Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (23 page)

The Owl cocked its ungainly head and released a low, rattlesnake-tail rattle, as if it had just sighed.

“Crackerjack shot, Captain Buckle!” Wolfgang shouted from inside his gas mask as he patted the Owl on the head. “Crackerjack shot!”

Buckle lowered his smoking musket. He realized that his finger was still clamped around the depressed trigger with a pressure that made his knuckle tendons ache. He slowly lifted the finger free.

He did not like having to do such things.

THE HEART OF A MARTIAN ENGINEER

M
AX NUDGED THE RUDDER WHEEL
under her fingertips as she watched the sea of gray mist drift slowly beneath the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. She had taken the helm, not because De Quincey had bungled it—he was quite capable—but because she simply could not stand being idle. She brought the airship back up to one hundred feet, out of reach of both the mustard and the sky mines. She felt a relief at being in open air once again, albeit sandwiched between fog below and clouds above. It was late afternoon now, just after five o’clock, and the angled rays of the sun were brighter behind the thinner currents and edges of the clouds, washing the gray, overcast sky in glowing white rivers.

Max kept one eye on her compass and one eye on Welly, who was bent over the drift scope with Apprentice Navigator Banerji tucked in close at his side. They were staying on course by carefully measuring their drift and direction against their own instrument settings and the shadows of the distant obelisks visible through the telescopes. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was barely moving, her chadburn set at dead slow. Countering her tendency to drift when at such a low speed was a complicated job, but the situation did have an advantage: the propeller and engine noise were so reduced that they were almost running
silent. Their snail-like progress was timed so that they would arrive over the rendezvous point at the same moment the rescue expedition was scheduled to appear there. And sweet velocity, even the slowest kind, was much preferable to a fully stopped airship; hovering over a fixed position for any length of time was a constant battle, even in the lightest of winds.

Max still wore her breathing mask, as did Welly and Kellie and every member of the zeppelin crew, for the mustard gas was heavy and slow to disperse, and pools of the deadly miasma still lurked in the lower decks of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. The gondola crew was fully plugged in, with their helmet breathing hoses screwed into the airship’s emergency oxygen lines, and their communication tubes connected to the chattertube system. And everyone aboard had their chattertube lines switched open. Max could hear the faint chorus of everyone breathing; it was as if they were all inside her helmet with her.

“Two degrees starboard,” Welly said, his voice distant but distinct as it carried through the chattertube. “Drift correction.”

“Two degrees, aye,” Max replied, her voice close and low in her own ears. Eyes on her compass, gyroscope, and direction finder, all aglow with frog-colored boil, she rolled the rudder wheel slightly to port and heard it make its familiar
tock
sound once as it turned. She stopped the wheel before the two-degree mark was reached, allowing for the zeppelin’s own momentum to carry it another half degree to the desired correction.

It was in times of crisis that Max did not mind spending every waking minute with her crewmates; she liked the communal energy when there was urgent business to be done. But Martians were solitary creatures, and under normal circumstances she preferred to be alone; when off duty, she often abandoned her cabin and her books, and clambered up into the
crow’s nest to listen to the wind and be alone with her thoughts. The crew had found her there in the morning so often, curled up asleep in her heavy coat, that they had long ago started calling the topside observation nacelle “Max’s nest.”

Max didn’t like it when a grinning crew member tapped her awake and she had to thank them, embarrassed, and slip down the companionway half-asleep and needing a hot, black shot of tea.

“Clouds of gossamer, moonlight mysterious as beryl. Lovely night if it wasn’t adrift in cataclysmic peril,” came the whispered voice of Nero Coulton, the ballast-board operator.

Max would have rolled her eyes if that was something Martians did. The crew was at battle stations and on survival helmets: talking was restricted to commands only. But Nero, the resident poet, knew exactly how much fluff he could get away with. Max wanted to chide him, but she did not. His little stanzas chipped away at the tension by amusing the crew, and he would only deliver one, carefully and poorly devised, per occasion.

Nero was a short, round fellow whose poetry, although as annoying as a loose and rattling screw, was also comfortingly familiar. Nero believed himself to be a wordsmith; it was his sacred duty to stage poetry readings on the fourteenth day of each month. He held his performances in the captain’s quarters, drawn up to his full length in front of the glass nose dome, and the overly dramatic renditions of his epic rhymes could drag on for hours. Anyone who missed a reading without a good excuse inflicted monumental hurt upon the great poet. The result was that the crew made it a game, going to extraordinary lengths to discover new ways to excuse themselves from Nero’s events. Ivan once faked his own death, the news of his unexpected expiration
after eating a bad sausage being grimly delivered just before the performance. Nero did not cancel the show but rather wallowed in the tragedy of the night, his maudlin soliloquies soaked with tears. The report of Ivan’s demise was retracted as an “unfortunate exaggeration of events” after the reading was over.

Ivan appeared regularly in Nero’s poetics after that, thinly disguised as a buffoonish character called the Donkey of Moscow.

Max heard crewman Arlington Bright sigh in his mask behind her, in response to Nero’s words: he was a rigger, and one of three crew members issued a musket and sword and assigned to the piloting gondola to repel boarders. Once you took into account the banks of instruments and chairs, the gondola only had limited space, so the three crewmen in portable oxygen gear plus Max, Kellie, Welly, Dunn, De Quincey, Banerji, Nero, and Assistant Engineer Geneva Bolling, not to mention Jacob Fitzroy in the cramped aft signals room, made for a full house. It was not a sardine can, but it was crowded.

Kellie, her ears poking up out of her gas mask, was up against Max’s legs. The dog always came to her when Buckle and Sabrina were off the ship. The animal was like clockwork when it came to her preferences: Buckle was choice number one, Sabrina choice number two, and, although she had no idea why, Max was choice number three.

The pneumatic tube terminal
cha-thunk
ed at Max’s left shoulder, ringing tube number four’s bell. Tube number four was the engine room. The pneumatic-tube messaging system aboard the airship operated on compressed air and partial vacuums, allowing messages too complicated for chattertubes to be zipped around the zeppelin at thirty-one feet per second. The four-inch copper pipelines connected every major
compartment aboard the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, their felt-capped copper capsules transporting handwritten messages from station to station.

Max retrieved the capsule from the receiving-chamber hatch and flipped it open to retrieve the message within. It was a standard note from Elliot Yardbird, the engine officer, calculating the increased consumption of coal due to increased drag on the damaged skin of the zeppelin. Fuel consumption and bunkering were not a problem on this short trip, but it was Yardbird’s job to acknowledge such issues.

Max checked her watch and compass. They should be passing over the outer walls of the city very soon. She returned her focus to the ocean of undulating mist below, scanning for any sign of the watchtowers that were said to once have existed there. Lore had it that the towers were once high enough for their cupolas to overlook the ceiling of ever-present fog, but that the Founders had decided to tear them down because they gave away the city’s location underneath.

It was a good hiding place. Flying over it, one would never suspect that the largest city in the Snow World lay sprawled beneath that canopy of befouled air.

The Founders and their city were a mystery; information about them came in scraps and dribbles from traders. The stories were often so embellished that one had to listen to them with a grain of salt. But professional merchants, the favored ones, were given permission to dock at the port of Del Rey, a walled-in airship and seagoing-vessel harbor where the Founders could trade goods without allowing outsiders access to the main city. Del Rey was rumored to be a rough place, characterized by the black-market villainy of the trader guilds, but it was also a vibrant exchange; it was said that ruthless merchants from every
corner of the known world could make themselves rich there—if they lived through it.

Still, Max wasn’t big on rumors. If the watchtowers existed, she would see them. And if they did, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was probably doomed. Given warning, the Founders would loose their infamous air armada, said to be more than a dozen warships led by two behemoth dreadnoughts that dwarfed even the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. The Founders’ machines would rise up from their berths in the fog and reduce Max’s sky vessel to a burning cinder in a matter of minutes, if not less.

But what of the dreadnoughts? Nobody had seen the Founders’ fabled fleet for one hundred years.

Max sighed inside her mask and then became worried that the others might have heard it. Despite the tension of the moment, she felt a little tired, which was odd for her; Martians, even half-breeds, possessed tremendous stamina. Yes, it had been an exhausting day of fighting Scavengers and tanglers, and yes, sliding off the side of an airship at three thousand feet without a safety line had been stressful. But what had really knocked the wind out of her was the thought that Captain Buckle had been killed. The weight, the sheer, awful weight of despair she felt when his apparent death was reported, had surprised her. Was it that she had fought to defend her captain, prepared to sacrifice her own life in the effort, and still she had failed him?

That was partly the reason. But there was more.

Why Max had always felt so protective toward Buckle both bedeviled and befuddled her. They had both been adopted by Balthazar as youngsters, and Buckle had taunted Max and her younger brother, Tyro, because he didn’t like “the stinking zebras,” whom he blamed for the death of his parents. Buckle would come at them with fists swinging at the slightest
provocation, forcing Balthazar and Calypso to separate them for long periods of time, which was difficult in the enclosed confines of a clan stronghold. At one point, when Buckle was eleven years old, he was sent to live with his uncle Horatio at the Devil’s Punchbowl outpost for one year, just to keep the domestic life in Balthazar’s house tolerable.

Old Horatio managed to straighten Buckle out, because when he returned to the family he never raised his hand against Max or Tyro again. And as Buckle moved into young adulthood, he outgrew his anger, slowly developing into a gracious brother whose maturing gentlemanliness would become a hallmark of his character.

And yet, through it all, even from the time when she was a very young girl, Max knew that she loved Romulus Buckle. Or, more accurately, she knew that she both loved and hated him. But she never allowed herself to explore her feelings toward him further; she was unwilling to accept what she might discover about herself if she did.

As for Romulus Buckle himself, well, after the terrible nights of the Tehachapi Blitz and the Imperial Raid, after he and Max had fought side by side and saved each other’s life in turn, she had sensed that something inside Buckle, something in the way he saw her, had changed. He had suddenly and intimately softened toward her. Perhaps it was that each of them had lost so much—Calypso, Elizabeth, Sebastian Mitty, and most of Tyro—that a profound connection forged through blood and pain was inevitable.

Max and Buckle. Buckle and Max. The blood between them could not have been more different. But they were joined on some mysterious level, nonetheless.

Max glanced at her sprawling instrument panel, where golden sand streamed through a large, boil-lit hourglass. She
had measured the sand to run forty minutes—roughly the amount of time the Crankshaft expedition would have breathable air in their oxygen cylinders.

The last grains of golden sand were falling.

Buckle and company had better be out of the mustard by now.