Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (48 page)

She fought back in the agonizing blackness. She fought back by hating the beastie.

A pistol blast flashed, illuminating the lids over her eyes, the nearness of it concussing her ears.

A great weight fell upon her, pressing the last traces of air out of her lungs, squeezing the blood out of her mouth.

“
Captain, go. Leave me.
”

“Miss Max!” Miss Max!” the weak voice of Cornelius Valentine poured into the dark snowstorm surrounding Max. “It’s just a bad dream, girl. Just a bad dream.”

Had she just been screaming? Wailing? She could not tell. Her mouth was open and she was breathing hard. And her cheeks were wet. Doctor Lee had removed her aqueous-humor-filled goggles—there was no need to moisten her eyes while she slept.

“You awake, Miss Max?” Valentine asked.

Max opened her eyes. It was evening, perhaps—the light at the window curtains was dim and gray, though the night lanterns had yet to be lit. She tried to move. She could, but to do so made every muscle ache terribly. She held still, shifting her eyes so she could see Valentine in the reflection of the silver water jug on her bedside table.

“Yes,” Max rasped, her voice sounding like it came from somewhere nearby. She focused her aching eyes on Valentine’s mirrored reflection. He was situated on the opposite side of the middle aisle, perhaps four beds down. A privacy curtain was
set up at the head of his bunk, but no one had drawn it. Max could see the disheveled outline of Valentine’s long hair about his pale face on the pillow, the long ridge of his body under the infirmary sheets—and the flat place on the bed where his right leg should have been.

“No doubt we both will have nightmares for a while. We’ve both had a bit of a rough go up on the mountain,” Valentine muttered. “You havin’ your run-in with the sabertooths, and I with the kraken.”

Max heard Valentine’s words, but they jumbled when she tried to understand them. She caught a glimpse of the powder-blue hummingbird egg and the butterfly chrysalis Buckle had brought for her, nestled on the table. Beside them, she saw the yellow gleam of the sabertooth-claw bracelet he had fashioned for her.

The sight of the claws made Max shudder. Despite the pain, she raised her arm and pushed Romulus’s bracelet behind the water jug, where she could no longer see it.

Buckle. Max could not remember where Buckle was. But the alarm twisting in the pit of her stomach when she thought of him tortured her. She closed her aching eyes, but the darkness there was full of floating flashes.

“We are quite the pair,” Valentine said, shambling in his own morphine haze. “Both broken, both having a piece of us bit off by a beastie. You’ll be fine, Miss Max. But me, me—they drum one-legged dogs out of the air corps straight away.”

Max opened her eyes again, forcing the nerves and worry away, and focused on the chrysalis. Her brain washed clear as a mountain stream, though swept along as a floating leaf, without control. What kind of engine drove the brainless worm to build its own sarcophagus of silk and bury itself alive? she mused.
What kind of biological engine, what magnificent impulse of genetics, transformed the worm into the butterfly?

Such were the mysteries of the universe that occupied Max when she had time to indulge them—not the hunt for mathematical solutions.

But in math she now saw a sanctuary. A quiet cloister in the storm. A path to escape the pain.

Valentine was talking again, but Max lost track of him. She gave in to her Martian instinct, careening through an endless galaxy of numbers. The formulae rolled back and forth in her brain, numbed as it was by the morphine, and she kept losing track of her computations.

She had known of the immortality equation all her life. She had never been interested in it. Who would be interested in an unsolvable trick of digits? She was familiar with the Martian penchant for mathematics and numbers, but she was only half Martian, and that characteristic did not seem to be a part of her makeup. She was excellent at math, but it did not
intrigue
her.

Until now.

If only her memories of the chamber of numbers were something more than morphine-soaked blurs.

COLLISION COURSE

B
UCKLE READ THE SWING OF
the deck; the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was running fast, gaining immense speed out of her turn. He was in imminent danger of ramming the
Czarina
, yes. But he was not going to lose the
Bellerophon
.

“I do not think the Russian captain saw your request, Captain,” Sabrina said, far too calmly. “Ten seconds to impact.”

“Prepare for emergency ascent,” Buckle said. “Prepare to dump all ballast.”

“Aye, aye!” Nero answered, gripping the red velvet handles of the emergency ballast-release levers over his head. Valkyrie moved to the ballast boards, placing her hands on the hydrogen feeder wheels.

The twenty-story-high envelope of the
Czarina
rushed perilously close, rapidly filling the nose dome window like a mountain cliff.

“Up ship!” Buckle shouted. “Emergency ascent!”

The cry of “Up ship!” sounded around the gondola. Nero slammed his ballast levers down like a madman, Windermere spinning his elevator wheel with equal urgency. Valkyrie slapped the hydrogen valve controls up and open, flooding the gas bags to higher pressure.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
lunged upward, her nose raised, arching for the sky above the
Czarina
’s envelope. Suddenly they were above her, the long, broad length of her canvas back, a small planet hurtling beneath the nose window, passing mere feet below the keels of the Crankshaft gondolas and the blades of their propellers, the Spartak skinners and snipers running and throwing themselves flat before they disappeared behind. “Level off!” Buckle shouted. “We shall soon have the angle, sky dogs! Look sharp!”

“There she is!” Windy exclaimed as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
hurtled out over the forward port quarter of the
Czarina
’s roof. The
Bellerophon
came into view just below, racing to port, the long, massive bulk of her envelope pale against the darkening earth.

With the
Bellerophon
in his sights, Buckle was in no mood to squander his chance. It seemed too easy. If he could, with his vastly superior tactical position, he would cripple the
Bellerophon
, board her, and take her as a prize. The Founders warship would make a desperately needed addition to the armada of the Grand Alliance.

They had cleared the
Czarina
. “Down ship!” Buckle shouted. “Emergency dive! Mister Windermere, put me level, and Mister De Quincey, put me on that devil’s stern!”

“Aye, aye!” Windermere and De Quincey replied.

“Jettisoning hydro!” Nero announced, winding the valve wheels.

Buckle felt his mind firing as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, plunging, decks rattling, wind wailing in her rigging and over her gunnels, bore down upon the enemy. The
Bellerophon
’s captain was turning in to the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, hard a’port, attempting to defeat Buckle’s angle. Bad airmanship, clinging to a failed tactic, Buckle thought.

Both of the
Bellerophon
’s gunnery gondolas released a simultaneous port broadside—from the muzzle flashes it looked to be three cannons apiece—but the severe traverse of their barrels, probably cranked hard up against the aft frame of their gun ports, sent the shots just wide, the cluster of caterwauling cannonballs hurtling past the port side of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s piloting gondola in glittering phosphorescent trails.

Kellie barked, emerging from her armored cubby. “In, girl!” Buckle snapped, and the dog scurried back in.

Buckle studied the discharge of the guns, never taking his eyes off the
Bellerophon
and her gunnery gondolas, wreathed in rivers of smoke. It would take the port-side Founders gun crews three minutes to reload—if they were any good at all. No matter. In two minutes, Buckle would have ripped off the
Bellerophon
’s wings, grappled her close, and leapt to board her.

“Hard a’port, Mister De Quincey,” Buckle ordered. “Line up his flank on our starboard beam, sir.”

“Aye, Captain,” De Quincey responded.

“Starboard guns double-shotted and ready to fire, Cap’n!” Considine’s voice rang breathlessly from the chattertube hood.

“Guns doubled and ready to fire,” Valkyrie repeated.

Buckle leaned into his chattertube. “Gunnery! We shall broadside the engineering gondola to starboard. Take out their propulsion!”

“Broadside propulsion, aye!” Considine replied. Sabrina’s head snapped toward Buckle, her green eyes wide under the chestnut curve of her bowler. She knew what he was up to. It was no time to attempt to take a prize, Buckle knew, and she disapproved. Ah, well, Sabrina often disapproved.

BROADSIDES

T
HE
P
NEUMATIC
Z
EPPELIN
WAS LABORING
hard to port now, as De Quincey pinned the rudder wheel over, bulling the airship around onto the
Bellerophon
’s port flank, to match her turn as she tried to outrun them.

“Turret! Prepare to fire into the propellers!” Buckle yelled into the chattertube.

“Propellers, aye!” Geneva Bolling replied from the turret below.

Buckle felt the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
roll slightly into her port-side turn. It was only a degree or so, a small hedging of the deck under his boots, but one degree off zero bubble was a measurable discrepancy he did not want his gunners having to compensate for. “Mister Windermere,” Buckle boomed. “Hold her steady as you please. Chase the bubble, sir—keep the platform steady.”

“Aye, sir!” Windy answered, rocking his elevator wheel back and forth with his eyes on his inclinometer bubble in its ornate glass tube in front of him. “Zero level, aye!”

“Stern observer reports the Spartak airship has descended, Captain,” Sabrina announced. “In pursuit of the
Industria
.”

The mighty
Bellerophon
, not yet up to full speed and handicapped by extensive damage sustained from the
Czarina
’s guns, seemed to crawl as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
hurtled down upon
her. Buckle heard Banerji’s bow chaser cannon
thump
, a distant, round wallop high above on the nose.

“Steady as she goes, lads and ladies,” Buckle said, folding his hands behind his back and squaring his feet at his station, with the master gyroscope floating in its great metal-framed glass orb in front of him.

Buckle eyed the length of the
Bellerophon
as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
closed in on her—she was a big war bird, but up close she looked worn, her skin mottled and stained, her copper gondolas encrusted with green oxidization. Sniper muskets flashed here and there from the envelope, trading shots with the Crankshaft skinners and marines.

A wild spattering of sparks and flame burst out of the
Bellerophon
’s high port-side propeller nacelle, the one being hammered by a glittering stream of harpoons from the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s hammergun; one of the steel points must have sunk home in the mechanism and jammed it. The propeller quickly tore itself apart in a scream of wrenching metal, kicking up and out of its seating and nearly tearing the entire nacelle loose of the main frame before it seized up and toppled over, smoking, motionless, ruined.