Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) Read Online Free PDF

six.”
    “Bouncing, aye!” Nero shouted, rapidly flipping levers on the hydrogen and water-ballast boards.
    Dunn grunted as he wound the elevator wheel to maximum lift.
    Buckle braced his feet as the deck lurched to a steep angle. The engines and propellers, now throttled up all the way, rose to an eardrum-throbbing roar. He heard a deep
whoosh
as rivers of water thundered from the amidships ballast tanks, their scupper hatches wide open, cascading to the earth below. Released from the water weight, straining with acceleration, and given a vertical punch with extra hydrogen in its gas cells, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
lunged upward.
    Buckle heard the heavy, metallic
chunk, chunk, chunk
of the compressed-steam hammergun belting away as Max, nowelevated enough to use the cannon from the belly turret, rained razor-sharp harpoons down upon the attackers. The hammergun had a limited range, but it employed a long, expensive belt of ammunition and was blessed with a near-continuous rate of fire, unlike the blackball muskets that took even an experienced shooter more than half a minute to reload. As for range, well, this skirmish—like most skirmishes—was almost point-blank.
    “Forty feet and rising!” Sabrina shouted over the noise. “Emergency ascent in progress.”
    A Scavenger’s musket ball, perhaps the last shot fired in the melee, struck a glass panel in the cockpit dome, leaving a spiderwebbed crack.
    “Scurrilous derelicts!” Romulus Buckle shouted in disgust.

UMBILICAL
    W ITH THE
P NEUMATIC
Z
EPPELIN
AIRBORNE, Buckle felt much better. “Serafim. You have the bridge,” he ordered, unplugging his top hat from the mainline.
    “Aye, Captain,” Sabrina said. Welly slid into the chief navigator’s chair, as was the protocol.
    Buckle refastened his scabbard on its gargoyle pegs. “At three hundred, raise boarding nets and reduce to all ahead full. I will be in engineering. I must speak with Pluteus immediately.”
    Sabrina nodded. “Aye, Captain. Give my regards.”
    “I’ll keep your name out of it. He’s not going to like the news,” Buckle said.
    “Aye,” Sabrina replied.
    Buckle turned between the staircase and the hammergun turret and entered the narrow passageway at the back of the piloting gondola. On his right was the door to the map room, currently unoccupied, and on his left was the door to the signals room where the signals officer, Jacob Fitzroy, a skinny, territorial kid of sixteen years, sat amidst codebooks, signal flares, message scrolls, mirrors, and pigeon cages.
    “How are your crazy birds, Fitzroy?” Buckle ducked his head in and asked.
    “Regurgitating and crapping all over everything, sir,” Fitzroy replied. “They don’t like the muskets.”
    “Very good. Carry on,” Buckle said, and strode to the end of the passageway, turning the crank on the round umbilical hatch until the main latch released. He swung the hatch open and Kellie bounded out between his legs. Buckle swung the hatch shut and turned. He paused, blinking. It took the brain a moment to process the void after he’d been cooped up in the narrow gondola for hours on end. The forward umbilical ramp was a flexible metal footbridge, rocking back and forth over the chasm of open sky between the piloting and gunnery gondolas. The ramp was now at a considerable angle due to the steep climb of the airship, and Buckle had to plant both hands on the rails to steady himself. Great rushes of icy wind passed him on both sides as they swept around the gondola and blustered along the length of the ramp, making every one of its thousands of metal hinges rattle and creak. The massive ellipsoidal belly of the envelope dwarfed everything from overhead, while the high rumble of her forward maneuvering propellers vibrated the air from their nacelles on both sides.
    It would have been easier to climb the piloting gondola staircase up to the main keel corridor and stroll through the warm, enclosed interior of the zeppelin to the