Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3) (6 page)

X

THE LATIFUNDIUM

Romulus Buckle, his head locked inside a copper diving helmet with windows of green glass, stepped out of the
Dart
’s flooded airlock and dropped into the freezing squeeze of the ocean. It wasn’t much of a drop—five feet to the sandy bottom—and the uncomfortable heaviness of his suit was replaced by a pleasant sensation of buoyancy held in check by the bulk of his boots and weight belt. The oxygen tanks and helmet felt familiar, similar as they were to a zeppelineer’s high altitude and poison gas equipment, though they were bulkier and more rigid in their construction. He gripped two weapons: a long-handled underwater spear and a small crossbow harpoon with a firing mechanism which combined tension and compressed air.

The Atlantis Approaches were a dangerous place, Felix had said. The Guardians, nasty creatures, operated in loose platoons under the command of vile beasties called ‘gagools’. Kill the gagools first if you can, Felix had said. Kill the gagools first and your odds of survival increase exponentially. One can beg an Atlantean sentinel or herder for one’s life but not a gagool.

The tan-colored bottom reflected the morning light but it all felt melancholy, surely the effect of the greenish glass of his helmet windows deflecting much of the light. He was also still in the shadow of the
Dart
’s belly. Bending as low as he could to clear the keel, he trudged out into the weak, undulating light, half-stumbling in slow motion as he learned how to move his boots over the bottom swells. It was humid inside his helmet and the faceplate trickled with condensation. The sounds of his breathing and the ping of the oxygen valves were oppressive but when he straightened up and saw the glorious green-blue-white play and sparkle of light and water on the surface he felt better.

Buckle turned, slow and awkward, to join Sabrina, Welly, and Penny Dreadful, who were collecting under the guidance of Kishi. They looked like phantoms in a netherworld, faces ghoulish in the round green portals of their helmets, the interiors lit by tubes of bioluminescent boil. It was near impossible to tell who was inside each suit except for size. Penny Dreadful, wearing no gear of any kind, moved toward him, smoothly, half-gliding across the bottom, looking like it was at home. Its golden eyes had a buggish bulge to them, enlarged by translucent lenses which had dropped from the metal skull and sealed the sockets. The machine had transformed itself once it was in the water: a sheer metal webbing had unfolded from its hands and feet, turning them into flippers, and a shark-like dorsal fin now thrust up from a slot in its back.

It took five more minutes for the remainder of the
Dart
’s crew to descend from the airlock, with Marsh and Rachel carrying Gustey between them on a basket stretcher. The last man out was Captain Felix. Once his boots hit bottom, Felix was on the move, leaning forward as he drove his legs, his boots sending up punches of dislodged sand. He jabbed his gloved finger forward as he passed Buckle, his face looking compressed and angry inside his helmet.

Buckle swung around and hauled his boots across the sand, staying close to Felix and Kishi as they took the lead and humped toward the towering domes of Atlantis. Buckle could see all seven of the domes, one large one surrounded by six more of varying sizes, and they all pulsed with a mysterious white light.

Buckle tested the unfamiliar balance of the spear in his hand. Felix had warned them to keep moving at all times and not to get spread out, for on foot they were likely to encounter the Guardians. If there was no Atlantean sentinel present with the Guardians—and apparently there often wasn’t—there would be a sharp fight to make their way through. The group numbered ten souls—not counting Penny Dreadful— and they were all well armed.

Atlantis loomed closer slowly, very slowly. Buckle leaned into his stride, throwing one heavy boot ahead after the other, plodding through the resistance of the water. He stopped and glanced back at Sabrina, Welly, and Felix’s crew, a ragged line of shambling ogres, faces lost in glowing green orbs, blasting clouds of bubbles out of the tops of their skulls. Beyond the group, the wreck of the
Dart
fell away in the murk. From this distance she looked undamaged, sitting neatly on her keel on the sandy bottom. Forty yards beyond the
Dart
the great black maw of Neptune’s Rift loomed and Buckle could
feel
the gaping cold of its black seam. There was no trace of the Founder’s submarine. Swallowed up and gone.

A fate the
Dart
had escaped by forty yards.

But there were many more Founders boats. The underwater blockade continued in full force, the gargantuan black silhouettes of the Founders submersibles dark against the wavering columns of sunlight overhead, their propellers chopping the depths as they circled Atlantis in trails of black and gray bubbles.

If the Founders were aware of the loss of their boat they did not respond to it. If they had noticed Buckle and the divers it seemed they didn’t care.

Soon the open sandy bottom gave way to a high, waving seaweed forest, its mossy floor glowing with a beautiful green bioluminescence. Felix and Kishi led the group along a narrow trail through the seaweed, a path so overgrown the plants constantly threatened to tangle harpoons and lead-soled feet.

After two hundred yards of hard slogging, the seaweed forest vanished and Buckle peered through his faceplate to see the sea floor spread wide and flat and take on the regimented, sectional appearance of farmland. Endless rows of tall, evenly-spaced plants with dark green stalks bobbed stiffly in the currents. Massive oyster beds, shrimp farms and phalanxes of lobster traps unfolded as far as the eye could see, well tended by Atlantean divers wearing tan suits and assisted by odd, centipede-like alien creatures, spotty orange-blue in color, which seemed to be weeding out dead and unwanted plants. The group reached an undersea road, its interlocking flat stones jarring to Buckle in their mathematical precision after he’d sweated his way through so much tangled flora and sand.

One diver stopped her work and stared at them as they passed.

In the distance Buckle saw the ruins of a great white and green metropolis emerging from a rise on the sea floor between them and the domes of Atlantis. He realized the drowned structures were of the ancient Roman style—the ruins of a once great city. That made no sense but Buckle didn’t care. His diving helmet echoed with resounding pings as he slogged, breathing harder and harder. Felix pressed the advance and it was work to keep up with him. Buckle glanced back, turning his entire torso to do so, and saw the group following with Penny Dreadful at their head, its machinery transformed into a streamlined form cutting through the water more smoothly than the humans in their bulky suits. Buckle swung around and threw his muscles into the plod forward.

Felix suddenly halted. Buckle stopped alongside him. Felix delivered a hand signal to his crew, who quickly assembled a circular formation with Tonda hovering over Gustey on her hammock in the center. Sabrina and Welly took places alongside the
Dart
’s crew in the defensive wall.

Buckle cursed the heat in his helmet and the sweat flowing into his eyes. He cursed the dribbling condensation, low quality of his window glass, though they were as about as effective as Crankshaft gas mask ports, no worse or better. He couldn’t see anything but seaweed waving in the green-blue murk. The weight of the sea now pressed down on top of him. He calmed himself through long, deep sucks of the ocean-cooled air from his tanks and felt his battle nerves kick in. The swirl of the water outside slowed down and his eyesight improved, piercing the shadows. He tightened his grip on his harpoon.

The Guardians. It had to be the Guardians.
Bring it on
, Buckle thought.
You’ll get the first blow
.
But I shall deliver the last
.

And when the first blow came, it came in a lightning flash of silver.

XI

THE GUARDIANS

Something slashed through the middle of the group, whipping back and forth in silver whirls of knife-edged fins. There was more than one. It was some kind of fish, or eel, some kind of razorfish. Buckle spun around. He heard muffled shouts, people screaming into their helmets. Blood billowed into the water, nearly black but showing red in its thinner surges.

“Kill it!” Buckle shouted into his helmet. The razorfish darted, too quick for the wallowing swipe of his harpoon. Don’t swing—jab. One of the divers crumpled forward, both gloved hands clutching at their inner thigh as blood erupted out of the diving suit in volcanic bursts.

Sabrina. It was Sabrina. Horror slapped Buckle. In the next instant he realized it wasn’t her but a
Dart
crewperson—Sabrina was beside him, stabbing at the razorfish with her spear—the wounded unfortunate was José, who was about the same size.

The two razorfish, perhaps six feet long apiece, zipped in and out of the circle, lashing their bodies back and forth like whips. Someone lost their spear and it drifted to the rocky bottom.

Rachel’s weapon discharged, firing a weighted net that blossomed and caught one of the razorfish, thoroughly wrapping it up, and the creature sank, thrashing the rocks in the middle of the circle, quickly shredding the ropes dragging it down. Rachel surged forward with as much speed as the water allowed, planted her boot on the razorfish and plunged a long knife into its skull. The razorfish jerked and fell limp, its tail wobbling in the current.

The second razorfish vanished. Buckle spun around, aiming his harpoon into the empty sea in front of him. The razorfish were only the opening salvo, he knew, a way to disorganize the defense, and now the brutes would come and finish them off.

The brutes came.

Looming out of the darkness, the nightmares came.

They came with light, brilliant light, shining in three tight, bouncing pairs.

Buckle blinked hard at the blinding, turquoise-edged illumination. What he could see made his guts tighten. A half-dozen razorfish slithered at the fore. Behind them heaved octopus-like beasties, pink flesh engines with lavender eyes glaring over rafts of black suckered tentacles pulling their huge bodies across the bottom.

The paired columns of light beamed down from the crowns of the octopi, pouring forth from the large eyes of the gagools. The gagools were awful creatures, manlike in form but scaled along the length of the body and equipped with skull crests that gave their heads a rabid, hippocampus-like appearance. Long gill rows, a darker blue-green color than the rest of their bodies, lined their necks. They jabbered in high-pitched shrieks, fangs bared, waving their arms above their rubbery octopus perches.

Buckle lifted his harpoon and took aim at the dark sliver of skin between the eyes of the lead gagool, but the creature saw him and ducked behind his octopus mount.

The octopi launched the first assault. Charging the circle on three sides, the cephalopods lashed with their orange-purple tentacles, the razorfish darting in beneath them in blurs of silver barbs. Buckle, Felix and Sabrina thrust their harpoons forward, forcing the razorfish aside and slashing the octopi’s squirming arms that jerked back in trails of purple blood.

At the edges of his peripheral vision Buckle saw the other two Guardian octopi and their gagools swing around on each flank, aiming to overwhelm the small knot of divers by encirclement. There was nothing he could do for that. His hands were full with the lashing, lithe tentacles of the octopus in his face, a gagool peering over its neck, the light from its eyes blinding him. Buckle ducked and staggered backwards to prevent being enveloped by the tentacle mass. Felix and Sabrina retreated alongside him, but to fall back much further would collapse the circle.

Buckle aimed his crossbow into the center of the octopi looming over him, into the underside between the tentacles, and fired. The crossbow bucked as the harpoon bolt zipped through the water and buried its point in the beastie. The tentacles jerked back. The octopus released a burst of bubbles and a shriek so piercing it battered Buckle’s ears inside his helmet.

The razorfish switched from harassment to full on attack. Buckle jabbed his harpoon left and right, fighting off blur after whipping blur of silver. Yellow-green blood streaked the water as his blade bit into one writhing body after another. The survivors, snapping at their dying fellows as they sank as if in disdain of their clumsiness, seemed undeterred by casualties.

A tentacle wrapped around Buckle’s harpoon and tore it free of his grasp. He grabbed at the knife on his belt, unsure of exactly where it was, and found it. He drew it in front of him, the metal blade flashing in the wobbling underwater sunlight, but it seemed pitifully small.

A shadow arched overhead; a gagool, launching from its high beastie perch, kicked aside a harpoon point and landed in the center of the company’s defensive ring. Kishi and Marsh turned but the monster knocked them aside as it charged, its white-hot eyes locking onto Buckle’s as it barreled straight at him.

Sabrina stabbed at the gagool but the creature hurled her aside. Slashing his knife back and forth, Buckle could do little but hold his ground. The gagool sprang, grabbing Buckle’s knife hand at the wrist with one massive webbed claw and taking hold of his chest plate with the other. It flung its mouth open, impossibly wide, the green tongue writhing in a cavern lined with rows of sharp triangular teeth rippling down the musculature of its throat. Buckle threw his free hand against the gagool’s chest but the gagool was stronger than he was. His muscles shaking so hard the bones threatened to shatter, he barely heard his own gasps in his helmet. He was done for.

Buckle jammed his hand into the gagool’s gills, attempting to rip one out, but it was no good. No good. The gagool yanked his head into its mouth, the fangs and horned tongue scraping his faceplate in cringe-inducing squeaks as it stuffed his helmet in.

The gagool was swallowing Buckle. It was swallowing his head whole, helmet and all. He could see down its throat, down the sucking funnel of teeth and blood-red muscle.

Buckle thrashed but the jaws had him locked in. The gagool stated swaying, jerking back and forth. Now the damned thing was trying to rip his head off.

All of a sudden, in a flash of white light and blue darkness, Buckle was free. He was hurled aside, his bruised body floating down to the flagstones. The gagool had flung him away.

The gagool clawed at its right leg. Buckle saw Penny Dreadful, the little robot not higher than the gagool’s waist, glowing red at the seams, bubbles streaming out of the back of its metal skull as it emitted a low, profoundly deep sort of wail. Two long-bladed daggers slashed in front of Penny; it wasn’t holding them—the blades had snapped out from its forearms, the metal hands now folded back, and it drove them with great speed, again and again, deep into the thigh and hip of the gagool. Dark blood gushed out of the beastie as it frantically snatched at Penny’s blades. But the automaton was too quick, cutting the monster to ribbons.

Finding his balance, Buckle swung to his feet and rushed the gagool but his dagger blade bounced off its neck. The gagool no longer noticed him. Penny Dreadful plunged both of its blades into the gagool’s right knee joint and yanked them out on each side, severing the creature’s lower leg.

Staggering, the enraged gagool snatched Penny and pressed both claws around its head in an attempt to crush its skull, even trying to sink its teeth into the unyielding metal. Penny continued the murderous assault, driving her knives over and over into the gagool’s midriff. The water inked thick with black blood. Buckle continued his attack and his stabs found thinner armor across the small of the gagool’s back, the knife snapping through the exoskeleton, followed by the easy plunge into the flesh.

The gagool crumpled forward, obscured a drifting shroud of its own blood. It took all of Buckle’s strength to pry the beastie’s hands off Penny. Once the automaton was free, the gagool drew its arms and legs into a fetal position, the light fading rapidly from its eyes, and sank.

The silver tornado of razorfish eased back, apparently stunned by the death of the gagool.  Buckle staggered through the blood-filled water. Everyone still roughly held the circle but the octopi had snatched away their harpoons and spears and they were now slashing with daggers. The two surviving gagools remained on the backs of their mounts, hurling javelins tipped with nasty-looking barbs. The riderless octopus attacked with a particular fury and its big cold eyes looked like they were locked on Buckle.

The company was being overwhelmed, rotating, slowly squeezing into a tighter and tighter fighting formation; they were almost back-to-back, the signature of the last stand. There was no way to break out, no hope of reinforcement, and they had to either defeat the beasties or die on the bottom.

Penny was still emitting its ear-throbbing, siren-like wail as Buckle knelt to collect a fallen harpoon from a bed of seaweed. As he rose he saw one of the
Dart
’s crew—it was Marsh—staggering backwards, both hands wrapped around a gagool’s javelin buried deep in his stomach, bubbles and blood flooding out around the shaft. The man’s face was ghastly, his mouth flung impossibly wide in a silent scream inside the glass. Buckle reached for Marsh but he dropped, his weight belt dragging him down onto the rocks.

The razorfish attacked the gap in the line, tornadoing in as they tried to wedge the opening wider. Buckle jumped in front of Tonda and Gustey, attacking the razorfish with his harpoon. Penny Dreadful was alongside him, its long, sharp knives at the ready, and he continued to be surprised at how easily the machine moved through the water and how powerful its movements were.

The two surviving gagools increased the illumination from their eyes to a blinding level, uttering long, demented shrieks. Lost in a tunnel of white light, Buckle saw the shadows of tentacles coming in from all sides, felt the surge of the barbed javelins brushing past as they cut through the water. The razorfish swirled, forming a violent, half-seen wreath of bladed, flashing silver bodies constricting around the company, threatening to cut to ribbons anything unfortunate enough to be caught in the wall of their churn.

Buckle gripped the handle of his harpoon as hard as he could and it was immediately torn out of his grasp. Drawing his dagger again, he shared a desperate glance with Sabrina on his immediate left.

She shot him a brave, encouraging smile.

Buckle smiled back.