Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (15 page)

“Helm!” Buckle croaked. “Hold your course! Helm!” Buckle turned to see Mariner on his knees, blood streaming from a cut above the hairline, his face contorted with effort as he battled the rudder wheel—and the wheel was slowly twisting him down. Buckle lurched aft to grab the opposite spokes of the wheel and, with an effort that threatened to snap his collarbones, helped Mariner inch the wheel back to starboard.

Windermere fought the same kind of war with the elevator wheel, both he and Wong gripping the shuddering instrument with all their might.

The
Arabella
took a sudden, stomach-lifting drop, nosing down; three seconds later, the updraft caught the launch again, and hurled the little
Arabella
upward into the storm.

“Captain! Captain!” Sabrina howled, her shout a bare hint under the thunder. “We are a’scudding, sir!”

“Aye, Navigator!” Buckle yelled back. His shout tore out through his throat, rough and loud, but he paid a price for it.

“Altitude one thousand, five hundred! Fifteen hundred and rising fast!” Sabrina yelled, her voice shrill. “Faster than the dials can spin, Captain!”

Buckle saw Sabrina’s shadow in the nose dome, her goggles gleaming green in the light of the surviving boil spheres, a lightning flash illuminating her for an instant in silhouette. “Aye!” he replied. He straightened out his back and thighs, but now the ship was being shoved from port and starboard, threatening to roll, Windermere and Wong’s efforts notwithstanding.

“Damage report!” Buckle shouted, hurting his throat.

Sabrina looked back at Buckle, shaking her head in an exaggerated fashion. “Cannot hear the voice tubes! Two thousand, five hundred feet and climbing!”

Buckle nodded, the underside of his chin scratching a line of ragged frost on his collar. Certainly the
Arabella
had taken shearing damage at various points, but her flight controls were responding, and that was all that mattered. If so—if the
Arabella
was truly intact and sound—then it was a miracle that the Bloodfreezer updraft had not ripped away the fragile cruciform fins and rudder.

“Hydrogen pressures all good!” Alison Lawrence shouted. “Buoyancy unknown!”

“Three thousand, nine hundred feet!” Sabrina bellowed.

“Hold her steady, mates!” Buckle commanded, his spine aching against the pummeling lift, somewhere in the back of his mind glad that he had not brought the ship’s mascot, Kellie, along for the trip. “We’ll let her spit us out, aye!” He rubbed at the glass surface of the water compass, which was now frosting over.

“Five thousand feet. Ice, Captain! Ice!” Sabrina shouted.

Ahhh, shite, Buckle thought. The insanely freezing, moisture-laden air of the Bloodfreezer—which would render the airship as heavy as a stone once it stopped lifting her—meant that every inch of the
Arabella
was coating up with ice. This added weight, immense when taken in its totality, would soon send the launch plummeting to earth, even with engines overdriven, ballast tanks empty, and hydrogen cells socked full.

Buckle leaned into the chattertube hood and yelled, doubting anyone aboard could hear him as he did so. “All axemen to the assembly station! I repeat, all axemen to the assembly station!” He took a staggering step toward Robinson at his aft signals station. “Mister Robinson! Axemen to stations! Pass the word!”

“Pass the word, aye!” Robinson answered, then turned and ran through the small passageway, veering to maintain his balance.

The big inclinometer above the helm, encased in ice, burst open, the glass splitting down the seams of its copper casing. Bright-green boil spewed forth, splattering Buckle and the deck with running splotches of glowing green liquid that vibrated and rolled with every punishment the superstructure took. Buckle smelled the boil—it had an ocean-water, fishy, seaweed stink.

“Seven thousand feet and rising, but I think rate of ascent is slowing!” Sabrina announced. “Seven thousand!”

Buckle tucked his top hat in a cubby and buttoned his leather coat up to the chin. “First Lieutenant! You have the bridge! I am going topside!”

Sabrina stumbled back toward Buckle in the darkness, her boots sliding in the greasy boil and shards of glass as Welly slid into the navigator’s station behind her. “No, Captain!” Sabrina scolded. “Send Windermere or me on the roof! It is our job!”

“Aye!” Windermere affirmed.

“Captain stays on the bridge, sir!” Sabrina continued. “And you are already exhausted, sir!”

“I shall have none of it!” Buckle howled, annoyed. “The bridge is yours, Lieutenant—you have nothing better to do in this black hole as it is, Serafim, you bloody mutineer!”

AXES

R
OMULUS
B
UCKLE CHARGED UP THE
Arabella
’s main companionway, pulling on a pith helmet and a topman’s greatcoat, a heavy tan coat with a high collar and a waist lined with safety clamps, hastily securing its clasps. The companionway, screaming like a cat in heat, as it always did in inclement weather—some annoying effect of design—shuddered and rocked. It was dark, the lantern curiously missing from its hook, and crowded with crew members—mostly the hastily dressed engine rats, smelling of coal and fire. Signalman Robinson carried a storm lantern; the black iron banister rail gleamed evilly under its soft, weaving, orange light, glazed with scant frostings of ice.

They burst up onto the weather deck and found it a howling cavern, unnaturally dark, except for a few undamaged buglights swinging wildly on their posts. Vertical rents thrashed about the envelope’s flanks, ripped along several of the frame girders towering five stories above, the patching and needles hanging, barely begun, abandoned by the skinners who had been called away to the axe teams. The long fabric shell billowed in and out in violent ripples and billows, surging with such force that Buckle was amazed the envelope had not been ripped away. As Buckle turned, he slipped and nearly fell, but managed to catch
himself on the frame of the belfry: the decking, already slick with a thin sheet of clear ice, gleamed treacherously as the airship bucked, and powerful gusts of wind tunneled in over the open gunwales.

Montgomery Muhammed Darcy led the six-member topside axe team, mostly riggers and skinners. Darcy was a barrel-chested, brawny-forearmed boilerman, with tawny skin and heavy-lidded eyes. He was bald as a billiard ball but furred with a dense brown beard he liked to chew on. He handed Buckle an ice axe. “Here, Cap’n,” Darcy said. “Your weapon, sir.”

Buckle hefted the axe; the long wooden haft was well weighted, the steel head forged into a sharp blade with a blunt pick on the back end, the pick the more effective implement when one was trying to bash ice away from the envelope. “Thank you, Mister Darcy,” Buckle shouted.

“Aye, sir!” Darcy replied.

Buckle turned to face the group huddled around him on the heaving deck. The crew members resembled grotesque beetles in the wavering yellow buglight, snapping their leather breathing masks up under their topmen’s goggles, completely shielding their faces, and shoving the small oxygen canisters into cloth pouches stitched into the greatcoat waists, taking care not to foul the rubber tubes. Lothian Blake, propulsion airman, passed out firefly lanterns. Carmen Steinway, skinner, was responsible for sounding the warning should the
Arabella
climb higher than breathable air, and had a bulky quicksilver altimeter strapped to her forearm, its long glass tubes lit up with bioluminescent boil.

“Iron up, lords and ladies,” Buckle yelled. “How about we trim this beauty clean?”

“Aye, Cap’n!” came the response.

“Current altitude eight thousand, six hundred, sir!” Steinway screamed into Buckle’s ear as Blake handed him a lantern.

“Eyes up for tanglers! Mind your safety lines!” Buckle shouted, looping the axe handle’s leather strap around his wrist. “Hurrah!”

“Hurrah!” the shout returned.

Buckle clambered up the amidships ladder, his greatcoat and equipment making his boots and gloves heavy on the metal rungs; he ascended into the surging, roaring envelope cavern where the stressed superstructure rattled and the gasbags heaved, their whalelike backs appearing half-alive in the swaying buglights, glittering with the copper lacings of their stockings, grinding and squeaking against their backstays and securing wires.

The noise, the earsplitting rip of the storm, threatened to stun the mind. Buckle sensed that the
Arabella
was already getting heavy, weighted down, sluggish—icing up fast.

He caught the scent of blood, or rather, the memory of the smell of blood. It was not his blood, not even human blood, but rather the sharper, sweeter odor of Martian blood. It was only for a heartbeat, but for one instant he felt a fear for Max’s life, as she lay helpless in her bunk below.

Buckle reached the observer’s platform as the Bloodfreezer coursed above the glass of the nacelle bubble, its black churn lighting up with erratic, ominous flashes of blue-white. Buckle slammed the securing bolt aside. When he opened the hatch, it was nearly torn out of his hands.

“Let us dance, you surly devil!” Buckle shouted, knowing only he could hear his words, and plunged up into the maelstrom with his lantern at the fore.

IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

B
UCKLE EMERGED FROM THE HATCH
of the amidships observer’s nacelle into a gauntlet of whips, of lashing wind, ice particles, and snow. The maelstrom sucked at his goggles, trying to tear them off his head. It was difficult to see. The
Arabella
’s canvas roof rippled and billowed like a surging sea, every stitch straining at the seams; even the two grappling cannons seemed to be rocking. Visibility was no more than forty feet, and Buckle experienced a sensation of falling as the walls of churning snow swept upward over the flanks and into the churning obscurity above.

And everything was coated in ice, clear, thin, glassy ice.

Buckle moved aside in a crouch, hooking his iron safety-line clasp onto the heavy cable of the main jackline—smashing that section of its ice sheath—as Darcy crawled out of the hatch behind him. Their lanterns whipped about their hands, the fireflies scattering inside the glass as they were walloped about.

“Nasty weather, Cap’n!” Darcy howled, pulling the next crew person—the rigger, Lansa Lazlo—up onto the roof with a powerful tug. “Nasty!”

“And I neglected to bring my parasol!” Buckle shouted back; he did not snap his oxygen mask up to his face, although he already felt the frostbite sinking in—he needed to be able
to shout and be heard. Darcy had not attached his face mask either.

Buckle waited, hunching as the severe cold bit through his clothes and buffeted the flat of his axe blade, until all the ice team had made it up onto the envelope and secured their safety lines. “Two and three forward with me!” Buckle shouted. “Mister Darcy, take the remainder to the stern! We shall meet amidships!”

“Aye, sir!” Darcy replied.

“Have at it, choppers! And mind your blades!” Buckle howled.

Darcy led his three ice cutters—skinner Hector Hudson, and riggers Ilsa Gallagher and Lansa Lazlo—along the envelope spine toward the stern, slipping and scrambling through the wind gusts. Buckle signaled for his two—skinner Carmen Steinway and the propulsion airman Blake—to accompany him forward to the bow. Buckle grabbed ahold of the stem of the forward grappling cannon, using it for support as he advanced, his boots skidding across layers of bumpy ice. It was a long scramble across the seventy-five feet of slick spine board and canvas to the crest of the nose, the wind exploding over and over again into their faces.

A flash of lightning, terrifyingly close, ripped through the murk off the port beam, its reflection flashing across the ice coating the length of the airship. A burned-metal smell stung Buckle’s mouth and nostrils—electricity.

Buckle and his axe team reached the crow’s-nest nacelle at the leading edge of the envelope, where the rounding of the nose fell away in a steep curve to the quivering bowsprit thirty feet below. “Top down! Top down!” Buckle shouted.

Steinway and Blake rappelled down the flanks of the bow, heads ducked against the beating blizzard. Buckle raised his axe
against the maniac wind, bringing it down with a fine glancing stroke, despite the waffling of the axe head. The force of the blow exploded the immature, thin ice at the point of impact, the mirrorlike fragments sucked away into the storm, while sending long, shivering cracks through the surrounding carapace. Buckle struggled to keep his feet. Clearing the roof of the new ice was the easy part; trying to keep one’s footing in the mess while swinging an axe was not.