Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (18 page)

BALTHAZAR’S ORPHANS

C
APTAIN
B
UCKLE STOOD IN HIS
cabin, looking up through the huge nose-dome window, hands folded behind his back, watching the sky mine skid and jerk along the port side of the jibboom of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. The mine had materialized from the undulating mist as if a ghost, but there was nothing ghostly about it: its chain was smothered in coppery green rust; its black balloon, shining with condensation, was packed with waterproofed-oilskin explosive packets, each spiked like cactus with tap-headed pressure triggers.

Buckle saw Ivan extend his fending pike from the left side of the bow pulpit and capture the chain with the clamp of his grasper, smoothly swinging the sky mine out and away from the ship. The sky mine slipped out of sight to the port side as Ivan passed it over to the next crew member waiting behind; on and on the bomb would be transferred along the length of the great airship, until the last person freed it beyond the fins at the stern.

Somewhat relieved, Buckle stepped to the washbasin beside his bunk and flipped open the hot water tap to scrub the last crusts of tangler guts off his hands. He had also managed a fresh change of clothes, and had scraped his leather coat and boots relatively clean of the tangler goo as well. Now, with his sword and pistol belts comfortably snug against his waist, his
metal breastplate clasped tight around his rib cage, his heavy air cylinder and its helmet riding easily on the tough sinews of his shoulders, he felt strong.

It was Buckle’s last tranquil moment away from the accelerating preparations for the attack. Kellie chewed at her paw on his bed. He smelled cinnamon: the cook, Perriman Salisbury, had sprinkled cinnamon on his potato pancakes at breakfast, which he had eaten at the Lion’s Table with Max, Sabrina, Ivan, and Surgeon Fogg. Salisbury, or Cookie, as everyone called him, only uncorked the cinnamon jar when dangerous missions lay ahead. Cinnamon on your pancake meant that Cookie thought you were in for it.

And the tough part of the day had not even begun.

Buckle had returned to his quarters to pick up Balthazar’s medicine. Sabrina had brought the vials from home, and the ones she had given to Buckle were secured inside a metal tin, which was tucked into a small leather chemist’s pouch. The medicine was an amber-colored elixir mixed up by the Crankshaft clan apothecary, to help alleviate the shaking fits from which Balthazar had begun to suffer in his mature years. Balthazar’s infirmity was a well-kept secret. Only those closest to him were aware of his condition. He still appeared to be quite healthy and hale, so when a seizure came on, his children whisked him out of the public eye before anyone could witness his affliction. Unfortunately, the convulsing attacks were becoming more frequent, and the physicians had nothing more for it.

Balthazar had been without his medicine for three days now.

Buckle tucked the pouch into his coat pocket. He worried that if Balthazar fell ill while in captivity, the Founders would try to exploit his infirmity. If the Founders even had him. If Aphrodite wasn’t double-crossing them and setting up
the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
for an ambush. Buckle shook his head. If Balthazar trusted Aphrodite, then he would trust Aphrodite.

Balthazar. Buckle shivered at the thought of losing Balthazar. Buckle was six years old when his parents died, and he had been raised as one of Balthazar’s sons, educated and trained to become a clan leader so, when the time came, he would be ready when called upon.

And the time had come.

Buckle loved Balthazar and Calypso dearly—as did the other seven orphans the strict but loving couple had adopted into their family. Most had been brought into the fold as infants or small children, such as Buckle and his sister Elizabeth, Max and Tyro, and Ivan. Sabrina had been adopted later in life, at the age of thirteen. The two youngest adoptees were a pair of twins named James and Jasmine, both rescued from the wreck of a downed privateer airship ten years before, at the age of three.

There was one more son, the eldest, and the only natural child of Balthazar and Calypso, the twenty-four-year-old Ryder, who was the heir apparent to Balthazar’s command. Ryder had been wounded defending his father on the night of his abduction at the Palisades Stronghold, and his injuries had landed him in the infirmary at the Devil’s Punchbowl, much to his great personal chagrin. Ryder had wanted desperately to take part in the rescue mission.

Buckle removed his top hat and placed it on the Lion’s Table before he turned and strode for the door. Kepler was waiting faithfully outside on the landing, he was sure.

It was his time. Romulus Buckle knew that he would rescue Balthazar and bring both him and the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
safely home. Of that he had no doubt. No doubt at all.

WHEN THE SKY FELL AT TEHACHAPI

T
HE
P
NEUMATIC
Z
EPPELIN
HAD BEEN
the jewel of the Imperial fleet until Buckle took her.

Up until that time nearly a year ago, Buckle had never considered trying to steal another clan’s airship; Crankshafts were not in the business of sky raiding—boarding an enemy ship usually meant heavy casualties—and while on the ground, the zeppelins were always well guarded at anchor in the heart of the clan strongholds. It would be perilous and costly to attempt to snatch one.

That was, until the nefarious and cowardly Imperials, without declaration of war and without warning, attacked the Crankshaft garrison at Tehachapi.

That was the night his sister, Elizabeth, was killed.

Buckle remembered the blitz the way one remembers a dream: vivid and clear in some parts, while vague and cloudy in others. It had been quiet as he walked from the council hall back to his quarters in the Crankshaft family compound. The moon glowed dully behind the clouds as always, and the cold air amplified every sound: the hiss of the torches and street lamps; the slow, rhythmic
chunk, chunk
of someone unseen but close
by chopping firewood with an axe; the crunch of his own boots across the frozen crusts that lined the ruts in the street.

The compound was located beside the airfield, where five Crankshaft airships and a dozen independent tramps and traders floated at night anchor, very low, their gondolas no more than twenty feet above the ground, their whale-like bodies illuminated by legions of swirling lanterns dangling from the mooring towers and docking ropes. On the towering flank of each Crankshaft sky vessel loomed the red lion rampant, the symbol of the Crankshaft clan.

Buckle had been in a mood as foul as Martian mustard—he had just been outvoted by the clan treasurer and the majority of the council; they had dismissed his proposal to purchase another war zeppelin from the Steamweavers. The Crankshafts were merchants by nature, the council had said, and needed more small, long-distance trader vessels for the rubber trade, not ponderous gunships.

As Buckle walked past a small rock lodged in a frozen rut, he took a listless kick at it—he remembered the sharp whack at the toe of his boot quite clearly. It was then that he realized that huge objects were drifting silently under the dark clouds overhead.

Zeppelins.

Buckle’s logic told him a Crankshaft zeppelin was returning home. Many of the Crankshaft clan’s airships were deployed; Balthazar was away, with his flagship
Khartoum
, and so was his brother Horatio, captain of the gunship
Waterloo
, as well as most of the smaller traders and cutters. But none of them were due back any time soon. No messenger pigeons had come in heralding their early arrival. No docking crews had been assembled to mill about the hawsers at the mooring towers, the smoke from their pipes curling about their heads.

Fear caught in Buckle’s throat. Something was terribly wrong.

The Crankshafts were not at war with anyone. Balthazar, the great soldier and diplomat, had done his work well.

A sledgehammer wall of air, spitting particles of dust and ice, nearly knocked Buckle off his feet. The big blackbang bomb—which had fallen in the alley behind the smithy—belched a deep wave of roiling black smoke, swallowing him up, choking him. Buckle ran—his memory of this part was hazy, but he remembered running, sprinting at full speed, though he could not see more than three feet ahead of him, running to get to the airships. He was the chief navigator aboard the
Bromhead
, an armed trader, and he had to get to her. He had to help get her into the air. Explosions rocked the earth and walloped him from side to side. Muted flashes lit up the murk as if he were inside a thunderstorm. Figures scrambled past him in the smoke, but he could not make out who anyone was; their shouts pierced the muffling vapors, sometimes yelling orders, sometimes screaming the names of children.

Buckle wheezed. His smoke-tortured lungs threatened to burst, but he kept on running. He stumbled into a gap of clear air. Brilliant flashes—the bombs and the defenders’ phosphorus flares—shocked his eyes. He saw the docked Crankshaft war zeppelin, the
Victory
, a sitting duck tethered to its mooring tower, catch fire. He stopped, staring, gasping: a drowning man. The
Victory
’s hydrogen cells erupted in geysers of flame and it collapsed in upon itself, toppling toward the earth, its superstructure skeleton glowing white-hot as the skin burned away in red-edged ripples.

Move
, Buckle thought.
Move!
He set off running, and, just before he plunged into another wave of smoke and airborne
debris in front of him, he saw the awful flash of another exploding Crankshaft airship. It was the
Bromhead
. The fireball lit up the entire world, and he glimpsed—just for an instant—the clear outline of an attacking zeppelin above; on its flank he saw the symbol of the iron cross.

The Imperials.

When dawn broke over the smoking ruins of the Tehachapi stronghold, four of the five clan airships docked there—the
Victory, Bromhead, Whirling Dervish
, and
Albert
—were nothing more than smoldering heaps of twisted metal fallen to earth. Only the
Gibraltar
, a big armed trader, had miraculously survived, now a forlorn titan floating over the wrecks of her sisters. Forty-one Crankshaft clanspeople were dead, and 122 were wounded.

Calypso Crankshaft, wife to Balthazar and mother to his children, had been killed in the blitz. Buckle’s sister, Elizabeth, her room in the left wing of Balthazar’s house incinerated by an Imperial bomb, was one of a dozen whose bodies were consumed by the explosions. Nothing left to mourn. Nothing left for the funeral pyre.

Romulus Buckle was consumed by rage.

Pluteus Brassballs, himself seriously wounded, led the efforts to rescue trapped clansmen and make preparations to evacuate the now uninhabitable Tehachapi stronghold. Balthazar and Horatio, aboard the
Khartoum
and
Waterloo
, returned at best speed and arrived within two days. The eleven remaining Crankshaft airships, complemented by five hastily hired cargo tramps owned by the trader guilds—who ratcheted up their prices when they knew you had an emergency—were loaded, and the entire clan relocated to the garrison at the Devil’s Punchbowl to the south.

Although he preferred to always negotiate terms of peace and trade, Balthazar was no shrinking violet when it came to battle. The Crankshaft clan now was vulnerable, and every other clan knew it. He was convinced that the best defense was high aggression: he immediately began formulating a counterstrike against the Imperials. Even as the wounded Crankshaft clan was airborne between Tehachapi and the Devil’s Punchbowl, the airship infirmaries packed with bleeding wounded, the cold Castle deck of the
Khartoum
a morgue where the wrapped bodies of twenty-nine clanspeople, including Calypso, lay, Balthazar called the surviving council members and commanders into his quarters to discuss an immediate and daring counterstrike.

“Yes, our clan is seriously crippled,” Balthazar said. “But this is a moment in which we must show the caliber of our resolve. Because if anyone believes that we can no longer defend ourselves, we shall soon be overrun.”

Balthazar’s plan called for a small force to raid the Imperial stronghold and destroy as many of their airships as possible. It was not elegant and it was not pretty: it was march or die, to awe with the steel of fearlessness and determination, to bloody the Imperials or perish in the attempt.

Buckle volunteered instantly.

Max volunteered. Tyro volunteered. Sabrina volunteered. Balthazar prevented any more of his family from stepping forward after that. He had just lost Calypso and Elizabeth—sending four of the remaining eight children on a suicidal mission was all the great lion of a man could handle.

The raid on the Imperials, led by Horatio Crankshaft, was a costly success. Two of the Imperials’ finest war zeppelins and a number of smaller airships had been blown to pieces at anchor, but nearly a third of the Crankshaft attackers had
perished, including Buckle’s best friend, Sebastian Mitty, and the entire crew of the armed trader
Zanzibar
. Buckle, with his captain dead and his crew decimated, decided that rather than destroy the Imperial flagship, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, he would
steal
it. In this he succeeded, despite losing half of his company, and he brought the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
back to the Devil’s Punchbowl to great personal glory. Balthazar was miffed that Buckle had altered his battle orders, but the clan needed the warship desperately.