Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (52 page)

“She has been scuttled! Bombs!” Buckle heard Valkyrie shout with a raspy hitch in her voice, back toward amidships. “Disengage and boom off! We are shackled to a dead man! Cut the lines! Just cut the lines!”

The boarders leapt back across the gap to the flank ratlines and the wide, broad gray back of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, where Wellington and the boatswain, Aubrey, raced back and forth, chopping grappling lines with axes, and the second-wave crew was hastily drawing boom poles from their fastenings along the spine boards.

Buckle staggered over bodies, fallen weapons, loose helmets, and pools of blood. His coughing subsided and his eyes grew accustomed to the silver incandescence of the moonlight spilling through the clouds—an illumination much brighter than the inside of the
Bellerophon
.

“Captain!” Valkyrie shouted. “Time to go!”

Buckle turned to see Valkyrie wave him toward the port side of the
Bellerophon
. For a moment he thought that they were the last two aboard, but then he noticed boilerman Rodney Winship and the marine Cartwright, desperately yanking at the gurney wire, which had been strung across the gap between grappling-cannon posts on each airship. There was a body in the gurney, a wounded crewman.

Buckle raced along the roof with Valkyrie at his side, both dodging debris and strewn rigging. All the grappling lines but one had been cut, the crew members on the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
poised, boom poles in their hands, waiting for the gurney to pass.

“Launch the gurney and boom off, damn your hides!” Buckle shouted, his singed lungs stabbing as he ran.

“It’s no use, Captain!” Winship yelled, stepping back from the gurney. “The lines are fouled!”

Buckle and Valkyrie arrived at the grappling-cannon post, Buckle tearing off his gloves as he tackled the Gordian knot of wires and rope at the base of the gurney. He felt the nudge of the booms pressing the
Bellerophon
to starboard, and heard the maneuvering propellers of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
whirl up, the nacelles traversing to drive the airship away from the
Bellerophon
.

“It be just a damned fogsucker, sir!” Cartwright said, furtively glancing at the boom poles, pressing the muzzle of his pistol to the gurney wire. “He is not worth the risk, I say! Let him burn!”

Buckle saw the face of the man poking out of the burlap wrapping and leather bindings that secured him to the gurney—it was the strawberry-bearded Founders officer he had skewered, apparently still alive.

Buckle shoved Cartwright’s pistol aside. “Go!” he shouted at Winship and Cartwright.

Cartwright spun and sprinted down the envelope slope, leaping across to the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
.

Winship hesitated. “He is near dead, sir! He is not worth the effort, sir!”

“Abandon ship, Mister Winship,” Buckle snapped as he battled the dismaying tangle of wire and rope. “That is an order!”

Winship dashed away.

Buckle grunted, his eyes stinging, concentrating on pulling loose the contortions of the knot, denying himself his desperate
need to look at his watch. Valkyrie stood across from him, looking over the gurney, quickly tying something up.

If Buckle had thought about it—if he had truly
thought
about it—he would have left the Founders man to die. But he was operating on instinct now, and his instinct would not allow him to abandon a wounded airman to a terrible fate.

That and the damned Gentleman’s Rules.

The gurney came loose. Buckle pulled on the baying line, hand over hand, and the gurney lurched out into the gap between the two sky vessels as the crewmen on the other side hauled it across. “Abandon ship, Princess—that is an order!”

“Very well, Captain.” Valkyrie nodded and leapt down the slope, jumping across to the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
as the crew, their bodies dark silhouettes against her mountainous spine, pulled her aboard and shouted, urging their captain on. But if the
Bellerophon
popped now, they were just as dead as he.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
and the
Bellerophon
separated with a shuddering rumble, pulling apart as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s propellers wound up to screeching roars and she backed off the doomed
Bellerophon
with a thunder of ripping rigging and splintering tack. Buckle saw a crack of night sky open between the towering airships. Bodies—at least a dozen—and debris that had tumbled into the crevasse now fell through the widening gap, their black forms plummeting down to the void of the earth beneath, the ground dotted with orange fires.

As the massive zeppelins eased apart, the grappling cannon bent on its post, its line the only attachment left between the two vessels. Buckle grabbed the rope just as it snapped and held on, keeping the gurney suspended, though the weight of it began to drag him down the side. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
crewmen hauled the gurney in, and Buckle released the rope as they secured it.

Buckle scrambled back up to the
Bellerophon
’s spine, avoiding her envelope breaches and hatchways, which were now expelled scalding columns of smoke and steam.

A chorus of encouraging howls came from the opposite roof. Buckle saw Valkyrie and Ivan hurrying along the deck, swinging themselves down the ratlines to extend their hands. The chasm between the two airships was opening up far faster than Buckle had anticipated, which was good for the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, but bad for him.

Buckle sprinted down the port-side curve of the
Bellerophon
’s upper flank, watching the rift between the two envelopes grow ever wider as he ran. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was descending away, her roof now about ten feet lower than that of the drifting
Bellerophon
, and that gave him a better chance. Buckle tried to calculate the distance he had to fly as he dashed toward the maw of dark air between the two airships and then just gave up on the math—whatever the distance was, he had to make it.

Then the
Bellerophon
blew up.

The zeppelin heaved upward in a violent paroxysm. Buckle stumbled and kept going, headlong, as stupendous geysers of burning hydrogen erupted through the roof.

Buckle landed his boot on the edge of the envelope and launched, hurling his body out into the chasm that separated him from the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. He saw the faces of Valkyrie, Ivan, and his crew staring at him, cringing at the furnace-hot explosions, their gleaming red eyes distraught.

He was witnessing them witness his own death.

Buckle sailed across the sky, thirteen hundred feet above the dark earth—and then he began to drop away, short, out of
her reach, and the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
rushed up and away from his outstretched fingers.

The dying blast of the
Bellerophon
, a continental concussion of fire, slammed Buckle in the back.

WHAT THE NAVIGATOR SAW

W
HEN
S
ABRINA
S
ERAFIM WAS FURIOUS
, she did not like to show it. But she knew that Romulus Buckle could read it in her eyes. So to hell with it, she grumbled in her mind. He should know how angry she was with him, her captain who, walking beside her with his top hat cocked on his head and the back of his leather coat burned and black, had once again barely escaped a violent death. It was all in a day’s work for him, apparently forgotten, with his boots now on Spartak ground, the dark night pulsing with the fires of Muscovy in the distance.

After the battle, the
Czarina
had signaled a desire to parley, so Buckle, the back of his coat still smoldering as he stood on the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s bridge, had followed the Spartak zeppelin to a mooring yard just south of the city. Sabrina had joined the negotiating party along with Valkyrie, Corporal Nyland, and two more red-jacketed marines. Ambassador Washington, having emerged from his cabin in a foul and standoffish mood, had joined them, demanding that he do all the talking with the Russians.

Washington led the group now, his strides forceful, his mist-puffs of breath and white lambskin greatcoat soaked with the yellow illumination of the lanterns swinging in the hands of the marines. They were walking down a path cut through a
scattered forest grove, the tall arrowhead shapes of the fir and pine trees black against a cluster of burning buildings on their left. Steaming at three thousand feet under the moonlit clouds, the gondola lights of the Imperial war zeppelin
Pneumatic Tirpitz
twinkled, having been signaled by Valkyrie to go on patrol as soon as she arrived.

Sabrina’s ears still rang with the tumultuous roar of the dying
Bellerophon
; the muffled quiet of the countryside, the soft crunch of boots in the snow, made her eardrums buzz harder. She glanced back: behind them the dark mass of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
loomed, her gondolas a mere three feet off the ground, her skinners and riggers fast at the repairs, shouting back and forth across the great whale expanse of her envelope, which was scorched black along nearly the entire length of her starboard side. The skin-repair teams worked in small bubbles of yellow buglight mixed with the witchy orange gleam of the night lanterns.

Sabrina turned forward. The Russians were approaching, ten of them, their silhouettes dark against the silver-white moonlit snow, their forms made burly by greatcoats of animal skins and leather, their round, stern faces ruddy in the light of the torches they carried. They were advancing fast; two on the left were riding big, shaggy horses, with two wolfhounds loping at their gaskins. Two hundred yards behind the Russians, the
Czarina
hovered low, her fires extinguished, but her envelope holes still leaking copious amounts of smoke that lumbered in slow drifts to the northeast.

Beyond the
Czarina
, about two and half miles distant, the stronghold of Muscovy burned, her buildings and ramparts swamped in spectacular ribbons of fire. In the waves of light cast by the conflagration, Sabrina could just make out a road,
a white strip leading northward into the wilderness; all along its length moved shadows, an army of overloaded wagons and straining horses, a population abandoning their fallen city, whose funeral pyre cast light but no warmth on their backs.

Sabrina shivered. The bitter cold did not bother her—it rarely did—but she felt an old discomfiture; with a revulsive sting she recalled the fashion in which Leopold Goethe had identified her in front of all the others. She was a Fawkes, yes, and she did remember Goethe, as a boy—his words must have inflicted immeasurable harm upon her life among the Crankshafts. No one had said anything to her about it, not even Buckle, but she knew it would eat away at them once they had time to think about it. The magnifying glass of suspicion would swing its jaded eye in her direction once again.

And Buckle would defend her from all comers, as he always defended her.

Sabrina was not one to idolize anyone, especially a man. But to her Romulus Buckle had become larger than life, once again cheating the swing of the grim reaper’s scythe as it grazed his heels, a tale breathlessly related by midshipmen Charles Mariner and Alison Lawrence upon returning to the bridge after the destruction of the
Bellerophon
. Captain Buckle, risking his life to save an enemy wounded by his own hand and disembarking last—as any good captain must—had taken a doomed leap between the zeppelins as the
Bellerophon
incinerated in a mountainous blast at his heels. And it was the force of this blast, a concussion that near knocked down everyone on the roof of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, that hurled Buckle the extra distance he needed. He landed in the ratlines, the back of his leather jacket completely afire, and held on with one hand until the crew hauled him up and doused the flames.

Sabrina had seen the burning
Bellerophon
fall away, a giant body of fire folding in upon itself, transforming into a skeleton raft of flames as it plummeted toward the earth. Thirteen hundred feet down, it crashed into the trees of the snowbound gray-white mountains, where what was left looked more like an insignificant forest fire than what had once been a magnificent flying machine.

At that moment, Sabrina had once again been certain that her captain was dead. She had done what the situation had demanded; once the news of the scuttling had boomed down the chattertube, she had ordered the grappling lines cut and the maneuvering propellers traversed to starboard, so she could disengage from the
Bellerophon
at best possible speed.

When the report came that Buckle was not yet aboard, Sabrina had hesitated, waiting one more moment, risking the entire ship for its captain. Just after she had commanded that the propellers be thrown into maximum rotation, the bombs had gone off, and she immediately ordered the firing of the starboard broadside into the
Bellerophon
, hoping to further hurl the zeppelins apart through blast and nonstabilized recoil.