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

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