Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (36 page)

“We may have lost a stabilizer!” Max yelled the words in Buckle’s ear, but now they barely registered over the roar of the falling zeppelin. Max jumped to assist Dunn on the elevator wheel.

“She shall not come around in time!” Buckle answered. They had no altitude. It would only be a few seconds before the airship crashed to the fogbound earth or, more likely, tore itself apart on the way down. Buckle was surprised that the hydrogen cell explosion had not already blown them all to bits.

The fog bank rushed up to meet them. With his engines near to bursting and his propellers spinning beyond maximum revolutions, Buckle had no more power to apply. But he had to regain lift or nothing else would matter. “Jettison all ballast!” he shouted. “Blow all tanks!”

“Blow all tanks, aye!” Nero replied, yanking down a series of levers on the ballast board. “Blowing all ballast across the board!”

“One hundred feet!” Sabrina shouted.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
plunged into the fog bank. The world outside went gray and blank. Buckle, his stomach rolling, saw little more than a vibrating whirl of bright green boil. He heard the surging roar of the ballast water pouring out of the scuppers, and felt their spray soak the air. The water smelled like metal. Relieved of the weight of her water reserves, the zeppelin’s descent was arrested; the hard yank of gravity nearly drove Buckle to his knees.

“All ballast tanks, main and emergency, empty, Captain!” Nero shouted.

“Eighty feet!” Sabrina reported.

All water-ballast tanks dumped, and their fall had slowed—but they were still falling.

“All crew engage oxygen gear! I repeat: all crew engage oxygen gear!” Sabrina shouted into the chattertube.

The crew would be fumbling with their gas masks and oxygen lines now. The bridge crew did not have time.

“Nero—flood to maximum hydro across the board,” Buckle shouted. The order could prove fatal—flooding all of the gas cells to their highest pressure while he had a fire on board was asking for it—but he had no choice: going down to shipwreck in the mustard promised certain death.

“Emergency hydrogen flood!” Nero said, manhandling the master levers as he opened the feeder valves. “Across the board, aye!”

“Sixty feet,” Sabrina reported. “Descent is slowing.”

Buckle leaned into his chattertube hood. “Kill all lamps! Kill all lamps!” If he was going to pump hydrogen into compromised gas cells and burning decks, at the very least he would have all of the lantern flames aboard extinguished. The fires in the overworked furnaces were another matter altogether.

“Killing lamps, aye!” Welly said. He spun a copper-handled hand-crank mechanism that lowered snuffers inside the piloting gondola’s lanterns, smothering the flames, leaving the crew in a muted darkness where the boil glowed a wild, primordial green.

Her water ballast dumped and gas cells bloated to near bursting, the now buoyant
Pneumatic Zeppelin
came out of her dive only inches above the mustard. The shuddering pressure in the steering wheels ceased, and Buckle and De Quincey eased the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
around, leveling out of her spin as she hurtled through the depthless fog.

“Altitude recovering. Leveling out, Captain. Forty feet altitude. Airspeed ninety-two knots.” Sabrina said. “Current heading is roughly southeast.”

The terrible pressure on the helm and elevators eased off. Max leapt back to her engineering station while Buckle stepped forward. De Quincey still had to lean on the rudder, pressing hard to starboard to counter a serious drag on the port flank. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was flying almost level, but she was flying blind and at breakneck speed, barreling through a void of fog, where the jagged remains of skyscrapers and transmission towers still lurked.

And she was heading away from home.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
trembled with an unnerving slackness. Buckle scanned his instruments. He had lost an unknown number of hydrogen cells on his port flank, and the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was dangerously out of equilibrium. Too much drag to port, too much lift to starboard. Max was already on it, manipulating her systems controls.

“Altitude seventy feet and rising fast, Captain,” Sabrina announced.

“Get her level, Mister Dunn! Zero bubble, if you please,” Buckle said.

“Even out your hydrogen dispersal, Captain!” Smelt shouted.

Buckle realized that Smelt was still on the deck; he glanced back at the chancellor at the bottom of the companionway stairwell. Smelt straightened his uniform tunic with a stiff tug at the hem.

“Regain your equilibrium properly, damn it!” Smelt snapped.

“Mister Banerji! Get the chancellor off my bridge,” Buckle shouted.

“Aye, Captain!” Banerji replied.

Smelt obeyed, turning to climb the circular staircase with Banerji at his heels. “Captain? You, Romulus Buckle, are
captain
of nothing,” he said. “You are the king of thieves, but you are the
captain
of nothing.”

Banerji and Smelt disappeared up the stairs.

“Well, you did steal his airship, after all,” Sabrina commented dryly.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
trembled. She felt loose, wobbling, unstable.

“And today I may very well sink it,” Buckle replied.

All of a sudden, the fog disappeared, or at least pulled back from the piloting gondola, to leave them stranded in the midst of a gaping hole in the fog bank. They were floating in the center of a large opening, like the eye of a hurricane, the walls of streaming fog whirlpooling around them. From the ground up to thirty feet, the mist was a band of dark yellow mustard; above that, the upper layer of gray sea fog soared another seventy feet.

“We are in another hole!” Sabrina shouted as she peered down her drift scope. “They are controlling the fog! The Founders can open the fog up at will somehow!”

“They have some sort of weather machine,” Max stated.

“Impossible,” Buckle said, but his response lacked certainty.

A
boom
resounded from below, followed by a high-pitched, shuddering
rip
that caterwauled past them very close to starboard.

“Aw, criminy!” Welly cried.

Buckle looked through the observation window at his feet, past Kellie—who had tucked herself into her cubbyhole under the instrument panel—and saw the dark, jumbled ruins of the old city below. And there, running directly beneath them, the huge black iron locomotive rocketed along the train tracks, the length of it lit up by lines of lanterns. The abandoned streets
were crisscrossed with gleaming railway lines—the train could rapidly change course in any direction—and it had to be moving at least eighty miles an hour. The locomotive pulled a coal bunker and a long flatbed car, where, under the stream of white smokestack smoke, a dozen men in gas suits worked on an immense iron scaffold to reload the biggest cannon Buckle had ever seen. The cannon was a beast, no less than three feet across at the mouth of the smoldering muzzle, which was pointed straight up at them.

“Enemy below!” Buckle shouted into the chattertube. “Directly below!”

The Founders gunners had just missed the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
at point-blank range. They had probably taken a quick shot as soon as the fog gap opened, and the zeppelin, skidding along at ninety knots from its crash dive, may have crossed the sky faster than they could traverse their cannon barrel.

“Helm, get us back in the fog! Elevators, emergency ascent! Up ship,” Buckle shouted.

“Aye,” both De Quincey and Dunn replied.

Altitude was the best defense against the cannon, but the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was in no condition to make a fast ascent. Dunn spun the elevator wheel and the nose of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
rose, but she was frighteningly sluggish.

Buckle had to disappear back into the fog before the Founders could get off another shot.

The hammergun uttered its familiar
chunk-chunk-chunk
, the turret vibrating the deck under Buckle’s feet. He looked down at the locomotive and saw the gunners ducking, as the cannon’s spinning darts ricocheted off the gun in violent staccatos of sparks.

Keep their heads down, Geneva, Buckle thought. Good shooting.

There was a last car on the Founders train, another flatbed with a fantastic device perched atop it, a large metal dish pointing up at the sky, its interior made up of interlocking rings of thick glass lenses, all glowing with a weird mother-of-pearl whiteness.

The opening in the fog bank collapsed, the walls of mist surging back in like a tidal wave, instantly swallowing the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
in gray murk.

“Ninety feet and rising,” Sabrina reported.

A cannon shot ripped through the mist. Another near miss. At least the Founders gunners could not see them anymore.

Buckle eyed his altimeter. The airship was ascending—with her ballast dumped, her hydrogen cells swollen, and her boilers roaring far beyond their safe capacity. She was nearly out of control—at least on the vertical plane—but nothing else mattered, as long as she was ascending.

A voice crackled on the chattertube. “Captain! Engines are overheating, sir!”

“Maintain speed,” Buckle responded. “Just a few seconds more.”

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
burst out of the top of the fog bank, nose high, like a whale breaching out of the ocean.

“Hard to starboard and due west!” Buckle shouted, relieved to be in the open sky.

De Quincey and Dunn spun the rudder and elevator wheels, whirling Buckle’s water compass to the west. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
slowly leveled out and banked to the left, the night horizon now anchored by the floor of fog and ceiling of cloud. There was no telling how far the Founders defensive complex might extend northward under the fog bank, and Buckle did not want to run that gauntlet. Wheeling westward would take
them out over the ocean and, hopefully, out of the reach of the Founders weapon systems.

Max leaned into her chattertube hood. “Damage report, by sections,” she said. Voices responded, listing one emergency after another.

Buckle scanned the fog, half expecting to see the behemoth crest of one of the legendary Founders dreadnoughts rising up to engage them, seeking to pop and burn their piddling zeppelin like a gnat, leaving nothing behind but a footnote in Founders history, and a forgotten wreck in the mustard.

Bring it on, Buckle boasted to himself, planting his boots hard on the deck.

The deck of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
shuddered ominously.

On second thought, perhaps not.

WHIRLPOOLS IN THE SKY

M
AX
’
S DAMAGE REPORTS SOUNDED LIKE
the eulogy for a zeppelin already gone down. “Gas cells sixteen and seventeen have exploded and compartment nine is on fire,” she said. “The firewalls prevented any explosions in the adjoining sections, but the stockingmen report cell eighteen in compartment ten is damaged and possibly venting. Ten’s primary valves have been sealed at the primary switching station. Fire teams are responding on buglight. All decks have switched to buglight.”

Buckle nodded. At least three of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s twenty-eight gas cells were out of commission: two destroyed and one venting. Buglight meant that the oil lanterns were doused shipwide, and the zookeeper was loading up special glass lanterns with fireflies—whose bioluminescence burned cold, and thus posed no threat in the presence of hydrogen leaks—and passing them out. The wounded, plowing airship, dragging, crippled in her lift, rammed forward by her overdriven propellers, was trying to roll to her left; De Quincey had to keep the rudder angled to maintain an even keel.

Buckle watched the unbroken, wavy surface of the fog bank 250 feet below. It seemed so tranquil now, in the minute since they had broken the surface, but he had kicked the Founders’
bee’s nest beneath, and something more might well be coming up out of the fog after them.

Buckle figured all he had to do was make it to the sea: once off the coast and out of range of the Founders cannons, he could turn north and make the long run for home.

An area of the fog bank, perhaps two hundred yards in diameter, suddenly shimmered a weird blue, as if every one of the billions of moisture droplets inside it lit a tiny candle and set to dancing. The sparkling fog opened into a whirlpool, exposing the circular patch of earth at the bottom of its throat. And on the ground was a locomotive—the same one as before, or perhaps another, Buckle could not tell—its lanterns vibrating with speed, the smokestack belching smoke. The strange dish machine on the last car shimmered madly with its mother-of-pearl glow.

And the huge cannon was pointing straight up at the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
.

“Evasive maneuvers!” Buckle shouted.

De Quincey spun the rudder wheel to the left, letting the damaged airship slide into the yaw to port as it wanted to, allowing a faster maneuver than the flying machine could normally make.

The walls of the whirlpool shaft flashed.