Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One)
Authors: Richard Ellis Preston Jr.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Richard Ellis Preston, Jr.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
Cover illustration by Eamon O’Donoghue
ISBN-13: 9781611099188
ISBN-10: 1611099188
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012951771
For my parents, Richard and Janet.
For my wife, Shelley.
And for Kellie.
PART ONE: FIRE, STEAM, AND HYDROGEN
I THE MAGNIFICENT ROMULUS BUCKLE
VII BLACKBANG MUSKETS AND HARPOONS
X PLUTEUS BRASSBALLS AND HIS BALLBLASTERS
XII “AIRBANGER—YOU’VE GOT A HOLE IN YER GASBAG!”
XX WOLFGANG RAMSTEIN AND HIS ROBOT
XXI THE ALCHEMISTS ARE FRIENDLY?
XXII ONE MARTIAN SAVED, ONE CAPTAIN LOST
XXIV THE CROW WHO COULD NOT CAW
XXVIII DEAD RECKONING AND OBELISKS
XXIX A MINEFIELD CHAINED TO THE SKY
XXXI WHEN THE SKY FELL AT TEHACHAPI
XXXV SKIRMISH IN THE MOON MOAT
XXXVII CAPTAIN BUCKLE PULLS THE TRIGGER
XXXVIII THE HEART OF A MARTIAN ENGINEER
XXXIX SPIDER TRAPS AND SEWER RATS
XLIII THE FINAL ACT OF THE MASTER OF THE WATCH
XLVI ANDROMEDA POLLUX AND THE COPPER CORRIDOR
LIV THE VELVET DARKNESS AND THE DUCKLING
LV THE WRETCHED AIR ABOVE LA BREA SQUARE
LVII “WE ARE NOT OUT OF TROUBLE YET, ANDROMEDA, MY DEAR—NOT BY A LONG SHOT.”
LXX THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
LXXIII FIREFLIES AND BURNING FUSES
LXXIV THE
PNEUMATIC ZEPPELIN
LOSES HER FIGHT WITH GRAVITY
LXXVIII I HAVE SEEN THE STARS BUT NEVER THE SUN
LXXIX OLD SALT AND HUMMINGBIRDS
LXXXI YE WHO HAVE LOVED AND LOST
LXXXII BUFFALO STEAK AND A DUEL FOR DINNER
LXXXVII TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Excerpt:
Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War
THE MAGNIFICENT ROMULUS BUCKLE
R
OMULUS
B
UCKLE WAS AN AIRMAN
, a zeppelin pilot, to be exact, or, to be less exact, in the local slang, a gasbag gremlin, a dirigible driver, a balloon goose, an air dog, or whatever moniker any lazybrat might cook up in his gin-stewed cerebellum. Cap’n Buckle, as most of his crew called him, was a tree-tall fellow, six feet and a couple of caterpillar lengths more if he was an inch, his cheeks and chin scruffed with whiskers the color of sand dunes, in ample quantities for a man of the ripe old age of eighteen. He was shot bolt-through with aviator dash, that legendary, heart-stirring
dash
: he laughed heartily and often, and his eyes, deep and glacier-water blue, made women swoon (all except for the beautiful Martian named Max, of course, who found him far too droll).
One might think Buckle was young to be in command of a sky vessel as dauntingly impressive as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
—and he was—but he led a crew whose average age did not exceed twenty years by much, except for Max, of course. Nobody knew how old Max was, and she was never in the mood for telling. But then, there was no “getting old” around the Snow World—the old California—in those days, not in the time of the Noxious Mustard (also referred to as stinkum
if you were using gutter talk) and the Carbuncle Plague, with the nasty beasties a-lurkin’, Bloodfreezer storms, and the high-percentage risk of one’s blackbang musket exploding in one’s face every time one pulled the trigger. Politically, everything was complicated by the little wars, the “skirmishes,” with each clan almost always at odds with every other, their fears stoked by the shady trader guilds, which played them all against each other for a halfpenny’s profit. Toss in roaming wolf packs of pirates and privateers to stir up the pot, and the entire situation became quite aggravated.
But, ah, the sky. The sky was the place to be as far as Buckle was concerned. It was no matter to him that zeppelineers were sitting ducks in their fragile steam clunkers that flew far too low, were notoriously difficult to bail out of, and were frighteningly susceptible to the catastrophic “pop” (steam engines, with their red-hot furnaces and boilers, did not really belong up in the sky inside giant fabric bags of flammable hydrogen, constantly battered and rattled around and shot at, not really).
Zeppelin pilots had a life expectancy of six months in a skirmish zone, one year in peacetime. But the second statistic was meaningless because all of the Snow World was a skirmish zone, always had been, at least since the day of The Storming (and nobody knew where that statistic had come from, anyway).
Buckle and his crew, members of the Crankshaft clan, had already lasted a year: a whole year since they had stolen the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
from the one-eyed Katzenjammer Smelt of the Imperial clan and made the spectacular airborne contraption their own. And like all the storied but doomed zeppelin captains and their crews, they took on a swaggering mythos that earthbound citizens would whisper about in awe, long after
their heroes had been incinerated in midair somewhere over the Big Green Soup.
Zeppelineer swagger always started with the topper. Buckle’s hat was a masterpiece, a black felt John Bull swimming with moving parts, a mechanical menagerie of steam tubes, brass gears, gauges, and a mercury-filled barometer. He liked to tuck the brim low over his eyes and tap it when he was thinking.
Buckle’s long leather coat was lined with gray wolf fur, tanned a brown so dark it was nearly black, double-breasted with two rows of shining brass buttons on the chest. The coat was satisfyingly weathered, with a fur-tufted rip across the upper left shoulder, where a privateer’s musket ball had punched through the cockpit glass and grazed him five months before.
Leather belts, in their fashion and width, were measures of an aviator’s soul, and Buckle’s belt was wide and intentionally plain, tucking the coat in at the waist and providing a holster for his pistol. He also wore the common airman’s black trousers with a red stripe—though one rarely glimpsed them between the knee-length coat and his high leather boots.
The leather scabbard of Buckle’s saber hung from two gargoyle-headed pegs at his left shoulder, the two gold tassels on its hilt swinging with the gentle vibration of the airship. Swordsmanship was a necessary skill for all zeppelineers, for the scarceness of steam-powered weapons and the unreliability of all blackbang-powder firearms, single-shot as they were anyway, was such that combat often fell to hand-to-hand, and the well-weighted sabers were the Crankshaft gentleman’s (and gentlewoman’s) bonecutters of choice.
