Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (43 page)

“Surrender, steampiper,” Buckle said as he stepped over her, the point of his sword poised at her throat, “and you shall be given mercy.”

The steampiper glared at him. She had a long white scar that ran from under her left ear all the way across her cheekbone, to end in a curl under the corner of her left eye.

Buckle saw her eyes flick to the near distance behind him. The other steampiper. He spun around.

The male steampiper was there, not fifteen paces back, having clambered back up onto the catwalk. His helmet was missing, and his hair was also red, though nowhere near as vibrant in saturation as the woman’s; a neatly trimmed beard, orange and
straw-colored, bedecked his sturdy, green-eyed face. And he had a pistol pointed straight at Buckle’s stomach.

Romulus Buckle knew he was a dead man.

A gunshot boomed, loud even over the wail of the wind.

Buckle jerked, stunned that he had not felt the impact of the ball, nor seen the phosphorus streak, nor witnessed the belch of black smoke from the muzzle. He ducked his head down, searching his torso for the bullet hole, his hands held in front of him, fingers splayed.

Buckle glanced up, confused.

The male steampiper fell forward, dead.

Buckle’s savior, Katzenjammer Smelt, stepped out of a companionway with a smoking pistol in one hand, another pistol in the other. “Taste some Imperial revenge, you bumptious fogsucker!” Smelt shouted, his monocle flashing over his left eye. He gave Buckle a hard look. “Consider my debt to you paid in full, Captain Romulus Buckle,” he said, fairly spitting the word “captain.”

The female steampiper pulled herself to her feet beside Buckle. Smelt raised his second pistol and aimed it at her.

“No, Smelt!” Buckle shouted. Too late.

Smelt pulled the trigger. The pistol boomed, phosphorus flashed.

Buckle heard the snap of punctured metal and a gasp of agony. He spun around in despair.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

S
ABRINA STOOD IN THE CENTER
of her ruined bridge, trying to figure out another method to get the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
under control again. “All ahead standard. Helm, give me a gentle turn to port.”

Max rang the chadburn handle back. “All ahead standard!” she shouted into the chattertube.

The chadburn sister dial swung into the same position, jangling the bell. “All ahead full, aye!” Elliot Yardbird responded from the engine room.

At least the engineers were still alive.

“The rudder is stiff, ma’am—barely responding,” De Quincey said, the helm wheel tocking oddly.

“Aye,” Sabrina said. “Try a turn to starboard, then.”

“I cannot keep the bubble on line; pitch is all out of alignment,” Ensign Caspar Wong said—he was the assistant elevatorman, and had just arrived on deck to take his post at the emergency wheel, his face black with gunpowder stains, and still overtalkative. “I cannot recover or maintain equilibrium properly.”

“Well, I have no more water ballast, and barely enough hydro reserves remaining to float a frog,” Nero, just recovered from his head bump, grumbled.

“Aye,” Sabrina said.

“The damage reports shall be coming in momentarily,” Max said. “We shall better know what we are dealing with then.”

“Two hundred feet and rising,” Welly reported, back over his drift scope and altimeter.

“At least we have some altitude,” Sabrina said. “We shall have to crawl home, but we shall get there.”

“Well done, First Lieutenant!” Balthazar cheered from the back of the gondola, as he helped Ensign Bolling up out of the hammergun turret.

“Obelisk!” Nero shouted. “Obelisk to port! We are on a collision course!”

Swerving into view from the left, and soon to be directly in front of them, loomed the massive pillar of the Catalina Obelisk, thrusting up from the Catalina channel, glowing a black purple across its uneven surface, darker than the clouds. It looked like a column designed to hold up the very heavens themselves.

“Hard a starboard! Hard a starboard!” Sabrina shouted.

De Quincey threw his entire weight into the rudder wheel, which spun once around and abruptly shuddered to a stop. “The rudder is jammed on the starboard swing, Captain!”

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, unresponsive to her helm—nose up, barely under control, and locked in an ascent—continued to drift to port, not away from the obelisk, but bearing
into
it with surprising speed.

There was a moment of shock on the bridge as the battered crew stared, unbelieving, as they rode the unresponsive
Pneumatic Zeppelin
on a collision course with the Catalina Obelisk, its monstrous mass swallowing up more and more of the nose-dome window. Welly took an unconscious step backward.

“Damn it! Hard a port! Hard a port!” Sabrina bellowed.

“Hard a port!” De Quincey replied, whirling the rudder wheel.

If the zeppelin could not turn to starboard, then Sabrina would go with the airship’s desire to nose to port and swing across the obstacle.

The bow hedged to port, picking up speed as the wall of the obelisk swept past from left to right in front of them. But it looked like it was too late. The obelisk was too wide and too close.

De Quincey pinned the rudder wheel, but there was little more he could do.

“Come on! Come on!” Sabrina shouted. She fought the urge to throw her engines into reverse, to cavitate the propellers. The airship was so damaged and out of balance that such a desperate act would more likely swing them sideways into the obelisk, rather than slowing them enough to maneuver around it.

“Brace for impact!” Max shouted. She leaned into the chattertube: “All hands! Brace for impact!”

There was nothing but a wall of purplish blackness facing them now.

Then, a slice of cloud-filled night, the gray clouds appearing bright compared to the light-sucking darkness of the Martian pillar, emerged on the left, slowly growing in size as the airship swung toward the edge of the obelisk.

It was going to be close.

And for a second, Sabrina thought they were going to make it.

The bow of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
skimmed past the cliff-like flank of the Catalina Obelisk.

“I think we made it!” Nero shouted.

“No!” Sabrina shouted. “Brace for impact!”

Then came the awful sound, the sound of the airship’s starboard-side envelope skidding along the edge of the obelisk, the sound of ripping fabric, snapping ropes, and the weird, awful, rivet-popping screech of superstructure supports wrenching and shearing.

“Collision!” Sabrina yelled.

“If it clips off the stabilizer, we’ve had it!” Welly cried.

The zeppelin was in contact with the obelisk for only a few moments, in actuality perhaps about three seconds, but to Sabrina it felt like an eternity. For those three seconds, the ship vibrated so violently it rattled her teeth and bones, and she feared it might come to pieces under her very feet.

But the vibrating stopped. The airship had made it past the obelisk, floating free once again. But now she swung hard to port in a wide, unnerving yaw.

Wong wrenched his elevator wheel back and forth, but it barely moved. “We have taken too much stabilizer damage, Captain,” he said. “I cannot keep her on an even keel for very long.”

Sabrina and Nero tried to assist Wong, but it was no use—the elevator controls were mired in mud.

The water. A cold shiver ran up Sabrina’s spine. She did not want to end up in the water.

“Can we keep her airborne long enough to launch the
Arabella
?” Wong asked plaintively.

“No,” Sabrina replied. “I am going to try to make for Catalina Island. Otherwise, we ditch in the sea.”

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

T
HE FEMALE STEAMPIPER HAD STUMBLED
back, one hand clutching at the catwalk rail, the other under a smoldering hole low in her cuirass, over her lower rib cage. Blood ran in dark rivulets over her fingers, staining the silver stripe on her black pants below. Pain swam in her green eyes, but did nothing to unsettle the profound disdain he saw for him there.

Buckle had lowered his sword.

“Don’t make me finish the job for you, Captain,” Smelt had said.

“I am taking her prisoner, Chancellor,” Buckle replied.

Smelt holstered his pistol. “She will never talk. Finish her off.”

Buckle had turned his back on Smelt and strode after the female steampiper, who was staggering toward the nose of the airship.

“Surrender and I shall give you mercy,” Buckle had shouted.

The female steampiper glanced back at him and continued her wounded shamble toward the bow. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was making a dramatic bank to port, and this made it difficult to walk along the catwalk if you weren’t used to it. Buckle followed her slowly, warily. She was moving toward the nose dome at the end of the Axial catwalk. The interior of the zeppelin
was dark—most of the buglights having dropped and smashed in the chaos—and loose fireflies swirled in the black flood of wind currents, their yellow bodies shifting in waves as if it were snowing fire.

The sky in front of the nose dome looked dark and uneven, as if they were flying into a wall. Buckle’s eyes blurred and he shook his head. The gray night sky appeared again, and he felt an odd sense of relief.

Suddenly the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
lurched, throwing Buckle forward to his knees. The envelope skin to his right and above him, what he could see of it between the cells, was violently sheared open from fore to aft by some colossal object. It was as if a gigantic knife were slicing its way along the starboard flank of the airship. It sounded like they had flown into a monstrous waterfall: wires snapped, slicing away into the darkness with shrill whips; rivets fired out of their holes like bullets; the superstructure, shaking so violently that it wobbled the catwalk, moaned with the horrible shriek of bending metal.

And then it was over as quickly as it had begun. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was loose and floating unhindered again, though Buckle, scrambling to his feet, could feel her drifting into an unhealthy yaw to port.

Buckle peered at the damaged skin beyond the starboard hydrogen cells, where the gray night sky loomed beyond. How much more damage could his zeppelin take? He had to get to the bridge.

“Your prisoner is escaping you, Captain Buckle!” Smelt shouted from behind.

Buckle turned to see the female steampiper limping down the catwalk toward the nose dome, about two compartments
ahead of him. He had taken off after her at a sprint, and now he had almost caught her before she reached it.

The female steampiper hunched around the four-pounder bow-chaser cannon to open the round glass hatch and step out onto the bow pulpit. She stood still for a moment, surveying the chasm of sea and sky, before she turned to look at Buckle. Her face was in shadow, her form silhouetted against the gray night sky, her windswept red hair roiling about her head.

“Wait!” Buckle shouted, slowing to a halt ten feet from her. He rammed his sword into its sheath with a leathery swish, hearing the clank of the hilt striking the brass mouth of the scabbard. “Surrender to me! You shall be returned home safely and unharmed! You have my word!”

The steampiper let her gaze linger on Buckle for a moment. For the life of him, Buckle thought he was looking at Sabrina.

The female steampiper turned her back to him.

“Wait!” Buckle screamed, rushing forward.

The woman clambered up the cannon turret, stepped up onto the top of the barbette, and threw herself into the void.

Buckle leapt out into the battering wind of the pulpit in time to see her falling away toward the ocean. At the last moment, just before the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
blocked her from his view, he saw a parachute on the back of her cuirass burst open, a soft puff of white in the darkness.

Buckle gripped the barbette rail as the wind thundered around him. He was overwhelmed by the darkness of sea and sky, and the irregular black mass of Catalina Island looming below. He felt dispirited, as if some desperately needed opportunity had just been lost.