Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (20 page)

Buckle nodded, pressing his shoulder up against the wooden frame of the amidships loading door. Kepler, bulling his way through behind him, jammed his considerable bulk in at his back. The space on the slender deck was tight for thirty-two people, most encased in heavy armor, and all wearing gas cylinders, plus two toe-treading robots.

Buckle took a deep breath of the stale air inside his helmet. His heart raced, but his nerves were calm. His faceplate was fogged, but his mind was clear. The hiss and ping of his oxygen tank, the whooshes of his own breathing, the metallic pump of the cylinder behind, swam in his ears. The mask stank of sour sweat and damp leather. The hold lay in semidarkness, illuminated only by the shifting gray light seeping in through the skiff’s cocooned envelope, and he could not see much, sandwiched the way he was at the edge of the crowd.

An
Arabella
crewman, two pistols stuffed into the bandolier strapped across his chest, his face lost inside the condensation on his faceplate, was perched on a step above the door, one hand on the drawbridge lever. Pluteus was in front of Buckle, sideways and facing the door, his armored shoulder and helmet gleaming a warm copper in the soft light. Wolfgang, crowded in against Buckle’s right shoulder with his head down, repeatedly swiped Buckle’s elbow as he wound a lever on a small, whirring metal box lined with dials and switches.

Then they plopped into the mustard.

The glowing yellow gas, heavier than air, poured in. It surged over the gunwales and flowed down in dense waterfalls
that pooled on the deck and rose with frightening speed. Buckle felt a tiny but significant twinge of anxiety as the gas swamped the hold up to his waist, and then his chest, until it flooded up and over his facemask, submerging him and everything around him in a swirling undersea world of sickly brown-yellow, poison-colored murk.

I hope my oxygen mask works, Buckle thought.

FORGEWALKERS

A
LIGHT
THUMP
HIT THE
bottoms of Buckle’s feet. The
Arabella
had landed. Nice work, Max, Buckle thought.

The launch crewman at the loading door threw the latch aside with a dull
whack
and booted the drawbridge; it swung out in a wide flop, revealing a snowbound world of ruins, everything broken and collapsed, the gutted buildings looming like ghosts in the yellow mist. A land of poison.

“Go!” Buckle shouted at the top of his lungs, trying to defeat the heavy, damp muffling effect of his mask. He charged down the ramp. His boots landed on a frozen street whose uneven concrete had been cracked by ice and earthquakes. Rusted-out automobiles with punched-in windshields, stripped down to mere chassis and broken springs, rested in clumps here and there; bones lay scattered in heaps between. Shadows loomed high and low in the mist, abandoned wrecks of the life that once bustled there, fronted by the stair-stepped remains of walls, and rows of frozen jacaranda and palm trees lining the boulevards.

A big, twisted business sign was still barely legible:
Pink’s Hot Dogs
.

Buckle stepped forward, his musket at the ready. The fog was thick and absolutely still, obscuring everything beyond twenty feet but the biggest buildings. A set of railway tracks—intact,
obviously built since The Storming—ran down the center of the street. There was a weird amber flickering in the mist that seemed to emanate from its depths. The musket felt very heavy. He did not carry a musket very often; he was partial to his pistols.

Kepler came into view at Buckle’s side; Kepler’s musket looked much smaller in Kepler’s huge hands. Buckle looked back to see Sabrina behind him, a pistol ready in one hand as she fished her maps out of their case with the other. Pluteus and Scorpius had disembarked, leading their soldiers down the ramp in good order and fanning out to the south. Wolfgang moved into the lead, the Owl cocking its head back and forth as it walked alongside him.

The wooden hull of the
Arabella
loomed in the mist, resting oddly along the street like a beached sea vessel, her dozens of thick lowering cables stretching upward and disappearing into the fog, where the huge shadow of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
hovered forty feet overhead. The
Arabella
’s weather deck was lined with gas-masked crewmen—the deck could be employed as a rampart when the envelope was folded down—and Buckle saw the hulking Newton, Zwicky, Chief of the Boat Christopher Glantz, and a handful of musketeers positioned along its length to provide covering fire.

Buckle raised his hand to signal Ensign Glantz. The
Arabella
’s drawbridge ramp cranked up and shut. The winch cables jerked taut and the
Arabella
lifted off, rising upward into the fog with a groan of straining rope and creaking bulkheads.

Buckle peered at his pocket watch through the wet glass of his helmet visor. They had roughly forty minutes of usable oxygen in their cylinder tanks. Forty minutes to get inside the
walls of the Founders’ city, or all that would be left of the expedition would be a stack of corpses and a somewhat confused robot.

Sabrina stepped alongside Buckle, her map in one gloved hand and her compass in the other. She pointed due south, straight down the middle of the old La Brea Boulevard. Pluteus signaled for the soldiers to advance at the ready; they moved forward in an arc with Scorpius and the Alchemist soldiers on the left flank. To Buckle, the soldiers looked as alien as the Owl, their human flesh locked inside their armored suits, their faces distorted and dark inside their helmet windows, dripping with condensation.

Wolfgang and the Owl took the lead, the Owl strutting in awkward chicken-prances: it started whistling, emitting high-pitched tones that echoed as they bounced back and forth, haunting in the dense fog. Wolfgang followed at the Owl’s heels, reading and adjusting dials on his instrument box.

Sabrina bumped into Buckle’s shoulder as they advanced in the pocket behind the troopers. She was trying to get her bearings on her map through her fogged and dripping visor, and seemed to be having only partial success. Kepler trailed at Buckle’s back, far enough behind that Buckle could only see him if he turned around—if Buckle had given it much thought, it would have made him uneasy.

They slogged across the dirty snow and ice for what seemed like an eternity, but by Buckle’s watch was only twenty minutes. Wolfgang and the Owl advanced, barely visible in the murk, flanked by Ballblasters on each side, the Owl rotating its head back and forth as it emitted its eerie little whistle every few seconds. The Crankshaft and Alchemist soldiers swayed as they walked, their musket barrels traversing the ground in front
of them. There was so much debris along the sidewalks—the flotsam and jetsam of apocalypse: car hulks, fallen building facades, high snowbanks, and collapsed trees—that the group had to funnel into the middle of the street if the heavily armored troopers were going to move with any speed at all.

And the middle of nearly every street and alley had been cleared, making way for the omnipresent railway tracks that forked off in every direction to vanish into the mists.

A green street sign emerged from the fog, twisted and mangled, still dangling above the intersection: it read
North La Brea
.

“Moon moat ahead!” Sabrina shouted to Pluteus, her voice straining inside her helmet.

Pluteus nodded and peered at a watch strapped to his forearm armor.

The formation continued moving forward. To Buckle it felt as if the atmosphere suddenly got much colder. A low ridge appeared ahead, a frozen ripple in the ground spanning the street and stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions. The earth had been tossed up in a great swell here, the earthquake-like force that caused it having also obliterated the buildings that once spanned the ground. Buckle had heard of the moon moat: it was a mythical place, created by the shockwave of a monstrous Martian shockbomb dropped on downtown Los Angeles on the day of The Storming. Inside the moon moat, the mustard-gas-filled blast crater was a plain of pulverized and melted ruins—that is, until the Founders came.

Wolfgang, the Owl, and the leading Ballblasters easily climbed the low outer slope of the moon moat, and everyone else followed, picking their way around jagged outcroppings of concrete, rebar, and disjoined skeletons. Buckle saw an odd-looking little machine resting on the crest of the rise, out of
place in the rubble: faded gold lettering that spelled
Espresso
was stamped on one side, but he had no idea what that word meant.

The inner slope of the ridge was a wash of loose shale, and although the angle was easy for Buckle to descend, it was a bit more of a chore for the heavily armored troopers, who scuffed and slid with considerable difficulty. The interior of the moon moat wasn’t very deep—the force of the blast seemed to have been directed horizontally—and from what he could see, it looked as if most everything inside it had been knocked flat and bludgeoned into crumbled heaps, with the exception of the newer railway lines, which ran through it at various angles.

The yellow fog was very thick here, and the dense concentration of toxic alien gas had corroded every surface: the ground, both snow and split concrete, was as pitted and pocked as a drought-stricken streambed. Still dissolving, everything smoldered and smoked. Sinkholes and depressions, both large and small, had formed in spots where the weakened earth had caved in, giving the surface a moonlike appearance—hence the name.

Growing up, Buckle had heard the tales told, the stories of the great moon moat that made the City of the Founders impenetrable, from both without and within. And now, as he strode into it, the place was surely as bizarre as the old stories had described.

Just how his navigator, Sabrina Serafim, had escaped the city, he would like to know.

The expedition advanced due south, although now there was no longer much of a street to follow. A gigantic black sphere—four stories high if it was a foot—emerged from the mist ahead. It was a Martian mustard sphere—a gigantic gas bomb. It was said that on the day of The Storming, the Martians had dropped fifty of the huge spheres in a ring around the
downtown, rendering the city uninhabitable. The terrible mustard gas spewed in continuous streams from hundreds of taps lining the exterior of the spheres, which, like the one directly ahead, were still emitting the poison after more than three hundred years—still maintaining what had become the City of the Founders’ most effective defense.

Pluteus signaled for the unit to swing to the right of the sphere. Buckle eyed it as he passed. The thing was huge, even with the bottom fifth of it buried in the crater it had created when it hit the ground. The black metal skin had a sickly silvery sheen to it, perhaps from weathering, perhaps corroded by its own poison, but the metal was still smooth except where it was punctuated by the spigot funnels.

Buckle kept checking his watch as the group advanced. Twenty minutes of oxygen left. Eighteen minutes of oxygen left. He could see Sabrina and Pluteus, and the handful of troopers immediately in front of him, but all the others were no more than shadows moving in the murk, shadows that occasionally passed under vague hints of girders and walls. The Owl whistled again and again, its metallic cries making the place seem even more desolate. Buckle’s soul felt cold. If ever there was a land of the dead, he thought, this was it.

The members of the group instinctively pressed closer together. Buckle stayed glued to Sabrina, who had her head down, focused on her map almost every step of the way, and he sensed that Kepler had crept up closer to his back.

The Owl suddenly stopped and made a whirring sound. Wolfgang thrust his arm in the air, hand open. Everyone halted. The Ballblasters dropped to one knee and froze.

Sabrina, looking down at her map and compass, had not noticed Wolfgang’s signal. Buckle grasped her by the shoulder
and yanked her to a stop. She turned her head and peered at him, her eyes dark inside her dripping visor. Buckle pointed at the Owl. Sabrina lowered her map into its case and slowly drew her pistol.

The silence left by the Owl’s sudden muteness was frightening. Buckle gripped his musket but there was nothing but fog to aim at. He pointed it between the backs of the two Ballblasters in front of him anyway, in the direction the Owl seemed to be looking. His faceplate was so sludged with dust and moisture he couldn’t see anything more. He could hear his breathing accelerate in his helmet, the sound mixing with the oxygen cylinder’s hiss and ping; he could even hear the rapid beating of his own heart. This was no place for an eagle-eyed aviator, damn it.

“All right,” Buckle whispered to himself, “don’t become completely worthless.” He took a deep breath and wiped his glove across the faceplate glass, managing to clear a streak he could see through.

The Owl released two small peeps and cocked its head back and forth as it scanned the mist. Steam puffed from its exhaust vents. It suddenly spun in one small, fast circle before stopping and peering in the same direction again. And then it held very, very still.