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

She attached her safety harness, plugged her headgear into the chattertube line, and wound the canister crankthat opened up the hammergun’s operating valves. The cocoon of bronze pipes around her hissed and creaked with the rising pressure of the superheated air.
    “Nice you could make it for the show, Max,” Buckle said without looking back. She could hear the usual smile in his voice. “We have a skirmish looming, you know.”
    “I would like to chat with the hack who bought us a box of substandard boiler rivets,” Max replied, pressing forward the hammergun’s priming levers with a satisfying metal-on-metal
chunk ka-chunk
.
    “That would be Ivan,” Sabrina said.
    Max made a tiny, unconscious grimace. She didn’t care much for Chief Mechanic Ivan Gorky. But it would be amusing to watch him fuss when she chewed him out.
    “Any damage?” Buckle asked.
    “Just a skin tear,” Max replied. “Number two is shut down.”
    “Good old Smoky,” Buckle grumbled.
    Max pressed her gun-maneuvering lever up, pitching her and the turret forward so that the long barrel of the hammergun pointed almost straight down. Once the turret rotated into firing position, it was exposed to the outside air: the freezing wind battered her seat in its unkind but familiar fashion. She peered down the aiming sight, scrutinizing the snowbound landscape below. The cannon barrel was fully retracted, so it wasn’t much of a sighting. She would not be able to extend it out to operating length until after they landed and then ascended again.
    Her spine tingled. She loved operating the cannon, firing it, stalking any prey she could find. Martians were predators. The visceral charge of the hunt burned so hot in Max’s half-Martian veins, she wondered how a full-blooded Martian could stand it.

THE ART OF THE BOUNCE
    S ABRINA SAW M AX SWING INTO the hammergun turret and grinned inwardly. She always felt safer with Max on the gun. Max was deadly. And Max loved it, even if she would never admit to loving anything.
    An odd pang struck Sabrina’s gut, the sort of random emotion—rare for her—that came out of nowhere when one was completely occupied with some other task. This was a weird sort of sadness. Max was Sabrina’s sister—in name only, for they were both adopted by Balthazar—but they had never been close. They had shared books and taken classes at the Academy together, but they had never sat together at the dinner table. They had never shared a secret.
    “Fifty feet,” Sabrina said. “Landing zone directly below. Magnolia and Hollywood Way. Rate of descent thirty feet per minute. Attitude zero degrees. Drift at one degree port bubble.”
    “Helm compensating,” De Quincey said.
    “Dead slow,” Buckle ordered, ringing the chadburn device as he cranked its handle.
    “Dead slow, aye!” engineering responded, along with the ring of the chadburn bell.
    The roar of the propellers steadily decreased.
    The piloting gondola hummed with the silence of expectation. The rudder and elevator wheels creaked ever so slightly as De Quincey and Dunn nudged them back and forth. A cloud of steam passed beneath the glass under Sabrina’s feet, driven by a light tailwind from the exhaust vents at the rear of the gondola.
    Sabrina eyed the array of intricate metal gauges, cranks, dials, and levers around her, observing the static-inertia meter, a palm-sized glass orb of clear liquid encased in copper, where two large bubbles measured the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s horizontal and vertical level. The liquid was seawater “boil,” a solution of distilled phosphorus algae. The boil would glow at night if one pressed the button to tap the agitation hammers within, thus disturbing the algae and making it generate bright, eerie bioluminescent swirls of greenish illumination. All of the vital cockpit instruments contained boil.
    Sabrina heard Max cooing in the chattertube. Martian females had soothing voices, and cooed when they were pleased with