doing here?” Welly stammered.

  “Either they have been here all along or they have beat us to it,” Sabrina said.

  “Where does that bloody well leave us, then?” Welly asked.

  “Do not jump to conclusions,” Washington warned.

  Buckle zipped his telescope shut and tucked it back into his top hat. “We stay the course.”

  “Just peachy,” Sabrina muttered.

  “Chief Engineer,” Buckle ordered. “Come forward.”

  Leaving Geneva Bolling on station, Valkyrie strode up to the nose through a harsh silence. She stopped beside Buckle and Washington; Washington peered down his huge nose at her, his cataract-fogged eyes attentive but not necessarily suspicious—unlike Wellington’s and Sabrina’s eyes.

  “Your people have visitors,” Buckle said.

  “A Founders airship. Aye. I heard,” Valkyrie replied, calm as ever.

  “How often does New Berlin entertain the Founders?” Washington asked.

  Valkyrie cocked her head ever so slightly at the ambassador. “Never,” she replied.

  “Take a look,” Buckle said, stepping aside in what little space he had to allow Valkyrie to slip forward into the nose bubble. Valkyrie drew a pair of bronze binoculars from her belt and raised them to her eyes.

  “One mile to the airfield, Captain,” Sabrina said, having turned back to her station.

  Buckle looked ahead. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was still approaching the Imperial city at considerable speed; the airfield and the ramparts of the town were now plainly visible in detail.

  “Quarter full,” Buckle ordered. “Bring us down to fifteen knots.”

  “Quarter full, aye!” Bolling repeated, ringing the chadburn bell.

  New Berlin was a large urban center that, despite hugging the uneven face of a mountain, displayed the regular lines and streets of a highly planned city with ring roads. The buildings were built mostly of gray stone, unlike the timber structures that prevailed at the Devil’s Punchbowl, and their roofs were shingled with some kind of metal. The inner fortress loomed on the mountain crest, its ramparts in the shape of a giant cog, its walls sheathed in what looked like gunmetal iron.

  Buckle recognized the topography of the town; he had seen it on the night of the reprisal raid, its outline accentuated by lines of torches and lanterns. The first sight of the giant orange-lit, cog-shaped stronghold against the black mountain was one of his strongest memories of the night. The city looked to be in good shape—if any of the bomb strikes inflicted on that night the year before had been profound, there was now no sign of damage.

  Buckle turned his eyes to the airfield, with the famous dockyard and its massive construction hangars looming beyond, where a half-dozen small Imperial airships hovered at their docking towers. The stair-stepped terraces of the airfield, great swaths of dirty brown snow crisscrossed with wagon and bowser tracks, splotched with piss-yellow pools of dumped, stiffening dope and lacquer, dotted with di
scarded buckets, and horse and mule dung, was the place where Sebastian Mitty and Captain Halifax had died, where Tyro had fallen to a fate worse than death.

  Valkyrie replaced her binoculars in their belt pouch and turned to face Buckle. “The Founders are here to deliver an ultimatum, I would presume.”

  “And we are supposed to take you at your word for that?” Ivan asked.

  Valkyrie pointed to the fortress. “Do you see the brace of flags beneath our Imperial banner, Captain?”

  Buckle looked at the fortress tower, where the large Imperial standard, a black iron cross set against a white background, flapped lazily atop its pole. Beneath it, on the circular balcony, hung a line of small, multicolored signal flags. “Yes,” Buckle replied.

  “The signals are for us. The green flag stands for a foreign ambassador of high rank. The blue flag with the vertical black stripe means they were not invited,” Valkyrie said.

  “And yet you still welcome them with open arms, eh, spiker?” Ivan sniped.

  Valkyrie turned to face Ivan, who had crept up behind, further crowding the nose. “My clan would have received a Founders ambassador with extreme trepidation. We trust the Founders no more than you do. We fear them no less than you do. But to turn an ambassador away could only make matters worse.”

  “But your alliance is with us—or is it?” Ivan grumbled, looking as if he might take a menacing step toward Valkyrie, who somehow seemed to Buckle as if she might welcome such a move.

  “That is enough, Ivan,” Buckle said. “One must always avoid confusion when the hounds of war are afoot.”

  “The Imperial harbormaster is signaling the airfield approach, Captain,” Sabrina said.

  “Aye, Navigator,” Buckle answered, eyeing the Founders phoenix below. “The hounds of war,” he whispered to himself.

  AMBASSADOR BISMARCK

  ROMULUS BUCKLE HAD NEVER RIDDEN in a steam-powered carriage before, though he had heard of them. The awkward, ponderous, vapor-wreathed contraptions were rare in the outland type of strongholds in which the Crankshafts existed, because there were no paved streets, nor mechanics trained to fix them, and they were constantly breaking down.

  The armor-plated Imperial steam carriage was big, seating six in the dark passenger compartment, plus the driver and an armed coachman at the fore. A huge steam engine strapped on the back end drove the iron wheels of the impossibly heavy conveyance forward with a piston-banging power that made the whole thing shake and rattle and puff contemptuously along the cobblestoned streets of New Berlin. Buckle could just barely hear the clatter of the horse-drawn carriages both in front and behind, and the rumble of the cavalry escort alongside.

  The interior of the compartment was lined with dark-blue velvet, which seemed to absorb the light from two gurgling boil lamps overhead, but could not obscure the gigantic bolts and rivets securing the iron sheets around them. Ambassador Washington was located on Buckle’s immediate left, while Sabrina sat on the other side of Washington.

  Buckle glanced at the three Imperials seated on the bench across from them. Valkyrie was directly in front of him, their knees almost touching, with her brother, Bismarck Smelt, on her right. Bismarck was the lead Imperial ambassador, and apparently made of the same genetic materials as she; he was tall, intelligent-eyed, narrow at the waist, and broad at the shoulders. A sandy mustache gave his boyish face a much-needed punch of manhood. His uniform was different from the other soldiers’; his collar tabs and cuffs were all white, and he wore a soft field cap, rather than the omnipresent pickelhaube. His chest was bedecked with medals, ribbons, and a wide white sash.

  Just from the way Valkyrie and Bismarck sat together, hip to hip, Buckle could tell they were close, and a formidable team.

  On the other side of Bismarck sat Colonel Rainer, the Imperial air-fleet commander, an unattractive middle-aged woman with a gold-spiked pickelhaube in her lap; her uniform, heavily laced with gold and crimson, gripped a body as thickset as a tree trunk. Her face was undeniably hard and gecko-featured, her long, hay-colored hair thatched into braids, and her leathery skin, bronzed by snow-reflected sunlight, presented deep wrinkles that made her look older than she was.

  The six of them had been riding in the armored motorcar for only two minutes, and already the conversation had trailed off into an uncomfortable silence. Buckle had felt anxious about the whole thing even as he and Sabrina strode down the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s gangplank behind Valkyrie and the ambassador, their boots landing on the mushy airfield permafrost in the artificial chasm formed by the soaring envelopes of the moored zeppelins all around them.

  Buckle could see the Founders pocket zeppelin docked nearby, its silver phoenix emblem gleaming like quicksilver in the daylight. He remembered the same silver phoenix emblem on the flank of the great sky vessel wreck on the Tehachapi Mountains. He had ordered Ivan to double the mooring guard.

  Valkyrie and Ambassador Washington were met by a numerous and well-armed Imperial welcoming committee, backed by the armored motorcar with large black iron crosses on its doors, and two military carriages carrying soldiers, drawn by teams of six shaggy-legged draft horses apiece. A full detachment of cavalrymen in iron cuirasses, with white horsehair plumes flaring atop their pickelhaube spikes, was on hand as well.

  Five Imperial officers had greeted them, all dressed in their powder blues, including Bismarck and Colonel Rainer; their faces had looked dead serious, their eyes darting, lids wide. Something was scaring them.

  Buckle and the Pneumatic Zeppelin were supposed to simply take on the Imperial ambassador and be on their way to Spartak, but with the appearance of the Founders, everything had changed. The Founders’ representative—somehow knowing that the Crankshafts were on their way to New Berlin—had demanded an audience with both the Imperial and Crankshaft ambassadors, and the Imperials had complied.

  “Your presence here at this difficult time honors us, Ambassador Washington,” Bismarck said loudly over the pounding steam engine behind. “Having you accompany our delegation to Spartak should impress the Russians with both the urgency and the imperative of our mission.”

  “And what of your other friends?” Buckle asked. He should have kept his mouth shut, but he could not.

  Bismarck nodded with a bitter smile as he turned his blue-eyed gaze to Buckle, who saw suspicion there, but surprisingly little hate. “The fly in the ointment, so to speak,” he replied. “But the presence of the Founders in no way lessens my father’s commitment to the Grand Alliance.”

  “It seems you are already at war, so numerous are the soldiers about us,” Washington shouted over the rumble of the iron chassis. They were heading up a steep incline now.

  “I apologize for the heavy escort,” Bismarck said. “But there are assassins in the city, and we prefer to take no chances.”

  “Assassins?” Valkyrie asked, with genuine surprise in her voice.

  Bismarck nodded gravely at his sister. “There were three attempts on three separate officials last night, mere hours before the Founders airship arrived. Magistrate Klopp, Colonel Von Camp, and Dorian Jacobsen. Only one of the murder attempts proved successful,” he added.

  “Who?” Valkyrie asked.

  Bismarck gave Valkyrie a sad, tender glance. “Dorian.”

  Valkyrie’s jaw went stiff. “I see,” she whispered.

  “I am sorry, my sister,” Bismarck said, taking Valkyrie’s hand. “I know you were fond of him. We were all fond of him.” Bismarck turned his gaze to Buckle. “Jacobsen was the head of our diplomatic corps,” Bismarck said. “A skillful man and a mentor to us.”

  Fury rippled through Rainer’s eyes. “Stabbed to death on the very steps of his home,” she said. “But we caught the bastard who did it. They are skinning him alive in the castle right now. But he refuses to speak. Not a word, the capital bastard. He is the monster spawn of the Founders, though—I guarantee you that. All mind-twisted. He is young, but his hair is all white. They were going to pack him into the iron maiden when I was
leaving.”

  Buckle realized that he liked Rainer. There was no nonsense in her.

  “I do express my most heartfelt condolences on your loss,” Washington said.

  “The arrival of assassins in your city at such a time does not bode well,” Buckle added. “We just had a run-in with an airship saboteur last night.”

  “It is the habit of the Founders to cripple their victims before the attack,” Rainer offered. “As we all learned, much to our own destruction, in the skirmishes that damaged our respective air fleets so profoundly last year.”

  Buckle nodded. He noticed that Bismarck was shooting furtive glances at Sabrina—at the red hair brushing her cheeks from under her derby. That scarlet hair. It intrigued, even galled, everyone Sabrina came across. Yet she made no effort to conceal it.

  The clatter of the metal-sheathed motorcar wheels suddenly fell into a muted, smoother rhythm—the vehicle had moved from cobblestones to flagstones.

  “My father told us of your discovery of the Founders zeppelin disguised as one of ours, and your apology for your reprisal raid,” Bismarck said. “But I cannot say I blame you for what you did at the time. It hurt us both. I blame no one but Fawkes himself.”

  “Aye,” Valkyrie said.

  “The Founders airship arrived early this morning, unannounced, just before dawn,” Bismarck said. “A biretta-hatted lackey disembarked—a noxious little prattler named Wallach—and told us to prepare for the arrival of their ambassador at nine o’clock this morning.”

  Buckle took out his pocket watch and held it under the green glow of one of the boil lamps: it was 8:27 in the morning.

  “The Founders ambassador did not come on the airship?” Washington asked.

  “Oddly, no,” Bismarck replied. “He is arriving by locomotive.”

  “Locomotive?” Valkyrie asked, stunned. “No locomotive has rolled into New Berlin for fifty years.”

  “Fifty years, exactly. But the tracks are still there, more or less,” Bismarck said. “And the Founders ambassador is coming by train.”