Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (17 page)

Guns were not going to do it.

“To hell with the peashooters!” Buckle shouted, jamming his pistol in his belt and waving his axe above his head. “Form up a wedge and have at the blade!” And with a battle cry, Buckle raised his steel and charged the kraken.

TENTACLES

A
S
B
UCKLE WADED INTO THE
forest of lashing tentacles, each swing of the blade slicing satisfyingly deep into yielding jellyfish flesh, he found Sabrina and her reinforcements on his flanks, bayonets and hatchets flashing.

“Who is driving the damned airship?” Buckle screamed at Sabrina.

“Windermere. He is more than capable, Captain,” Sabrina answered, swinging her axe.

“Ah, splendid!” Buckle shouted as he lay about with his axe, fending off the beastie’s slithering attempts to rope him and his mates as the wedge advanced.

A man screamed overhead. Buckle looked up to see Cornelius Valentine, who had accompanied Sabrina up onto the roof, being lashed back and forth by a tentacle wrapped around his right leg. A sickly snapping sound came as the bones broke apart, and Valentine’s body flopped at a disturbing angle.

“Save that man!” Buckle shouted.

Darcy, the closest to Valentine, was on him in an instant, severing the beastie’s arm with one massive swing of his axe.

Valentine dropped to the deck, writhing in utter agony.

Buckle heard a familiar
bang
, a large powder cartridge fired behind him, and a grappling hook whizzed over his head, a clawed projectile of spinning silver, trailing its rope behind.

The kraken saw the flash of the grappling-cannon muzzle and instantly slammed its big eye shut; the grapnel slammed into the armored eyelid and spun away to port. The beastie tightened its grip on the envelope with a violent shudder of ripping canvas, snapping rigging, cracking ice, and the frightening groan of the bending girders beneath—while the six smaller eyes, remaining open, sought the source of the attack.

Buckle glanced back to see Martin Robinson manning the forward grappling cannon, its oilskin wrappings hastily ripped aside and flapping as they dangled about its post. Samantha Frost, gunner’s mate, hunched close at Robinson’s side, was rapidly clearing the anchor chamber of the rope so she could load a second shot.

A tree-size tentacle sailed through the air above Buckle, uncoiling in a whip of suckers and muscle, and the end of the huge arm snapped through the grappling cannon’s stock and into Robinson’s chest, launching him up and backward over the starboard side, and into oblivion. Frost stood motionless, in shock, her hands splayed over the twisted ruins of the grappling cannon, completely unscathed by the blow.

Buckle turned his head forward, opening his mouth to urge his crew forward. But suddenly he could not breathe. He was locked in a great squeeze about his upper chest and neck. He tried to twist, to inhale, but the air was crushed out of him. A tentacle had dropped upon him from above, wrapping snakelike about his torso, and he could do nothing for it now; he was lifted into the air, the upside-down world a whirl of lightning and falling snow, a fallen lantern flashing as it rolled across the
roof. His ribs, bending into his organs, pinned them into stasis. His muscles went limp, his mouth gaping, his vision shuddering to black.

In the last moment of consciousness, a consciousness of what seemed to be the end of his life, Buckle felt the monster’s suckers—somehow penetrating between his pith helmet and the collar of his greatcoat—latch on to the skin at the back of his neck and take hold.

Then the kraken dropped him.

Buckle, near blind and half-dead, was jolted back into coherence. The impact of the fall, soft with the give of the envelope skin, and hard with the slap of the ice and the unforgiving girder underneath, punched a shot of air into his chest. Sabrina was on him, her axe blade and goggles awash with yellow beastie blood, her bright red ringlets swinging around her head, her white teeth gritted.

“Romulus, damn you!” Sabrina shouted as she tore at the tentacle binding his body. “Stay with the wedge, sir, damn you, with all due respect, sir!”

Though his head swam, Buckle heard Sabrina’s words; with his lieutenants constantly saving his life—Max and now Sabrina—perhaps he should be more careful.

Darcy was there, his mighty hands alongside Sabrina’s as they pulled the tentacle loose. The sucker that had latched onto the back of Buckle’s neck was torn free; he felt a disc of his skin rip away with it. Buckle wheezed, sucking in snow-filled air that near froze his lungs solid, but the pain reanimated him.

Buckle forced himself to his knees, gasping over the hacked remains of the beastie tentacle that had been one squeeze away from killing him. The rancid ammonia reek of the beastie blood cleared his senses. He lurched to his feet and picked up
his axe—it came up with a sticky snap, the blood-slushy haft already half frozen to the deck—and found himself alongside his crew, battling the weaving net of tentacles surrounding them. The kraken hunched forward, foot by foot, and with each heave the
Arabella
shuddered under Buckle’s feet.

Sabrina, standing right in front of Buckle, dropped hard on her back, losing her axe, and was jerked away toward the kraken. A tentacle had secured Sabrina’s left leg from heel to thigh in loops, the reddish-purple muscles locked down despite her attempts to lurch forward and pry at them with her hands. The beastie had her.

“Lieutenant!” Darcy howled, grasping, but the curling brawn of a beastie arm knocked him back into Buckle as he lunged.

Sabrina’s helmet bounced away, her red hair bursting loose of its pinnings, swirling about her head like fire in the twilight, and she vanished into the beastie’s thicket of arms.

Sabrina Serafim, having just saved the life of her captain, now only had mere seconds to live herself.

CLICK, CLICK, CLICKETY-CLICK
. The kraken sawed its beaks in anticipation.

Buckle scrambled to his feet and charged.

“Captain! Wait, sir!” Darcy howled as Buckle sprinted past him.

A mistake to wait, Mister Darcy, Buckle thought. A mistake to charge as well. Buckle chose the better mistake.

Swerving through tentacles, Buckle plunged into the forest of writhing whips and roots. He kept his axe tight against his body, ducking and weaving under the grasping suckers that sought to wrap him. He ran straight ahead—straight at the kraken. Buckle had attacked out of instinct—but he trusted his
instinct to be right. The big-brained beastie would expect the zeppelineers to try to save their crewmate. The last thing the kraken might expect would be a sprint right down its gullet.

Before he was even ready for it, Buckle found himself springing along a main appendage, launching in a great leap up and over the beastie’s wall of tentacles. He arrived, in midair, under the creature’s cheek, face-to-face with snapping jaws slathered with an awful mix of human blood and alien saliva.

Buckle’s small, mortal eyes met the huge center eye of the monster, with its thousands of glittering chambers. The kraken saw Buckle—it
saw
him—and Buckle was suddenly aware of an unfathomable weight of centuries, of endless light-years of distance in the far reaches of space, of the weariness of eternity; he was hypnotized in the split second between his leap, his body in the air, axe raised high over his head, and the delivery of his blow.

The middle eye slammed shut its massive, armored lid, but Buckle sailed past it, having launched his jump to the right. The three small eyes on the left side of the kraken’s head were still open; Buckle hewed his axe blade through two of them in one swing, rupturing them in guttering gouts of clear fluid. The eyelids slammed shut over the slashed orbs, but too late. The kraken recoiled, its tentacles wrenching the
Arabella
’s airframe, making girders shriek and bolts pop like gunshots. Buckle slammed into the side of the kraken’s head, losing his grip on his axe as it stuck fast in an eye socket. He grabbed ahold of the beastie’s bone-ridged brow, swinging over a nest of snaking arms.

A tentacle had him, prying him loose. As Buckle’s hands tore free of the gelatinous flesh of the brow, he found himself suspended by a great anaconda coil of tentacle, wrapped around his waist. The kraken flung open its big eye as it dangled Buckle
in front of it, the honeycombed lenses scrutinizing him, the beaks slewing back and forth below it.

CLACK, CLACK, CLICK, CLACK, CLACK
.

The tentacle tightened about Buckle’s body, slowly lowering him into the horrible sawmill of the mouth, as if the beastie intended not only to consume him but to enjoy the agonies of his slow death.

Buckle drew his pistol, jammed it into the center of the gigantic, multichambered eye, and pulled the trigger.

The blackbang pistol boomed; the great eye collapsed, imploding, the chambers flickering between light and darkness, the eyelid blinking madly, sloshing-over iridescent fluid pouring out of the bullet hole, followed by streams of yellow blood.

The kraken’s beaks stopped grinding and flung open in a death splay. The beastie clenched up, gurgling as it made a last, vain effort to draw sense from its riven brainpan, and then fell limp. The wavering forest of tentacles all dropped to the deck at once. The arm binding Buckle released him—he fell onto the envelope, landing in a pool of blood and eye plasma. He nearly slipped through a hole, which would have been unfortunate, for he would have plummeted five stories down to the
Arabella
’s weather deck, below.

The beastie slid backward, slowly, but gaining speed, as the weight of the huge carapace dragged the corpse off the end of the stern.

No brain stuffing for this kraken, Buckle thought as he staggered to his feet, sidestepping the streams of dead tentacles as they slithered away with their dead master. He saw the beastie’s face, the light in the center eye going black as its life was extinguished, a life he knew to be as old as the world.

“Romulus!” Sabrina shouted.

Buckle spun to see Sabrina, her leg still wrapped in the dead kraken’s tentacle, being dragged with it over the side.

SKIES OF GLASS

“C
OME INTO THE ATRIUM
,
MY
dear Sabrina, please,” Sabrina heard her mother, Chelsea, ask in her dulcet voice, which reminded her of warm tea, strawberry jam, toy dogs, and amateur but well-acted theatrical productions. “Isambard has powered up the cloudbuster—you can come in and take some sun with me.”

It was strange to Sabrina that such a memory would come as the dead kraken carried her off stern of the
Arabella
and into oblivion in the Bloodfreezer. Such things that leap into the mind of the doomed!

Yet Sabrina had not given up. She still fought for life with all she had; having lost her axe, she hacked at the thick, rubbery tentacle with her knife. But she could only lean forward in lunges at the flesh that held her as it dragged her in a skittering slide across the roof, delivering jarring blows to her arse and spine at the hump of every girder.

Her vision was a blur of flashing sky and tentacles.

“Damned, wretched beastie!” she swore, barely aware that she was yelling. Her helmet had fallen away, taking her goggles
with it. Her cheeks and ears were numb, and the wind cruelly whipped her scarlet hair about her face and eyes, half blinding her. She had slashed her shin several times as she stabbed at the tentacle, but that did not really matter.