Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (45 page)

Tonight they had a date. And he was going to stand her up.

But Holly would understand. Surely. A fellow really should be forgiven when his zeppelin is on fire.

Ivan liked to think about Holly. It made him feel hopeful, and he needed that feeling, especially now, when so many bad things had happened. He snatched the top rung of the ladder and jumped up onto the Axial deck’s forward catwalk, sliding the buglight handle off its hook and into his hand. The catwalk grating tilted down toward the nose—they were descending fast. He kept one hand on the railing—things were calm now, but the badly wounded airship could suddenly keel over again without warning, and he did not want to be catapulted off into the superstructure.

Ivan walked slowly toward the bow, peering through the hatchways ahead, swinging the buglight back and forth as he scanned each compartment and access hub, searching for the little black sphere of a steampiper bomb. If the fuse was lit, he would see the glow. He sniffed for the stink of burning hemp. He listened for the sharp hiss and pop of incinerating fibers. Other search teams shouted out, behind and below him, announcing compartments clear: their voices were muffled by the howling wind pouring in from the massive skin rents on both flanks, rippling and rattling every inch of everything inside the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
.

The strategy of the steampiper attack had been clear: some of the steampipers had been pure soldiers, armed with pistol and sword, but others were grenadiers, loaded down with bombs. If the attempt to capture the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
failed, then they were going to destroy it.

It would take only one small incendiary bomb, placed at the proper junction, to blow the entire airship and everyone aboard her into a million burning fragments.

And Ivan was sure that there was still a steampiper or two stowed away aboard the ship. He pursed his lips, his left hand moving to the handle of his pistol in its holster, strapped across his chest. Pushkin stuck his head out of his breast pocket, poking it around. Ivan clicked his tongue, which the wugglebat understood as “Go to sleep,” and Pushkin ducked back down. Ivan was not supposed to be on his own; the search teams had been dispersed in pairs, but he and his partner, a rigger named Arlington Bright, had decided to split up, to search more compartments at greater speed. Now he wasn’t sure whether he regretted his decision or not.

He should have brought Kellie with him, at least. Zeppelin dogs were trained to sniff out explosives. Some airships used potbellied pigs.

He should have brought the dog with him.

Something rattled on the Castle deck catwalk overhead. Ivan froze. He peered up into the darkness. Clutches of fireflies wheeled in the gaps between the gas cells. On one end of the catwalk, in the bow compartment, he saw a shadow…then he saw the flash of a tiny, flickering light.

It was a flame.

Ivan’s heart skipped a beat. No crew person would ever strike a match inside the zeppelin.

Ivan dropped to one knee and held his breath. He drew his pistol, but he had no shot though the grating. Setting the buglight on the catwalk, he crept to the companionway and rushed up the steps, two at a stride, trying to make his boots pat the metal stairs as quietly as possible. He wanted to move slowly, with stealth, but if a bomb fuse was about to be lit, he did not have any time.

Ivan reached the Castle deck catwalk and sprinted, aiming his pistol in front of him. The steampiper was there, ten paces ahead, crouched down. The man had removed his helmet, revealing a swirl of short-cropped strawberry-blond hair, and his back was crisscrossed with bandoliers full of bombs.

Ivan gripped the handle of his pistol. His heart pounded so hard the barrel shook. His shoulder ached, the result of a fall against the corner of a firebox, when the ship had lurched violently before. When he cocked the pistol hammer, the
click
sounded brutally loud in his hears, like somebody had dropped a saucepan.

Ivan saw the match, a tiny waver of white under the glowing pink of the hand cupped around it. The match suddenly burst in a fluttering spew of reddish sparks—a bomb fuse had been lit.

Ivan charged. “Hey! Snuff it, fogsucker!” he screamed.

The steampiper jumped to his feet, the lit match in one hand and the bomb in the other, its sputtering fuse casting a bright illumination onto his face from beneath, making it look ghostly. He was broad shouldered and stalwart, about twenty-five years of age, with pale skin.

“Snuff it!” Ivan howled. He was a mere five paces from the man now.

The steampiper cocked his head with a strange, unnerving smile.

Ivan’s finger tightened on the trigger. This fool was going to make him shoot.

The steampiper flicked the match at Ivan. The spinning flame whirled into Ivan’s face and he jerked aside, snatching the match out of the air and crushing it in the palm of his glove.

“Damn you!” Ivan yelled.

The steampiper grabbed for the pistol in his belt.

Ivan’s pistol boomed with a blast of smoke and muzzle flash.

The steampiper toppled backward, a smoking hole in the chest of his cuirass, landing flat on his back. His limp arms were flung over his head and the burning bomb rolled free, spinning and wobbling down the catwalk in a fishtail of sparks.

“Blue blazes!” Ivan shouted, hurdling over the steampiper as he scrambled after the bomb. The bomb was round, like a little cannonball, except for the fuse stem, and it rolled and clacked along the tilted grating at considerable speed.

A low howl rose in Ivan’s throat. He guessed that he might have three, maybe four seconds left on the fuse.

He guessed wrong.

THE
PNEUMATIC ZEPPELIN
LOSES HER FIGHT WITH GRAVITY

T
HE NEW EXPLOSION, A MONUMENTAL
gut punch, shook the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s piloting gondola as if the airship were riding an earthquake. The night clouds lit up with a brilliant flash of yellow.

Everything shook violently.

Sabrina Serafim knew they were going down. Their chances of survival had gone from rotten to worse. She steadied her weight against her instrument panel, taking a good hold of her drift scope curtain, trying to continue taking altitude readings as the airship lunged, waffled, and then nosed down into another precarious descent.

“De Quincey!” Buckle shouted. De Quincey leapt forward to assist Buckle on the helm.

“Damn the Founders to hell!” Balthazar growled.

“All ahead flank!” Buckle yelled.

Max slammed the chadburn dial forward to all ahead flank. “All ahead flank! I need all the airspeed you have!” she shouted into the chattertube.

“All ahead flank, aye!” Elliot Yardbird’s voice returned on the chattertube, joined by the ring of the bell on the chadburn, as the sister needle swung into place.

“All hands! Emergency landing!” Buckle yelled. “Land if we’re lucky! Water if we’re not! Secure all boilers and brace yourselves!”

“Compartments one and two, all cells now reading zero pressure!” Nero shouted from the ballast station.

“Positive buoyancy can no longer be maintained,” Max said. “We are going down.”

“Prepare for emergency vent,” Buckle said, as the gondola swayed precariously.

Sabrina glanced back at the hydro boards. The hydrogen in the gasbags had to be dumped at the point of impact when you ditched. It was impossible for a hard landing on either earth or sea not to result in snapping superstructure girders, which caused both sparks and punctured gas cells: the perfect recipe for utter incineration.

The thirty-odd percent of hydrogen left in the reserve tanks loomed large now, Sabrina realized. It would be all they had to try to get home with.

“Aye, preparing for emergency hydrogen vent!” Nero replied.

“Eighty feet and falling,” Sabrina said. She looked up at the horizon. Catalina was very close. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
swooped toward the island at too great a rate of speed, but there was nothing for it. The airship was going down, and she had to be driven forward by her propellers for her stabilizers and rudder to function. At least there was no weather but a negligible crosswind. “Seventy feet.”

“Secure for emergency ditch!” Max ordered.

Sabrina lowered herself into her chair and buckled into her seat harness. Welly and Nero did the same. She glanced back into the gondola: beyond the greenish banks of boil-lit instruments, it was dark except for two swinging buglights, and one
lone firefly making loops in the air over the hammergun turret. The Ballblasters and crewman had retreated into the map room, where they could use the harnesses on the seats; Max was at the engineering station, attaching her safety belt around her waist; Kellie was hidden, curled up in her alcove, as she was trained to do in a ditching drill; Balthazar stood alongside Wong, both of them in their harnesses.

But Buckle and De Quincey were not.

“Get your safeties on, helm!” Sabrina shouted.

De Quincey strapped on his harness.

Buckle did not move, grimacing at the helm, his feet set wide, bent at the knees with the strain of fighting the rudder wheel. “Yawing to port!” Buckle yelled, as he reached up and switched a propeller feathering handle. “Correcting! Landing bumpers down!”

“Landing bumpers down. Aye!” Nero replied, grabbing a large copper handle and cranking it furiously.

“Sixty feet altitude,” Welly said. “Two hundred and fifty feet to landfall. We are at thirty knots. Fifteen seconds to landfall.”

“We are coming in too fast,” Max announced. Leave it to Max to point out the gloomiest details.

“Tell it to gravity!” Buckle answered.

“Aye!” Max replied, though Sabrina could not tell whether she was being serious or not.

“Fifty feet altitude!” Welly reported.

Buckle slapped a set of spoiler levers above his head. “We’ll make the island, but it won’t be pretty.”

Sabrina turned back to her instrument board, the wind pouring in through the nose breach thundering in her ears. Outside she could see the sparkling black sea passing in a blur underneath, the dull-white mass of the large island, encased in
snow, coming at them with what seemed like an even greater velocity. She eyed the altimeter needle on her instrument panel. “Forty feet altitude!” she yelled.

“Yawing to port again!” Buckle shouted. “Correcting!”

“Twenty-five knots airspeed!” Welly said. “Five seconds to landfall!”

“Altitude thirty feet!” Sabrina shouted.

“We are coming in too fast,” Max repeated stoically.

Max was right. But what was there to do for it now?

“Shut down all engines! Shut down all engines and raise propellers!” Buckle yelled into the chattertube, slapping the chadburn handle to all stop, ringing the bell.

“Shutting down boilers!” Yardbird answered. “Sealing fireboxes!” The chadburn bell jingled.

The view in Sabrina’s drift scope flashed from black to white. “Landfall!” Sabrina shouted. “Altitude twenty feet and the ground is rising fast!”

“Ballast! Emergency vent!” Buckle screamed.

“Emergency hydrogen vent, aye!” Nero responded, cranking open the master venting levers.

It was dangerous to vent when there were fires aboard. Most certainly, whatever had caused the explosion, a steampiper bomb or fiery ember, had left a fresh string of burning debris behind it. But Buckle had no choice at all.

“Fifteen feet!” Sabrina shouted.

“Brace for impact!” Buckle shouted.

Seeing nothing but a white blur through the nose dome, Sabrina buried her head in her arms. But instead of finding blackness under the eyelids, her life flashed before her eyes, sort of. Disjointed childhood memories. Screams in the night, echoing down elegant corridors of gray stone. Flickering blue lamps.
Lifted from her bed by powerful hands and wrapped warmly in her blanket. The sour smell of tobacco and sweat leaking through to her nostrils. The sensation of being carried, carried, carried down corridors and stairwells and streets, and into a cold, damp, unseen unknown.

She had so many plans swimming in her head, so many futures engineered, such a desperate, bloody revenge to take…it would be a shame if it all ended here.