Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (8 page)

And that somebody was going to be Buckle.

“Tuck! Gear me up!” Buckle ordered.

Tuck pulled a heavy safety harness out of a chest and swung it onto Buckle’s back, assisting him as he slipped his arms and legs through the straps.

“Captain, sir,” Boyd, already suited up in her safety harness and skinwalking boots, yelled. “With all due respect: I volunteer. It is my job, Captain.”

“Captain’s prerogative, Miss Boyd,” Buckle said. Skinwalking was a part of the skinners’ pedigree, he knew, but if he could
take a crew member’s place in a perilous situation, he intended to do so without hesitation.

Tuck clicked Buckle’s harness clasps together across his chest, checking and double-checking them, then handed him a white pith helmet with goggles, Havelock flap, and red puggaree, all fur-lined—the traditional Crankshaft headgear—and took his elegant topper for safekeeping.

Boyd shook her head with dismay. “It is my responsibility, sir. You always go out. It is not correct.” She shot a look at Max. “Am I mistaken, Lieutenant Max?”

“I disapprove of his risk taking, but the captain does not answer to me. You are on your own if you wish to argue with him,” Max shouted. Her black eyes flickered pink inside her goggles, the Martian color of frustration; Martians had eyes like mood rings.

Buckle felt the hollow thump of the heavy parachute cylinder hit his back as Tuck snapped it into place. Ambrose finished securing a special harness and leather helmet on Kellie, who sat with great anticipation, her brown eyes shining through the goggles.

Buckle pulled his goggles down over his eyes and winked at the dog. “You ready, girl?”

Kellie barked.

“I am ready to assist, Captain!” Boyd shouted from his shoulder, her voice sharp with a snap of bitterness.

Tuck handed Max a loaded blackbang musket, and she checked the primer.

“At least it is directly on top,” Max shouted. “You will not have to rappel, or hook up to the jackline.”

“See! Lucky!” Buckle said to Max. “Thirteen is my lucky number!”

Ambrose snapped safety lines onto the harness-belt hooks of Buckle, Boyd, and Kellie. The leather-wrapped cables were cumbersome, as were the bulky bronze canisters containing their silk parachutes, but eminently necessary.

“A ten-foot square should do the trick!” Boyd yelled, folding a large fabric patch into the tool pocket on the chest of her harness. Her small eyes looked even smaller inside her thick safety goggles, but her full lips, freshened by the brisk air, looked bright red.

“Keep your head up, Cap’n!” Ivan said.

“Aye!” Buckle replied, lifting Kellie into his arms.

Ambrose pushed a stepladder under the flapping hole. A depthless void of gray sky gaped above, pale as death.

KELLIE OF KELLS

T
HE SENSATION OF EMERGING FROM
a hole on the top of a flying airship was something that Buckle had experienced many times before, but that made the new trial no less daunting. Pushing up from the narrow confines of the Eagle deck into the mind-blowing vastness of the sky would put the whackwillies on anyone’s head for a moment or two. Fear was a thing Buckle had taught himself to swallow and never regurgitate. But it did take a specific moment to swallow it. And in that moment he held still on all fours, his gloved hands clutching a sea of canvas that surged and rippled under his knees as if he rode the back of some colossal whale. The empty gray sky was blinding, despite his polarized goggles. The freezing wind sucked at every inch of him, biting at his cheeks, threatening to snatch him, snap his safety line, and hurl him into oblivion.

And then the moment was over.

All was familiar. He was firmly planted on the back of his great airship. The heavily doped canvas skin fluttered against the long spineboard. The grappling cannons and pepper guns, bundled in oilskin wrappings, stood erect and unbending in the gale.

Buckle clambered around the breach so that the wind was at his back. The howling air buffeted him, but could not penetrate
his heavy leather coat and the fur-lined helmet flap covering his neck. He would have the hole stitched up in no time.

And the view was fabulous. Sabrina, heading due south now, had lifted the airship to nearly three thousand feet altitude to clear the rolling white crests of the small Santa Monica Mountains. Under the stern of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
receded the broad plain of the San Fernando Valley and the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. To his left, the Big Green Soup twinkled dark blue under a distant haze. In every direction he could see the purplish Martian obelisks, dropped on the day of The Storming, looming over the landscape: the Catalina obelisk in the channel to the south, the Piru obelisk in the mountains to the northwest, and the Redlands obelisk in the haze to the east, the tops of their monstrous columns soaring higher than the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was designed to fly.

Ivan popped up from the hole with Kellie in his arms, pressing Buckle’s safety line to one side to make sure it did not foul. He set the dog down facing Buckle and she crouched low, the slipstream pressing her fur pancake flat. She released a happy yip, tail valiantly trying to wag.

Buckle patted the top of Kellie’s flying helmet. The dog was a veteran of such adventures at the ripe old age of three, and as dauntless as her master. But the mascot was not on top of the airship to provide companionship—she was there to sound a warning if tanglers approached. Dogs hated the flying beasties, the massive former pets of the Martian invaders: a mad scientist’s fusion of pterodactyl, vulture, and cassowary, which could zip through the earth’s atmosphere like bullets. Tanglers attacked in a crash dive from a high altitude—a deadly tactic when a man was exposed outside a moving zeppelin. The nefarious tanglers possessed unearthly animal smarts and regularly
shadowed airships at a distance, patiently waiting for the opportunity to steal a meal.

Kellie was positioned to watch the sky at Buckle’s back.

Tanglers always struck from behind.

Marian Boyd climbed up onto the roof and clamped down at Buckle’s left shoulder. She was so small that Buckle half expected the wind to snatch her up and sail her like a kite at the end of her safety line. She opened the repair satchel attached to the chest of her safety harness and handed Buckle an envelope needle, a nine-inch, razor-tipped awl designed to punch through the dope-stiffened fabric of the airship skin. The needle was already threaded with heavy hemp rope. Buckle attached the needle’s leather strap to his wrist so the wind could not yank it away from him.

Max rose up in the hole gripping the blackbang musket—packing a nice little punch in the arse for any irritating tangler.

“Let’s get cracking!” Buckle shouted at Boyd, feeling his bravado kick into gear. Having removed the skin patch from her harness satchel, Boyd battled the torrent of air as she pressed it down on the undamaged fabric at the leading edge of the breach. Buckle punched the needle through both the patch and the taut skin beneath, yanking the thick hemp thread through and reaching under to draw the needle up again. Each stitch could be no more than three inches apart. He punched the needle through for a second stitch and then a third and a fourth.

Kellie whimpered at Max, who was blocking her view, and pulled herself forward so her paws hung over the opening, cocking her head up at the sky.

Buckle grinned at Kellie as he stitched. When he had found her, more a starved ball of fur than a lost puppy, her appearance in the house had not thrilled Balthazar, who
threatened to let the mongrel sort-of-terrier go. But Balthazar’s bluster was often ineffective when it came to his children; nine youngsters—one born by natural process to Calypso, the other eight adopted from far and wide—raised to be independent and headstrong, who had no qualms about clashing with the will of their father.

Balthazar and Calypso were the only parents Buckle and his sister Elizabeth had ever really known. Their real parents had been killed when Buckle was six years old, and his treasured memories of them were fragmented and cloudy.

Buckle, fifteen years old at the time, claimed the lost dog as his ship’s mascot, even though Buckle was only an apprentice navigator and lacked an airship of his own. There was nothing Balthazar could do. Every captain—or future captain, Buckle argued—was allowed a mascot. Balthazar’s dog, a bulldog named Agamemnon, had the run of Balthazar’s zeppelin, the flagship
Khartoum
. It was even rumored that Balthazar fed Agamemnon buttered bread on occasion, although he would never admit to spoiling his beloved canine in such a fashion.

“I know what to name her,” Buckle had said as Balthazar threw up his hands and wandered off into the sitting room to smoke his pipe.

“Kellie of Kells!” Buckle shouted again, the puppy squirming in his hands, her hot tongue working hard under his chin. The Book of Kells was an illustrated Irish manuscript of considerable age, and Buckle’s mother had inherited a copy that had somehow survived The Storming. She loved the book. Buckle did not have many memories of his mother, but he did remember her saying once, as she tucked him into bed after a nightmare, that she often dreamt in its colors.

For a short time, there had been no response from the sitting room, except a lazy puff of smoke drifting in through the doorway. “Kellie it is, then,” Balthazar finally grumbled.

“You’d better dunk that mangy hound in vinegar and scrub it until its fur falls off,” Balthazar had shouted with false gruffness. “It is lousy with fleas! And it’s not sleeping in the house. Not over my dead body!”

Of course Kellie slept in Buckle’s bed that night (both of them ended up having to take a bath in vinegar) and nearly every night since, wherever Buckle laid his head.

And, on the roof of a zeppelin three years later, it was the bark of this once flea-bitten dog that saved Buckle’s life.

TANGLERS

K
ELLIE
’
S BARK WAS A HIGH-PITCHED
squeal of warning. Buckle knew he was in trouble. A dog could sense a tangler coming. But a tangler came so fast the warning usually only amounted to a second or two.

But it was enough.

“Tanglers!” Max shouted.

Buckle grabbed Boyd by the collar of her work coat and threw both himself and her flat. The skin fabric bounced and snapped back under his weight, and for an instant he feared he might have impaled himself on the repair needle, but it was still clenched in his hand.

A huge shadow slashed over Buckle, its wings blocking out the sky, the claws snapping like giant scissors. He had an impression of a feathered riot of blue, crimson, green, Roman purple, white, and yellowy orange, the velociraptor body beneath ripped with scaly muscle, the arms and legs tipped with talons as big as butcher’s knives.

The huge beastie missed and then it was gone, diving over the starboard side.

Max’s blackbang musket boomed. Buckle jerked his head up to see the wind snatch away a big puff of black smoke as a second tangler dove down upon them.

The second tangler spun wildly, dead, gut shot. Max’s musket had done its work. But it was plummeting toward them, the great wings blocking out the sky.

The nightmare head flopped back and forth atop its sinew-wrapped neck, the kookaburra beak and sweeping skull crest dominated by big amber eyes that were bottomless and ancient.

Even when a tangler was dead, the yellow eyes still glowed for weeks.

The tangler slammed down with the resounding wet
thump
of a flesh-bound locomotive.

Part of the tangler—probably a wing—walloped Buckle, hurling him across the roof, knocking the air out of him. He heard the tangler bounce off the canvas, and caught a glimpse of its spinning corpse disappearing over the starboard side.

Buckle lay stunned and gasping. It was as if he were staring up at the gray sky from the bottom of a well dancing with white sparkles. The sounds of ripping fabric and snapping tangler bones echoed in his brain. Was Marian Boyd still in his arms? He could not tell.

Buckle heard shouting. Kellie was barking up a storm. He shook his head to rattle his senses back into order, and he suddenly became aware that he was sliding, the torrent of wind pushing him through something slick. He dug his gloved fingers into the slippery skin until he found the line of a superstructure girder and stopped his movement. Another shake of his head failed to knock the blur out of his vision. Panic surged inside him. One tangler was still out there. And that one had surely zeroed in on him.