Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (24 page)

SPIDER TRAPS AND SEWER RATS

B
UCKLE DROPPED ABOUT SIX FEET
down the manhole, out of the luminous yellow mustard and into the pitch black of the sewer tunnel. His boots smacked on wet concrete. The weight of his gear forced him to his knees—which he bruised considerably—and with a sharp grunt he lurched aside to avoid being squashed by Kepler, coming down right behind him.

Buckle steadied himself with one hand against the slimy wall. Sabrina and two Ballblasters had already descended and were striking matches to light kerosene lanterns built into the crests of their helmets. The soft orange light glowed on the water-slicked walls and allowed Buckle to get his bearings. He hurried forward as more troopers dropped down the manhole behind him.

Time was not on their side. The skirmish with the Founders scouts had slowed them down, and their exertions had rapidly drained the reserves in their oxygen tanks. Already Buckle had the impression that he was working harder to breathe—as if his air was already thinning—even though his cylinder gauge still reported two minutes remaining in its supply.

Scorpius and Kepler stepped up beside Buckle; being a subterranean clan, the Alchemists also had lanterns installed
in their helmets, but with an ingenious built-in tinderbox that ignited the kerosene wick internally, sparked by the rolling of a cog under the chin.

“I don’t see any stinkum,” Buckle said to Sabrina. What he could see of the tunnel looked clear, and free of the yellow mist. “Are we good?”

“I wouldn’t risk it yet,” Sabrina answered, neatly folding up her map with the care of a navigator. “Not if we don’t have to. Let’s move.”

“Wait, Lieutenant. Let’s not get too spread out,” Scorpius cautioned.

Sabrina halted, staring into the depthless black length of the tunnel ahead. Buckle could tell that she was agitated, itching to advance.

Kepler planted his massive hand on Buckle’s shoulder and turned him around to face him. Startled, Buckle squinted; Kepler’s lamp was bright and the shadows inside his helmet hid his face. Kepler lit a match, a white sulfur flash that made Buckle squint even more. Kepler flipped open the glass door of Buckle’s helmet lamp and lit the wick. Another friendly act from his assassin, Buckle thought. Kepler clicked Buckle’s lamp door shut and snuffed the match between his gloved fingers.

“Thanks,” Buckle said.

Kepler nodded.

The rest of the surviving Ballblasters—seventeen of the original twenty—had now dropped into the sewer tunnel with heavy armored
clank
s. Lighting their helmet lamps, they joined the seven remaining Alchemists and the Owl, which had leapt down the manhole with the surprising lightness of a bird. The last man to descend was Pluteus—yes, Pluteus—who had miraculously survived the titanic blow delivered to him
by the robotic arm of the forgewalker. After the skirmish, the Ballblasters had charged into the fog and fished their beloved Pluteus out of a frozen snowbank. Brittle honeycombs of ice had collapsed sufficiently to break his fall; he was bruised and battered, his glass facemask cracked and sprayed on the inside with blood and snot, but he was very much alive.

“That hurt like hell!” Pluteus announced as he landed inside the tunnel, grimacing with pain. “A good day to be alive!

“We’ve got to move, people!” Sabrina shouted. “Move!”

Sabrina set off down the sewer pipe with such a severe stride that Buckle, even with his much longer legs, had to work to keep up with her. The old sewer was a straight tube, at least as far as Buckle could see—the ghostly illumination of their helmet lamps melted away about twenty feet ahead. The floor was flat concrete, with water channels cut into the base of each wall, which didn’t seem to be very effective at draining away the disgusting slop they were splashing through. The arched ceiling dripped with moisture and dangling gobbets of transparent goo.

They were at a near run. The metal-sheathed boots, armor, and equipment of the troopers, not to mention the Owl’s iron claws, rattled, jingled, and clanked. It sounded as if there were a horse and carriage coming down the sewer at Buckle’s heels. Well, stealth was not required at the moment, was it?

Here and there Buckle thought he glimpsed translucent swirls of yellow mist fluttering in the air, visible only for an instant. Damned mustard.

Buckle’s low-oxygen alarm went off. Inside each Crankshaft air canister was a little spring-mounted hammer, which tapped a bell when the tank’s pressure indicated less than one minute of air remaining—but they were notoriously inaccurate. He could
have ten seconds worth of breathable air left. He heard Sabrina’s alarm go off, and within a few more seconds, the alarms in many of the Crankshaft troopers’ tanks started ringing.

Buckle coughed. He found it difficult to catch his breath. He didn’t look at his oxygen gauge. He slowed his breathing even though his lungs screamed for more.

“Hold on!” Sabrina shouted, her voice sounding muffled and far away over the jangling of the alarm bells.

Laboring to breathe as he ran, Buckle’s vision narrowed—or was it just the fogging of his faceplate glass? The ceiling shimmered silver, fluttering. It was getting harder and harder to run…as if something was pushing him back.

Sabrina suddenly stopped. Buckle bumped into her and nearly knocked her over. The entire group skidded to a halt behind them. Sabrina lifted her hands, jerked her chin straps loose, unclamped the oxygen mask, and yanked her helmet off her head. Her bright red hair flopped loose, bunched and soggy with sweat, the pale skin on her forehead and cheeks discolored with deep, pink depressions from the padding of the mask.

Sabrina took a big breath. “Good for the goose, lads!” she announced, grinning widely, her mask dangling from its strap on her left shoulder.

Buckle snatched at his bulky helmet, now an instrument of suffocation, detaching the leather cinching straps and wrenching it off over his head so hard he feared he might have taken a few strips of flesh with it. He guzzled great lungfuls of air—the atmosphere was wretched and it stunk of decay, but it was the sweetest air Buckle had ever tasted. And instead of being slapped by the cold, still air he expected, the skin on his perspiration-drenched face was met by a stiff lukewarm breeze coming from the tunnel ahead.

Looking up as he gasped, Buckle’s eyes focused on a gargantuan cobweb stretching across the entire length of the arched ceiling, its silky mesh billowing back like a sail against the flowing air. The web strands shimmered in the lamplight, shivering with the struggles of a trapped moth beating its dull-brown wings against the ancient trap.

“Is that how you knew there wasn’t any mustard here?” Buckle asked Sabrina. “The spiderwebs?”

“I don’t know about moths and spiders,” Sabrina said. “But…” She pointed to one of the darkly shadowed concrete channels running along the wall. Buckle realized it was streaming haphazardly with something other than water; he stepped forward and peered down into the channel with the illumination of his lamp. It was flowing with naked-tailed vermin.

“Rats,” Sabrina muttered loudly, still not accustomed to speaking outside of her helmet. “The place is still filthy with rats.”

THE CITY OF THE FOUNDERS

“D
ISCARD ALL GAS EQUIPMENT
!” P
LUTEUS
shouted through the howling wind in the darkness of the sewer tunnel. “There is no reason to lug it from here!”

Buckle watched the Ballblasters and Alchemists unstrap their air cylinders, harnesses, hoses, and masks and drop them into the drainage channels, as hundreds of rats squealed indignantly below. Buckle cast aside his own heavy gear with little regret; although the equipment was expensive and it had kept him alive, they had been running at a jog for the last three minutes, and losing the sixty pounds of metal and rubber was a tremendous relief to his spine.

Needing the lamplight, everyone kept their helmets on, faceplates open. The orange illumination jiggled frenetically as the helmets were buffeted by the fast-moving air.

Sabrina was beside Buckle, her red hair floating about her head in the torrent of wind that had greatly increased in intensity in the last two hundred yards. Its blast was strong enough to make Buckle duck, and it battered his eardrums, which were accustomed to the tight insulation of his gas mask.

The powerful air currents had scoured this section of the tunnel clean; there was no hope for spiderwebs to cling here, and the floor and ceiling were as dry as a desert. The source of
the powerful outgoing draft, which carried the seaweed odor of ocean air, was unknown, but Buckle suspected it was a way for the Founders to keep the mustard from flowing in under their city.

Sabrina stopped in front of a large metal hatch sunk into the tunnel wall. Its surface ran with horizontal rivers of flaky orange rust; it had the look of an ancient tomb door that had been sealed shut for eternity. She drew a crowbar from her jacket and rammed it into a lock over the hatch lever. “Give a hand, here!” she shouted.

Buckle and Kepler stepped forward and placed their hands on the crowbar, ready to throw their backs into the yank.

“The lock is already broken!” Sabrina bellowed, planting her mouth as close as she could to Buckle and Kepler’s heads. “The hatch door is seated tight, but all we have to do is pry it open! Heave!”

Buckle and Kepler threw all of their might against the crowbar. The cumbersome door creaked in protest and came unstuck, shifting open just a hair, squirting a pop of powdery rust, instantly snatched away by the wind. Buckle groaned, his muscles quivering, but Kepler’s brawn was making the real difference. Once the hatch portal was cracked an inch—fortunately it swung with the wind current rather than against it—a crowd of Ballblaster and Alchemist hands grabbed hold of the rim and pulled it open.

The hatchway led into total darkness. Sabrina immediately jumped in.

Buckle followed Sabrina with pistol and musket. In the bouncing light of their helmet lamps he found himself in a narrow cylindrical tank about forty feet long, its rusting walls pulsing with cockroaches. His boots sloshed through an inch-deep
slush of old sewage, slime, and floating chunks of what looked like Spam, but the vile appearance of the tank paled in comparison to the vileness of its smell.

“Perhaps we should have kept our gas masks on a little bit longer,” Buckle whispered, fighting the urge to retch.

“As you may have guessed, we’re in the old sewage system,” Sabrina replied, apparently not much affected by the stench. “The Founders built much of their new city underground, including the prison. The sewers and subway tunnels of old Los Angeles passing through here were all sealed off. But somebody cracked this one.”

“I’m going to have to burn these boots,” Buckle grumbled, but he was musing over Sabrina’s spilling of a little inside information. He would bet a bucket of hydrogen she would be willing to tell him everything if he asked, but that would violate Balthazar’s sacred code safeguarding his adopted children’s pasts. Buckle would never ask.

And what in blue blazes was a subway?

Buckle glanced back. Kepler was behind him and the tank beyond was filling up with headlamp beams as the team filed in, each member experiencing their own private dismay at the putrid soup lapping around their ankles.

When Buckle and Sabrina reached the far end of the tank, Sabrina pressed her boot against the old access hatch and shoved it wide open. Buckle was so close behind her that he bumped her rump with his helmet as she clambered out. He paused, allowing her to get clear, and then swung out the opening to drop a few feet to the floor, his boots leaving rude splatters on the concrete.

Buckle took a deep snort of stale air to clear his nostrils. He scanned the new chamber with his headlamp. It was a small,
windowless room, a room of the old kind, a utilitarian cement box. Two identical sewage tanks loomed alongside the one they had just emerged from. Hundreds of pipes of various sizes ribbed every inch of the walls, although some had large sections missing, the victims of Scavengers. A desk with an instrument panel and a computer screen, the weird electric machines long since dead, stood in the middle of the room, buried under dirt and dust. A lone wooden chair, an ugly, prefabricated piece, sat forlornly in a corner. The door was large and metal, and most probably locked from the outside.

Sabrina handed her breastplate, helmet, coat, sword, and map case to Buckle. “Hold on to these for me, please, Captain,” she said, retaining only her pistol, tucked into her belt. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

Sabrina clambered up onto the computer desk and, stretching to her full height, cat-jumped up to a ceiling vent and shoved it aside. She pulled her body up through the hole until her boots disappeared. Tiny avalanches of dust fell onto the computer.

Kepler, freshly escaped from the sewage tank and smelling like it, arrived at Buckle’s side; he peered up at the hole and grunted.

The little room filled up rapidly as trooper after trooper, headlamps glowing, climbed out of the tank. Wolfgang appeared and, after some difficulties getting the Owl’s large head through the hatchway, managed to get both of them down to the crowded floor.