Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (46 page)

CATALINA ISLAND

R
OMULUS
B
UCKLE, WITH HIS GONDOLA
keel hurtling mere feet above the surface of the island, with hydrogen vented and engines shut down, worried that he may have done his job too well.

They had dropped like a stone.

The slopes of the island rose up toward them: a giant white hand about to strike.

“Ten feet! Twenty knots!” Sabrina shouted.

A hill passed on their right, so close that Buckle could make out the tussocks of dead grass and jumbles of stones on its great white flank. He held the rudder wheel tight, maintaining course down the throat of a shallow valley that ran between the large hill on the right and another on the left.

“Steady…steady, old girl,” Buckle whispered, watching his horizontal and vertical level bubbles inside their boil tubes. He had to keep the keel level. Striking the ground at an angle would split the airship to pieces. Even so, since he could no longer maneuver, they were at the mercy of the topography. Digging the nose of the gondola into a hidden hillock would collapse the superstructure like an accordion, and most surely crush the
Arabella
with it. Even if the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
somehow did not explode, the survivors would be stranded far from
home, at the mercy of pirates and traders, not to mention any vengeful Founders who found them here.

“Keel is level!” Buckle yelled. “Slide, old girl! Slide!”

The nose wheel of the piloting gondola struck the ground with a brutal
thump
. In the same instant, the broken glass nose dome imploded with a
bang
. A high wall of snow and frozen earth fragments flew up in front of them. The airship bounced back into the air, three or four feet or so, hung for a second, and dropped again.

“All superstructure pneumatic joints maintaining integrity!” Max shouted.

When the gondola slammed down again, it stayed down, locked in an icy slide as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
became a gigantic, shaking toboggan. A foaming wake of snow rolled out from both sides of the gondola nose. The ground was uneven, delivering tooth-rattling bumps. With the entire weight of the zeppelin perched on its three gondolas, the strains and stresses pushed every metal girder, screw, and bolt to its very limit. The rumbling racket rose immediately into a wall of noise that screwed into the eardrums and mule-kicked the brain.

The rudder wheel shook so violently that Buckle had to release his hands for fear of breaking his fingers. He saw dark blood all over the steering wheel pins, more of it soaking the entire length of the right sleeve of his coat.

The airship started to slow down, and once its forward momentum decreased, it rapidly decelerated to a halt, with a final abrupt jerk.

There was a weird silence. The last surviving buglight swung overhead, its handle creaking as it rubbed on its hook, its yellow light rocking back and forth.

“Are we dead or alive?” Sabrina asked. “I’ve lost track.”

SHIPWRECK

B
UCKLE’S BOOTS CRUNCHED AS HE
strode through the snow, big crunches accompanied by a pattering of smaller crunches, as Kellie followed at his heels. Dawn had almost arrived, breathing a warm pink into the lightening darkness. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
loomed at Buckle’s left shoulder, a dark mountain anchored by a hundred hawsers to the frozen earth. Her huge gray envelope, swaths of her skin ripped wide open and gutted, hung listlessly over her superstructure ribs, like the skin of a starved animal. She sat at the end of the half-mile-long channel of brown earth her gondolas had scraped through the snow as she skidded into the valley. She was listing badly to starboard, the huge crimson lion, symbol of the Crankshaft clan, sagging on her flank.

But her back was not broken. They could patch her up enough to at least get them home.

The world was still, almost unnervingly so, after all the raging wind and shuddering decks, but it also gave all sound a wonderful richness and vibrancy. The air resounded with the shouts of engineers and the sounds of hammering, sawing, mallets striking metal, and steam-powered rivet cranks. Skinners and riggers swarmed the wreck from without and within, with needles and long rolls of fabric patching, rapidly stretching, stitching, and
gluing. The ship’s goat, Victoria, was tethered to the piloting gondola, where she chewed on what looked like a wad of paper; she gave Buckle a disdainful glance and looked away.

Buckle paused for a moment, watching the hydro men tend a line of fires on the far slope, melting snow in mess cauldrons to replenish the water ballast. He despised being grounded in such a fashion, his mighty airship now a beached whale, helpless, hemmed in on both sides by rock-strewn hills. Yes, the ship was snug in her temporary berth, lashed down by Max and her securing teams, and Pluteus’s troopers patrolled the perimeter, but he felt terribly exposed nonetheless. He also did not like the buffalo. The island swarmed with herds of the big, shaggy creatures, who apparently cared not one whit about zeppelins, often galumphing right up the hawsers, sniffing and snorting bolts of dense mist from curling nostrils, searching for anything vaguely edible with their dark brown eyes, looking as strange as any Martian beastie.

Snort, grunt, snort
, the buffalo would say.

Buckle winced. His arm ached in the sling Nurse Nightingale had tucked it into, after the gentle-fingered Fogg has stitched up the nasty slash across his wrist. “What is it with you line officers?” Fogg had complained. “None of you can stay put. Balthazar and Lady Andromeda are the worst patients a surgeon could ever wish for. Everyone else has to go before them, even if they themselves are shot through and the others are stricken with no more than splinters and hangnails. I have a lot of wounded to attend to, and all of you, once you’re not watched, get up and stagger off. I don’t have any nursemaids. Frankly, I am considering tying all of you down!”

Fogg and Nightingale had been busy: the shipboard infirmary was full, and they had erected an emergency tent to accommodate the less urgent cases.

Buckle felt tired. Damage inspection after damage inspection in the darkness by buglight had strained his wounded body and soul. Weakness flooded his legs. His stamina was shot all to pieces. At least he was well and warmly dressed, wrapped in a soldier’s heavy greatcoat lined with sheepskin, its high collar flaps pulled up around his neck. He had replaced his sleek leather pilot boots with foraging boots, their interiors luxurious with wolf fur.

And he had a prisoner.

A steampiper.

A vengeful energy refueled Buckle’s legs. He was on his way to interrogate the steampiper in the brig, and he wanted answers. Two Ballblasters had found the man lying semiconscious on the Hydro deck after the boarding skirmish. The young fellow had now had time to recover his senses, all of the time he was going to get, at least. And Buckle was in no mood for defiance or obfuscation. Buckle was not one for torture, but he liked entertaining the idea, where a steampiper was concerned.

Buckle blinked hard. His burst of energy wavered already, but he would mine his marrow for the strength to carry on, reinforced by the rattlesnake juice of spirit. He arrived at the gunnery gondola. Blast marks along the side marked where steampiper grenades had been hurled at the metal plates, denting them with their detonations. He swung into the open rear hatch, immediately encountering the interior darkness and its heavy stink of cordite. He and Kellie swung up the companionway to the keel corridor and strode toward the stern, dodging repair workers and banks of buglights along the way.

A zeppelin on the ground, not sky-moored thirty feet up or dry-docked, but fallen belly down on the earth, each girder in danger of being crushed by its own weight, is, for her captain, a
depressing sight. Buckle’s guts wrenched as he scrutinized every bent screw, dinged hydrogen tank, popped stitch, and warped hinge, peering up into the bombed-out cathedrals of the blasted compartments, where shredded tapestries of burned goldbeater’s skins and imploded stockings hung from deck after deck of melted catwalks.

Dawn clouds soaked in lavender scudded across the gray sky, visible through the great holes in the roof overhead, looking free and clean and bright.

Buckle’s grumpiness was rising. The musty aroma of unrolled skin boles and the chemical stink of fabric stiffeners made him slightly nauseous—he was starving—and the constant pounding of the repair hammers and steam-driven metalworking machines antagonized his aching head.

But beyond his headache and empty stomach, he was primarily annoyed at being grounded. The whack of his boots on the catwalk gratings had too much gravity in it—to a neophyte, a well-trimmed airship on the fly seemed as solid and stable as mother earth, but to an experienced aviator, who could feel the float of the platform, feel the slightest degree of tilt, feel the weightlessness of the machine beneath his boots, it was like riding the back of a butterfly. And when the zeppelin lay bound to the earth, so too the magical lightness of its being was lost to the zeppelineer.

It was like walking inside the corpse of a loved one.

Buckle pressed his fingers against the bandages on his wrist and they came back bloody.

Buckle arrived at the brig door, where Sabrina stood beside a crewman cradling a blackbang musket.

“Good morning, Captain,” Sabrina said, and smiled grimly, logbook tucked under her arm. She crouched to pat Kellie on
the head and looked the pink of health, her skin flushed by the chill of the ocean air, her eyes bright green, her bright-red hair loose under her bowler.

That damned red hair. Hair so red, it was the color of lava. The color of fire. Buckle had never thought that he could be tortured by a color.

“Good morning,” Buckle said.

“How is your arm?”

“It stings. I should have that quack sawbones sent before a firing squad.”

Sabrina chuckled as she straightened up. “Nice to see your lousy humor is still intact. But you do look a bit pale.”

Buckle glared. Sabrina bit her lip. “No more of this dithering over my health,” Buckle grunted. “Did you confirm the casualty report?”

“Yes,” Sabrina said, flipping open the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s large, leather-bound logbook. She took a deep breath before she spoke. “Our expedition has suffered seventeen dead and twenty-six wounded, of which two are in a grave condition. Of bridge officers, Lieutenant Ignatius Dunn was killed in action, and Chief Mechanic Ivan Gorky was seriously injured.”

The list of the dead. After every skirmish came the list of the dead. The roll call to the tomb. The casualties had not exceeded his own grim calculations, but the sound of Ivan’s name on the list stabbed deep. “What is Ivan’s condition?” he asked.

“Fogg says he will live. His situation is classified as serious, but not grave,” Sabrina replied, her face belying her own concern over their cantankerous brother. “He was caught in the final bomb blast and thrown into the superstructure.”

“Continue.”

Sabrina turned a page. The heavy parchment scraped as it rolled over. “The casualties break down as follows: crew of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, five dead and thirteen wounded, including yourself; of the Ballblasters, eight dead and eleven wounded; of the Alchemists, four dead and two wounded. Of the clan leaders, Balthazar and Lady Andromeda are both banged up but recuperating. Katzenjammer Smelt seems to have escaped without a scratch.”

“Of course. And what of our prisoner?”

Sabrina glanced at the brig door. “I am told he is not being cooperative. I made sure that he has not seen me yet, as you requested.”

“Good. Wait here for two minutes, then come in. And remove your bowler.”

“Aye,” Sabrina replied, her eyes narrowing slightly.

Buckle opened the brig hatch and stepped inside.

PRISONER OF WAR

B
UCKLE STEPPED INTO THE
P
NEUMATIC
Zeppelin
’s brig, a small, narrow guardroom with a jailer’s desk, and two small, narrow jail cells beyond. Two people occupied the cabin: the guard, an empennage crewwoman named Zara Kenoff, who stood beside the hatch with a loaded pistol in her belt, and the steampiper, who sat at the table, his wrists and ankles in iron shackles.