Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3) (27 page)

“Hatch sealed,” Cicero announced, already on his way back to the bow.

Buckle heard a loud bump of metal on metal from the stern and the pod slid forward, buoyant, loose, free, into the ocean.

“We have disengaged,” Valeria said.

Buckle clutched the seats beside him; he felt weightless, dizzy, as the pod ascended and spun around.

“Engaging aether engines,” Valeria said as Cicero slipped into the seat beside her. The pod interior hummed to life with a quiet, purring vibration. Electricity. Valeria’s instrument panel tubes lit up with the soft glow of the luminiferous aether. “Hang on.”

The deck tilted as Valeria accelerated and banked hard to starboard. Buckle scrambled to a starboard porthole and peered down. There, looking up through one of the oblong window ports in the docking bay, her face pale as a ghost behind the glass, was Sabrina. She pressed her hand against the inside of the window and disappeared, turning away to meet her fate.

“Sabrina!” Buckle shouted, clutching the back of the seat. The escape pod veered again, descending down and away from the Atlantean dome, leaving behind its towering mountain of dark, dead glass. The electric boat would have amazed Buckle had he not been shocked numb. It was as if his heart had been ripped from his body for a second time. He had lost another sister to the Founders.

And his soul was unsure if it could stand it.

XLVI

SHUBA

Her hand pressed against the cold glass, the clang of the docking bay clamp disengaging still ringing in her ears, Sabrina stared up through the rippling surface of the sea window. The Atlantean escape pod, gold and white and beautiful, rose away. She was glad they had escaped. But it hurt when she glimpsed Buckle looking down at her, his face terribly stricken, and she felt guilty at having caused him so much pain.

Sabrina did not regret acting without thinking, acting in Buckle’s defense, but she hated the idea of dying before exacting her revenge, the old revenge which had lived with her for so many years. It would be an itch she could never scratch. It would itch in her dead bones for eternity.

She turned to face the passageway, balancing the weight of her saber in her hand. It would have been good to have her knife in her free hand but that had been left behind in the Vicar’s skull. So, take as much blood as one can now, for now is all that is left.

She lowered her head, listening to the breathing from the wall of enemies inching towards her in the dark, closing panther-like, their black and navy blue Founders uniforms lit up by sputtering bursts of the aether cascading from the tubes overhead, the crackling illumination shimmering across their forest of poised blades.

She raised her head and saw them lift their boots as they advanced, stepping over the lifeless body of Ensign Wellington Bratt.

Sabrina raised her sword. Welly had fought and died well. His charge and her pistol blast had put the enemy on their heels, if only for a moment, but long enough for her to throw the emergency release switches for the escape pod. It surprised her how calm she was, how at ease she was. She did have great affection for Welly but she hadn’t the time to miss him—and she would be seeing him again very soon, for wherever he was she was sure to follow. She would, however, inflict as much damage as possible before the deal was sealed. She took a deep breath and smelled seawater and ambergris.

Sabrina had born a Founder and now she would die under Founders blows. There was some vein of irony in there if she had cared to mine it.

The enemy loomed closer now, not wary but rather enjoying the pause before the kill, safe in their numbers and the glacis of sword and pike blades in front of them.

“The First Consul’s escape pod is away, sir!” one of the Founders reported.

“They won’t get far,” an officer’s voice barked. “Senior Sergeants! End it!”

Two sailors, more shadows than light, leapt at Sabrina, both swinging cutlasses. She deflected their blows in sprays of sparks and sharp rings of metal. The sailors weren’t attacking in perfect tandem and their alternate swipes gave her a chance to address each blade in turn. These were regular sailors, not steampipers, and the quality of their swordsmanship proved it.

It was time to kill somebody. Sabrina ducked the cutlass swipe from the figure on her left, the bulk of his shape silhouetted against the sea window, hearing the whip of his blade passing over her head.

Bringing her blade up and across, Sabrina slashed the man’s neck. Hot blood sprayed her left cheek on the thin skin just under the eye. She heard the man gurgle, heard the thump of his body against the window glass. “That’s for Wellington Bratt, you pigs!” she said.

The second attacker, a short, husky woman, lunged at Sabrina’s now exposed right side. The spilling flash of a luminiferous aether tube lit up her cutlass as she raised it above her head and brought it down in a diagonal chop. Sabrina parried the blade and with a snap of her wrist sliced the woman’s bicep. The woman gasped, her cutlass hitting the deck with a thump, and fell away.

Sabrina backed up. She felt the bristling heat of the mob, their hands gripping their swords so tightly the atmosphere hummed, now hedging toward her as the overhead aether tubes kicked out more bursts of jittering white sparks.

“The fools! Kill her!” the officer howled. “Just finish it!”

“What is this?” a new voice boomed, approaching from the rear of the Founders group. It was an odd voice, male, young, with a strange, throaty vibration. “Where is the First Consul?”

The group in front of Sabrina halted, quivering, their eyes locked on her.

“We have cornered the last defender, Shuba—but the First Consul’s pod has escaped.”

Sabrina’s gut tightened up. She knew who Shuba was—one of the mysterious Founders Martians, a young male of the elite whom she had seen only a few times as a child.

“Escaped?” Shuba roared. “Fools! You shall be called before Parliament and Fawkes himself to answer for this failure, Commander.”

“As you will, Shuba,” the officer replied, his tone fearful, defeated.

“What is this?” Shuba asked. “Step aside.”

The wall of Founders sailors parted for Shuba as he strode through them, stopping to regard Sabrina from ten feet away. In the dying shudders of the aether light Sabrina could see him peering at her, tall and slender and wearing a long black cloak with red lining, his white face displaying a darting pattern of black stripes. Shuba was no half-breed like Max. His eyes, like a shark’s eyes, glowing inside a large pair of goggles, faint, depthless violet-black in the dark, struck an unsettlingly primitive cord in her human soul, as if she remembered those eyes peering down at her in her cradle.

Sabrina considered attacking the Martian but he didn’t come within her measure—and there were many Founders blades between them.

“The scarlet,” Shuba announced. “This one is the scarlet; a Fawkes. The one the Vicar spoke of. Isambard’s niece. Odessa’s long lost sister. Do I need remind you that it is an offense punishable by death to kill a scarlet, Commander?”

“My apologies,” the officer replied quickly. “We had no idea who she was, Master Shuba. I swear it.”

“Redeem yourselves by capturing her alive,” Shuba snarled. “Each and every scarlet is of interest to Isambard Fawkes!” He whirled on his heel and vanished into the passageway.

“Yes, sir,” the commander replied. “It shall be done.”

Now Shuba had given an order, an order which would save Sabrina’s life, if only long enough to be interrogated and torn to pieces as a traitor by her uncle, Isambard Fawkes. Sabrina gripped her sword tighter. She would die here, simply, cleanly. She would force the Founders to kill her. It would be easy for one of them to inflict a mortal blow while fighting for their life in the dark.

Even in death she could defy Isambard Fawkes.

Sabrina lunged to the attack, crashing into a body and driving her sword thrust into flesh as the skewered man cried out.

Hands clawed at Sabrina from every angle, strong hands dragging her down.

“Take it easy!” the Commander screamed. “If any one of you as much as scratches her I’ll kill you myself, I will! Don’t bleed her! Don’t bleed her!”

Sabrina elbowed and punched as the shouting, grasping sailors compressed around her, preventing the swing of her blade. Fists struck from the shadows. Curses filled the air, flung at her in bursts of hot breath laden with the stink of bad teeth and stale grog. They had her arms. Her wrist was twisted terribly and her sword wrenched away. A hand clamped down on her face. She bit a finger, feeling the skin break between her teeth, the slick roll of a knuckle, the gush of hot blood on her tongue. A man howled and yanked the hand back, nearly breaking her jaw as he tore free of her gnashing.

“Put her down!” a deep voice hissed.

A big, meaty fist, gloved in leather, catapulted out of the shadows and slammed into the side of Sabrina’s head.

Sparks exploded inside her eyes. The world fractured, flipped sideways.

The roar of the sea came to Sabrina, implacable and endless and ancient as the echo inside the nautilus, the sound not of waves but of unimaginable mass, of the immense pull of its gravity, of the spin of the earth and the pull of the tides. She fell into the sea and descended, slowly, gently, along the rippling green towers of a seaweed forest to the cold dark bottom where thousands of black mussels opened and nipped her skin and where she, ignoring the pinches, settled on the stony bottom to curl up with an octopus.

XLVII

ROCKETS IN THE MIST

Romulus Buckle sat in the last seat, the one closest to the hatch, listening to the weird sputter of the Atlantean escape pod’s dying luminiferous aether engines. For one of the few times in his life he could remember, he was uncertain as to where he was. They had been traveling for hours, traveling for hours in a silence housing the weird hum of the aether engines, the hiss of the air fans, and the stream of the sea against the hull.

Valeria and Cicero sat with their backs to Buckle, occasionally clicking switches or peering into scopes, working the cockpit instruments under the wide sea window which was black with night.

Elizabeth was gone. Sabrina was gone. Welly was gone. Buckle had nothing to do. He was a mere passenger. He did not have the role of captain to save him with action, to force him to rise above his personal tragedies and appear strong for his crew. He had nothing to do to keep himself busy except plan rescues, plan to recover his shipmates through audacity, suicidal risk-taking and brute force.

Elizabeth was most certainly still alive—he had seen her. But why had the Founders brought Elizabeth to Atlantis with them, and how could she penetrate his dreams so vividly and lead him to her location inside the submersible? He thought he could still feel Elizabeth’s presence, a trace of it, but that sensation was quickly ebbing away, dissolving in the unseen distance outside of him.

Sabrina might be dead but he was hoping that she wasn’t. To him, she’d simply vanished into the Founders shadow world like Elizabeth. Her scarlet hair would save her life, he believed, if only for a little while. Of Welly’s fate, the poor young fellow, Buckle had no idea.

Buckle rejected desperation, despair, motionlessness. He could not allow it. Such things were luxuries a captain could not afford, even when he was in limbo under the sea. He turned his mind to the next steps. When he reached the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
what was he to do? What would be his immediate course of action? His first mission would be to return the Keeper of the Aether to the Atlanteans, to escort him to the mysterious Insulae Five the doomed Horatus had mentioned. The Atlanteans apparently oversaw a sprawling sea empire much bigger and deeper than Buckle and his eastern contemporaries had ever estimated them capable of. But the Atlanteans had been overrun by the Founders, at least at the Aventine dome, while also embroiled in a civil war of their own. Buckle wasn’t sure of what use they might be to the Grand Alliance now.

After that, it would be necessary to sail the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
back to Crankshaft territory and join the fleet. The Alliance would need every gun it could get. But if Buckle truly did believe Lady Andromeda’s prophecy, that Elizabeth was the key to winning the war, should not every other concern be secondary to Elizabeth’s recovery?

Including Sabrina and Welly?

Penny Dreadful, the little girl machine, slid into the seat next to Buckle and looked up at him with her inhuman gold eyes as she clasped her cold metal fingers around his. Buckle heard something odd, a mechanical wheezing, and he realized the sound was coming from Penny. Buckle felt a new pang of worry. The gunshot delivered by the Vicar must have damaged her internal system; now the ancient, compromised machinery sounded like it was struggling, pushing too hard, overtaxed. And in such a condition the decrepit living machine might go haywire—as had all of her brothers and sisters before her—and become dangerous.

It was in his concern for Penny Dreadful that Buckle found himself again. He’d lost important people in his life, yes, but many more needed his protection. He still had a robot-child to worry about, a crew to worry about, a clan to worry about, a world to worry about. And they all needed him, at least, they all needed what little bit he could do to defend them.

Buckle decided he’d ask Ivan, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s chief engineer and inventor, to look at Penny once they returned to the airship. He gathered himself. He must find his words again.

“I wish I could weep,” Penny whispered. “I am so very sad.”

Buckle patted Penny’s iron shoulder as he would to comfort to a real child, even though she was much older than he was.

“Can’t we save them?” Penny asked. “All the others, my brothers and sisters, I have never been able to save anyone.”

“They must fight their own battles for now,” Buckle said. “We must return to the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
before we can do anything for them.”

“Aye, Captain,” Penny said bravely. She placed her hands in her lap and sighed, again with that low, awful wheezing.

The little automaton was all that he had left of his Atlantis expedition team, Buckle realized.

“We are about to surface at your given coordinates, Captain Buckle,” Valeria announced. “We’ve used the last of our aether fuel so I hope your airship is on the mark.”

Feeling the escape pod ascend, Buckle stood up, stiff from hours of inaction, and steadied himself by taking hold of an overhead pipe. “She’ll be here,” he said. “She shall be here. Well done, pilot.” Assuming that the Founders had laid siege to all of the Atlantean domes and their associated island ports, Valeria and Cicero had agreed to make a run for the rendezvous with the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. The airship, with Valkyrie Smelt and Ivan Gorky in command, would be waiting in the sea mists to pick them up. The plan had been for the airship to be on station one mile due north of Santa Cruz and to move another mile due north if Founders activity conspired to make the first position unsustainable. With Vera Cruz captured, Buckle was certain that his cautious bridge officers would have relocated to the more distant position.

Of course, events had conspired to prevent Buckle from making the rendezvous. The Atlantean escape pod was designed as a short-range emergency lifeboat, its limited aether fuel further taxed by running deep. But they had made it through a combination of luck and Valeria’s skill, slipping through the Founders blockade net.

The escape pod surfaced into uneven patches of sea mist, the moonlit, blue-gray clouds visible now and again through gaps in the fog banks. The sensation of the ocean changed, from the smooth flow of the underwater currents to the rolling push and pull of the surface waves.

“Shutting down propulsion,” Valeria said as she depressed a brass lever. The stuttering propellers wound down into silence. “Drop sea anchor.”

Cicero manipulated levers at his station. “Dropping sea anchor.”

“Let us go see if your air machine is here, shall we?” Valeria said as she pulled two heavy oilskin coats out of a cubby, tossing one to Buckle before pulling hers on. She wound the crank of an overhead hatch. “Keeper, bring the flare gun.”

Donning another oilskin coat—one which did not fit him around the middle—Cicero opened a compartment door and tucked a flare gun into his toga, along with a leather case containing five cartridges. “I would like to say with all sincerity, Captain,” Cicero offered, “that I understand what sacrifices were made this day for my protection. I shall to see it that the memory of your officers is both exalted and immortalized.”

“I am sure you shall build them fine statues,” Buckle replied sourly.

“Please, Captain,” Cicero responded, with considerably more softness than Buckle had witnessed in him before. “It is very little but it is all that I can do for a debt I can never repay.”

Buckle nodded.

“Hole in the boat!” Valeria announced, lifting the ceiling hatch. A small flood of cold seawater splashed down on the deck grating.

A rush of fresh sea air hit Buckle in the face. The slap of it was good for him. It helped clear his mind, settle his emotions. He climbed the ladder after Valeria and found himself standing on the small, open bridge, exposed to the weather and the spray, and he much preferred it to being inside the submarine. His face felt damp and cool but not uncomfortably so. It was an unnaturally warm mist.

Valeria snapped out a night glass and peered into it. “No sign of an air machine. Mind you, it could be right on top of us and we couldn’t see it. Damned fog.”

Buckle placed his hands on the rail and stared into the mountainous ebbs and flows of the moonlit fog. Icebergs floated by, white and blue giants lurking in the gray distance. Seagulls squawked from the icebergs, grounded by the near-constant mists and probably starving. The fog deadened sound but brought its own silent hum with it. Again Buckle was struck by the strange weight of the mist, moisture-laden and far too temperate for the icy wind which pushed it.

“By Salacia’s seaweed crown, I hate the surface!” Cicero groaned, struggling to clear the hatch as the roll of the vessel cast him about. Buckle pulled him up by the hood of his coat.

“Ready flare,” Valeria ordered, snapping her night glass shut and jamming it into her coat pocket. “Completely useless in this soup,” she muttered.

“Aye,” Buckle agreed. The fog bank, constantly shifting from translucent sheets to dense, opaque curtains, made telescopes useless, even misleading. The naked eye, far more sensitive than the glass, was a better tool under the circumstances.

“What are we going to do if this zeppelin can’t find us?” Cicero asked.

“A lot of paddling and dining on raw seagull, most likely,” Valeria answered.

“They’ll find us,” Buckle stated flatly. He simply chose to believe it. He’d had enough bad luck for one day. At some point Lady Fortune had to balance her scales.

“Very well, Captain,” Valeria said with a smile.

Cicero clicked a cartridge into the firing chamber of the flare pistol. “Ready here.”

“Loose the flare when ready,” Valeria said.

“I suggest you aim north, more or less,” Buckle offered.

“I have no idea what direction north might be from this tilting bucket,” Cicero grumbled.

Pulling a compass from her pocket, Valeria pointed towards the forward port quarter. “North, Keeper.”

“Thank you,” Cicero replied. He aimed the flare gun upward and fired. The glowing cartridge vaulted high into the mists before it popped, bursting into a bright red haze that arced away slowly on its parachute, burning smaller but brighter as the magnesium burned down to its wire.

Buckle scanned the wreathing, flare-lit mists. He couldn’t see a damned thing. There was a very good chance the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, even if it was only a few hundred yards away with a full complement of lookouts on station, would never see their flares.

A flash of green, soft but casting a wide, undulating glow, rose and fell in the fog to the northwest. It didn’t appear close but it had to be close to be seen at all.

“There we go,” Buckle said, his relief immense, his sense of what the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
would be like without Sabrina and Welly also brutally sharp and bitter.

“Bravo, Captain,” Valeria said with a small smile. “I’m certainly glad we won’t be sharing any uncooked seagull giblets in the near future. Fire another flare, Keeper.”

“As you wish, Valeria,” Cicero answered. He flipped a smoking cartridge out of the pistol chamber and replaced it with a new one.

“Do we board by a lowering of ropes, Captain?” Valeria asked.

“Yes,” Buckle replied. He suddenly felt very tired.

“You take the Keeper up with you first,” Valeria said, watching Cicero fire the second flare. “I shall scuttle the pod and come up after you.”

“We can probably salvage your vessel,” Buckle offered.

“No,” Valeria replied. “This pod carries a luminiferous aether generator; its secrets must be obliterated and go to the bottom with it.”

“As you wish,” Buckle said.

“I wanted to tell you, Captain,” Valeria said. She was a skinny, hard-faced woman with a high, aquiline nose. “What your officers did, they saved us all, just as much as Horatus and the Praetorians. You should be proud of them.”

“I am,” Buckle replied, but he could bring himself to say no more.

A huge elliptical shadow, growing darker and darker in the fog overhead, announced the arrival of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. Buckle caught his breath as her great mass descended into view forty feet above, her copper and bronze gondola pods laced with spars and ratlines and her port windows glowing faintly of yellow buglights and green boil. With her propellers still and engines cut she came to him slowly, like a ghost ship, silent except for the wooden creaks of her decking and the light brush of the breeze across her skin.

“Captain below!” a lookout shouted. It sounded like Lansa Laslo, one of the riggers.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
suddenly took on life. Black forms sprang out into the rigging, buglights in their hands; the big maneuvering propellers whirred, steadying her against the drift of the ocean breeze. The massive airship slowed to a stop with her gunnery gondola suspended a mere fifteen feet above Buckle’s head. The gondola’s loading bay doors swung open and a long rope ladder rolled out, unfolding neatly as it flopped its way down to the bridge of the escape pod.

Buckle could feel her, his beloved airship, her titanic mass displacing the moonlit fog in the sky, the sweet sea air buried under the stink of her coal fires and damp canvas.