Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (17 page)

Never.

Max adored the rules and regulations of the sky-vessel tradition. One could even say that she was obsessed with them. Yet she understood that sometimes the rules had to be bent, depending upon circumstances. But what Buckle was doing was wrong. It endangered the ship. Sure, Max was an excellent pilot, but she wasn’t the best. Not like Romulus Buckle. Not like Sabrina Serafim.

And right now, as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
descended into the dense fog bank above the City of the Founders, they needed their best.

Max saw the reddish glow in her goggles getting a shade brighter.

The engine-order telegraph dinged with a puff of steam as Max swung the dial handle. “Ahead one-third,” she shouted into the chattertube.

“Ahead one-third!” came the response from the engine room, along with the sister dial dinging into the identical position.

Ahead one-third was slow. Very slow. Docking speed. But they were about to dip down into the fog bank and, safe from the eyes of any Founders’ sentinels, proceed the last two thousand yards hidden but flying blind. The navigators’ only reference to their position would be calculations according to their watches, maps, compass, and last known rate of drift.

“Vent steambags, thirty percent, across the board,” Max ordered.

“Venting steambags, thirty percent, slam bang, aye!” Nero Coulton answered, flipping master switches on the hydrogen board, which controlled both the gas cells and the steambags. Lift was first reduced by venting hot air, rather than bleeding off the hydrogen.

Max felt the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
lose a hint of her lightness. She removed her sword from its hooks overhead and buckled the scabbard to her belt. The air cylinder on her back annoyed her. She peered down through the floor observation window: the gray mass of fog came closer and closer, its wavy undulations becoming less distinct as the character of the surface, a misty cloud, emerged, looking vaporous, ethereal, and damp. The tops of tall palm trees, frozen as fuzzy icicles, poked out of the miasma in irregular lines, still in place along the unseen boulevards below.

“Thirty seconds to immersion!” Welly shouted in the chattertube.

“Oxygen masks on!” Max shouted into her chattertube hood. “Oxygen masks on! Make sure you plug back into the chattertube line!” She double-checked her crew, making sure that De Quincey, Dunn, Welly, Banerji, Nero, and the assistant engineer, Geneva Bolling, pulled on their masks. She heard the rattle of the mask clasps as they were snapped, the squeak of the leather straps as they were tightened under chins, followed by the
clink
of the cylinder knobs being cranked open, hissing with compressed air.

“Signals! Verify mask on!” Max said, twisting backward to look past the staircase into the rear corridor, where the door to the signals room was located. She saw the signals officer, Jacob
Fitzroy, lean out of the signals room, his oxygen mask oddly large on his small face and head. He gave her an annoying thumbs up.

“Verbal confirmation, if you please, Mister Fitzroy,” Max said.

“Mask on, Lieutenant Max,” Fitzroy answered, his high voice soft inside his helmet.

“Eyes up for floating mines!” Max shouted. She pulled her heavy oxygen mask over her head and tightened the straps before she plugged herself back into the power and chattertube lines.

“Entering fog bank!” Welly yelled from inside his mask, his voice muffled, his breath misting the interior of the glass.

“Engage boil,” Max ordered, her words dropping hollowly inside her helmet.

“Boil engaged, aye,” Geneva Bolling responded at the engineering station, flipping the levers to activate the pressurized agitation rods inside the cockpit’s liquid-filled instruments, causing the bioluminescent creatures within to emit their soft green illumination.

The vast ocean of fog rose up and swallowed the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. To Max it seemed as if they had been sucked into a shadow, a swirling gray vault of nothingness. Her skin was suddenly damp and warmer, her goggles speckled with pinhead droplets of condensation. She could hear her heartbeat drumming in her ears; the oxygen mask and fog absorbed sound so efficiently that for a moment, she was concerned that the engines had stopped, so complete was the sudden silencing of the familiar drones of the propeller nacelles.

Max’s eyes swung to the instrument panels where, in the eerie half darkness, the bioluminescent boil glowed moon green inside the chadburn dial, inclinometers, floating gyros, drift and
deflection pointers, thermometers, thermohygrometers, winding clocks, compasses, barometers, and a vast array of tubes and cylinders.

“Flying blind now,” Welly stated, a compass in one hand and a watch in the other.

Max kept a close watch on her compass. “Maintaining course. Ballast, maintain forty-five feet altitude. We want to keep our feet out of the mustard.”

“Forty-five feet and steady as she goes, aye,” Nero repeated.

“Keep your eyes peeled for mines,” Max said. It was a useless order, she knew. The pea-soup fog would hide any floating mines until they were almost upon them, and the zeppelin was far too big and slow to avoid them even at docking speed. It would be up to the men positioned outside on the bow and flanks to deflect any mines. She started laboring to breathe—as if her air was becoming too thick—until she realized that she had not opened the oxygen lines to her helmet from her air canister on her back. She cranked the cylinder knob open, filling her mask with musty oxygen that smelled as old and dead as dinosaurs.

A MINEFIELD CHAINED TO THE SKY

“A
LWAYS OUTSIDE THE AIRSHIP THESE
days,” Ivan grumbled as he hooked his safety line to the bow-pulpit railing at the nose of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. The world was a gaping wall of gray mist that fell away into the void ahead of him. Mechanics were supposed to work inside the machine most of the time, weren’t they? Oh, well. He was warm enough, bundled up in his fur-lined coat, boots, and gloves, and the oxygen mask, designed for high altitudes, was insulated with dog fur. Besides, the ocean fog was warm. Warm but wet. The good thing was that tanglers weren’t supposed to like the fog. The bad thing was that nobody really knew what other sorts of unknown beasties might lurk in the permanent mists.

Ivan preferred not to think about that.

He was perched on the nose of the great zeppelin, a dot on its sheer, rounded face, standing on the iron frame of the black bowsprit, from which the jibboom extended forward nearly fifty feet in a tapering V shape, festooned with the tacks of jibs, stays, long rolls of antiboarding netting, and the furled spinnaker sail, leading the ship like a hollow arrowhead. He screwed his boots down on the narrow bowsprit in an attempt to secure his footing. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was moving so slowly that
the slipstream wasn’t a problem, and he was well anchored with two safety lines—one hooked to the bow pulpit and the other hooked into the small rail along the port side of the gun turret—but he was holding a twenty-foot wooden fending pike, and if floating mines appeared, he would be leveraging himself into a variety of precarious positions.

Ivan wasn’t the only one on the exterior—the airship’s entire complement of skinners and riggers were also stationed evenly on both flanks of the ship’s axis, all armed with fending pikes, their numbers supplemented by a Ballblaster here and there. He could see none of them in the dense mist, however, not even Chief Skinner Marian Boyd, who was only a few yards to his right on the other side of the bowsprit, so for all intents and purposes, he was alone.

Ivan peered into the vaporous nothingness that pressed him with its gentle, invisible current. He could only make out fifteen feet of the jibboom before it vanished, plunging into the obscurity of the mists. He cursed the condensation distorting his goggle lenses; his constant wiping resulted in muddy streaks that were only slightly better in terms of clarity. But his main discomfort was an itch on the end of his nose. He considered lifting the oxygen helmet up so he could quickly scratch the offending skin, holding his breath until he clamped the mask back down—he was certain that the airship had not yet descended to the level of the yellow-colored mustard gas—but he thought better of it. He gripped his fending pike tightly, hoping that the painful clutch of his fingers would distract him from the itching that was rapidly threatening to drive him mad. The fending pike had a copper grasper attached to the tip of its pole, and Ivan could open and close the grasper by manipulating a control wire that ran alongside the shaft. The fending pike was
light, made of hollow wood and thin metal, but the awkward tug and pull of it was taxing his muscles already. Ivan wasn’t a big fellow; the thin rails he had for arms possessed a wiry strength good for twisting wrenches, but not for manhandling jousting lances.

Eyes up. Watch the sky. Or at least the gray wall, which is all the sky you’ll get, Ivan thought. If there actually was a floating minefield within the fog bank surrounding the City of the Founders, and such things were not merely the inspired imaginings of storytellers beefing up their myths around the campfires, then he’d better be ready. He peered into the roiling mist. Once a mine came at him, either straight on or skidding along the leading edge of the bowsprit, he would only have a few seconds to bring the fending pike to bear, grasp the chain, and pass it along to the next crewman twenty feet behind him, who was ready to pass the bomb to his fellows along the flank from bow to stern.

Ivan sighed inside his mask. It was as if he was aboard a ghost ship. He could see very little except his side of the bow pulpit, and the bowsprit plunging into oblivion, along with its bracing wires and tack. The constant
whoosh
of the passing wind outside the helmet and the low
ping
of the air cylinder valve left him alone with his own thoughts, thoughts that were amplified along with the rasps of his own breathing.

His own thoughts. His own thoughts usually frustrated him. Trying to figure out people and politics was as tangled and unrewarding as philosophy. He liked math. Practical problems. A Gordian knot of malfunctioning machinery allowed him to immerse his mind in the complicated calculations of a perfect grease-lubricated solution. That was the crackerjack life. Sitting in a garden and ruminating on the world was as limp
and useless as pap. And being here, alone in the mist with one’s own thoughts, despite the possibility of sky mines, was sort of equivalent to sitting in a garden. Pap.

And of course there might not even be any sky mines. No one knew. He could be out here half an hour, maybe more, and never see anything but vapor. That would be a good thing, yes, but unlikely. Not uncommon in the Snow World, sky mines were the favored defense of fixed positions against airship raids: tethered to the ground by chains, they were small hydrogen balloons that piggybacked loads of blackbang explosives porcupined with pressure triggers. Sky mines were expensive and unreliable, and often duds, but it only took one good bump—a brutal blast of shrapnel and flame—to incinerate a hydrogen airship.

Ivan’s imagination took off. If they struck a sky mine he would feel the airship shudder—if he wasn’t instantly vaporized by the first detonation—and then drop violently as the hydrogen gasbags exploded in rapid sequence. He could unhook his safety harnesses and jump free of the fireball. But he wasn’t high enough above the ground to deploy his parachute. He’d rather jump than burn. He had seen friends die by fire in airships. He didn’t want to go that way.

What was all this thinking? Pap.

His eyeballs quivered, straining from his intense peering into the void. He placed his hand on his mask and worked it around in small circles so the padding massaged his head, hoping to ease some of the stress on the muscles in his forehead and cheeks.

He heard a screeching, a weird, assaulting sound, both metallic and animal, and for a moment it unnerved him. Was it something alive? Some sort of horrible beastie that lived in the fog?

The screech came closer and closer, and when Ivan saw dull yellow flashes in the murk ahead, he realized what it was. A metal chain was skidding along his side of the jibboom, casting sparks and catching here and there on the tack. He swung the fending pole forward and pulled the grasper wide open. The sparks grew brighter and brighter and the screeching increased with such intensity he thought it might shatter the faceplate of his helmet.

“Let’s have at it, you bastard sticker!” Ivan shouted, more to try to clear the pressure on his eardrums than anything else. The vertical chain popped out of the fog, a wreath of fiery sparks swirling at the point of contact between its rusty links and the bowsprit, and fifteen feet up, at the end of the line, bobbled the black, spiky ball of the sky mine.