Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (3 page)

The stylish accoutrements notwithstanding, it was a bad idea to cross Sabrina Serafim.

Her nickname was not “Sabertooth” for nothing.

But no one called her that to her face: she didn’t like it.

Sabrina also owned a sword, a red-tasseled saber she kept slung across two old horse-head pegs above her head, and she knew how to use it—in spades. She was left-handed and that was an advantage in a battle of blades, for it tended to confuse an opponent.

A light crosswind kissed the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
with the bump of a butterfly’s wing; the titanic airship shuddered ever so slightly, so imperceptibly that no one aboard except the captain and chief navigator sensed the innocent tug of drag.

“Crosswind from the northwest, starboardside, Captain,” Sabrina said as she reached for a wooden-handled lever, slowly sweeping it sideways as she watched her drift-measuring dial, as intricate as an Austrian grandfather clock, wavering in front of her. “Adjusting for horizontal drift, helm. Two degrees to port.”

“Two degrees port, aye,” De Quincey repeated, nudging the rudder wheel a tock or two. He was a big man and taciturn,
rarely speaking of his own accord. His black hair swept about his long, stern face where his deep-set eyes and chestnut-brown skin offered a somewhat sinister countenance until one recognized his gentle nature. Sabrina liked him.

Buckle kept his eyes locked upon the rapidly approaching earth through the round observation window at his feet. Kellie circled the decking around the window, sniffing, tail wagging, anticipating high activity. “Keep your eyes peeled,” Buckle said.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Sabrina replied, familiar with Buckle’s thousand-yard stare, the intense functioning of his mind’s eye just before the call to action. The maneuvering propellers responded to the drift controls and she felt the shift in their vibration ripple through her body.

“Descending, ninety-eight feet per minute,” announced Welly.

Sabrina eyed Welly as he leaned over the drift telescope, calculating their rate of drift, his pencil scratching furiously across his navigational maps, pinned to the dashboard. The kid could have easily rounded up, described the rate of descent as one hundred feet per minute, but he was striving to impress and that was fine.

“Maintain dive,” Buckle said, sounding almost annoyed.

“Boards steady, Cap’n. Aye,” Nero said. It was Nero’s job to bleed the hydrogen out of the cells at the correct rate to maintain the steady descent.

Sabrina mumbled the words she often mumbled, even though afterward she always regretted mumbling them, but she was by nature something of a cynic. “We’re sitting ducks.”

“Piece of cake,” Buckle responded absentmindedly, as he had many times before.

“Sure, a real peach,” Sabrina answered. She peered down at the shattered landscape and then leaned over her navigation table to check her map. She tapped her derby at the brim, where a little copper arm with a magnifying glass swung out of its nest among the valves and tubes, its miniature gears whirring with steam power, and dropped in front of her right eye. The map was old and blurred, stained yellowish by exposure to the mustard, as many things that had survived The Storming were; enlargement was required to make out the smudged small print.

Sabrina peered into the drift-telescope eyepiece affixed on the instrument panel in front of her. “Magnolia Boulevard intersection with Hollywood Way. One Three Four Freeway running east-west, due south. Right on target,” she announced, with more than a smidgeon of pride in her voice. “Welcome to the Boneyard.”

THE BONEYARD

T
HE
P
NEUMATIC
Z
EPPELIN
DESCENDED INTO
the heart of the sprawling valley once known as the San Fernando. Low brown foothills loomed to the south and east, their rough backs striped with rivers of snow and ice. Buckle sniffed. Despite hundreds of years, the place still stank of ash. He did not like this—going to ground when a cunning enemy like the Founders might be on the move. There was no easier target than an earthbound zeppelin. It was little more than a bounce, yes—Buckle would have his feet in the snow for only a minute or two—and the likelihood of the reclusive Founders being anywhere near the Boneyard was almost nonexistent, but a little needle of anxiety stabbed him nonetheless.

Pluteus and his grunts had better be on time, on target, and ready for evacuation.

Buckle clamped his teeth. Once Pluteus and his soldiers were aboard, they would be on their way to the City of the Founders, the most powerful clan’s fortified citadel, considered impenetrable to attack, on a desperate expedition to save their leader, Admiral Balthazar Crankshaft, from the clutches of the Founders, who had abducted him.

It was also of no small matter that Balthazar was Buckle’s father by adoption, and really the only father Buckle had ever known.

“Airship sighted!” the aft lookout’s voice rattled down the chattertube. “North northwest, five miles off the stern!”

Buckle leapt to the stretch of open sky at the starboard gunwale, pulling his telescope from his hat and whipping it out to its maximum length. Looking back, he caught the tiny black dot over the mountains with his bare eyes and trained the scope on it. The slipstream of passing wind dragged at the glass, making it difficult to see, but the bulky form of the magnified sky vessel suggested that she was a tramp, a trader guild steamer, and no threat to Buckle and his airship.

“Tramp!” Sabrina shouted, peering through the powerful main telescope affixed in the nose dome. “Heading east.”

“Aye!” Buckle shouted back into the gondola. Due east meant the tramp was probably on her way to sell her goods in Gallowglass territory. And judging from how she lumbered, her holds were packed, probably full of ivory, fish, and whale oil from the coast.

Still, Buckle hated having a foreign airship of any kind at his back.

Pluteus and his grunts had better be on time.

Buckle looked down. As the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
descended to the earth, the blasted corpse of the Valley came into sudden, wince-inducing focus. The ground was a mess, a crumbled catastrophe of architectural ruin: endless miles of gutted buildings and abandoned suburbs collapsed down around themselves in a porcupine’s back of naked girders, walls, and chimneys. The street grid was still visible under the debris, making aerial navigation easy.

But what made the place ghostly beyond description were the endless bones. The sea of bones. Ice-rimed skulls and rib cages, femurs and spines. Human bones, mostly, with surely
some dog bones, cat bones, horse bones, bird bones, rat bones, possum bones, and squirrel bones mixed in.

They called it the Boneyard.

Unimaginative, but accurate.

Scouts reported that skeletons still sat inside the caved-in cars, bony fingers still clutching the steering wheels. Frozen bones snapped under one’s boots with each step, the scouts said—an ocean of skeletons under the snow. Exposed bones were a pearly color, picked clean by crows, hawks, and vermin, the tattered remnants of their clothes long since carried off to line nests and burrows. An endless glut of rusted cars still lay locked in a traffic jam on both sides of the freeway, all heading northward; the tires had been an excellent source of salvaged rubber until exhausted only a few years before.

No official clan lived in the valley now, even three hundred years later. There were still pools of heavy stinkum gas lurking about, squirting out of unused pipes or suddenly surging up from toilets and sewers. But that was not the real reason: it was simply too spooky to live in that snowy swamp of bones. Some people did live there. People who didn’t mind the horrors. People who stripped the cars and skeletons of valuables and traded the goods, all of them stained telltale yellow, with their fingers stained yellow, in the markets to the south.

Scavengers. Yellow-fingered Scavengers.

And Scavengers didn’t like visitors unless they were coming to buy.

MAX THE MARTIAN

M
AX, THE CHIEF ENGINEER, HURRIED
down the main keel corridor of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. She had just come from the boiler room, where furnace number two, affectionately known as Smoky, had “spit” a seven-inch iron rivet (launched by the sudden snap of an overheated metal plate, the rivet was fired like a bullet out of a gun, leaving a little round hole in the outer skin), and the boilermen had been forced to shut it down. It wasn’t a huge deal—the other five boilers could generate enough superheated steam to maintain the airship’s systems at their highest efficiency—but Max hated going into action with malfunctioning equipment. And that happened far too often for her tastes, she had to admit.

Zeppelineering was not an exact science, by any stretch of the imagination.

It was more of a juggling act.

Max walked in the silent, gliding fashion of Martians, effortlessly, as if her hips were oiled, as if she were carried along by a friendly current of air. But she was not nearly as smooth as a regular Martian, because she was only half Martian. Her father had been a Martian, actually a descendant of Martian rebels, and her mother, bless her soul, was human. Humans and Martians found each other attractive and could mix if they
wanted to, but this was rare, because there were only a few Martians. Since the time the aliens had arrived, the people of earth had called them Martians, even though it was clear they had come from much farther away than that. The aliens had never given up any information about themselves or where they had come from, and the few descendants of the survivors did not seem to know or remember.

Max knew nothing of her Martian ancestors. Her mother and father were long dead. She was another one of Balthazar’s orphans, and as an alien she was fated to a lonely existence in the world. She had a brother, Tyro, who had been severely wounded in the Imperial Raid—he now lay in a coma, lost to her, perhaps forever.

Max wasn’t Max’s real name. But the alien name her father gave her was so unpronounceable by humans that something else had to be used to refer to her. Her Martian name contained many sounds that a human voicebox could not reproduce, but went something like
Kaa-speethththlojogga-rantan-(unintelligible)-skee-(unintelligible)-grtzama-klofgurt-(unintelligible) pivkthth-max
. When the name was actually pronounced by a Martian, about the only thing any human heard clearly was the last bit, “max,” so everybody called her Max, including her mother.

Martians were a beautiful, rare species, tallish and slender and graceful, but their appearance took a little getting used to if you had not grown up around one of them. The stripes on every Martian face, which tapered to points about the temples, cheeks, and throat, were always unique to the individual. Max was only half Martian, but the Martian genes dominated her appearance: her white skin and black stripes were quite pronounced, and she wore the aqueous-humor-filled goggles that the Martians always wore because their sensitive eyes were irritated by the
dryness of the earth’s atmosphere. The clear, soothing water completely filled the goggles and made her hypnotically black eyes look bigger than they actually were.

Max wore a black leather flying helmet of the old style; it lacked the excessive cog and valve trappings of the pilot’s, but its brass-tubing system for her goggles’ aqueous-humor reservoir gave it a streamlined flash, and lining the crest of the helmet were a series of oval metal lockets that housed the sensitive devices she used to tinker with the most delicate parts of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s vital systems.

From underneath the helmet flowed the long black locks of Max’s hair, always unruly but sheer as silk, dropping to swirl about her shoulders. She wore a black turtleneck sweater under a knee-length, raven-black leather coat lined with ebony bear fur, black pants, and slim black boots that cupped just under her knees. All of the blackness in Max’s clothes accentuated the white quality of her face and the swirling black stripes at the edges of it. In a way, it made her more alien than she needed to be.