Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (50 page)

GRAPPLING HOOKS

T
HE SIX GRAPPLING CANNONS FIRED
, with shallow hippopotamus-belly-flop
whumps,
the charges on the barrels sending the fifteen-pound grappling hooks in high arcs, their ropes trailing over the top of the
Bellerophon
.

Buckle paced along the spine board. “Retract! Bring us in!”

The grappling cannon operators yanked back the retracting levers at the base of each gun, which sent up screaming blasts of steam as the pneumatic winches below began recovering the lines. The grapnels caught hold of the
Bellerophon
, their sharp claws hooking into canvas and rigging, lines snapping taut with the tension of the winches.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
rocked to port with a lumbering groan as her steam-driven machines drew the great masses of the two zeppelins together in a slow, sideways glide. The gap was quickly down to twenty feet, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
being cinched down from her higher position, coming more level with the back of the
Bellerophon
.

Buckle lifted his sword into the air overhead. Bullets zipped past like bees. “Steady! Steady!” he shouted at his boarders—about forty in number, more than half the zeppelin’s complement—all bent at the knee, leaning forward, muskets and pistols poised. He eyed the Founders aircrew across from him,
similar in number, their independently discharged guns and pepper cannons quiet on the hasty reload—the Founders had wasted much of their shot at too great a distance. They crouched on the roof or hung on the ratlines, swords and pikes glittering in the sunset, a frozen tableau hung in a translucent void, holding their breath just before the two gigantic zeppelins collided.

“Fire pepper guns!” Buckle screamed. The two forward pepper cannons—small guns packed with canisters full of grape shot—erupted in an irregular volley. Knots of the Founders crew staggered, men and women screaming at terrible wounds, the dead, perhaps three or four, falling, gratefully silent.

“Fire weapons!” Buckle shouted. Forty Crankshaft muskets and pistols discharged as one, the line of muzzle flashes bright in the darkening evening. The ranks of the Founders staggered. The Crankshaft boarders laid down their firearms and rose, knives, axes, pikes, and swords gleaming in their hands.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
and the
Bellerophon
crashed together, their flanks meeting below where their envelopes were at their fattest, two mountains of canvas, ropes, and iron trundling into each other with a rumbling shake and a roar of bending metal. The airships bounced apart, perhaps five feet, and slammed into each other again, this time staying tight, pinned by the winches, creating a vertigo-inducing chasm between.

A low howl rose in Buckle’s throat, ending in the bellow of “Attack!” He charged, sprinting down the slope of the starboard zeppelin roof, and just as the canvas fell away, threw himself into the air with a great leap, sword raised, pistol pointed directly in front of him. He dropped, for the spine of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was a good fifteen feet higher than the back of the
Bellerophon
. In midair he fired his pistol into the face of a Founders crewman, a short, stubby fellow clinging to the ratlines, who was
waiting to impale him on some kind of pike. The Founders man plummeted away. Buckle landed on the sloped port side of the
Bellerophon
’s roof, bouncing on the canvas skin; he snatched at the ratlines, tossing aside his empty pistol.

Sword high, Buckle climbed as his crew flung themselves across the gap, their flying leaps silhouetted against the glowing clouds, swarming the
Bellerophon
in a din of screams and hurled orders, of clashing swords and pistol shots, their shouts near lost under the whistling wind and the moans of the airships grinding at their flanks.

Buckle snapped his head toward the bow just in time to catch sight of a Founders rigger swinging for him on a rope, bouncing along the skin like a demented spider with a long sword.

Buckle raised his second pistol, but a single shot rang out from behind. The Founders rigger bent over at the stomach, toppled off his line, and fell only a few feet, his lifeless body hanging upside down, his boot entangled in his line.

Buckle glanced back to see Sergeant Salgado perched on the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, musket smoking, offering him a wide grin. His grin disappeared. He jumped to his feet, desperately drawing his pistol. “Captain! Look out!” he screamed.

Buckle looked up. A Founders officer, dressed in black with silver piping on her collar and sleeves, was charging down at Buckle from above, leading with her saber, flanked by two
Bellerophon
crewmen—stokers, by the looks of their blackened faces and leather coveralls—both gripping smithy hammers.

Salgado’s pistol cracked. The whistling ball missed, leaving a tiny hole in the canvas between Buckle and the Founders officer.

Buckle fended off the officer’s sword thrust with his saber; he raised his pistol and fired it point-blank into the woman’s chest. The force of the ball slammed her backward, her cap spinning
away to reveal short-cropped orange hair streaked with gray—her body bounced off the envelope and catapulted limply down upon Buckle, rolling into his legs and slamming him face-first into the canvas, before tumbling off into the chasm below.

Buckle tried to arrest his fall, landing hard on the angled skin that stank of mold, the iron frame beneath delivering a bruising blow to his abdomen. He had no time to catch the breath that had just been slammed out of his lungs—the first Founders stoker was on him, swinging his hammer in a low arc, aiming to bat Buckle’s skull off his shoulders. Buckle was up, thrusting his saber to deflect the hammer blow, and as the man’s momentum carried him forward, Buckle smashed the side of his head with his pistol butt, probably cracking the skull, and the man somersaulted past, rolling away.

The second stoker was on Buckle an instant later. Buckle brought his saber up, but the man’s powerful swing slapped the sword out of his grasp, the blade plunging into the canvas and sticking there, out of his reach. The stoker laughed, swinging his hammer again. Buckle threw himself flat to avoid it, but the stoker kicked him in the jaw, and he rolled down the ratlines. Buckle looked up, half stunned, and saw the flash of a dagger in the stoker’s hand as he leapt upon him.

The stoker suddenly jerked still. A silver flash burst out of his chest, splattering Buckle with blood. The man’s eyes rolled up white. Valkyrie stepped out from behind him, planting her boot on his back to kick him off her blade, sending the body over the side. She leaned down and offered Buckle her gloved hand. “I heard you were notorious for falling off airships, Captain Buckle.”

“An odd time to find your humor, Princess,” Buckle said, not sure if he had any teeth left in his mouth or not.

THE
BELLEROPHON

V
ALKYRIE YANKED
B
UCKLE UP ON
his feet. He retrieved his saber and they clambered up to the crest of the spine, where the hand-to-hand battle was now in full swing. The numbers might have been close, but it seemed as though the half-pirate Crankshafts were already gaining the upper hand. Salgado and his marines remained perched on the higher roof of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, potting the Founders officers as fast as they could reload and aim again.

Buckle and Valkyrie waded into the fray, catching a group of Founders off guard as they held the foremost section of the bow. Buckle stepped over the facedown body of Regina Ford, a somber but competent member of his propulsion crew, her blood running in rivers that pooled in the depressions of the topside canvas. He closed ranks with hydroman Murray Collins and stocking man Sylvester Turpin, both hardy veterans and near surrounded on their edge of the roof.

Buckle glimpsed the flash of Valkyrie’s red-and-gold-laced blue cuff at his side as she deftly wielded her blade. She was fighting one stride behind him, covering his back, in the same fashion Max or Sabrina would have.

Hurdling a grappling line, Buckle cut down an enemy crewman—nearly chopping the poor fellow in half—before
he was rushed by a Founders officer in a well-tailored uniform with cuffs resplendent in silver lace; he was a strawberry-haired youth with blue eyes and a red-whiskered mustache, oiled to curl at the tips. The strawberry-haired officer handled his sword well—Buckle was hard-pressed to hold him—but he did not keep his adrenaline in check and swung too high and too hard, allowing Buckle to lunge under his guard and dispatch him by running the point of his sword deep into his innards. The Founders officer cried out and dropped, curling up in a ball as Buckle stepped over him.

The forward roof of the
Bellerophon
was a killing ground. The deck was awash in blood and fallen rigging, littered with bodies both motionless and crawling, while the zeppelineers still standing trampled them. Men and women screamed in agony as swords and axes bit into their bodies and broke them, followed by the vengeful, animal cries of the victors, howling up their courage.

With the bow section lost, the surviving Founders backed up, retreating slowly in good order toward amidships, exacting a toll with sword and pike on the Crankshafts who charged them.

Buckle heard a chorus of “Hurrah, musketeers!” on his left, from the roof of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. It was uttered by the second wave—the port-side gun crews and the remaining boilermen and stokers—led topside by Wellington Bratt and the boatswain Richard Aubrey, bringing nearly a dozen fresh Crankshaft muskets and cutlasses to the fight. Welly shouted “Ready ranks!” and his division lined up near amidships, directly opposite the clustered Founders defenders.

Shoving his way forward in the mass of Crankshaft boarders, Buckle waved his saber above his head and shouted. “Founders!
Lay down your arms and you shall be spared! Surrender!” Buckle’s response was a well-aimed pistol ball that whizzed just past his skull, the streak of its phosphorus mere inches from his eyes.

“Aim!” Welly screamed. The musketeers lifted their dozen rifles as one.

The Founders defenders cringed, perhaps fifteen of them still standing, still fighting, but now with one eye on the Crankshaft firing squad on the opposite roof: they compacted, which was the wrong response to the danger, but all their officers were down.

“Crankshafts!” Buckle yelled as loudly as he could. “Stand fast! Do not move forward! Stand fast!”

Buckle’s crewmen eased back, and a small gap appeared between the attackers and the Founders.

“Fire!” Welly yelled. The small line of muskets boomed in a burst of black smoke and snake-tongued orange flames. Phosphorescent trails streaked into the tightly bunched Founders—many crumpled, some motionless, others screaming as they gripped bloody legs and arms—shattering the glass bubble of the observer’s nacelle.

Buckle expected the Founders to break, to retreat, to drop down the nacelle hatchway in a panic, crashing down upon one another on the landing below. But they did not. They closed their ranks and stood their ground. Not one offered to surrender. Not one begged for mercy.

“Have at them!” Buckle bellowed, and the Crankshaft boarders around him surged forward, closing in, bloodthirsty after the casualties they had suffered, overwhelming the remaining handful of Founders even as they swung their weapons about them.

The last Founders crew member left standing, a small woman wearing the leather belts of a rigger, threw her sword, a spinning flash of silver, into the mass of advancing boarders before a pistol ball cut her down.

“Form up!” Buckle shouted, a furious animal pleasure working in his brain as he hurried aft to the nacelle, stepping over bodies, fallen weapons, and dark splashes of blood. “Secure the roof, Mister Bratt!” Buckle shouted across the gap. “Transfer the wounded and prisoners immediately!”

“Aye, Captain!” Welly responded; his gunners and stokers were already leaping across, fastening gurney clamps to one of the grapnel ropes to establish transport for the severely wounded. Buckle saw Meagan Churchill among them, for she was part of the number-two gun crew, and her right hand was dripping with blood, though whatever the nature of the wound, it was light enough for her to ignore it.

Ivan saluted Buckle as he strode past in the crowd. “Nice to see you still alive, brother,” he said with a grin.

“And you, brother,” Buckle said.

“The amidships hatch is locked down, Captain,” Darcy announced as he tugged powerfully at the observer’s nacelle hatch. “It is locked.”

“No matter,” Buckle replied. Even if the hatchways were thrown wide open, Buckle would not have used them. He would never give the defenders below the luxury of being able to predict the points where his attackers might penetrate. His boarders would cut their own entrances into the fabric roof and drop in via those, avoiding whatever traps the defenders had surely set underneath the hatchways.

“Each division, fore and aft of the nacelle! Cut two doors on the spine, here and there!” Buckle ordered with points of
his sword; hydroman Murray Collins, his face and pith helmet splattered with blood, tossed him a loaded pistol. Both Darcy and the engine officer, Elliot Yardbird, took up position with axes as their boarding groups collected around them.