Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (5 page)

Reels of chain-mail netting rattled as they unrolled down both flanks of the gondola, driven along slender rails by metal pulleys spewing steam. Within thirty seconds, the antiboarding netting would seal the underside of the airship, making a ground breach rather difficult.

It would also strand any of Pluteus’s men outside if they had not made it aboard yet.

“Ivan! Thirty seconds!” Buckle shouted into the chattertube. His chief mechanic and brother, Ivan Gorky, another one of Balthazar’s orphans, would be manning the open rear hatch of the engine gondola at that very moment, a blackbang pistol in one hand, his other yanking Pluteus and his troopers aboard into the narrow gangway corridor.

“Ten seconds, Cap’n!” Ivan’s voice, tinged with a Russian-throated grumble, returned in the chattertube. “Ten seconds and you’re good to go!”

“Ten seconds!” Buckle repeated, his voice suddenly sounding loud in his ears—the racket of the gunfight had quieted: muskets were being hastily reloaded on both sides. His nose
stinging with the punch of gunpowder, his blood a cavalry charge of adrenaline, Buckle paced the deck. He needed to get his zeppelin up and off the damned ground. He glanced over the port gunwale, his view partially obscured by drifts of black-bang-powder haze. Not a Scavenger could be seen, but there had to be at least fifty of them.

Buckle didn’t want any more of the Scavenger’s muskets.

But the thunder of the firearms started up again. Buckle heard another ball zip through the fabric skin somewhere above his head,
chink
against something metal, and drop at his boots, a deformed and smoldering lead orb.

Ivan’s voice rattled in the chattertube: “Everyone aboard!”

“About time,” Buckle muttered. “All ahead flank!” He snatched the chadburn handle and slammed it back and forward three times, ringing the bell three times. “Now, Nero! Up ship! Emergency ascent. Increase hydro twenty percent across the board. Jettison ballast five and six.”

“Bouncing, aye!” Nero shouted, rapidly flipping levers on the hydrogen and water-ballast boards.

Dunn grunted as he wound the elevator wheel to maximum lift.

Buckle braced his feet as the deck lurched to a steep angle. The engines and propellers, now throttled up all the way, rose to an eardrum-throbbing roar. He heard a deep
whoosh
as rivers of water thundered from the amidships ballast tanks, their scupper hatches wide open, cascading to the earth below. Released from the water weight, straining with acceleration, and given a vertical punch with extra hydrogen in its gas cells, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
lunged upward.

Buckle heard the heavy, metallic
chunk, chunk, chunk
of the compressed-steam hammergun belting away as Max, now
elevated enough to use the cannon from the belly turret, rained razor-sharp harpoons down upon the attackers. The hammergun had a limited range, but it employed a long, expensive belt of ammunition and was blessed with a near-continuous rate of fire, unlike the blackball muskets that took even an experienced shooter more than half a minute to reload. As for range, well, this skirmish—like most skirmishes—was almost point-blank.

“Forty feet and rising!” Sabrina shouted over the noise. “Emergency ascent in progress.”

A Scavenger’s musket ball, perhaps the last shot fired in the melee, struck a glass panel in the cockpit dome, leaving a spiderwebbed crack.

“Scurrilous derelicts!” Romulus Buckle shouted in disgust.

UMBILICAL

W
ITH THE
P
NEUMATIC
Z
EPPELIN
AIRBORNE,
Buckle felt much better. “Serafim. You have the bridge,” he ordered, unplugging his top hat from the mainline.

“Aye, Captain,” Sabrina said. Welly slid into the chief navigator’s chair, as was the protocol.

Buckle refastened his scabbard on its gargoyle pegs. “At three hundred, raise boarding nets and reduce to all ahead full. I will be in engineering. I must speak with Pluteus immediately.”

Sabrina nodded. “Aye, Captain. Give my regards.”

“I’ll keep your name out of it. He’s not going to like the news,” Buckle said.

“Aye,” Sabrina replied.

Buckle turned between the staircase and the hammergun turret and entered the narrow passageway at the back of the piloting gondola. On his right was the door to the map room, currently unoccupied, and on his left was the door to the signals room where the signals officer, Jacob Fitzroy, a skinny, territorial kid of sixteen years, sat amidst codebooks, signal flares, message scrolls, mirrors, and pigeon cages.

“How are your crazy birds, Fitzroy?” Buckle ducked his head in and asked.

“Regurgitating and crapping all over everything, sir,” Fitzroy replied. “They don’t like the muskets.”

“Very good. Carry on,” Buckle said, and strode to the end of the passageway, turning the crank on the round umbilical hatch until the main latch released. He swung the hatch open and Kellie bounded out between his legs. Buckle swung the hatch shut and turned. He paused, blinking. It took the brain a moment to process the void after he’d been cooped up in the narrow gondola for hours on end. The forward umbilical ramp was a flexible metal footbridge, rocking back and forth over the chasm of open sky between the piloting and gunnery gondolas. The ramp was now at a considerable angle due to the steep climb of the airship, and Buckle had to plant both hands on the rails to steady himself. Great rushes of icy wind passed him on both sides as they swept around the gondola and blustered along the length of the ramp, making every one of its thousands of metal hinges rattle and creak. The massive ellipsoidal belly of the envelope dwarfed everything from overhead, while the high rumble of her forward maneuvering propellers vibrated the air from their nacelles on both sides.

It would have been easier to climb the piloting gondola staircase up to the main keel corridor and stroll through the warm, enclosed interior of the zeppelin to the engineering gondola staircase at the stern. It would have been easier. But from the umbilical, Buckle could better inspect whatever damage the Scavengers might have done to his airship. And it was faster.

Buckle dropped a quick glance at the Boneyard, now two hundred feet below: the occasional puff of blackbang smoke popped here and there against the white landscape, but the range now rendered the shots ineffective. He scrutinized the
underside of the zeppelin envelope as it loomed above him: the metal-plated skin was designed to be open in many places on the bottom, and he could often catch glimpses of the fourteen-story-high interior. From here, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
always seemed to him to be some kind of hoax planet, pulled down from the sky and discovered to be actually a huge, complicated construction of fabric, girders, gasbags, catwalks, pulleys, rigging, and wires—a colossal feat of otherworldly engineering. Sweeping banks of gleaming bronze steam tubes, whistling copper vents, and dripping water-ballast scuppers running above the umbilical ramp made the impression even more fantastic.

Mostly, though, he was relieved that the only visible damage to his sky vessel seemed to be a few scattered musket ball holes.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
leveled out at three hundred feet, and the last few steps of Buckle’s ramp journey got much easier. He reached the umbilical hatch in the nose of the amidships gunnery gondola, flipped the latch, and entered as Kellie darted in between his legs.

Stepping over breeching ropes and pulleys, Buckle hurried down the middle of the gunnery gondola to reach the aft umbilical hatch in its tail. The forty-foot-long gondola was teardrop shaped and streamlined, but shorter and broader than the piloting gondola, housing the four twelve-pounder blackbang cannons—two on each side, their brass muzzles nosed back from the open firing ports—and a host of firing hatches and slots. The chamber stank with the acrid sulfur of ignited blackbang powder. The crew within, eighteen stalwarts, both male and female, were busy cleaning their recently fired muskets and delicately unloading the cannons: the skirmish had not required the expenditure of the expensive cannonballs—a good judgment
call by the experienced master gunner, Tyler Considine, and a husbanding of resources appreciated by his captain.

The gun-team members were all regular airship crewmen—hydros, riggers, skinners, and more—trained in gunnery as their post when the call to battle stations came. Buckle traded a quick salute with the chief skinner and captain of gun crew number three, Ensign Marian Boyd, a petite twenty-two-year-old spitfire with cropped brown hair and pale cheeks roughened by freezing wind. She had a touch of a snarl in her smile that reflected her ability to rappel across the cliff-like flank of a diving zeppelin or stare down a brawny boilerman with cool, daredevil ease.

Skinners, the crewmen tasked with maintaining the mountainous fabric envelope that was the hide of the entire airship, usually possessed colorful personalities, and their propensity for calculated gambles reflected the dangerous nature of their business. It was normal for a skinner to be good at his or her job—lousy skinners usually, and quickly, ended up as pockmarks on the Snow World landscape below.

“Gun number three secure, Captain,” Boyd said as Buckle strode past.

“Very good,” Buckle replied. He always forgot how small she was—her personality being so big—until he was right next to her. “Where is Mister Considine?”

“Up in the magazine, sir,” Boyd answered. “Was the package picked up successfully, sir?”

“Yes. Excellent work. Carry on,” Buckle said as he passed through the main gunnery deck and into the aft umbilical access corridor, where Kellie was waiting at the hatch.

Buckle popped the hatch and stepped out onto the aft umbilical ramp. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
had leveled out and a
lack of crosswinds left the ramp steady and flat. Kellie took off at a run. Buckle followed, passing under the long keel of the
Arabella
launch.

Heading toward the stern beyond the
Arabella
, the umbilical ramp passed between the two big blurs of the aft maneuvering propellers, both identical to the forward maneuvering propellers. Seventy-five feet ahead, Kellie was already waiting at the nose hatch of the engineering gondola.

Buckle did not need to glance back toward the bow to know that the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was climbing to clear the Santa Monica Mountains. His view to the rear, past the engineering gondola and the smoking, steaming Devil’s Factory at the stern, was of the sprawling, snowbound San Fernando Valley and the San Gabriel Mountains to the north; many miles beyond that, to the northeast, the Crankshaft clan’s stronghold stood secure in the rocky citadel of the Devil’s Punchbowl.

Home.

Odds were he and his crew would never see home again.

CRAZY IVAN

A
S
B
UCKLE SWUNG INTO THE
engineering gondola through the nose umbilical hatch, Kellie jumping in through his legs, he heard shouting over the din of the driving machines.

“I oughtta skewer you, you mudlarking Russian berserker!” Pluteus Brassballs bellowed in his gruff baritone.

“Try it! You should be thanking me! You should!” was Ivan Gorky’s response, his voice shriller but defiant.

“You nearly blew my head clean off!” Pluteus charged.

“Ungrateful wretch, ah, General, sir!” Ivan cried.

Exactly what Buckle had been afraid of…

The access corridor in the nose of the engineering gondola was very short—not more than five feet—a narrow hallway lined with metal tubes: Buckle cleared it in one stride.

Please don’t spit on him, Ivan, Buckle was thinking. Please don’t spit on Pluteus.

Buckle emerged onto the main propulsion deck, ducking under the teeth of a rotating cog wheel as the skunk-reek of hot oil, both whale and synthetic, slapped him, encouraging his nostrils and eyes to close of their own accord. The chamber was blazing hot, despite four ventilation ports in the nose that admitted a constant stream of freezing wind—the engineers and mechanics alternately broiled and froze, but they were used to it.