Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (46 page)

There was one more soul out on the bow with them, perched on the curving bowsprit platform on the port side: a marine, Robin Bogdanovitch, crouched with her hands over the flintlock of her long-barreled musket, ready to fire.

Banerji glanced up. The zeppelins battling overhead were less than 250 feet away, and approaching fast. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was in position to tuck her nose right up the arse of the port-side airship. They might get a warm reception, a raking blast in return, if the Founders zeppelin had a stern gun. Banerji would ignore any stern chasers, no matter. Captain Buckle was going to land him point-blank on the enemy’s backside, and it was his job to fire a devastating rake.

Banerji was terrified, his heart racing like a mad horse, tears welling in his eyes inside his goggles, but he knew that he was made of the stuff that stood fast in the face of danger; it was remarkably easy to do when other men were watching him, waiting for his decisions, their lives in his hands. “Steady, boys!” Banerji shouted. “Just a few moments, now!”

Something else drove Banerji this day, burned inside him. He had failed Captain Buckle by allowing the saboteur to escape him.
Failed
his captain. It chewed up his gut every time he thought of it. But he would be damned if he neglected his
duty again now. No matter what the Founders threw at his little garrison on the tip of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s nose, his shot was going to be perfect.

Banerji glanced back and saw Howard Hampton, the powder boy—the captain had asked that he be addressed as a gunner’s mate—poised just inside the hatch of the towering glass-and-cast-iron nose window. Howard had his ear close to the chattertube hood and the brass pipe of the giraffe periscope neck beside it; he cradled a velvet-and-leather canister containing the next powder charge, which he had carried up from the forward magazine. He looked pale and frightened, but resolute.

Banerji smiled at Howard. Howard’s eyes brightened and he smiled back. So far, things had gone swimmingly. The gun crew had arrived on their action station promptly, flung the chocks, tackle, and tompion aside, and run out the gun with by-the-numbers gusto. The long brass cannon was loaded, primed, and ready to fire—a single ball, for the four-pounder did not perform well double-shotted. Garcia, the sponger, had one hand clamped over the barrel’s touchhole so the wind could not suck out the fine-grained primer powder while he had his back to it, using his mass to shelter the slow match burning in its bucket. Perriman held a cannonball he had just rolled out of the shot locker, and Pasternak waited at the two winder wheels, one wheel for barrel elevation and depression, the other for turret traverse.

They were just under the fighting airships now, within pistol shot, coming up shockingly fast, no more than fifteen seconds away. Banerji could see the rigging patterns on the undersides of the gondolas, and their next volleys of cannon fire were loud, casting slender rivers of black smoke streaming away overhead.

Banerji doubted he would have to worry about aiming the six-foot-long barrel at all—he was certain that Captain Buckle
would plant him straight on the keel line of the target, the perfect position for his dreaded raking shot, sending his three-inch cannonball, a cast-iron round spinning with burning phosphorus, rocketing through the length of the entire zeppelin at one thousand feet per second.

A raking shot was your best bet to pop a zeppelin with a single bang. The cannonball, throwing sparks and phosphors as it glanced off catwalks and girders, created so many holes in the hydrogen gasbags, in one side and out the other, that it stood a good chance of defeating at least one of the self-sealing rubber stockings and releasing a sure-to-be-ignited geyser of hydrogen.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
lurched with a great heave, rapidly slowing her ascent, and the weightless sensation made Banerji feel like he might puke the beefsteak and cinnamon pancakes Cookie had made everyone for breakfast. The air was suddenly a flood of dark smoke, awash with the acrid stink of blackbang gunpowder and the eye-stinging issue of steam boilers and superheated oil. After a moment of choking, they were up and out of it.

Banerji worried that somehow he was unprepared, even though he knew his gun was in perfect order. “Ready to fire!” he screamed as they humped up behind the mountainous white-brown-gray stern of the Founders war zeppelin, her five massive bronze propellers disemboweling the air with eardrum-splitting force.

They were so close that, for an instant Banerji feared the tip of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s jib boom might be chopped away. But they leveled out clear above the screws, the harsh rush of the wind subsiding in his ears, and he was now staring into the stern window of the gigantic arse of the Founders zeppelin—the
Industria
was her name, clearly stenciled in silver across the stern arch board of her engineering gondola.

A musket ball banged off the iron barbette just in front of Banerji’s face, the flash of sparks near blinding him for an instant. He saw a Founders crewman, dressed in black, standing in the center of the stern window, hatch open, gripping a smoking musket.

Bogdanovitch’s musket cracked. The Founders crewman dropped his musket and fell away into the dark interior.

“Bravo, marine!” Banerji shouted. He peered down his gun barrel, though there was no need to aim—it was pointed straight down the
Industria
’s axial line, where, thank the Oracle, there was no stern gun waiting to pot them. “Fire!” Banerji shouted.

Shielding the slow match as he yanked it from its tub, Garcia eased it across the barrel’s vent field and jammed the flame down into the touchhole.

The touchhole flashed. The gun erupted with a heavy
boom
, hurling scarlet-and-yellow flame and bits of fiery wad from the muzzle. The carriage recoiled, flung backward like a mad rhino along the turret rails, passing under Banerji as he leaned over it.

The oncoming wind snatched the muzzle smoke and hurled it into their faces before carrying it away an instant later. Banerji saw the shot shatter one of the
Industria
’s big rear windowpanes upon entry—satisfyingly close to the round center pane—followed by a small but bright white flash, as the ball hurtled through the inside of the airship. Whether the flash had been a momentary hydrogen breach before the rubber stockings stoppered the hole, or a ricochet off a metal girder, Banerji did not know.

“Stopping the vent!” Banerji shouted as he plugged the smoking touchhole with his vent piece. He hoped that his crew did not hear in his voice the obvious twinge of disappointment that their shot had not popped the enemy. “Reload!” he howled.

HARD A’STARBOARD!

R
OMULUS
B
UCKLE HAD NOT SEEN
the course of the bow chaser’s raking shot through the
Industria
. But he did see her drop—not much, ten feet perhaps—the telltale sign of a sudden loss of hydrogen pressure.

“Heel! Hard a’starboard!” Buckle shouted.

“Hard a’starboard!” De Quincey shouted back, heaving the helm wheel to the right, the deck instantly threatening to roll as the airship’s port-side maneuvering propellers turned and wound up. Windermere was busy on the elevator wheel, for it was difficult to keep the bubble level in a rapid rotation at high speed.

The looming backside of the
Industria
swung to the left as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
heeled sharply to the right, turning at a good rate. De Quincey would bring the Crankshaft twelve-pounders to bear on the
Industria
’s stern to deliver a broadside rake with the bigger guns. Buckle caught a nose full of blackbang smoke as it flowed in over the gunwales. It stung his eyes and nose, and exhilarated him. The nasty stink of battle, of cannons pouring loose their red-hot iron and flaming wad, both braced and beckoned him.

Buckle saw the
Industria
’s steam exhausts pillow violently and her propellers flash at a faster rotation as more power was
applied—the first sign of an evasive maneuver from her captain. He had not disengaged, had not broken away instantly once raked. It was sloppy work. Fatally sloppy work.

Snapping a toggle on his chattertube hood, Buckle spoke directly to the gunnery gondola. “Mister Considine, once we have them on the beam, you may fire at your discretion.”

“Aye, Captain!” Tyler Considine’s booming shipyard foreman’s voice quickly bounced back up the tube. “We’ll have at them, sir!”

“Be ready to depress to follow her drop, if her captain is worth any salt at all!” Buckle added.

“Aye!” Considine replied.

“Altitude thirteen hundred,” Sabrina said.

“Ready ahead all flank,” Buckle said calmly.

“Ready ahead all flank, aye,” Valkyrie repeated.

Buckle stepped to the port gunwale, sticking his head outside as he kept the stern of the
Industria
in full view.

“Captain!” Sabrina shouted. “Snipers, off the beam!”

“Occupational hazard, Lieutenant,” Buckle shouted back. The massive stern of the Russian war zeppelin was on his right, her guns still blazing. He eyed the
Industria
: with her emergency steam power applied and the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
slowing as she turned, she was increasing the distance them, but not enough to matter to the guns. One hundred to 150 feet was still point-blank range to a twelve-pounder, more or less.

The
Industria
began to ascend, her scuppers pouring great cascades of ballast water, waterfalls sparkling in the late-afternoon sun, as the great zeppelin began to lunge for altitude, to escape on the rise.

But it was too late.

Buckle understood the
Industria
’s dilemma; although her rubber stockings had withstood the four-pounder’s raking shot, the airship was still in dire condition. Surely there were hydrogen leaks—even if small ones—and the captain had to assume that he now had volatile pockets of gas pooling under his roof in amounts larger than his venting system could immediately disperse. Dumping ballast was the safest tactic, but it was also the slowest.

De Quincey and Windermere slowed their manhandling of the rudder and elevator wheels, and the maneuvering propellers brought the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
nicely steady as she ascended level with the fleeing
Industria
’s stern.

“We are abeam!” Buckle shouted, the freezing wind on his cheeks, barely aware of the little flashes of the Founders sniper muskets on the
Industria
’s roof.

The sound of the two twelve-pound cannons firing in unison from the gunnery gondola 250 feet aft of Buckle erupted with a low, muffled, heartwarming
ba-boom
. Two streams of glittering yellow-white phosphorus ripped between the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
and her target. Two holes appeared in the stern of the
Industria
: one shattering the port side of her stern window, the other punching a small black hole in the envelope beside.

Buckle winced. It was difficult to witness that kind of a hit, even inflicted upon an enemy. In his mind’s eye, he saw the two cast-iron balls hurtle through the guts of the zeppelin, cutting gasbags wide open, shattering the ligatures of the rubber-stocking mechanisms, tearing away rigging, shearing high-tension wires into slashing whips that could easily cut a man or woman in half, and such things were nowhere near the worst of it. Any frame girders or supports in the path of the cannonballs would be smashed apart, taking elements of the
envelope with them, the jagged edges of the shorn metal plunging into the gasbags. The cannonballs would continue, roughly parallel to the Axial corridor, sending up huge sprays of sparks wherever they might hit metal, shrugging off waves of phosphorus as they passed through the massive caverns within the gasbags they punctured. For humans they brought nothing but agony, either in the splintering shrapnel of pulverized wood and iron that shredded limbs, faces, and spines or, for those physically unscathed, the terrifying realization of the incineration awaiting them in the inescapable pop.

And within a second the pop came.

Buckle raised his arm to shield his eyes. Two huge explosions racked the
Industria
, the force of the ignited hydrogen and air funneled outward by her compartment blast shields, belching surging eruptions of bright-yellow fire out into the sky. The heat hurt Buckle’s face, so close was his zeppelin to the conflagration.

The
Industria
’s amidships gunnery gondola, sundered by a blast immediately overhead, broke away from her pins and dropped loose of the airship frame—she hung for a terrible moment, her brass-and-copper armor gleaming in a hammock of its own rigging and cables. The ropes and wires snapped, and the gondola dropped silently away, flashing in the muted sunlight as it spun into the void.

The
Industria
lurched, heeling oddly to port, smoke spewing from the burning edges of her gaping envelope holes. She began to drop away, falling into a slow, uncontrolled spiral.

Buckle observed the plunge of the
Industria
coldly, with a detached blend of horror and satisfaction. A cheer rose on the bridge, joined by a howl from Kellie. Buckle did not join in; he ducked inside, secretly angry with the instant of self-congratulation, of inaction.