Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (7 page)

Buckle instantly volunteered himself and the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, prepared to die in order to rescue Balthazar Crankshaft, his adopted father and the greatest hero of the Crankshaft clan.

“We’re going in hot as fire pokers, then,” Pluteus said, with a little charge in his voice.

“They won’t be expecting it,” Buckle replied. He felt a little strange as he started to explain the council’s attack plan to Pluteus, who was the clan’s undisputed master of infantry strategy and tactics. Pluteus was Balthazar’s cousin by blood, and the two men, along with Balthazar’s brother, Horatio, were the old lions of the Crankshaft clan. “We plan to drop the assault team outside the perimeter walls,” Buckle continued. “We know a way in from there, following old sewers straight in to the back door of their subterranean prison.”

Buckle saw Pluteus’s eyes flash, though his face remained calm. “
Who
knows the way in?” he asked pointedly.

Buckle set his jaw. Pluteus had every right to wonder who amongst the Crankshafts might possess such intimate knowledge of the Founders’ city and its underground. “I cannot say.”

Pluteus narrowed his eyes at Buckle. “I do not trust this Aphrodite,” he snapped.

“It is not Aphrodite.”

Pluteus took a deep breath, moving on. “We’ll need our heavy gear,” he said. Buckle saw Pluteus’s mind racing behind his eyes, tackling the logistics of the brazen attack plan.

“All of your equipment is on board. Phoebe made sure everything was in order before we left.” Pheobe was Pluteus’s supply officer.

Pluteus nodded, staring straight at Buckle without looking at him.

“The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
will come over the wall to evacuate the team once we have Balthazar,” Buckle said, feeling a tiny shiver crackle up his spine. Flying his airship over the fortified City of the Founders at rooftop height was so insane it might just work. “The fog should provide sufficient cover.”

“The Founders,” Pluteus grumbled, puffing his pipe, watching the snowcapped peaks drift under the floor window. “Of course it was them.”

“And they were supposed to be the most virtuous of us all,” Buckle said quietly.

“Ha! Perhaps in the beginning—but not anymore, lad,” Pluteus said with a cynical chuckle that sounded like it stung his throat. “The original three might have been visionaries, but they’re long gone, moldering in the grave. What we are stuck with now is their inbred, watered-down descendants, all lazybrats, skulkers, and blackhearted defectives. The good blood has gone rancid and their empire is lost. Treachery is their milk and honey, and they’re obsessed with conquering us all.”

Pluteus paused, taking another pull from his pipe. Buckle listened to the drone of the engines at full power, the
whup-whupping
of the propellers not far behind the gondola, the grind of the huge turbine shafts spinning a few feet over their heads. His stomach tightened: he felt unsettled, as if he had just eaten a bad apple. If Aphrodite was proved correct and the Founders had abducted Balthazar, then the Founders had committed an act of war. And the Crankshaft clan was already weary of such tensions, having been on the brink of war with the Imperials for the last year. “It was not supposed to be this way,” Buckle said, and sighed. “This is not the world the three Founders intended.”

“Nothing is ever the way it was supposed to be, Romulus,” Pluteus replied. Then he was lost in his thousand-yard stare again.

A tiny hitch vibrated in the metal beneath Buckle’s boots. He raised an eyebrow in alarm. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was slowing down.

In the next moment there was a commotion at the ladder above; Pluteus’s infantry sergeant, a weathered pugilist named Scully, ducked his head down the hatch. “Airbanger—you’ve got a hole in yer gasbag!”

A hole in the bag. A hole in the bag meant the possibility of a breached hydrogen cell. Loose hydrogen inside a zeppelin was an impending catastrophe.

Buckle, with Kellie bounding at his heels, shot up out of the hatch so fast that Sergeant Scully had to jump aside.

“AIRBANGER—YOU’VE GOT A HOLE IN YER GASBAG!”

E
VEN IF THE HYDROGEN CELL
had not been compromised, a hole in the skin envelope of a zeppelin was never a good thing. Immediate repair of any significant breach was a necessity. At high speed—and the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was running at all ahead full—the constant battering of the wind would snatch at the loose skin and make the hole larger and larger. The airship had a rigid iron superstructure set in flex joints that made it supple as a whole, but a current of air roaring like a locomotive into the interior would place horrific stresses upon the gigantic gas-cell balloons and the elements that secured them. Airships taking massive damage to their outer-skin envelopes had been known to tear themselves apart internally, even in moderate winds.

Max, sporting both pistol and sword at her belt, hurried in from the umbilical hatch and joined Buckle as he strode toward the circular staircase. Pluteus’s Ballblasters eyed “Balthazar’s zebe” with suspicious leers, as they always did.

“Where’s the rip?” Buckle demanded.

“Topside, over cell thirteen in compartment seven,” Max said. She did not look worried. She rarely ever looked worried.

“From above?”

“It would appear so, Captain. The breach is reported to be sizable. Lieutenant Serafim gave the order to reduce speed. Skinners have initiated repairs.”

Buckle started up the circular staircase to the main deck with Max at his flank, their boots ringing on the cast iron steps. The hot stink of smoke, steam, and lubricant oil hit them as they rose into the engine room.

“Do we have a hydrogen breach?” Buckle asked.

“Damage assessment is ongoing,” Max replied. “No reports of cell compromises yet.”

“Well, we shall know soon, one way or the other,” Buckle said as they emerged inside the cavernous envelope, which housed the twelve-story-high hydrogen cells and steambags, all floating like monstrous gray elephants, each secured in a colossal web of girders, ladders, catwalks, wires, ropes, tubes, climbing shafts, ventilation shafts, and pipes. High above, the outer skin rippled.

A punctured hydrogen cell would flood the zeppelin, a huge bottle containing furnaces, boilers, steam engines, and kerosene lanterns, with explosive gas. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was designed with twenty-eight gasbag cells, set in horizontal pairs in fifteen compartments across the ship’s main axis. Normally, about one-tenth of the cells were filled with superheated air to supplement lift—the much-preferred hydrogen was expensive and scarce—and when a cell contained hot air it was referred to as a steambag. The massive cell balloons were constructed from overlapping sheets of goldbeater’s skin, which was made from the intestines of cows. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
had required 825,000 sheets of goldbeater’s skin for her gasbags.

That was a dang lot of cows.

Buckle, Max, and Kellie strode past the six gigantic boilers, which looked like black-steel locomotives perched on both sides of the aisle. The firebox furnaces—all except number two—glowed yellow and roared. The pressurized boilers gurgled in an eardrum-pummeling cacophony, fed fuel heartily by the stokers, the “sky dogs,” stripped to the waist, their muscles shining under the perspiration that flowed in runnels down skin blackened by coal dust and fire.

Buckle hurried through the blast doors at the main valve-switching station and leapt up the forward staircase, moving so fast that Kellie, and even Max, with her long legs, had to strive to keep up with him. He led them up to the Hydro deck where the catwalk, lined with hydrogen tanks, heaved between the gray flanks of the massive gas cells. The ship’s belligerent goat, Victoria, was tethered to a chattertube pipe outside the ship’s zoo, where the chickens clucked, the pigeon coops stank, and fireflies swirled behind glass; she barely gave any of them a second glance as they passed her in their rush to the next companionway, her split-pupilled eyes looking bored as she chewing something that she always chewed, even if there was apparently nothing there to chew.

Buckle’s lungs started to labor as he ascended to the Axial deck, the main catwalk that ran down the centerline of the airship from the nose to stern, but he kept up his speed, launching his legs up the small staircase, which carried him up to the Castle deck and the upper reaches of compartment seven.

Buckle glanced up in an attempt to catch a glimpse of any damage to gasbag number thirteen overhead. It always felt like he was in the bottom of a well whenever he looked up into the hydrogen-cell city from below: it was a narrow view between the looming, gray hydrogen cells and the copper blast walls on the sides opposite. Although he still could not view the hole
directly because it was above the gasbag, he could see the kaleidoscopic effects of the muted sunlight pouring through the hole and bouncing around in the interior, the light fluttering as the torn fabric skin flapped sharply against a whistle of twisting wind.

Then Buckle saw Ivan peering down between the bags, grimacing as he patted the shaft of a primitive harpoon, its point sunk into a wooden support beam.

“Hydrogen?” Buckle shouted.

Ivan shook his head. “Nope. Not a trace. How the hell did those yellow-fingered Scavs get their hands on a shooter as big as this, anyway?”

Buckle eyed the harpoon—it was big, but ramshackle, the bole poorly smoothed, and cut from uneven wood, the impressive iron point ill-fitting at the base, as if it had been designed to fit on something else. Judging from the angle of the harpoon in its resting place, it appeared to have plunged down on the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
from above. Probably fired from a massive crossbow of some sort, positioned atop a hill, Buckle decided, its trajectory arcing high in the sky before it came down on the vulnerable zeppelin. Either way, it was a lucky shot for a Scavenger’s near-useless equipment. But it was also a lucky shot for the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
: yes, the harpoon had damaged the envelope skin, but that was eminently repairable; the real treasure, the fragile cell number thirteen and its exorbitantly-priced, explosive hydrogen, had been spared any damage at all, and that was real luck.

“Precious little souvenir, eh?” Buckle shouted back to Max.

“Not the way I would describe it,” Max answered.

Buckle’s boots clanged on the catwalk as he raced to the small set of stairs leading up to the top Eagle deck. Deck four
was called the Castle deck because when all of the blast-shield portals were open along its length—as they were now—it resembled the grand hall of a castle, lined with the waists of the rubber stockings that sheathed the gas cells in towering curtains of mottled gray. The stocking skins were laced with complex mechanical latticeworks that resembled a million metal spiders joined together at the legs, glittering as they quivered at high tension. And the curving arches of rigging, backstays, and piping high overhead under the Eagle deck catwalk gave the ceiling a vaulted look, as architecturally pleasing as the roof of a church.

It only took a few more moments for Buckle, Max, and the dog to climb up the cast iron stairwell to reach the Eagle deck at the top of compartment seven, a narrow catwalk running just beneath the roof of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s envelope. Here, one could almost reach up and touch the underside of the fabric skin rippling along the airship’s back, and if one took a look down over the rail of the catwalk, one was rewarded with a vertigo-inducing view of the vertical gas-cell city, which plunged straight down to the keel corridor one hundred and forty feet below.

Hit by a torrent of fresh, freezing air, Buckle lowered his goggles and focused his eyes on the hole in the skin just above the catwalk over cell thirteen: it was an irregular gash about four feet in diameter, with a center of slate-gray sky. Its edges of ragged fabric lashed about like an enraged octopus. The harpoon itself had probably created a much smaller puncture, but the force of the passing air—the sound of it was deafening—had already greatly increased the size of the breach. Ivan and the chief skinner, Marian Boyd, were already working underneath the hole. Two more skinners, Rudyard Tuck and Amanda
Ambrose—both of diminutive size, which was handy in their line of work—hunched low, clutching clockwork hydrogen meters with their chemical sticks, and puttering in repair boxes flipped open at their knees, handing up nine-inch needles, dense hemp thread, and rolls of fabric. Both Ivan and Boyd wore safety goggles and thick leather gloves as they fought to grasp the fluttering shreds of fabric, their hands constantly jerking back, stung despite the padded leather. The left lens of Ivan’s goggles was cracked.

In-flight skin repair on a zeppelin running full speed was no easy business.

“This one is a real stinker, Cap’n!” Ivan shouted, finally managing to pin down the biggest flap of loose canvas amidst the cataract of air. “We should slow down!”

“No chance!” Buckle replied, peering up at the hole.

The interior repair was mere damage control: pinning down the ripped fringes of the breach so they would not further aggravate the opening. But somebody had to go outside and stitch a patch over the leading edge of the hole so the wind could not get underneath it, pluck it up, and continue to tear the envelope apart.