Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (44 page)

There was also a weird chill in his gut—what doppelgänger theory might explain why he had just battled a near-perfect double of Sabrina Serafim?

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
yawed to port with a terrifying looseness, fighting to stay under control, but foundering. They were probably going to have to ditch. Buckle ducked back into the nose port: he had to get to the bridge. He saw Smelt peering at him on the catwalk ahead, his monocle swirling with glimmers of the fireflies between them.

“The cat lost his mouse, did he?” Smelt laughed. “Why am I not surprised?”

Buckle did not answer.

“And perhaps you should thank me for how well we Imperials construct our airships,” Smelt shouted. “Or we would all be dead by now.”

Buckle reached the circular staircase and paused, against his better judgment, to glare at the Imperial chancellor. Why, of all the people in the world, Buckle grumbled in his mind, did it have to be Katzenjammer Smelt who had saved him? Buckle would have rather been chopped up in a propeller than owe anything to this vile blackguard.

“You yellow-fingered thief,” Smelt said.

Buckle grabbed the hilt of his sword, drawing it an inch before he stopped himself.

Smelt’s impressive, hair-filled nostrils flared. He slid his hand down to the handle of his sword. “The day you draw your sword on me, boy, is the day your shoulders get lonely without your head.”

Buckle gritted his teeth. He did not have time for this, this self-absorbed ruffling of feathers with Katzenjammer Smelt.
He forced his blade back down in its scabbard—the click, as he drove it home, was humiliating—and hurried down the companionway.

“The time will come, Romulus Buckle,” Smelt shouted after him. “You and I, Cranker, we have unfinished business, and that business shall be resolved at the point of a sword!”

NO REST FOR THE WICKED

W
HEN
R
OMULUS
B
UCKLE ENTERED THE
piloting gondola, he wondered how the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
could still be controlled given the wreckage he saw. The glass nose dome was shattered, and a strip of the gondola’s port side had been torn away in a long, jagged rip, as if a cannonball had raked across it, snapping away instrument panels and rendering banks of once-elegant instruments into grotesque metal spaghetti. The freezing wind howled in through the gap, swinging the buglights overhead, shaking the glowing green boil in its spheres and tubes.

Kellie burst out of her cubby, whirling around Buckle’s knees as he hit the bottom of the companionway—she looked to be the only living thing there that wasn’t badly worn out. A Ballblaster and a crewmen still guarded the base of the staircase, gripping their muskets, looking exhausted; another crewman, sitting on the deck, his right arm soaked with blood, was being bandaged by Fitzroy; Welly and Nero stood at their stations, their faces slick, their eyes glassy with shock.

Max spun from the engineering station. “Captain on the bridge,” she announced, a formality Buckle disliked; even though he had told her so, she still continued to do it.

Balthazar, assisting Wong on the emergency elevator wheel, his face running with blood from a laceration high up on his head, gave Buckle a sour look. “You’ve got one hell of a mess on your hands here, son. And, by the way, the sky curses captains who don’t stay put on their bridge.”

Buckle nodded, which was his way of ignoring Balthazar’s criticism, and stepped to the helm. Sabrina smiled grimly at his approach, her cheeks damp with perspiration despite the howling, cold air.

“Do we need to relocate to the battle bridge?” Buckle asked. The airship had a secondary emergency bridge, located behind the engine room at the stern, where the crew could transfer control; it was rudimentary and almost blind, and only to be considered as a last option.

“It would not help, Captain,” Max answered at his back. “Our flight-control systems and control surfaces are damaged. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
has simply absorbed too much punishment to maintain equilibrium.”

“She is not going to stay in the air much longer, Captain,” Sabrina said. “I am making way for Catalina Island, and initiated a slow descent at half full. I recommend an emergency mooring to effect repairs.”

“Aye. I’ll take her from here, Navigator,” Buckle said, as he stepped to the helm wheel. De Quincey immediately released his grip on the spokes when Buckle clamped his hands down on them. Buckle gasped. The amount of effort it instantly took to hold the wheel in place surprised him: it nearly pulled him off balance before he had time to set his feet. “Catalina sounds like a good idea,” Buckle said, straining. He glanced back at De Quincey, who was soaked through with sweat.

“You need a hand, Captain?” De Quincey asked.

“Not at the moment, Mister De Quincey,” Buckle replied. “But stay close.”

Sabrina cast a disapproving glance at the bloody wound on Buckle’s arm, as well as the bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head. “You are injured, sir.”

“I appreciate your concern, Navigator,” Buckle said with a smile. “No rest for the wicked.”

“Yes, Captain,” Sabrina replied. “Look out—she is extremely heavy to port, constantly wanting to fall out of level, and barely responding to commands.” She rubbed her arms as she stepped forward into the navigator’s chair, and Welly shifted aside.

“How goes the fight up top?” Balthazar asked.

“It looks like we sent them packing,” Buckle replied. He had seen the aftermath of the desperate battle along the keel corridor, the dead bodies of steampipers and his own crewmen scattered on the platforms and gratings, shrouded in drifting gunpowder smoke and mourned by legions of sparkling fireflies. Buckle had observed the carnage with a cold eye. The time for mourning would come later. “Pluteus and Ivan are overseeing deck sweeps in the search for stowaways and bombs. Hopefully we harried them so much they were unable to plant any explosives.”

“Nicely done,” Balthazar said.

“I hope you killed them all,” Nero grumbled. “Serves them right.”

“One hundred and fifteen feet and descending,” Welly reported.

Buckle watched the sweeping mass of Catalina Island, centered in the broken bull’s-eye of the nose dome, looming large in the glittering sea. He scrutinized the topography, looking for a wide slope to make his landing on. The zeppelin struggled to
maintain its course, speed, and altitude, and the wheel in his hands, usually light, felt leaden. It was a royal strain just to keep the level bubbles on target as they wobbled in their glass arches.

“Engineering, damage report,” Buckle asked.

“We are screwed, aye,” Sabrina replied.

“I would appreciate a little more detail than that.”

“Almost every major system of the airship has been compromised, Captain,” Max said. “The skin is now too irregular to maintain balance or streamlining. Our drag exceeds maximum limits. We are lucky it is a calm night in the air—if we were to fly into even a stiff headwind, I fear the internal pressures would now tear the airship apart. We are running on three boilers with one, two, and three shut down. Water coolant is dangerously low and all water ballast, both the mains and reserves, has been jettisoned. Positive buoyancy is just above the line, and we have only thirty-three percent of hydrogen remaining in the reserve tanks.”

“A real peach of a pinch,” Sabrina noted grimly.

Buckle nodded. The hydrogen percentage was critical. Anything below 30 percent in the reserve tanks and they would not have enough lift to get off the ground again. And if anything went wrong with the emergency land mooring, a tricky maneuver even with a healthy airship, they might have to vent the existing hydrogen in the gasbags to prevent a crash fire. That would mean that all the hydrogen they’d have left was what was in those reserve tanks.

“One hundred feet,” Sabrina said, her eyes buried in the drift scope at the navigator’s station.

Max tapped a barometer cylinder and eyed the measurement lines painted on the glass. “We do not have the capacity to recover from our damages in flight. Not enough to make it over the mountains to home.”

“In other words, yes, we’re screwed. Aye,” Buckle said, with a wink to Sabrina.

“Catalina works for me,” Balthazar said. “I’ll take a hard thump in the arse over a cold bath any day of the week. We shall patch this old lady up and be on our way by morning.”

Catalina Island.

Buckle felt his heart sink in his chest. He, for all of his braggadocio, was not going to be able to get his zeppelin home without a perilous stop for repairs. Now he had to make an emergency mooring at night over unfamiliar terrain. Catalina Island was said to be uninhabited—no clan had officially claimed it—but it was known to be a secretive refuge for privateers, pirates, and fugitives, and the Atlanteans were rumored to have outliers operating in the vicinity. And if the Founders clan had decided to be there at some point, they would be there.

“’Have the crew prepare for emergency field anchor,” Buckle said, eyeing the dark outline of Catalina against the dully sparkling ocean—it seemed much bigger now than it had just a minute ago.

“Prepare for emergency field anchor!” Max shouted into her chattertube hood.

“Eighty feet altitude,” Sabrina reported. “Speed, twenty-two knots. Crosswind of two knots, north by northeast.”

Buckle shoved the rudder wheel around. Trying to bring a damaged zeppelin down in a decent hover was one hell of a trick. A flip of bright red caught his eye. It was a tendril of Sabrina’s hair, a loose curl dangling against her temple from beneath her bowler hat as she leaned over the drift scope at her station. Buckle fought an unsettled feeling in his stomach. Sabrina was the only person he had ever seen with hair so red as that—until today. How could the Founders steampiper possess
scarlet hair equally brilliant? More disturbingly, how could she bear such an uncanny resemblance to Sabrina that it would be difficult to believe them anything less than family, or indeed anything other than twin sisters?

Both of them were even left-handed.

Buckle was bound by oath never to ask another sibling orphan any questions about their past. This was Balthazar’s cardinal rule. But the Founders clan was fast becoming the Crankshaft clan’s greatest enemy. And it was obvious to Buckle that her nearly identical appearance to an elite officer of their steampiper corps proved that Sabrina’s connection to them ran far deeper than an unexplained familiarity with their city and its sewer systems suggested.

The matter had to end here. He had a broken zeppelin to land.

The matter had to end here. For now.

FIREFLIES AND BURNING FUSES

“D
AMN THIS DISCOMBOBULATION
!” I
VAN GRUMBLED
as he clambered up an access ladder between compartments four and five. His firefly lantern swung from his wrist hook, casting waves of orange illumination back and forth in the near darkness of gigantic rustling gas cells and creaking metal girders. They weren’t going make it home for days, his airship was a mess, and to top it all off, he was going to miss his first date with Holly Churchill.

Holly had repeatedly thwarted Ivan’s courting, stating emphatically that she was not interested in such dalliances at this time in her life. It had taken him three months to persuade her to accept a date. He was completely taken with her, and in the most gentlemanly way. She wasn’t like the other Crankshaft clan girls. She was serious, intense, and did not smile easily—though when she did, she could melt the heart of an ogre. Her sandy-brown hair wasn’t the longest, and she wasn’t the most beautiful—though there was nothing wrong with her looks—but she possessed an incandescent sultriness, a magnetism that made men climb mountains and write songs, and hate any other poor fellow who might also throw his hat into her wide ring of suitors.

Ivan wanted to impress Holly, to open doors for her, to throw his jacket over puddles for her. He didn’t want to be his usual
boorish self and screw this one up. In his spare time he had been carving a little present for her. He was an excellent whittler, good enough to be specific about the qualities of the wood he used, and he had spent many long hours sitting on a propeller casing, carving a cardinal for her. The bird was extravagant in its detail, in every feather and dent in its beak, and Ivan could feel the tight little weight of it in snug in the left-arm pocket of his leather jumpsuit.