Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (16 page)

Sabrina laid out her map of the Founders’ city—the map she had drawn up for Buckle—on top of an old road map on the table.

“How is it that a member of the Crankshaft clan does possess such an intimate knowledge of the City of the Founders?” Scorpius questioned, never taking his eyes off her. “A fortress no one enters and no one leaves?”

“I got out,” Sabrina stated flatly.

Scorpius flicked his eyes to Buckle and then back to her. “You got out,” he repeated in a fashion that made obvious his distrust of her words.

“Yes,” Sabrina replied.

Scorpius had every reason to be incredulous. It was said that no one had ever met anyone from the City of the Founders, beyond their crimson-cloaked ambassadors. It was a place of phantasms, obscured behind dark fables. Stories were told about an elite clan of near immortals sequestered in a grand citadel, feasting on beef and cherries while they masterminded an empire guarded by invincible zeppelins, locomotives, and soldiers that could fly. The city itself, sealed up behind massive walls and an ocean of Martian mustard gas, was rumored to be a filthy metropolis existing mostly underground, its thousands of citizens locked in scab-riddled poverty as they slaved inside factories and foundries of unimaginable size and scope. And no downtrodden citizen, no matter how resourceful, intelligent, or desperate, ever,
ever
escaped.

“And just how did you get out?” Scorpius demanded.

“I was carried out, as a child,” Sabrina said.

Scorpius leaned forward. “Carried out by who?”

“General, we do not have time for this,” Buckle said sharply.

Scorpius glared at Buckle, then turned a cold eye to Sabrina. “It is said that Isambard Fawkes has hair as red as fire, and that each member of his family does possess hair more scarlet than the next.”

Sabrina met Scorpius’s gaze with cool detachment. She had expected the interrogation.

“That is enough, General Scorpius,” Buckle said. “We can discuss fairy tales and myths at a later date. Proceed, Lieutenant.”

Sabrina slid her finger across the map of Los Angeles. “We disembark at the landing point: Melrose and La Brea Avenue. From here we travel due south on La Brea for about a mile, crossing the moon moat, a wide ditch apparently created by a
big explosion on the day of The Storming. The Founders patrol this ditch with forgewalkers in sealed armor suits, and it would be best to avoid them. Once inside the ditch, we enter the sewer system here. We work our way through the old channel pipes to a large sewage-holding tank—long since abandoned—but which takes us under the walls of the city and one hatch away from the underground prison warren. I will be able to locate Balthazar and Andromeda’s cells once we are in there.”

“Locate the cells? How? How do you know this?” Scorpius spluttered.

Sabrina glanced at Buckle.

“How she knows it is not important,” Buckle said.

“It is important to me,” Scorpius shot back. “I have to trust this woman with my life and the lives of my men, not to mention the life of Andromeda Pollux, which is worth more than all of us put together.”

“I’m no spy, damn it!” Sabrina blurted, then clamped her lips together. Her heart was pounding.

“With all due respect, General Scorpius, that is enough,” Pluteus interjected. “The young officer remembers nothing more. She is the adopted child of Balthazar and we all trust her absolutely. That will have to be good enough for you.”

Pluteus’s defense of her honor surprised Sabrina, though she concluded that it was due to his distaste for an Alchemist interrogating one of his own more than to his standing up for her and her mysteries, which also confounded him.

Scorpius took a step back. “I and only I, Scorpius Carbon of the Alchemists, shall determine what is good enough for me.”

“Sabrina, continue with the briefing,” Buckle ordered.

Sabrina took a deep breath and ran her finger across her map. “Okay. Once we secure our people, we will move above
ground and into the city. It is only a short distance to the main plaza, a big open area where the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
will lower the launch and evacuate us.”

“March straight into the heart of the City of the Founders?” Scorpius sputtered. “This is your escape plan?”

“Surprise is our main weapon, General,” Buckle said, tapping his hand on the table. “We shall be in and out before they know we are there.”

“Bah!” Scorpius huffed, but he did not argue.

“We have run out of time, gentlemen,” Buckle said. “Scorpius, you have been briefed on the battle plan, and you are either with us or you are not.”

“The Alchemist Council has commanded me to assist you,” Scorpius replied. “I have no intention of failing to follow my orders.”

“Good,” Buckle said. “Generals, see to your preparations. We shall join you presently.”

Scorpius made a little bow. “Captain,” he said respectfully, then avoided Sabrina with his eyes as he turned and strode for the door. Pluteus gave Buckle a quick nod and followed Scorpius.

“Chief Navigator, stay a moment, please,” Buckle said.

“Of course, Captain,” Sabrina said, folding her map back into its case. She knew he had many questions for her, questions he could never ask.

Buckle returned to his teacup and took a long sip. “It is strange,” he said. “We are only a few moments from our assault on the Founders’ city…but I feel quite subdued, as relaxed as a man about to slip into a warm bath. Perhaps after falling three thousand feet with a tangler nipping at my heels, running the gauntlet of the city doesn’t seem so dangerous in comparison.”

“Perhaps,” Sabrina answered as she watched Buckle drink his tea and ruffle the silvery fur on the top of Kellie’s head with his free hand. She still could not quite get over her amazement that he was there, standing right in front of her, unhurt and in the flesh, after she and everyone else had given him up for dead not more than an hour before. She also noticed that his forehead was wrinkled in an uncharacteristically serious way.

Buckle stepped to the dome window and looked out, folding his hands behind his back. The late afternoon clouds glowed, variously bright and dark. “Ours is a mysterious world,” Buckle said quietly. “Under every shadow lies a secret.”

“Yes,” Sabrina said.

Buckle turned to face her. “But there are a thousand secrets inside every soul.”

Sabrina did not reply. She felt nervous. Had Buckle decided that she was untrustworthy? No one knew anything about her history, except Balthazar—and he didn’t know everything. And now that it was obvious she had a connection to the City of the Founders, would Buckle and the crew spurn her as a turncoat? She looked into Buckle’s blue eyes and found them soft and calm. She suddenly felt safe.

“I have seen into your soul, Sabrina Serafim,” Buckle said. “And I shall always trust you.”

DEAD RECKONING AND OBELISKS

M
AX WATCHED
D
E
Q
UINCEY AS
he rocked the rudder wheel back and forth in his hands, guiding the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
as she descended, countering a weak crosswind flowing in from the sea to the west, pushing at the airship’s starboard flank. He inched the rudder wheel to starboard, to press the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s nose back into line over old Hollywood. The huge zeppelin groaned comfortably as it leaned its colossal mass into the crosswind.

De Quincey was a very good helmsman.

“Light crosswind to starboard, evening sea breeze,” Welly announced. He was at the chief navigator’s station now. “Recalculating rate of drift.”

“Aye,” Max replied. Welly looked like a hunchback, with his big brass oxygen cylinder strapped to his back, its bulky, glass-plated helmet pushed up on his head and its flexible tubes loose about his shoulders. Everyone in the gondola was wearing their oxygen equipment, including Max; she found the heavy gear quite cumbersome.

Max took a slow, deep breath as she observed the ground through the glass nose dome of the gondola. The cityscape below was hidden beneath a gray fog that blanketed the entire
Los Angeles basin. Ruins of office buildings and skyscrapers jutted above the fog bank’s surface in jagged clusters of rusting girders and crumbling masonry. One could not see the deadly layer of mustard gas from above. The alien mustard was dense, and it hugged the ground beneath the fog bank, rising to no more than thirty feet at the most, while the harmless sea fog swirled up to fifty feet higher above it.

The fog bank came closer and closer as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
descended. Their plunge into the misty depths and the City of the Founders was, by her calculation, no more than ten minutes away.

No defenders had come up to meet them, nor had a shot been fired. No one had noticed them, as far as she could tell. The deadly fog bank surrounding the City of the Founders may have kept everyone and everything away—but perhaps it also made it nearly impossible to see anything coming.

“Make sure you account for the added weight, navigator,” Max said. “And watch her trim. With thirty-one extra troopers and two robots aboard, we are notching up power for altitude and sluggish on the turn.”

“Aye, Lieutenant,” Welly replied, checking two pocket watches clamped to a panel. Darius Banerji, the apprentice navigator, was now in the cockpit at the assistant’s station. Both Welly and Banerji bent low over their instruments and charts, constantly checking and updating their calculations as they proceeded to position the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
over the exact point—one they could not see—that Sabrina Serafim had dotted on their maps.

Welly peered into the leather-cushioned eyepiece of the binocular-shaped drift scope, which was built into the instrument panel, pointing straight down through the floor of the
gondola. The drift scope’s magnification was set to match the ship’s altitude, and its lens, etched with a set of parallel black lines, allowed the navigator to measure the sideways motion of objects passing beneath the airship, and thus calculate the current rate of drift.

“Fifteen seconds,” Welly said without looking up. “Fifteen seconds starboard, south by southwest.”

“Fifteen seconds starboard,” Banerji repeated, his eyes on the daughter compass and a timing hourglass streaming with golden sand. “South by southwest. Aye.” He made fractional adjustments to the drift indicator by tweaking a series of small wooden knobs.

Welly lifted his head up from the drift scope, his forehead pink from being pressed into the leather headrest. “Taking obelisk sextant reading,” he announced, lifting a complicated metal telescope seated in a maze of gears and dials to his eye. Other than the Big Green Soup of the Pacific to the west, and the snow-locked peak of Mount Wilson to the east, the only permanent landmarks the navigators had to work with were the gigantic Martian obelisks that loomed at many points on the horizon.

Max watched Welly taking his obelisk reading. She felt a twinge of despair. It was the Martians who had dropped the obelisks, mountain-sized rectangular slabs of purplish stone that towered in the sky, many of them tall enough to split low-lying clouds as they passed overhead. Up close, they were uneven and craggy, hoary with ice, the unknown stone they were cut from more blue than purple. No man had ever been able to chisel, blast, or melt even the tiniest chip off one. It was said, in the
Histories of Charlie W.
, that in the time before the obelisks, there was a wonderful, magical source of power called
electricity, but the obelisks suffocated it. It was even said that, oddly, the obelisks were responsible for milk souring almost immediately after being drawn from a cow or goat, and this was the reason people now called it
fastmilk
, because you had to drink it right away.

The obelisks made mankind hate the Martians, so Max hated the obelisks.

Max watched Welly bring his obelisk sextant to bear on the Catalina Obelisk, looming very close to the south, triangulating its position against the Redlands Obelisk to the east and the Piru Obelisk to the northwest. Welly could take accurate sightings, pinpointing his position down to just a few meters.

Max was upset—the fact that Martians were never supposed to get upset made her even more upset—and the fact that anyone who looked at her would see it made her angry. She knew her eyes were pulsing with a faint scarlet—she could see the liquid color reflecting in her goggles. She hated her eyes, her Martian eyes. She was a hybrid, and in the genetic milkshake she had inherited her father’s black alien eyes, which betrayed every passionate feeling with sudden parades of color. Her eyes had forced her to live a stoic life, an emotionally tepid existence, where she kept all others at arm’s length in order to keep her private feelings private. But now she could not find a way to stuff her anger down, not all the way down, at least.

Max was indignant because Sabrina Serafim was joining Buckle on the Crankshaft rescue expedition. Max wasn’t jealous of Sabrina personally—the chief navigator was as capable as anyone to accompany Buckle—but she was piqued by Buckle’s complete, even careless, disregard for the regulations governing zeppelineers and ground operations. The captain of a Crankshaft
airship was never to get involved in dangerous ground operations. The captain’s place was aboard the airship. And if the situation on the ground demanded the captain’s presence, then his second-in-command was required to take the helm. Never, ever, were both the captain and his first mate to be exposed off the ship in a hostile environment.