Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (21 page)

They had been stopped for perhaps forty-five seconds—no more than that—but to Buckle it was too long. Bad luck. Bad, bad luck. He held his watch up to the clearer section of his facemask to read it. Fifteen minutes of air left.

Buckle shared a grim look with Pluteus. They couldn’t afford to sit still much longer, no matter what was out there directly ahead of them. Pluteus raised his hand to signal his men.

The Owl shrieked. Buckle nearly jumped out of his skin. The Owl’s echo bounced back. The Owl flung out one lanky
arm and pointed. Wolfgang raised his head from his instrument box and pointed vigorously in the same direction.

Wolfgang tried to shout something at Pluteus, something that sounded distinctly like “Forgewalkers!”

The Crankshaft and Alchemist troopers raised their muskets and aimed at the wall of mustard-colored fog. The two troopers manning the pneumatic rifle swung it up onto its tripod and charged the breech with a loud snap of the metal bolt.

What cursed bad luck, Buckle thought.

And then everybody started shooting.

SKIRMISH IN THE MOON MOAT

W
HEN THE FIRST
B
ALLBLASTER
’
S BLACKBANG
musket fired, the sound was muted, but the concussion of the shot slapped the side of Sabrina’s helmet. Her faceplate glittered as muzzle flashes erupted from the fog very close ahead, peppering the vapors with pops and slashes of swirling light.

How close that first Founders’ volley came to killing Sabrina was something she could calculate pretty well.

The musket ball punched a smoking hole through the map she was holding, slashing through the gap between her left arm and waist, taking a strip of her jacket sleeve with it, and slicing a shallow trough across her skin just inside the elbow. It delivered a sharp sting, but as the firefight broke loose she completely forgot about it.

Materializing out of the mist, lumbering into view like three upright rhinos, marched the armored Founders patrol. Aye, there were only three of them—at least that was all that Sabrina could see at the moment—but they were big, each over seven feet tall, encased in black-plated metal, and what little could be glimpsed beneath the armor crawled with spinning cogs and pressurized copper steam tubes so overheated that they glimmered red. At first glance, Sabrina thought the armored patrolmen were pure robots like Newton—the interiors of the
helmets inside their large glass faceplates were so dark one could not see any faces—but they moved with a smoothness and intention that proved there were men inside the machines. Forgewalkers.

The forgewalkers advanced in crazy, sparkling haloes of light: their forearms belched fire as they blazed away with sets of blackbang-musket barrels built into the wrist plating. The Crankshaft and Alchemist musket balls, zipping through the mist in brilliant white phosphorous streaks, bounced off their armor in bright but ineffective showers of sparks.

Speaking of slowpoke Newton, they sure could have used him here.

The pneumatic rifle opened up,
chack-a-chak
, its flashing harpoons striking the lead forgewalker with enough force to stagger it. A small metal plate spun off the forgewalker’s abdomen in a burst of sparks. At least the pneumatic rifle was big enough to do some damage, Sabrina thought, and she felt a touch relieved.

A Ballblaster standing in front of Sabrina jerked, the visor of his helmet shattering in glittering glass fragments. He dropped like a stone, facedown on the decimated concrete. That was the horror of a battle inside the moon moat: even a grazing shot, if it managed to split open your visor, air cylinder, or any of the tubes in between, let the deadly mustard gas in.

From then on, you would live only as long as you could hold your breath.

Sabrina raised her pistol and aimed at the head of the leading Founders scout. He was close, within thirty feet. It was an easy shot. She pulled the trigger and the weapon responded with its familiar kick and puff of dark smoke. She saw her musket ball ricochet off the helmet with a harmless spurt of light.

Someone suddenly hooked her collar and yanked her from behind. It was Buckle, pulling her back, dragging her to the rear of the line. “Stay back!” Buckle shouted, his words barely reaching her over the din of the battle and the insulation in both of their helmets.

Sabrina didn’t want Buckle to save her. Damn it—he was always trying to save everybody. “I can take care of myself!” she screamed inside her helmet.

Buckle knocked his faceplate right up against hers. His face looked distorted through the wet, slurried glass. “Save it, Lieutenant!” Buckle yelled. “No matter what, we can’t lose you now!”

Once behind the second firing rank, Sabrina tore free of Buckle’s hands and fell, stumbling over an uneven bench of cracked earth, landing hard, the impact punching up her arms and into her shoulders as she caught herself with her hands. With a sideways glance, she glimpsed the ponderous, metal-sheathed boots of the forgewalkers slowly advancing, the weight of their machines pulverizing the crumbled concrete in gray puffs. Out of the corner of her eye she saw another member of the expedition fall—one of the Alchemist troopers.

Buckle had her in an instant, lifting her to her feet. “Are you hit?” he shouted. Even though the storm of noise, she could hear the fear in his voice.

“I’m okay!” Sabrina shouted back, and Buckle let her go.

Wolfgang and the Owl, hurrying back behind the line, joined them. “The old Owl, she sniffed them out, did she not? Of course she did!” Wolfgang enthused.

The riot of gunfire faded away with a few ragged shots, as every blackbang-musket battle did: close-quarter skirmishes opened with the muskets and pistols, which, taking too long to reload, were set aside in favor of swords and other weapons of
muscle and steam. It was an eerie transition: to be caught in the middle of a furious musket barrage and then fall into a surging near silence as everyone drew swords and charged.

The forgewalkers kept coming, slowly advancing through the ghostly shrouds of yellow gas and black gunpowder smoke. Their gun cuffs, emptied of ammunition, were ejected to the ground; the armored sleeves snapped open and, in blasts of white steam, flipped up bladed wheels that started spinning like buzz saws.

“Fall back!” Pluteus ordered, with a wave of his arm. “Two firing lines! Reload!”

Fall back? Fall back to where? Sabrina thought. Backing up was no good. There wasn’t enough air left in their tanks to retreat. And besides—there was no place to retreat to. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was gone, already on her way to the rendezvous point, and the mustard stretched for miles in every direction. But what could Pluteus do? He had to keep his distance from the behemoth forgewalkers, hoping for a lucky shot. There was no way they were going to defeat these things hand to hand.

Sabrina holstered her empty pistol and drew her sword. She didn’t know why she did that, really—what use was her saber against the armored scouts? But she would feel better if she went down swinging…if it came to that.

It was so quiet. Why was the pneumatic rifle not firing?

“Blue blazes! Get that gun running!” Sabrina heard Pluteus scream. She whipped her head around to see the big rifle standing silent, its power plant steaming—the two Ballblasters manning the weapon working frantically to unjam the breech.

The pneumatic rifle, with its razor-edged harpoon projectiles, was their only chance. Sabrina raced toward it, sheathing her sword and drawing her knife from her belt as she ran. Buckle shouted something unintelligible at her back. She ignored him.

“Front rank, fire!” Pluteus ordered. The front rank of Ballblasters released a crisp volley.

“Second rank, fire!” Pluteus ordered. The second rank of Ballblasters and Alchemists fired.

A sideways glance confirmed for Sabrina that the musket volleys had failed. The forgewalkers came on, knives spinning. The Crankshaft line faltered.

“Go to the blades and hold ’em, boys!” Pluteus bellowed, charging to the front of the fray. “Hold ’em!”

Pluteus knew—they all knew—they had to buy the pneumatic gunners time to clear the breech. The Ballblasters drew their swords and dug in their heels.

Sabrina arrived alongside the Ballblaster gunner as he struggled at the rifle. Both of his gloves were smoking. She peered into the steaming breech and saw the mangled brass casing of a harpoon jammed inside it, along with the broken blade of the gunner’s knife. The man had been clawing at the metal with his hands, scorching and shredding the fingers of his gloves.

“Stand aside!” Sabrina shrieked, her voice deafening inside her helmet, shoving the man away.

To her left, she could see the battle figures surging in the fog, the whirling outlines of the soldiers as they fought for their lives, slashing and jabbing at the seams of the enemy’s armor, while ducking the slicing whirl of blades.

Sabrina drove her knife blade into the gap between the cartridge and the breech wall, as far forward in the compartment as she could manage. It was difficult to see—damn the condensation inside her mask! With the tip of her blade wedged in, she began to quickly rock the knife forward and backward parallel to the flanks of the chamber. Pressure fore and aft was the way
to clear a serious jam. The gunner had panicked, attempting to wedge his knife under the casing and pop it up, and had snapped the blade.

Sabrina glanced at the battle, just in time to see a forgewalker catch a Ballblaster in its buzz saw. Fragments of equipment and ragged metal slewed in all directions, just before the man’s oxygen tank exploded.

Something struck the barrel of the pneumatic rifle just in front of Sabrina’s face—maybe a blade fragment, or shrapnel, or a bullet, or a piece of armored-sheathed bone—and the eruption of sparks nearly blinded her, the concussion on the barrel stinging her hands. She gasped, blinking her eyes hard again and again, tasting blood, sucking in so much air that the supply seemed to slow, verging on suffocating her—but she never stopped working the blade.

The forgewalkers were closing in. She could feel the shudder of their footfalls shaking heavier in the ground.

The harpoon cartridge jiggled against the knife. Sabrina dug in deeper, her blade deforming the brass casing, seeking a notch to catch and push.

Sabrina glanced at the forgewalkers again. She saw Pluteus, stepping over the corpse of his dead comrade, wading in to the enemy with his heavy saber. The fury of his attack, the resounding crashes of his blade against the body of the steam-powered iron suit, actually made the man inside it take a few steps backward.

The center forgewalker flung out his monstrous right arm, striking Pluteus full in the chest with a violent blast of sparks. The blow lifted Pluteus off the ground and launched him through the air; spinning, he disappeared into the fog.

THWACK ’EM!

B
UCKLE KNEW THE SITUATION HAD
gone from very bad to desperate in the last five seconds. Pluteus was gone, batted away like a doll and probably dead. Another Ballblaster and an Alchemist had been killed. And still the three forgewalkers came on, bladed arms flailing, scattering the hard-fighting survivors on the line. Buckle had his head down, reloading his musket as Sabrina worked on the jammed breech. His heart leapt into his throat. They needed something big. They needed to bust up the man-machines, or this mission was going to end in tragedy here and now.

They needed grenades. Crankshafts did not use grenades. But Sergeant Scully and Corporal Druxbury both had satchels containing a sticky bomb apiece.

A sticky bomb could blow a forgewalker into orbit.

Buckle searched the mist for Scully and found him only a few yards to his right, having rallied a handful of troopers around the pneumatic rifle. Buckle charged up to Scully, planted his hand on his armored shoulder and shouted into the side of his helmet. “Sergeant! Sticky bombs!
Now!
”

Scully jerked back, startled by Buckle’s sudden appearance, but Buckle saw a grim grin rip across his rough face. “Aye!” Scully said. He flipped open the bag on his belt and plunged
in his gloved hand, lifting out a rectangular block of explosive with a loose, gluey fabric wrapping. He drew a dope-stiffened hemp fuse from his pocket and screwed it deep into the soft body of the bomb.