Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3) (17 page)

XXXI

ODESSA

The chamber was plain for an Atlantean one, windowless, with copper pipes lining one wall, hatchways on opposite sides and a large table in the middle carved with leaping dolphins and winding eels. To Sabrina it felt like an interrogation room, though the diffused illumination from the luminiferous aether tubes overhead took the edge off everything. The Praetorians had brought her here without a word and now she waited.

For Odessa.

Sabrina wasn’t nervous. At least, she told herself she wasn’t nervous. She had no idea what to expect from her twin sister, wasn’t even sure why she’d asked to see her. They’d been immensely close long ago. Perhaps Sabrina needed to see if any of their old bond still remained or if Odessa would now prove to be nothing but a stranger to her entirely.

Beside the table sat two chairs with plain wooden seats. Sabrina took one step toward a chair but stopped herself. She didn’t want to be sitting down when Odessa first came into the room. Sabrina slowly slid her foot back, the leather sole brushing across the metal floor.

Odessa. Her sister. Sabrina fought her old memories, always tried to avoid dwelling in the happy days before the purge, for that meant dwelling with ghosts. But it was impossible not to fall back into them now. She and her sister were not ghosts.

Or were they?

If one vanished from one life and re-emerged into another, did that not make one some kind of ghost?

Ghosts. As much as one wished to leave them behind they always followed—not like hauntings, necessarily, but more like one’s own shadow, always there but rarely noticed, popping into view at odd moments, arriving with a sound, a smell, the way someone folded their hands, or drifting into the otherworld before sleep. Odessa had been a ghost for Sabrina. One of her most potent memories of her sister was a day with their mother, Chelsea, the first day Isambard had taken the girls outside of the Crystal Palace, or at least one of the first times she could remember being outside.

***

Sabrina and Odessa had been at least seven years of age, riding their ponies at the grand equestrian center inside the city. She remembered her pony named Wren. The girls rode every day under the strict supervision of their instructor, Peter Darling, with either their mother or nanny in attendance. The equestrian center was a large dirt arena with a grandstand where the Founders cavalry would parade for Isambard and the elite families. Lines of thick black smoke, issuing from the factory quarter’s chimneys, streamed endlessly over the high ceiling of dirty glass and wrought iron, resulting in faint stripes of shadow and weak sunlight across the equestrian center floor.

Sabrina remembered looking up as she rode, the warm body of Wren under her and the depthless, glowing mass of clouds far overhead making her feel like she was floating. She would often forget to keep her little pony on line, which rather miffed old Darling.

Sabrina had loved the equestrian center with its horses and ponies and the smells of dung, wood chips and greenhouse-grown hay, complemented by the salty air blown in from the ventilation tunnels by the huge underground fans. The smells made it a lovely place to breathe in comparison to the more stuffy corners of the palace where things tended to take on the odor of decomposing vegetation and canary droppings.

It was a particularly bright afternoon—the clouds seemed thinner than normal—and Chelsea had taken the girls to their practice session with Darling. Isambard, their older cousin, had arrived, his face pink with an enthusiasm that clashed with his long, brilliant red hair. Sabrina always remembered how happy Isambard looked that day; he did have a dark streak in him which often made him melancholy and spiteful, but today he had a new machine and he was ecstatic. The engineers had unveiled an armored train, one which Isambard’s father had ordered built upon the day of his birth but only now, eighteen years later, had all of the train’s cars rolled out of the worksheds complete.

“Come with me, cousins!” Isambard said, clapping his hands. “I have something to show you!” Five people accompanied Isambard, all dressed in cloaks with breathing masks strapped on their shoulders, ready to go outside. The first was Isambard’s engineering tutor, Rodrigo, a tall, gangly man who always looked serious but could sing everyone under the floor at dinner parties when asked to perform. The second was Shuba, a young Martian male who was Isambard’s best friend and who often acted as a representative of Lotus: an older Martian female whom people rarely saw, sequestered as she was in her private chambers in the southeast corner of the palace. Lotus had the distinction of being the most trusted counselor of Isambard’s father. Sabrina had seen her only once, and the tall alien woman had frightened her, both with her big violet-black eyes and the set of winged alien armor she wore which looked like it was permanently attached to her body.

The third member of Isambard’s party was Greyfell, one of the military leaders of the Founders, a once-handsome man who kept himself quite fit and had a white beard and the saddest blue eyes that Sabrina had ever seen. Greyfell was unmarried, which was rare for a Founders man of his age, and the story went that he’d lost the love of his life in his youth and his heart had never recovered sufficiently to accept another. Sabrina couldn’t remember a time when she had not felt sorry for Greyfell.

The other two men were steampiper corporals, big strapping fellows in black uniforms and silver cuirasses and loyal to the death despite never being able to rise above the rank of senior sergeant. Such bodyguards were necessary for elites who wished to travel outside the gilded glass confines of the Crystal Palace. It wasn’t spoken of, but citizens unhappy with their station in life might sometimes express their displeasure with rocks and knives, despite risking a trip to the gallows for such traitorous behavior. No one seemed to be able to explain sufficiently to Sabrina why some citizens should act in such a way. Had not the Fawkes provided the citizens of the city with a home safe from the mustard gas? Had not the Fawkes built the city for their protection, the factories for their work, the greenhouses for their food and the hospitals for their woes? Such dangers confused and angered Sabrina.

Although Sabrina and Odessa shared many things they did not possess equal affections for Isambard. Sabrina was sufficiently relaxed with her cousin, for despite his sometimes mean teasing he cared for her, but there was always something between them—a sour note of indefinable condition which prevented them from being close friends. Odessa, on the other hand, adored Isambard and he adored her back. Sabrina never saw Isambard smile more than when he was playing with Odessa or when she hugged him or brought him a secretively plucked daisy from the palace gardens.

“The girls are not yet finished with their lesson, Isambard,” Chelsea said pleasantly.

“Please indulge me, Aunt Chelsea.” Isambard grinned. “I have waited all of my life for this train and today I have shown it to everyone except you three!” He motioned toward the steampipers, who carried cloaks and masks for Chelsea and the girls. “I have brought your outdoor gear.”

“Very well,” Chelsea said, laughing. “It is a momentous day.”

Odessa urged her pony over to the rail where Isambard stood, dismounted in one easy motion and hugged him about the lower waist. Isambard smiled and blew a kiss to Sabrina as she trotted her pony over.

“Ah, my favorite girls!” Isambard enthused. “I am happiest being able to show my train to you.”

Sabrina cinched her black cloak around her shoulders and pulled on her elaborate breathing mask. Masks were worn by the elite during extended stays outside the Crystal Palace, for they were designed to filter out the coal and tar smoke which hung thick in the city’s air. They provided some protection from hurled rocks as well. Each mask was stylized in a sort of masquerade ball fashion, with Sabrina being a little owl, Odessa a wolf pup, and their mother the face of a doe. The steampipers donned their standard-issue helmets while Isambard put on his large mask, a grotesque metal hybrid of a lion and a raven. Sabrina always thought it was odd that Isambard did not wear a mask similar to that of his father, the traditional Fawkes phoenix with three large metal feathers thrust up at the top and a long, wickedly curving beak. But Isambard tended to go his own way; some even whispered that his own way was the way Lotus wanted him to go.

The filtering masks served two functions: to purify the air of the noble person breathing through it and to separate the royals from the masses in the street. Sabrina agreed with keeping one’s distance from the unwashed mob because, though the palace servants were lovely and clean, the general citizenry suffered from scabrous maladies and lived in various unhealthy and filthy conditions. The citizens coughed a lot and many succumbed to black lung disease from years working underground in the pits.

Odessa grabbed Sabrina’s hand, clutching it as they approached the equestrian center door. They’d rarely been taken outside, never to the railway yard, and now it was happening so fast, so easily. The steampipers swung the doors open and Isambard stepped in between Sabrina and Odessa, taking their hands in his. Sabrina had not minded, for she was always impressed with Isambard; he referred to Sabrina as the “older” sister—she’d arrived from the womb first, beating Odessa’s appearance by seven minutes—and Sabrina had always liked that. Mother and Greyfell followed close behind, Greyfell wearing the mask of a sullen bear which was barely more somber-looking than his own hang-dog appearance.

As she stepped outside Sabrina was immediately struck by the bottomless, upside-down heave of the sky, the high, ribbed-cloud ceiling of it, causing a headiness one did not feel while looking up through the palace glass. The still air chilled her cheeks and she shivered, though from cold or exhilaration she couldn’t tell. She’d always wanted to be outside and see the city. She’d always wanted to see the city from above. You can’t see anything from the air because of the sea fog, everyone said, but she wanted to see it anyway. Sabrina and Odessa’s father was a Commander of Zeppelins and he’d informed his daughters that each of them would earn an air officer commission and make a career out of the service unless they preferred politics. Sabrina had wanted to be a zeppelineer; it had been her heart’s desire from the first time she could consider such things, and it was agony to have to wait until she was twelve to enter the airship cadet program.

But therein lay the sticky problem.

The Founders never flew. Their zeppelins sat docked and mouldering in permanent reserve, hidden in huge hangars in the northwest quarter of the city. Air officers spent their careers maintaining the grounded airships while only a lucky few were assigned to the extremely rare scouting mission. Sabrina and Odessa, as the daughters of a high-ranking Fawkes family, might get a shot at one of the operational missions, but probably just one. And the dreadnaughts, the mighty near-mythical dreadnaughts which Sabrina had heard of but had never seen, remained always hidden in the darkest hangar, their earthbound crews sworn to silence. Sabrina’s father always said that the dreadnaughts were more effective against the enemy as ghosts than real warships that could be seen.

Sabrina despaired over the prospect of a zeppelin career on the ground, but she also knew that she wanted nothing to do with politics. She always assumed that, when the time came, her father might provide her with other options.

Everything sounded different outside. The air took noises and carried them away and brought other sounds back with it. The click of Sabrina’s boot soles on the cold-brittled flagstones was new. The cold and space invigorated her and she wanted to run but there wasn’t far to go. The guards standing at the railway yard gate greeted them with salutes and they passed into a different realm of oily gravel, long metal tracks and dozens of looming locomotives and armored trains.

“Here she is!” Isambard said as he led the girls to the huge gold-copper locomotive. “I present to you, the locomotive
Isambard
! Isn’t she a beauty?”

Sabrina gasped, for the machine was beautiful: its metal skin curved into a thousand polished, gleaming lines. Its large, teardrop-shaped windows bulged like gecko eyes over the engineer’s turret and the sleek boiler stacks angled backwards so the noxious mustard could not force its way into the combustion system. It was a mountain of a machine, perhaps seventeen feet high, and it looked like a mythical whale to Sabrina, captured and recast in bronzed metal.

“Brilliant,” Sabrina breathed, and heard her mother and the others murmur their approval.

“Can we go for a ride?” Odessa asked. “Please, please, please?”

Isambard laughed. “Not quite yet, little bird,” he said, patting the top of her wolf pup mask. “Her airtight seals have still to be approved. She must pass her trials out in the noxious mustard. But once that is done, yes, you may go for a ride. With your mother’s approval of course.”

Sabrina looked up at Chelsea, who looked disappointingly skeptical. “We shall see,” she said.

“Oh, they must!” Isambard laughed.

Sabrina and Odessa never did get to take their ride on the
Isambard
.

***

Sabrina jumped as the opposite hatch clicked and swung open, pushed by the white and gold gauntleted hand of an Atlantean soldier. Odessa stepped in, wearing her black steampiper uniform and its black cloak with red lining, her face the mirror image of Sabrina’s, her hair the same saturation of crimson, her features bearing the same Asiatic influence— but there was also a harshness in the green eyes and a gauntness in the line of the cheekbones which were absent from Sabrina’s visage.