Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (37 page)

“They’re firing!” Sabrina yelled.

Buckle gritted his teeth. “Dive!”

Dunn whipped the elevator wheel around toward its full-dive position.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
trembled, trying to descend, but without her water ballast, she could not defeat the lighter-than-air hydrogen.

“Emergency vent, forty percent,” Buckle said. “Crash dive.”

“Crash dive, aye!” Nero shouted. “Emergency vent! Forty percent!” He frantically wound wheel after wheel on his hydrogen board, dumping 40 percent of the hydrogen from every gas cell on the airship.

“Crash dive! All hands prepare for crash dive!” Max shouted into the chattertube. “Hang on!”

The whistling Founders cannonball went wide, passing through the air where the nose of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
had been not five seconds before, but close enough for its shockwave to buffet the envelope with a spattering rattle.

Jettisoning hydrogen at a stupendous rate, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s nose swung down as she slumped into an accelerating descent. This was what Buckle wanted. The higher he was, the easier he was to spot from the Founders’ tubular spyholes; if he was down low, just skimming the surface of the fog bank, then the Founders would have to open a hole right under him in order to see the ship. The rate of dive increased as more hydrogen was released; the superstructure, already compromised by holes, explosions, and fires, began to groan under the stresses of the vertical drop.

The fog whirlpool sucked inward and disappeared in the usual blanket of gray.

“The hole collapsed again,” Sabrina noted. “Looks like whatever they’re doing to part the fog, they can’t maintain it for long.”

“Captain! Engine room!” The chattertube squawked with the voice of Elliot Yardbird, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s engine officer. “Boilers are overheating, Captain!”

Buckle had expected the message. “Maintain all ahead flank, Yardbird!” he replied. “Maintain speed!”

“Aye, Captain!” came the response.

“One hundred and thirty feet!” Sabrina reported.

“Level out at one hundred feet,” Buckle said.

Dunn wound the elevator wheel back to neutral.

“Leveling out at one hundred, aye!” Nero responded, cranking valve wheels, slowly transferring hydrogen from the reserve tanks into the cells to arrest their descent.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s nose lifted as she came out of the dive and barreled along the ceiling of the fog bank, hurtling along at eighty-five knots, the prow of the piloting gondola nipping the upper tendrils of mist.

“Ballast, what is the status of our hydrogen reserves?” Max asked.

“Forty-five percent, all tanks, across the board, ma’am.” Nero replied.

“Very well,” Max said.

“Here we go!” Buckle shouted as he saw the fog swirl open about three hundred feet ahead. “Helm, hard to port!”

“Hard to port, aye!” De Quincey swung the rudder wheel to port and the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
responded quickly enough to glide past the northern fringe of the whirlpool, which vanished after they passed.

“Take us due south, Mister De Quincey,” Buckle said, watching the boil-lit water compass in the binnacle.

Two firefly-filled lanterns were lowered from the keel above, the buglights slipping down their chains in silence, swinging in the slipstream, alive with the fluttering white-orange light cast from the abdomens of the fireflies swarming within.

Buckle took ahold of the chadburn handle and dialed it back to all ahead full, ringing the bell. “Engineering, all ahead full,” he said into the chattertube.

The chadburn bell rang as the sister dial swung to match the bridge dial. “All ahead full, Captain,” Elliot Yardbird’s concerned voice responded. “The boilers are severely overheating, sir. And our water coolant reserves are near empty.”

Buckle understood the note of concern. They had dumped the blue-water ballast tanks, which were also used as the reserves to draw upon for boiler coolant. Overheated boilers could easily explode, and the engine crews, caught in eruptions of iron and superheated steam, rarely fared well.

“Ensign Yardbird, shut down boilers one and three, and transfer their coolant to the remaining three,” Buckle ordered. “I repeat, shut down one and three. Reroute coolant to remaining three boilers.”

“Shutting down engines one and three. Rerouting coolant. Aye, Cap’n,” Yardbird answered.

Buckle cursed under his breath. Having to shut down boiler number two, Old Smoky, earlier now loomed large in their predicament.

Welly glanced back at Buckle. “Lookouts report a hole opening, Captain,” he said. “Eight o’clock low.”

Buckle stepped to the port gunwale and peered back toward the stern where the gaping maw of a new whirlpool spun about two hundred yards behind; as he had hoped, the Founders were expecting the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
to run inland for home, and not south to the sea.

“It appears they have lost us, Captain,” Sabrina said.

“It appears,” Buckle replied.

“Fire control to bridge,” Ivan’s voice rattled down the chattertube. “My fire teams have no water pressure! We need a white water transfer immediately!”

Buckle glanced at Max. Blue water, used for the fire system, was the designation for water ballast and boiler coolant; white water was clean water for drinking, cooking, and bathing; black water was the noxious stuff, those pipes being used for sewage, chemicals, and refuse flushing. They had dumped all of their blue water ballast, except what had been in the boilers at the time, leaving the overdriven engines dangerously dry after they had evaporated much of what was left in their boiler tanks. The fire system relied on the blue-water tanks as its reserves, but those were gone. White water could be transferred to the fire system but to do so—and maintain pressure with minimum bleed—would require a complicated series of valve deflections at the main switching station.

“Reroute white water to the fire system, Max.”

“Yes, Captain,” Max replied, already halfway up the companionway.

“We have a lot of hot spots up here!” Ivan shouted on the chattertube. “I need more hands—all the hands I can get!”

Buckle jumped to the chattertube hood. “Reserve fire teams report to compartment nine, on the double!” Lionel Garcia, the apprentice navigator—and reserve fire-team member—dashed up the staircase.

Buckle wanted to punch a bulwark. He may have escaped the locomotive cannon and its fogsucking machine, but now he was limping along on three overheated boilers, holed and burning, low on hydrogen and fifty miles from home. And while the white-water reserves would douse the fires for a while, there was not a lot of it.

They would make it, though. It would not be pretty, but they would make it.

Sabrina glanced back from her station. “Captain, we are approximately ten minutes from the southern coast at current speed.”

“First Lieutenant, you have the bridge,” Buckle said. “Once you reach Catalina, turn northwest and take us out over the Soup. We shall give the Founders a wide berth on our way home. I am going to lend the midshipmen a hand upstairs.”

Sabrina stepped to the captain’s station as Welly took over the navigator’s chair. “Aye, Captain,” she said. “And please do not shut off any more of my boilers, thank you.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, my dear Serafim,” Buckle replied.

FIRE AND WHITE WATER

A
S
B
UCKLE RACED UP THE
iron staircase from the piloting gondola, he dreaded what he was about to find inside the envelope of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. The kind of damage they had taken was not the kind you could repair in flight. And draining two of the hot engine boilers of their water coolant—especially after they had been run above the red line for so long—was a good way to end up with a catastrophic explosion.

It did not matter. He had to risk it.

Fire aboard a hydrogen airship was always the first priority. The fire had to be put out. Then he could worry about boilers.

Buckle leapt up into the keel corridor. He was immediately hit by gusts of hot wind, thick with swarms of swirling red embers, that rocked the buglights and whistled through the miles of wires and rigging. Water streamed down from above, weaving jerkily in the wind currents, as if it were raining somewhere up in the vast, vaulted darkness of the superstructure girders and gas cells. Overhead, above it all, the interior of the airship envelope glowed yellow and orange as it fluttered, reflecting the fires still burning within.

It was the storms of embers that worried Buckle the most. Red-hot embers drifting mere inches from the hydrogen gas
cells—the thin goldbeater’s skins that despite their rubber stockings, were always suspect for leaks.

Buckle sprinted to the nearest companionway and charged up to the Hydro deck. He found three crew members on the Hydro catwalk, having popped the hatch on a ballast tank, their faces drenched with sweat, cranking a hand pump to draw the last few gallons of blue water into a fire-hose line.

“Good work, old salts! Throw in some spit if you can!” Buckle shouted as he passed, hopping onto the next staircase and climbing two steps at a time up to the Axial corridor. He had his head up despite the stinging embers and buffeting wind, watching the awful glow of the fires rise and fall across the ceiling skin of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. It was dark in the shafts between the cells, and the illumination of the firefly lamps, wobbling in streams of sparkling water and tornados of churning red embers, was ghostly.

As Buckle climbed through the decks and raced along catwalks he could make out Ivan’s voice, both urgent and calm, cursing the world. He heard the goat, Victoria, bleating, along with the sounds of pigeons cooing and hens clucking unhappily. There were the voices of men mixed in, voices shouting back and forth from above.

Buckle clambered up to the Castle deck and raced along the catwalk in compartment eight, ducking through the firewall hatch and into compartment nine. He nearly ran into the backs of two crewmen who, blacked with soot, gripped a fire hose that only dribbled water.

Buckle swerved past the crewmen and his boot plunged off into space, dropping into a fire-laced void where the catwalk grating should have been. Hands snatched Buckle by the collar
and yanked him back; he found himself in the burly clutches of the two men manning the fire hose.

“Look out, Cap’n!” the bigger fellow, a boilerman named Nicholas Faraday, shouted over the howling wind. “There ain’t no deck there anymore, Cap’n.”

“Thanks, Nicholas,” Buckle said, regaining his balance.

“We’ve got no water pressure, Cap’n,” Faraday shouted.

“You will in a few seconds. Hold on!” Buckle yelled. He stepped to the catwalk rail and looked down. Both of the gigantic gas cells in section nine were gone: the gaping maw of the blasted compartment, twelve stories of metal catwalks, some of them bent and mangled, poked out of the firewall hatches below; shreds of the goldbeater’s cells hung everywhere, burning a translucent purple. The portside envelope was ripped wide open in a towering vertical slash, revealing the clouds beyond.

The damage to the envelope was daunting in its scope: over one hundred and twenty feet high, and thirty feet across at the widest. The edges of the flapping rent glowed orange, burning, brightening as the slipstream sucked wave after wave of embers down into the interior of the airship.

The copper firewalls were still intact, and they had surely saved the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
from oblivion: bolted-in sheets that separated every compartment from ceiling to keel, the firewalls were designed to isolate any hydrogen explosion and funnel the volcanic force of the blast outward and away from the rest of the ship. But there were always openings between the compartments—tube ports and catwalk hatchways—so sometimes the firewalls worked and sometimes they didn’t.

It was a miracle that the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was still there.

“You got some water there for me, Cap’n?” Ivan shouted, hurrying along the catwalk, his goggles and coat encrusted with
ash, his ushanka smoking in spots where embers had landed. “We’re fresh out and still burning.”

“Any second now, Ivan,” Buckle said. “Max is on it.”

“Never trust a Martian!” Ivan shouted over the wind, though Buckle knew Ivan was glad Max was on it.

“You are truly an arse, Gorky,” Buckle replied.

“Are we going to find a place to put in, or try to make it home?” Ivan asked.

“Home,” Buckle replied. “I don’t want to overnight in a strange port—not with the passengers we have aboard.”

Ivan grinned, his white and gold teeth abrupt against his blackened skin. “Good! I have a date, you know.”

“Holly?” Buckle asked, knowing full well that the subject of Ivan’s affections was Holly Churchill, the winsome daughter of the town mayor, a girl whom Ivan hadn’t stopped talking about for days, since she had agreed to attend the Crankshaft Theater’s performance of
Golem
with him.

“Ah, who else? Are there any other girls in the world? I don’t notice them anymore,” Ivan said, then scratched his head under his hat. “I could really use some water.”