Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (21 page)

Pouring the honey-colored rum into the first tumbler, Buckle let it rise until it hugged the brim. When he raised the glass, the lukewarm alcohol sloshed out over his fingers. To Sebastian Mitty. He drained the glass and poured another. To the dead. He drained the glass and poured another. To the living. He drained the glass.

Buckle lowered the tumbler to the table with a deliberate movement, placing the glass between two wet rings of slopped rum, and filled it to overflowing again. He took a deep breath, still annoyed by the stink of the lacquer, despite the harsh reek of burning coal seeping in from the passageway.

A fist rapped on the door. Buckle turned to see the Windermere leaning in. “I have the updated damage reports,
Captain,” Windermere said with a smile. “And I believe you have the good rum.”

“Ah, so I do. Come in, come in, Master of the Launch. These are your quarters, after all.”

Windermere ducked under the lintel and stepped to the table. “Not when you are aboard, sir. But I must admit to a desperately bruised ego regarding the matter—a stiff whack of Standard’s would go a long way to speeding my recovery, sir.”

“Here you are, wounded duck,” Buckle said, passing the overflowing tumbler to Windermere.

“Thank you, Captain,” Windermere said, holding the glass between thumb and forefinger to avoid letting the rum dribble from his fingers to the sleeve. In comparison, Buckle noticed, his own cuff was soaked with rum.

“How are we doing?” Buckle asked.

“Well, much better than we probably could ever have hoped, considering what we have been through.”

“All so not very specific, Lieutenant,” Buckle said with a false gruffness, the alcohol making him playful.

“No, sir. My apologies, sir. Ah, propulsion, engine, and flight systems are all good. The upper rudder fin is bent—the freaking kraken sat on it—but helm can handle it. The stern superstructure had to be triple propped, but the fixes are holding even at best speed. The increased drag is limping us a bit, but we should make it home by midafternoon, barring any further encounters with Bloodfreezers and krakens.”

“Very good,” Buckle said, raising his glass. “You handled the airship artfully in the storm, Mister Windermere. Well done.”

Windermere shot his glass up quickly enough to splatter the deck with rum, an excited motion, then paused and tapped
the lip of his glass against Buckle’s. “Thank you, sir. I shall pass your compliments on to the crew.”

“To the crew, living and dead,” Buckle toasted.

“To the crew, living and dead, aye,” Windermere repeated.

Buckle swallowed the rum—it was going down quite easily now, and when it started getting too easy he usually chose to stop.

“Ah, Standard’s Irish,” Windermere enthused, holding his glass up to the light to admire a trickle of the honey-brown alcohol pooling in the base. “Lovely.”

Buckle slid the bottle to Windermere. “Help yourself to more of the ‘lovely,’ Lieutenant.”

Windermere nodded as he plunked his glass down beside the bottle. “Perhaps in a moment. Thank you, Captain. I am not much of a drinker, I am afraid. Lightweight.”

“Aye, a good predicament, however. The grog is nothing but a troublemaker,” Buckle said, grabbing the bottle to pour another glass, which he threw back.

“How is First Officer Max doing? I have not yet had time to look in on her, I am afraid.”

“Tough as Martians are, I am not so sure,” Buckle replied. “Honestly, I think if it were either you or I who had absorbed such ravages, we would be sewn up in canvas sacks with pennies on our eyes by now. I think she shall make it.”

“I would not bet against her, sir.”

“Nor I,” Buckle replied. He did not know Windermere well. Though of similar age, Andrew Windermere had been a sickly child, often excused from school and outdoor events, so Buckle had not grown up with him, as he had so many of the others. Later in life, when Windermere had recovered his haleness, they had always been posted to different training classes
and airships. But upon Windermere’s recent transfer to the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, Buckle had immediately liked the lieutenant—liked his warmth, his genuineness and above all else, his ability.

Buckle took the silver phoenix emblem from his pocket and laid it on the table, right in the middle of a puddle of rum.

Windermere squinted at the insignia. He picked it up and rotated it back and forth between his fingers. “A Founders phoenix, sir?”

“A uniform pip. Freshly ripped from the collar of a dead zeppelin officer, frozen solid on the mountain.”

“I see,” Windermere said, looking Buckle in the eye. “So you found the mystery airship.”

“It would appear so.”

“And it was the Founders.”

“Aye, though well disguised as Imperial.”

Windermere placed the phoenix on the table, positioning it clear of the gleaming grog pools. “Shall this set us to war?”

“I would say we were already at war, whether we knew it or not.”

Windermere nodded slowly.

“We all know that Balthazar and the council have been hearing rumors, reports that the Founders are on the move, gearing up for something big,” Buckle said.

Sabrina entered, rapping her knuckles across the wood as she strode in. “How posh, gentlemen,” she said, with a gleam in her green eyes. “I see you found the Standard’s.”

“Well on our way to knocking it off, Lieutenant,” Windermere replied, tapping the brim of his hat to Sabrina.

“Well, while you are at it, please pour me a snort,” Sabrina said.

Windermere slid a new glass forward and poured.

“We have news.” Sabrina unrolled a hastily scribbled note and handed it to Buckle. “The lamp station at the Pondecherry outpost relayed this signal from home. The clan ambassadors are already arriving at the Punchbowl. Balthazar requests the
Arabella
return home at best speed.”

Buckle nodded, refolding the cold paper and handing it back to Sabrina.

“He wants you to be there, sir,” Sabrina said.

“He wants all of us there,” Buckle replied.

“One more for each of us,” Buckle said as Windermere handed Sabrina a nicely topped glass. Windermere quickly swamped the two already sticky tumblers and handed one to Buckle.

“If I may, Lieutenants, let us raise a glass to the Crankshaft clan and a new alliance,” Buckle said.

“To the Crankshaft clan and a new alliance,” Sabrina and Windermere answered.

All three shots of rum were swallowed, and the glasses thumped on the table. Buckle cleared his throat and stuck the Founders phoenix back in his pocket. “Keep us at best speed. Bang-up job, mates. I shall be on the bridge presently.”

“Aye, Captain!” Sabrina and Windermere replied in unison and strode out, Sabrina in the lead. They passed Ilsa Gallagher, whom Buckle realized had been waiting patiently with a handful of papers out in the corridor, wearing mismatched boots because the kraken had stolen one.

“Ah, Miss Gallagher. Come in,” Buckle said.

Ilsa stepped into the cabin. She wore her dense but tight-fitting leather skinner’s jacket, resplendent with hooks, pockets, and strappings, her hair loose about her shoulders. The skin on
her face was flushed, her eyelids heavy, her lips slightly parted, and she eyed him with the soft certainty of a hawk.

“You have the cordage numbers, I see,” Buckle said. He suspected what was coming and, though he was exhausted, he was of no mind to prevent it. Ilsa occupied a soft spot in Buckle’s heart; she was a good salt, an excellent rigger, tough, pleasant, fearless, extra pretty because she did not fuss about her appearance, and she had shared his bed with him occasionally over the stretch of the previous year. Theirs was a friendly, playful association, but not a romantic one: after their first night together, Ilsa had gently informed him that she could never love an airship captain, and Buckle had easily accepted her caveat, loose and unencumbering as it was.

Ilsa stepped closer, tossing the papers on the rum-splotched table and grabbing the bottle to take a long swig.

“Would you like a drink?” Buckle asked.

Ilsa kicked the hatch shut with a backward thrust of her boot. “The ratlines are fine, Captain,” she whispered, snapping open a button at the throat of her collar, exposing a tiny patch of lily-white skin. “But I need tending to.”

THE DEVIL’S PUNCHBOWL

S
ABRINA LIFTED HER HEAD FROM
the eyepiece of the
Arabella
’s navigator’s telescope and scanned the wide, snowy plain of the Antelope Valley as it led them southeast toward the Devil’s Punchbowl, a Crankshaft stronghold. Formerly a pirate’s den, it was built into a sprawling formation of massive sandstone rocks that erupted from the slope lands just below the San Gabriel Mountains. The flat stomach of the valley was beginning to undulate with gentle rises and shallows, the whiteness of its snows streaked by the dirty lines of the wagon roads that followed the cracked asphalt of the old highways underneath. Ragged black bunches of frozen Joshua trees and junipers passed thicker and thicker.

Sabrina resumed looking through the telescope eyepiece, ratcheting the viewfinder dial, rolling it around to its longest focal length, and the world sprang forward in a tight tunnel with the Punchbowl magnified in the middle. She could see the sentry towers with their red-and-white flags.

Her stomach warmed. She loved coming home. “Watchtowers in sight,” Sabrina announced. “Altitude five hundred feet and descending. Airspeed, thirty-one knots. Light crosswind from the south.”

“Helm compensating for crosswind, aye,” Charles Mariner responded; the rudder wheel tocked once as he nudged it.

“Splendid,” Buckle replied from his station behind Sabrina. “All ahead half.”

Alison Lawrence cranked the chadburn dial. “All ahead half. Aye.”

“All ahead half,” cried Faraday on the chattertube, the chadburn engineering dial dinging the bell as it clicked into position.

Sabrina felt the
Arabella
begin to slow as she watched the brass dials of her airspeed mechanism and her altimeter winding down. “Airspeed slowing…twenty-five knots. Four hundred feet.”

Something caught her eye over the mountains—a long, cigar-shaped shadow over the San Gabriel peaks, its outline silhouetted against the bright late-afternoon clouds. Sabrina flicked her magnifier lens into her scope and trained it on the hulking, familiar zeppelin. “
Khartoum
is on patrol, due south, high off the starboard bow.”

“Very well, Navigator,” Buckle replied.

Balthazar had invited all the clan ambassadors—with the exception of the Founders, of course—to his negotiating table in an emergency parley. But such an invitation was always a risk, as the debacle of the Palisades-Truce kidnappings had recently proved, and the big Crankshaft war zeppelins—the
Khartoum
, the
Waterloo
, and the pocket zeppelin
Constantinople
—were surely deployed at altitude in case an invitee tried to make a raid.

The bridge had gone momentarily quiet under the drone of the propellers. Even the chattertube, its hood usually amplifying a constant prattle, was still. The brass-and-copper daughter-compass casing at Sabrina’s station rattled distractingly. “We shall need to apply a screwdriver to that, Welly,” she said.

“Aye, Miss Serafim. Will do,” Welly answered.

Sabrina glanced back at Buckle. He stood in the center of the
Arabella
’s crowded little bridge, his arms folded comfortably behind his back, Windermere and Wong hunched at the elevator station on his left hand, Mariner at the helm wheel at his back, and Alison Lawrence at the combined ballast and engineering station on his right.

Buckle gave Sabrina one of his wry, handsome grins, and she smiled back. She wanted to ask him how his neck was feeling, but she knew he did not like to discuss any of his own physical ailments in front of the crew. “If you live long enough to die a grizzled old bear in your bed, Romulus,” Sabrina sometimes told him, “you will have no skin left but scars.”

She turned to her altimeter, and the pain in her backside made her take a deep breath; her arse had taken a considerable beating when the kraken had dragged her across the roof.