Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (19 page)

Buckle was awarded the captaincy of his captured prize, the traditional honor that he vigorously demanded, and he chose the young but experienced Ivan, Sabrina, and Max—his brother and sisters—as his senior officers.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was a family affair.

THE OWL WHO COULD HOOT

B
UCKLE HURRIED ALONG THE KEEL
corridor with Kepler—big and out of place as a beached whale at his shoulder—intrusively matching his every step. Kepler was gnawing on a piece of sausage—where he had gotten the sausage from, Buckle didn’t know, but the meat stank of garlic. Their boots rang heavily on the gratings, weighted down as they were with their brass oxygen cylinders and breastplate armor, and Kellie zigzagged just ahead, frustrated by their reduced speed.

They swerved around the gunnery gondola’s magazine dumbwaiter shaft and entered the ready room, where Pluteus and his Ballblasters, sealed in armored suits from head to toe, were moving aft to assemble on the
Arabella
’s forward loading platform.

Pluteus stepped up to Buckle, grinning widely inside the glass faceplate of his bulky helmet. He thrust a blackbang musket, primed and loaded, into Buckle’s hands. “Ready to die, Buckle?” he asked.

“Never and always,” Buckle replied.

The Crankshaft armor consisted of iron plates that the blacksmiths rounded off to deflect musket balls. Their full metal helmets looked ancient Greek in style, with cheek guards girding heavy glass faceplates. Pluteus’s helmet
sported a tall red brush signifying his rank. The troopers were also weighed down with double sets of oxygen cylinders, and impressive arrays of gunnery belts, bandoliers, swords, and daggers. They didn’t seem to mind, however, watching the proceedings through the thick glass of their visors as they cradled their heavy blackbang muskets in the crooks of their metal-sheathed arms. Two of the Crankshaft troopers carried a portable pneumatic rifle, a large weapon that required a team to handle it.

Sergeant Scully and Corporal Druxbury had large canvas satchels hooked to their belts; in each of the satchels was one sticky bomb, a heavy chunk of concentrated blackbang gunpowder, coated with a gluey stickum so it could be pressed against door locks and exploded. This was a prison break, after all; they were expecting to blast a few doors.

Scorpius and his Alchemist soldiers were also ready on the platform, grouped closer to the nose of the
Arabella
as she rested at her berth inside the gigantic hangar. The Alchemists were more lightly armored than Pluteus’s troopers, but still formidable in elegant bronze breastplates and greaves that crawled with rotating gears. Their oxygen cylinders were far more ornate than those of the Crankshafts, and their helmets were smooth, polished sallets, like Newton’s head.

Newton and the Owl stood off to one side as Wolfgang and Zwicky tinkered with them. Robots waiting patiently, Buckle supposed. The Owl was coming along, but it had been decided that Newton, too big, slow, and noisy to accompany the assault force, would remain aboard the
Arabella
and provide cover when they arrived at the evacuation point inside the city, which would probably have developed into a running gunfight, unless they were incredibly lucky.

And luck had not been on Buckle’s side so far today. Or had it? Only the Oracle might know.

Wolfgang grinned at Buckle as he approached. “Prepare to be dazzled, Captain,” he said as Zwicky handed him a wrench, “when you witness the finest Alchemist robots in action.”

“You don’t say,” Buckle replied, scrutinizing the odd Owl. He could feel Kepler’s hot, garlicky-sausage-smelling breath on the back of his neck. He ignored it.

“Quite a mechanical wonder, isn’t she? Pure crackerjack,” Wolfgang boasted, grinning even wider at Buckle’s focused attention. “I’ll be running her for the duration of this mission. Zwicky here—my faithful assistant and robotics apprentice extraordinaire—shall be running Newton.”

“She?” Buckle asked.

“Of course,” Wolfgang chuckled. “She, Captain. My beautiful Owl here, she’s got a truly female personality. Very stubborn.” He winked.

The Owl was certainly a strange robot: the head resembled an owl’s because the face was dominated by two large eyelike saucers, concave bowls of circular canvas rings stitched into thousands of miniature cogs that held them taut. The metal head seemed designed to do little more than hold the eyes in place, though there was a small round opening in the area of the mouth. The Owl’s body looked like a mad scientist’s merging of a metal cheetah and a metal ostrich, long and lean, built for speed. It had two five-fingered hands that it casually flipped open and shut like a fan when it wasn’t occupied, and sometimes tapped at the glass window in its midriff, where steam surged in its belly.

“I admit she takes a little getting used to, Captain,” Wolfgang stated emphatically, patting the Owl’s head. “But she’s a real peach.”

Buckle couldn’t see any weapons on the Owl. “What’s she for?”

“She’s a reconnaissance robot,” Zwicky said, clicking shut the access panel he’d just been tinkering inside. Zwicky’s personality was much more prickly than Wolfgang’s, although Buckle sensed it was more a nervous insecurity than true rudeness. “The Owl sees with sound, like a bat. She emits a distinct series of whistles, and when the sound waves bounce back she can ‘see’ them.”

“Shouldn’t you call them ears, then?” Buckle asked.

Zwicky screwed up his face as if he’d just bitten into a worm-packed lemon.

Wolfgang laughed. “Well, technically, yes. But since she organizes the different echoes she sees into a map of what’s in front of her—she can, in her way, see sound. So we call them eyes.”

“I see,” Buckle replied.

Wolfgang laughed. “The Owl was developed for night operations. She will prove especially effective inside the fog.”

“Robots ain’t worth the screws you put into ’em, if you ask me,” grumbled one of the Ballblasters, a sour-faced private named Moss, who was coaxing his messenger pigeon into a hermetically sealed canister at his waist.

“Nobody asked you,” Zwicky snapped back. Wolfgang simply rolled his eyes.

“Keep it down,” Buckle said, moving forward on the platform. Not many people liked the weird robots that the Alchemists were so fond of. As children, they all had been told wild stories of Alchemist machines going haywire and wiping out entire towns and villages, cracking open a hundred skulls before being stopped, and so on. The stories were probably all a
bunch of poppycock: just a few of the many dark tales available to scare children with in the Snow World.

“Captain! Up here!” Sabrina shouted, waving from the open loading hatch in the nose of the
Arabella
. She wore armor and oxygen equipment similar to his, and her map case hung at her hip alongside her pistol holster.

Buckle slipped around the Alchemist soldiers and strode up the wooden ramp to Sabrina. Kepler stayed with him step for step.

“Fashionably late, as usual, Captain?” Sabrina asked.

“Just attending to the affairs of state, my dear,” Buckle replied.

Sabrina gave Buckle a bemused look before turning and shouting at the assembled crowd. “All aboard, people! And double- and triple-check your gas masks, because you won’t find any forgiveness from the mustard!”

INTO THE MUSTARD

B
UCKLE
, S
ABRINA, AND
K
EPLER DUCKED
into the forward loading hatchway in the bow of the
Arabella
and headed down a wide ramp into the main cargo hold, a cylindrical chamber eighty feet long, twenty feet wide, and fifteen feet high. Once reaching the hold, Sabrina turned back to enter the elevated bridge located in the nose above the forward loading door. Buckle and Kepler followed Sabrina into the bridge, as the Crankshaft and Alchemist troopers streamed down the ramp and into the main hold behind them. There was no need to man the stations—the
Arabella
was going to be lowered thirty feet to the earth by the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s steam winches—but Sabrina could monitor their position from there.

Buckle stepped up to the glass nose dome, folded his hands behind his back, tucking them under his oxygen cylinder, and peered into the empty wall of fog. He could tell that the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was slowly descending, not only by the feeling of dampness he had in his bones but because the mist was getting darker and darker by degrees.

The loading door under the cockpit thumped shut with a heavy wallop, followed by the sounds of the lock bolts slamming home. The expeditionary force was all aboard.

Buckle glanced at Sabrina, who was already bent over the drift scope. “See anything?” he asked.

“Vertical visibility is actually pretty good,” Sabrina replied. Buckle heard the gears of the drift scope clicking as she moved them back and forth. “Rotten-banana yellow down beneath, but pretty good. Fifty to sixty feet.” Heavy fog was impossible to see into horizontally, but fog banks were generally shallow, so the ground could often be glimpsed if you looked straight down into them. “Surface in sight. I have an intersection directly below. I can’t make out any road signs, but the street plan’s orientation matches Melrose and La Brea. I have no doubt that Max and Welly will plunk us down exactly where we are supposed to be, light as a feather in the drop.”

Buckle also had complete faith in the dead reckoning skills of Max and Welly.

Max’s cool voice rang down the cockpit chattertube hood, which was connected by umbilicals to the mother airship’s chattertube line. “Ready to disengage launch!” she shouted from the cockpit. “Disengage!”

The
Arabella
jerked, making everyone bend at the knees a little—except perhaps the robots—as the launch swung out of its berth in the center of the zeppelin. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s gigantic steam winches started grinding, and the
Arabella
’s control cables unspooled, smoothly lowering the launch.

“Masks on! Air canisters on!” Max’s voice rattled through the chattertube, followed by the squeal of a bosun’s whistle.

“Masks on! Air canisters on!” Sabrina shouted, sneaking one last glance down the drift scope before she pulled her helmet on.

“Aye!” Buckle replied. He turned and strode into the cargo hold. “Masks on! Oxygen on!” he shouted. “We’re descending into the mustard!”

The assault team had assembled amidships, ready to disembark from the main cargo doors, hemmed in by the launch’s innards of steam pipes, driving shafts, hydrogen tanks, and water-ballast tanks; the rigid superstructure was folded back like a huge accordion overhead, with the envelope skin and gas cells draped limply between each crease. Everyone turned to face Buckle when he shouted the order, including the Owl, which stared at him with its gigantic eyes. The hold filled with the sounds of dozens of oxygen cylinders hissing to life at once.

Buckle pulled his helmet over his head and secured the leather straps of the gas mask, pulling them snug into their clasps with a few sharp tugs. He rotated the sealing dial on his chin and felt the rubber borders of the mask tighten around his forehead and under his chin. He reached to his left cheek and gave his air-hose knob a twist, filling his ears with the gush of pressurized air. One had to wear an oxygen mask above fifteen thousand feet of altitude, where the oxygen was too thin to breathe, but Buckle did not like the claustrophobic sensation of his head being pinched in a box, or having his vision impaired by the thick, muddled glass of the visor plate. Pilots relied on their eyesight for survival, to see what was coming before it was already upon them, and the murky masks felt unnatural, even dangerous. Goggles, with the clear lenses spit and polished enough to magnify the sky, were the zeppelineer’s eye gear of choice.

Sabrina arrived at Buckle’s shoulder and they hurried forward to join the group, with Kepler, screwing on his helmet, at their heels. Buckle worked his way along the hull to the loading doors, keeping his musket pointed up as he brushed past the heavily armored Ballblasters and Alchemist soldiers.

“Crackerjack!” Wolfgang gave a muffled shout from inside his helmet as Buckle nudged past him.