Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3) by Richard Ellis Preston Jr. Read Free Book Online Page A

breath as Buckle handed him the bottle. “Well, this trip is surely eating away at my profit.” He corked the bottle and tucked it back into the binnacle cupboard.
    Gustey lifted her mufflers. “Enemy boat slowing to three knots, almost directly above us at five-fifty.”
    “Ah, he isn’t in the mood to test his iron, is he?” Felix said through gritted teeth. “The coward.”
    “Cavitation,” Gustey said as she listened hard in her earphones. “Engines reversed. He’s stopped.”
    Everyone peered up at the dripping ceiling.
    “He’s a suspicious sort, he is,” Felix muttered. “I’ll give him that.”
    “What do we do now?” Welly asked.
    “We wait,” Felix whispered. “We can stay down much longer than he can. Once he is forced to surface we’ll be clear of him.”
    A metal bolt fired out of the aft bulkhead and ricocheted off of the chadburn.
    “Is your little submarine going to last?” Buckle asked.
    “You’ll know it if she doesn’t,” Felix said. “I see no reason for her to let me down.”
    Buckle’s ears ached in the following silence, so intent was he upon listening. He heard the huge Founders submarine’s boilers, a low, distant, constant rumble.
    “Enemy boat holding position, directly above us,” Gustey said.
    “He knows where we are,” Welly whispered.
    “He heard our propeller shafts clang when they became unseated but he does not know our depth,” Felix said grimly. “He’s listening. Don’t make a peep.”
    The Dart shuddered along her entire hull, a long shriek of tortured metal.
    “Well, I’m pretty sure he heard that,” Sabrina said dryly.
    Felix took a seat in his captain’s chair. Buckle wasn’t sure, but in the sea lamp and boil-lit darkness it seemed that Felix’s face had paled. Buckle coughed, his lungs irritated by the thickening atmosphere, contaminated with burnt coal smoke and agitated mold.
    “He needs to flush us out before he is forced to surface,” Felix said. “Ready yourselves for a rough ride.”
    “I hate depth charges,” Rachel said.
    “Depth charges?” Welly asked. “What kind of weapon is that?”
    “Underwater canister bombs,” Felix replied, scanning his instruments as he spoke. “Devil crackers. They are expensive—only big clans can afford them. They’re unreliable: the internal fuse is set so close to the powder charge that I’ve heard tell of entire ships and zeppelins being obliterated after they lit their poorly sealed ordnance. But if a live one catches a submarine, well …”
    “Iron coffins,” Rachel whispered.
    Buckle shot a glare at Rachel. The woman was no ray of sunshine, to be sure. The sourness of her personality seemed entirely at home in the gloom.
    Gustey slapped her hands against her ear mufflers as she strained to hear. “Hatches opening, Captain,” she said. “Metal rolling on metal.”
    “Here we go,” Felix whispered.
    Kishi slipped her pocket watch out of her coat and started counting silently, her lips moving but making no sound.
    Felix placed his hands on the armrests of his chair, his fingers digging into the leather coverings. “They’ll have set the timers on these bastards.”
    “Big objects coming down,” Gustey said. “I hear hissing. Fuses in cans.”
    Buckle’s heart started pounding. “How closely can they estimate our depth?” he asked Felix.
    “They’ll have a good sense of it, unfortunately,” Felix replied. “They’ll suspect that I can’t go far beneath the gloom ceiling, and that my hull is ready to pop. They’ll set the charges to blow at six seventy-five or thereabouts. No more I hope—it won’t take much more than a granny’s squeeze to finish us off down here.”
    “So we just sit here and take it, then?” Sabrina asked. She sounded pissed off.
    “Felix ignored Sabrina. “Gustey—is the Founders submersible stationary or drifting?”
    Gustey recalibrated her equipment and listened. “She hasn’t stopped entirely. Momentum and the current are carrying