Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (49 page)

“I also wanted to thank you for your bravery up on the roof yesterday, when you protected me from the tanglers.”

The blue tint faded from Max’s goggles. “I failed you, Captain.”

Buckle shook his head. “Courage is courage. Courage against long odds is never diminished by the result. So I thank you, my brave, brave friend.”

“You are welcome, Captain.” The goggles went blue again.

Buckle stepped to his little pantry and collected another shot glass. “Have a drink with me, Lieutenant.”

“I appreciate the gesture, Captain. But I should not.”

Buckle planted the glass on the table beside his. “I am attempting an appropriate gesture of appreciation here. Well, how about I order you to have a drink with me, then?”

Max cocked her head. “An order?”

“Damned right, it is an order,” Buckle announced playfully as he poured. “And a heartfelt request.”

Buckle lifted a brimming glass toward Max. She sighed and stepped forward, taking it in her long, white fingers.

“And goggles up, please,” Buckle said.

“Another order?” Max asked, almost shyly.

“Another heartfelt request. I should like to see your eyes, Lieutenant. This means a lot to me.”

Max reached up to her leather pilot helmet and flipped the lever that retracted the aqueous humor from the space between her eyes and the goggle lenses. She lifted the goggles up to their resting position on the crest of the helmet and wiped her wet eyes with her sleeve. She paused, and then did something that surprised Buckle slightly—she pulled her helmet off, her thick black hair swirling about her face and shoulders. It was an act of casual undress; she rarely did such a thing in his presence.

“Goggles off, Captain, as requested,” Max said.

Buckle smiled. Max had caught him off guard, and she knew it: a devious blue haunted her dark eyes. “Very well, then.” He raised his glass with his good hand and motioned for Max to step closer. “To the blood.”

Max took a confident stride up to him. They hooked arms at the elbow, each drawing their hand back so their glass was
poised just below their lips, their faces only inches apart. “To the blood,” Max said.

“Aye,” Buckle said, his voice emerging in a husky whisper. Two zeppelineers who drank to the blood together were forever bound to sacrifice their lives for each other. Buckle had made this toast with Max before, as he had with several crewmates, but this time it was different—something crackled in the air between them like a swarm of invisible bees. “To the blood.”

Buckle threw back his rum, feeling Max’s slender elbow rotate in the crux of his arm as she did the same. When the arms came down, he found himself caught in her hypnotic alien eyes. What was this? Buckle could not move. Max’s breath, sweet with the rum, warmed his lips. He realized that her Martian heart, pressed up against his forearm, was pounding. Something demanded that he kiss her. He wanted to kiss her. But to do so meant to throw himself off a cliff, and into the depthless chasm of those bottomless black eyes that now danced with purple will-o’-the-wisps. He could not move.

A rapping came from the door as it swung open with a scrape of wood and glass.

Max jerked back. When she yanked her arm away from Buckle, she lost her grip on the shot glass; it spun to the floor and shattered. Buckle’s lips suddenly felt cold.

Sabrina stared from the doorway, having shoved the door open for little Howard Hampton, cabin boy and gunner’s mate, to enter, proudly striding in with a tray of hot tea. “Howard made you some tea, Captain.”

“Very good, lad,” Buckle said with a smile, flicking his eyes once to Max. “Place it on the table here, please.”

Max pulled her hair back and yanked on her flying helmet. She lowered her goggles, flooding them with the aqueous
humor. “I shall see to the next status report, Captain,” she announced, and strode for the door.

“Very well, Max,” Buckle replied, watching Howard pour him a cup of dark tea.

“This is much better for you than the rum, sir,” Howard said. “Especially with such a nasty chill in the air, sir.”

“Aye, lad,” Buckle said, watching Max disappear out the door. He turned and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Aye.” There was something different about Howard now…something serious had crept into his blue eyes above the blackbang powder stains on his cheeks. He had witnessed war for the first time. The innocence was gone.

“Cookie cooked up some bangers and eggs for Kellie,” Howard continued. Kellie yipped at the word “bangers.” Kellie was crazy for bangers. “Cookie said there’s nothing like a crash landing to make the hens pop eggs like there’s no tomorrow.”

Sabrina opened her logbook in her casual, unperturbed fashion. “I have a status report on the piloting-gondola control surfaces, if you wish, Captain.”

“Go ahead,” Buckle said. As Sabrina began her list of repairs, Buckle could not help but be distracted by the raucous singing resounding from the mess hall. Had they been singing all this time? He could not recall.

YE WHO HAVE LOVED AND LOST

I
T WAS AN OLD MEMORY—AT
least for Sabrina, who was only nineteen, six years distant was an old memory—and it overwhelmed the present moment with such vividness that she actually stopped speaking in midsentence, in order to catch her breath.

She was aboard the airship trader
Condor
once again, a thirteen-year-old whose heart was beating so rapidly she could feel it drumming in her wrists.

“I love you, Sabrina,” Gabriel Teague said, his face only inches from hers, speaking loudly over the roar of the steam boilers, just inside the hatchway of the old tramp.

It was a loud, seal-oil-stinking, greasy place—but they could be alone there, away from the laughing eyes of the crew.

Sabrina placed her hand on his chest, halfheartedly pushing him away. “Dear Gabriel,” she answered. “It is no good.”

His brown eyes never left hers. “I love you.”

Sabrina looked away and found the porthole across the passageway to stare at, the gray clouds drifting by. She could say nothing. Yes, she loved him. But she was only thirteen—what did she know? He was two years her senior and brutally handsome, in her opinion, his father the
Condor
’s owner and captain, and she was only a hired hand, a cargo rat one rung above a
stowaway, working for bunk and board. “Your father would not approve,” she said.

It was such a falsehood. She knew Gabriel’s father, and he would not care one whit. But Sabrina feared—she knew—that she would only torture Gabriel with her damaged heart.

“If you do not declare the love I know you harbor for me, I swear I shall throw myself off the airship right now,” Gabriel declared, quite defiantly.

Sabrina turned her eyes to his and kept them there. Inside, she was crumbling. Her family was gone. Marter was gone. Helpless to act upon her plots of revenge, she was alone. She
wanted
to love Gabriel.

“I love you then, if saying so will serve to prevent you from jumping over the side,” Sabrina blurted, and when Gabriel kissed her, she wept.

“I shall make a fortune for us, you shall see,” Gabriel had enthused. “My father has given me shares. Tomorrow morning, after we deliver our rubber shipment, I shall be a wealthy man.”

The next morning, Gabriel and his father were dead, along with most of the crew. The
Condor
, stripped of her cargo and hydrogen, was burning.

And Sabrina, the Jonah, bloody and branded with a hot iron, lay in the hold of the slaver pirates, waiting to die.

It was startling what the brain might suddenly choose to offer from its depths, uninvited.

Sabrina inhaled and continued reading her instrument reports out loud. She was unsettled. It was not the memory of poor Gabriel that derailed her. It hurt, certainly, but, no—she was dismayed by what she had just seen.

She did not know what she thought of what she had just glimpsed between Max and Buckle. Seeing them locked
together, drinking “to the blood,” was not unusual—she had taken that comradely oath with Buckle as well—but the naked moment she witnessed between them, more
sensed
than saw, was startling.

Sabrina and Max were not particularly close, more acquaintances than sisters, but she knew what purple in Martian eyes meant. Max was in love with Romulus Buckle. Max was in love with Romulus Buckle, and he, magnificent, kind, handsome oaf that he was, had no bloody idea.

At first she was just surprised. Now she felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach.

BUFFALO STEAK AND A DUEL FOR DINNER

B
Y THE TIME
C
APTAIN
B
UCKLE,
Howard Hampton, and Kellie arrived in the mess hall, the festivities were in full swing. Some of the Ballblasters and Alchemists were also in the thick of it, including Wolfgang and Zwicky, and they appeared to be enjoying themselves. The airship’s string quartet fiddled at the back of the chamber. It was not a full quartet, not anymore, not with the fourth chair empty after the death of their second violinist, Amanda Ambrose, the night before, but the remaining three carried on.

“Three cheers for Captain Buckle!” shouted boilerman Nicholas Faraday, shoving through the crowd and thrusting a shot glass of illegally acquired gin into Buckle’s hand. “The Cap’n who soars with the tanglers!”

The voices of the assembled crew rose as one. “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

Buckle lifted the glass and threw back the gin, its bite always popping with midshipman memories, most of them fond. He was a gin man no more, however—the juniper berry distillation was coarser to his palate than his much preferred rum.

The men and women cheered, and a chant arose: “Name! Name! Name!”

Buckle raised his hand. The mess went silent. He eyed the empty chair and thought of the name. “Amanda Ambrose,” he announced loudly. “The finest skinner I ever saw, the sweetest violinist I ever heard, and the finest ripper I ever met!”

“To Amanda Ambrose!” the chief skinner, Marian Boyd, shouted.

“To Amanda Ambrose!” the crew repeated in unison, then cheered.

The wake party surged on, and Buckle found himself propelled forward by the husky arm of Perriman Salisbury.

“I could cook you up some tangler giblets, Captain,” Salisbury joked. “Scraped fresh off the roof. Think of it: the beastie tries to eat you, but you eat the beastie. The irony of it all makes one’s mouth water, does it not?”

“Tangler innards are poisonous, are they not?” Buckle asked.

“That is beside the point.” Salisbury laughed. He sat Buckle down at a table, and slid a plate of hot buffalo steak, eggs, and bangers in front of him. Another plate, with bangers and a greasy shank bone, was placed on the deck for Kellie.

“Everyone else has been fed, Cookie?” Buckle asked Salisbury.

“Yes, Captain,” Salisbury replied. “I always make sure you are the last.”

“It looks to be a capital dish,” Buckle said, thrusting his fork into the thick cut of venison on the metal plate, swirling it around in its greasy blood and the butter from the eggs, and cutting away a chunk of it with his knife. He jammed the meat into his mouth. It tasted so good he almost fainted.

Katzenjammer Smelt’s voice ruined the whole thing.

“Romulus Buckle, I expect you to surrender my airship to me the moment we arrive in Imperial territory,” Smelt announced,
suddenly appearing across the table. “I will, of course, assure you and your crew safe conduct home.”

Buckle, slowly chewing his steak, stared at Smelt. “What is done is done. This is my airship, Chancellor.”

“I am honor-bound not to accept such an answer,” Smelt said evenly.

The mess hall suddenly fell silent.

“The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
is my airship, and you shall return her to me or suffer the consequences, sir,” Smelt pressed.

“Have a drink, Chancellor,” Buckle offered.

Nicholas Faraday ambled forward and shoved a glass of gin into Smelt’s face. “Aye! Have a drink, Imperial. Take the edge off.”

Smelt slapped the gin away, spraying it all over Faraday.

Sergeant Scully lunged forward, hurling his glassful of grog into Smelt’s face. “The captain said have a drink, you filthy spiker!”