Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (4 page)

But perhaps that was the point.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was about to land in the Boneyard. Max wanted to be on the bridge, but she could not help trying to scrutinize every inch of girder, wire, pipe, bolt, and baggywrinkle along the long keel corridor that was the spine of the entire sky vessel, running nine hundred feet and nine inches from bow to stern. The huge hydrogen cells, twenty-eight of them in all, in fifteen compartments, loomed overhead, fabric cathedrals fourteen stories high, each strapped into position within a spider’s nest of girders, wires, catwalks, ladders, and blast panels, always groaning and grinding under the stresses placed on such a city-sized contraption in flight.

Max’s sharp eye caught a tiny jet of steam issuing from under the Axial catwalk over her head. A small feeder pipe had burst, probably under the stress of the crash dive. Stress. Managing structural stress was a big part of the chief engineer’s job. Max was the master of a surgeon’s array of tools designed to measure the amounts of force being applied to every inch of wire, rope, fabric, and metal inside the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. Countering the effects of altitude, windstorms, and temperature fluctuations was an intellectual battle. She constantly assessed hydrogen flows and steam and water pressures in miles upon miles of pipes and tubes: there was always a leak springing up somewhere as the rigid but supple airship frame constantly shifted against the wind.

And the engines. The engines! The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s six immense coal-black furnaces and boilers had been well built—her compliments to the Imperial clan’s shipbuilders—but there was always a fine line between stoking them up to maximum efficiency and actually blowing them up.

As much as it pained the chief engineer, the feeder pipe would have to wait.

Max arrived at the forward circular staircase that wheeled down into the piloting gondola. Descending two steps at a time, she was in a rush to jump into the revolving turret of the hammergun—a pneumatic cannon—slung under the gondola’s waist. The hammergun was not the chief engineer’s official battle station, but Max had claimed the honor early on and Buckle had not been inclined to fight her on it.

Max alighted on the gondola deck behind Buckle, and with one smooth motion swung her body down into the hammergun turret. She attached her safety harness, plugged her headgear into the chattertube line, and wound the canister crank
that opened up the hammergun’s operating valves. The cocoon of bronze pipes around her hissed and creaked with the rising pressure of the superheated air.

“Nice you could make it for the show, Max,” Buckle said without looking back. She could hear the usual smile in his voice. “We have a skirmish looming, you know.”

“I would like to chat with the hack who bought us a box of substandard boiler rivets,” Max replied, pressing forward the hammergun’s priming levers with a satisfying metal-on-metal
chunk ka-chunk
.

“That would be Ivan,” Sabrina said.

Max made a tiny, unconscious grimace. She didn’t care much for Chief Mechanic Ivan Gorky. But it would be amusing to watch him fuss when she chewed him out.

“Any damage?” Buckle asked.

“Just a skin tear,” Max replied. “Number two is shut down.”

“Good old Smoky,” Buckle grumbled.

Max pressed her gun-maneuvering lever up, pitching her and the turret forward so that the long barrel of the hammergun pointed almost straight down. Once the turret rotated into firing position, it was exposed to the outside air: the freezing wind battered her seat in its unkind but familiar fashion. She peered down the aiming sight, scrutinizing the snowbound landscape below. The cannon barrel was fully retracted, so it wasn’t much of a sighting. She would not be able to extend it out to operating length until after they landed and then ascended again.

Her spine tingled. She loved operating the cannon, firing it, stalking any prey she could find. Martians were predators. The visceral charge of the hunt burned so hot in Max’s half-Martian veins, she wondered how a full-blooded Martian could stand it.

THE ART OF THE BOUNCE

S
ABRINA SAW
M
AX SWING INTO
the hammergun turret and grinned inwardly. She always felt safer with Max on the gun. Max was deadly. And Max loved it, even if she would never admit to loving anything.

An odd pang struck Sabrina’s gut, the sort of random emotion—rare for her—that came out of nowhere when one was completely occupied with some other task. This was a weird sort of sadness. Max was Sabrina’s sister—in name only, for they were both adopted by Balthazar—but they had never been close. They had shared books and taken classes at the Academy together, but they had never sat together at the dinner table. They had never shared a secret.

“Fifty feet,” Sabrina said. “Landing zone directly below. Magnolia and Hollywood Way. Rate of descent thirty feet per minute. Attitude zero degrees. Drift at one degree port bubble.”

“Helm compensating,” De Quincey said.

“Dead slow,” Buckle ordered, ringing the chadburn device as he cranked its handle.

“Dead slow, aye!” engineering responded, along with the ring of the chadburn bell.

The roar of the propellers steadily decreased.

The piloting gondola hummed with the silence of expectation. The rudder and elevator wheels creaked ever so slightly as De Quincey and Dunn nudged them back and forth. A cloud of steam passed beneath the glass under Sabrina’s feet, driven by a light tailwind from the exhaust vents at the rear of the gondola.

Sabrina eyed the array of intricate metal gauges, cranks, dials, and levers around her, observing the static-inertia meter, a palm-sized glass orb of clear liquid encased in copper, where two large bubbles measured the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s horizontal and vertical level. The liquid was seawater “boil,” a solution of distilled phosphorus algae. The boil would glow at night if one pressed the button to tap the agitation hammers within, thus disturbing the algae and making it generate bright, eerie bioluminescent swirls of greenish illumination. All of the vital cockpit instruments contained boil.

Sabrina heard Max cooing in the chattertube. Martian females had soothing voices, and cooed when they were pleased with themselves: it was a pleasant sound, a sort of a mix of a cat purring and a dove warbling. Max was a master of the coo because she was usually amused by herself and annoyed by everyone else. It was also her version of laughter, unless one could really get her splitting her sides. Sabrina could remember seeing Max laugh like that only once, when Sabrina was seventeen.

“Pleased with ourselves, are we, Max?” Buckle said, also aware of the cooing.

The cooing stopped. “Just be careful with my airship, Captain,” Max replied, her voice hollow but loud over the chattertube connection. As far as any crew member was concerned, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was “my airship.” “Another hole would surely ruin my day.”

Buckle leaned in to his chattertube mouthpiece and shouted, “Eyes up! Wait for the signal!” He pulled his saber down from its gargoyle pegs and clipped it to his belt.

A signal flare rocketed up into the sky directly in front of the zeppelin’s cockpit dome, leaving a curling trail of black smoke until it popped, its burning magnesium casting an intense white arc as it floated down and disappeared into the bones below.

“Signal flare sighted,” Sabrina commented dryly. “Thirty feet to ground.”

Welly spun a hand crank. “Lowering static lines,” he said.

“Pluteus sighted!” Max’s voice rang in the chattertube from her position in the belly turret. “Ten o’clock low.”

Kellie barked, her tail wagging, ears bolt upright.

“Right on time,” Sabrina said, nodding her approval as she eyed the copper-winged clock at her station. And sure enough, here came Pluteus B. B. Brassballs and his twenty-man company, filing through the snowdrifts, rubble, and bones. They were close, but Pluteus and his Crankshaft clan troopers, referred to as the “Ballblasters,” were never easy to see: the soldiers wore dun brown and white to match the dirty snow, and dulled the brass on their rifles to prevent them from gleaming in the diffused sunlight.

Pluteus and his men were the closest thing the Crankshaft clan had to an army, an uneven collection of brawny ne’er-do-wells who excelled at the art of war, infantrymen who traveled light and struck hard at any target Admiral Balthazar Crankshaft ordered them to hit.

Pluteus and his Ballblasters had been hunting for a Gallowglass clan airship that had reportedly crashed in the Boneyard a week before. The troopers carried pressurized tanks, hoping that they could locate the wreck and tap whatever
precious hydrogen might be left in the reservoir tanks before the yellow-fingered Scavengers tore everything to shreds. Hydrogen was lighter than air, but in the Snow World it carried more weight than gold.

And now, with great suddenness, both the Ballblasters and the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
had been called upon to embark on a mission that verged on suicide.

“Prepare to take the passengers aboard with all good speed,” Buckle ordered.

“Ten feet to ground,” Sabrina announced.

Buckle ducked back inside the gondola, snapping his telescope shut and tucking it back into his hat. “All stop,” he ordered, leveraging the chadburn dial to its vertical slot.

“All stop, aye,” engineering repeated, ringing the chadburn bell as their sister dial matched the first.

Sabrina heard the whirling propellers go silent as they wound down to a lazy roll. Low as an earthworm’s balls and just as slow. Her stomach felt like there was a rock in it.

“Be ready to bounce,” Buckle told Nero through clenched teeth. “I’ll want air and I’ll want it precipitously.”

Buckle hated being on the ground like this. So, for that matter, did Sabrina.

“Ready to bounce. Aye, Captain,” Nero replied.

“We stop for nothing after this,” Buckle grumbled.

“Airspeed zero. Hull at ground,” Sabrina said.

Kellie started barking. It wasn’t a good bark. The hair jumped on the back of Sabrina’s neck.

They were at their most vulnerable position. Stalled, with the gondola hulls floating a mere three feet off the ground.

And then the shooting started.

BLACKBANG MUSKETS AND HARPOONS

B
UCKLE, HEART RACING, JUMPED TO
the port gunwale and looked out. Scattered puffs of black smoke erupted from the blasted ruins surrounding them, bursting from rubble piles, burned-out vehicles, and doorways. Blackbang musket balls left long, sparkling tails of burning phosphorus and corkscrewed as the projectiles lost speed, and they looked to Buckle like a swarm of burning bees. Sharp
plinks
and
tonks
snapped against the gondola as musket balls bounced off its bronze-plated flanks. A kerosene lamp hooked to the gondola prow shattered with the high crash of breaking glass, its kerosene falling loose of the fuel canister in a wobbling pancake of liquid.

And there was another sound, a far worse sound for the soul of a zeppelin captain—the rip of puncturing fabric. Bullets punching through the envelope overhead. Bullets coated with burning phosphorus.

Buckle ducked back into the gondola. “Ambush! Port and starboard! Gunners let them have it!” he shouted into the chattertube mouthpiece.

Buckle did not actually have to say the last bit—the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
crew, weapons at the ready, were already returning fire, aiming at the sources of the telltale smoke puffs
and phosphorus streaks. He heard the low, burping
bumpf
of his crew’s muskets replying to the attackers, combined with the sound of the Ballblasters triggering their firearms in a measured response outside.

“Lower the nets!” Buckle ordered, his hand instinctively reaching to the polished brass butt of the pistol in his belt. This was the perilous window of opportunity for the Scavengers, who could attempt to board and seize the earthbound air machine. That is, if the Scavengers had any desire to charge the ship rather than take potshots at it.

“Lowering nets! Aye, Captain!” Sabrina shouted, reaching over her head to pull down a lapis-lazuli-handled lever.