Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (16 page)

Buckle fought to keep a good grip on the axe handle. There was already a slick slip to it, and it shifted in his grip as he swung—a problem when the angle of the blade was the only difference between chipping away ice and gashing a hole in the fabric beneath it.

Suddenly, the violent storm abated, the dark, churning surface of the blizzard falling away below as if the
Arabella
had just leapt up out of a stormy sea. The atmosphere was clear except for a gentle snowfall, the night sky above Buckle a high ceiling of lightning-shivered clouds that cast a ghastly, uneven illumination of silver and ultraviolet black. Buckle was nearly thrown from his feet as the
Arabella
, released from the clutches of the updraft, bounded forward, her engines and propellers roaring.

Buckle gasped; it was now easy to breathe the painfully cold air, without the wind trying to suck his collapsing lungs free of it. The
Arabella
had burst up into a higher altitude of the storm, a hidden, twilit world with an atmosphere dramatically different than the layer of clouds below it. Visibility was much better, despite the falling snow—and the snow was
falling,
for the updraft had vanished with the storm.

Buckle also felt the
Arabella
, despite her hydrogen bags filled beyond capacity, and her boilers on the red line, begin to founder.

Get us the hell out of here, Sabrina, Buckle thought, and slammed his axe down again, splitting streams of ice that seemed to be re-forming as quickly as he cut them away. A forked bolt of lightning tore downward past the starboard side of the bow, perilously close, making Buckle’s skin itch and tingle.

“Twelve thousand, four hundred, Captain!” Steinway yelled from her perch on the starboard flank below.

Not high enough to require oxygen, but colder than hell.

Buckle glanced backward, hoping to gain a glimpse of Darcy and his aft team despite the obscuring drifts of the snowfall. It was then that Buckle, from the corner of his eye, glimpsed a great shadow rise behind the stern, a hulking presence of a deeper shade than the dark, silk-silver murk about it, a hovering monstrosity equal to the size of the
Arabella
, its beating bat wings wider in their sweep than the length of the airship on either side, the nightmare body alive with a writhing mass of tentacle arms.

Along with the shadow came a strange noise that instinctively made the stomach sour and the nerves ache, an ancient, nasty clicking.

Steinway had spun around on her line and, espying the looming monstrosity above the stern, she screamed. “Kraken! The monster of monsters is upon us, Captain! It be the kraken!”

THE KRAKEN

T
HE KRAKEN DESCENDED
,
ITS HUGE
wings beating, a flesh-and-blood nightmare shedding the unreality of myth, an alien beastie so ravenous that no aviator unfortunate enough to face one had ever come home alive. The fables described the kraken as a hunter of human sweetmeats, devouring entire crews in mere minutes, a pitiless crusher of airships.

For an instant, all Buckle could do was stare. The kraken resembled a giant squid, reddish yellow in color, though the head was almost blue, nestled amidst countless muscle-bound tentacles, the tubular body long and sheathed in an armored carapace, crowned with a horn-lined frill—a triceratopian head. The four sweeping wings, bat-like with their translucent, veined flesh and the protuberance of the skeletal structure beneath, beat slowly but powerfully, each one leaving massive vortexes in the snowstorm, each one as big as the
Arabella
itself. Blue-white arcs of electricity crackled back and forth across the kraken’s skin.

And the eyes—the beasties always had such terrible, glowing eyes. The kraken had seven of them—one huge, multichambered orb in the center of the head, and three smaller eyes aligned on each side. They were hypnotic, drenched with malevolence, and frightful in their intelligence.

It had to be killed, and killed quickly. And all Romulus Buckle had in his hand as he hurled aside his safety line—a deadly hindrance now—and scrambled amidships with a heart firing like artillery…well, all he had was a blunt axe.

It would have to do.

“Lazlo! Raise the alarm!” Buckle screamed back at the rigger, who stood just ahead of the amidships nacelle, staring dumbfounded at the apparition ahead. “Alarm! And muskets!”

“Aye, sir!” Lazlo shouted back, sliding into the observer’s nacelle to sound the emergency bell.

Buckle suddenly found himself catapulted forward, the deck dipping down in front of him. The kraken was latching on to the envelope roof, drawing the weight of its monstrous lobster body onto the canvas and heaving the
Arabella
down at the stern.

Buckle landed hard on his stomach, sliding a few feet on the treacherous ice before recovering his feet at the leading tips of the beastie’s tentacles, dozens of them, writhing on the deck, the suckers clamping on the envelope skin.

He saw Darcy and Ilsa Gallagher trapped at the stern, chopping frantically at the sea of arms coiling back and forth around them. An overhead scream made Buckle snap his head up to the brilliantly lit sky of shimmering lightning and falling snow—Hector Hudson thrashed in midair as the tentacle that had just lifted him squeezed, then ripped him in half.

Something exploded in Buckle’s brain.

Buckle hurdled over tentacles, moving beneath dozens more that lashed back and forth in the darkness overhead. “Have at the monster, mates!” Buckle shouted into the teeth of the wind, and slammed his axe down upon the joint of a thick tentacle arm. The blade sank deep into the jellyfish muscle beneath,
sending up gouts of yellow blood. The arm yanked back reflexively, nearly tearing the axe out of Buckle’s hands as it snapped away.

Buckle howled. A murderous ecstasy ripped through him at the feel of the chop. He wanted to rage at the killing of Hudson—the kraken had committed the unforgivable, attacking his airship and its crew—but the strategist inside Buckle had already taken over. To win, he had to prevent the kraken from clamping down. To win, he and his crew, gnats against a lion, had to kill the beastie in a matter of seconds. The eyes. Take out the eyes. And then the eviscerating could begin.

“The eyes!” Buckle screamed as he leapt over a lashing tentacle, battling toward Darcy and Ilsa at the stern. “Chop the bloody eyes!”

Darcy and Ilsa lay to, delivering vicious cuts to the kraken’s squishy flesh, but the beastie seemed unperturbed—it brought the upper half of dead Hudson’s torso to its mouth and jammed it into the fetid hole, a circle of overlapping hooked beaks, each snapping and grinding in its own motion, and slewed the remains of the poor fellow down its gullet.

Once finished with its mastication, the kraken slid its bloodstained beaks back and forth across one another with an ear-numbing
CLICK
,
CLICK
,
CLICK
.

Blake and Steinway were now at Buckle’s side, axes whirling, and Lazlo joined the battle line a moment later. They swung their axes back and forth, fending off the growing number of tentacles snapping in from every angle in the flashing light, throwing up waves of yellow blood wherever the blades sunk and bit. Slowly they worked their way forward to Darcy and Ilsa until they were only a half-dozen yards away. The
Arabella
groaned and shuddered, still sinking at the stern—the kraken
had secured itself upon the rear of the airship now, its slithering arms constricting around the envelope, the suckered appendages pulling along its rippling length in great accordion-heaves of muscle, the great black wings, quivering overhead like death-ship sails, slowly folding down onto the long curve of its back.

The kraken intended to stay for a while.

Buckle broke through, hacking at an arm as thick as a tree trunk until ten feet of the end fell off and slithered away. He lunged toward Darcy and Ilsa. The canvas at his feet was awash in yellow blood, the jackline cable screwed in a jumble, its iron securing bolts having been separated from the superstructure girders beneath by the awesome force of the beastie’s suckering arm when it had snatched Hudson from the deck.

An orange tentacle caught Ilsa by the boot and jerked, upending her; she lurched forward, hacking at the swaying appendage as it lifted her, carrying her to her doom.

Buckle lunged for Ilsa, but his gloved hand missed, his fingers brushing the end of her puggaree as it dangled from the upside-down pith helmet. Ilsa dropped her axe, folded her body up, and popped her foot out of the tentacle-wrapped boot; she dropped free, landing hard on her back amidst a nest of writhing kraken arms at Buckle’s feet. He yanked the gasping, one-booted woman to her feet as Darcy parried a tentacle, its suckers festooned with an axe, alongside.

“Are you in one piece, aviator?” Buckle shouted at Ilsa.

“Yes! We won’t let the beastie get away, Cap’n!” Ilsa shouted, drawing a knife from her belt.

“That’s the spirit, Gallagher!” Buckle yelled back, sidestepping a tentacle as it curved toward him from the murk. “Go for the eyes! The damned eyes!”

The kraken suddenly withdrew a raft of tentacles and stacked them like lumber, one by one, down upon one another, forming a wall of beastie flesh as impenetrable as a portcullis between the zeppelineers and its face.

It was as if the beastie had heard Buckle, understood his intent—but that was impossible.

They needed muskets.

“Back up amidships!” Buckle screamed, swinging his axe left and right. “Stay tight! Stay tight!” The group retreated slowly, Darcy, Ilsa, Lazlo, and Steinway, their picket fence of axes slashing under the writhing archways of tentacles in a twilit world of lightning. Splatters of hot, yellow kraken blood slopped the deck and stank of wine vinegar, melting the ice in irregular, steaming valleys.

Suddenly a tentacle, a massive, snaking whip of sucker and quivering muscle, rolled in upon the little phalanx, knocking Buckle and Darcy to their knees, and nearly bashing Lazlo over the side, so great was the force of its collision; then the arm snapped away, and Steinway was gone.

“Carmen!” Ilsa shrieked, but the poor skinner was out of reach, the beastie whipping her body back and forth high overhead.

“You bloody devil!” Buckle bellowed, hewing at the writhing mass of tentacles in front of him as his crew did the same.

The kraken, ignoring the vicious blows inflicted upon its arms, stuffed the screaming Steinway into its beaks and ripped the unfortunate woman to shreds, the last flails of her arms punctuated by a sparkling burst of boil and quicksilver.

The kraken spit a blood-soaked boot onto the deck. The eyes, the seven iridescent bug eyes, peered down with cold
calculation as it chomped and chewed. A flash of lightning lit the world white and blue, and the eyes reflected in hundreds of tiny prisms, in murderous rainbows.

Fury throttled Buckle, banging the blood his brain, pumping adrenaline into his muscles as he swung his weapon. “On me!” he screamed, waving his arms. “On me, you ill-looking brute! You’ve got a big brain, do you?”

The huge center eye swung to Buckle, watching him.

“Know this—you shall die this day!” Buckle howled, raising his blood-slicked axe high. “You have slithered into your grave and here I stand, your bloody executioner!”

Surprised by the theatricality of his words, Buckle felt like he was onstage in the devil’s theater. He was going to split open the kraken’s skull, chop the gooey brain out, and pickle it in a grog barrel for Doctor Fogg to inspect upon their return home.

“Captain!” Sabrina shouted, appearing at Buckle’s flank with a blackbang pistol in each hand.

“Good lass!” Buckle said, grabbing Sabrina’s offered pistol, whipping out his arm, and taking aim at the kraken’s biggest eye. He fired.

The kraken, apparently well aware of a firearm’s effect, slammed its pinkish, armored eyelids shut. The ball struck the lid and ricocheted away in a corkscrew of sparks.

Buckle hurled the spent pistol aside. “Down, Captain!” Sabrina shouted, yanking him, and shoving another pistol into his free hand. “Everyone, get down!”

Buckle dropped to one knee, turning to see six crew members advancing in a ragged rank along the roof, each one recognizable to Buckle despite their faces being buried inside goggles and the grasshopperish oxygen masks. It was Faraday’s gondola ice team, along with the signalman Martin Robinson,
the boilerman Cornelius Valentine, and the gunner’s mate Samantha Frost, armed with axes and muskets with bayonets gleaming from beneath the muzzles.

“Aim!” Sabrina screamed into the wind, raising her pistol.

The firing squad lifted their weapons.

“The eyes! Target the eyes, musketeers!” Buckle yelled, ducking lower, yanking Ilsa and Darcy down by their collars on each side of him.

“Fire!” Sabrina screamed.

The six muskets and one pistol erupted in a ragged volley of booms, blackbang-powder clouds leaping from the flash of each barrel before streaming away in the darkness.

Buckle snapped his head around to see the musket balls, each loaded with burning white phosphorus, zip through the snowy air and pelt the face of the kraken. But the great beastie clamped its armored lids shut again, flinging them open once the balls ricocheted away. Annoyed, the beastie ground its beaks from side to side with their awful
CLICK
,
CLICK
,
CLICK
.