Behemoth Read online

  Alek looked sternward through the motionless propeller. The ironclads were steaming away.

  “That’s odd,” he said. “They don’t seem to want to finish us off.”

  Klopp nodded. “They’ve gone back to their north-northeast heading. They must be expected somewhere.”

  “North-northeast,” Alek repeated. He knew that was significant somehow. He also knew that he should be worried that the Leviathan was now drifting southward, away from Constantinople.

  But breathing was worry enough.

  Deryn stood up slowly, blinking away spots from her eyes.

  A barking lightning bolt! That was what had fizzled up from the Clanker warship and leapt across the sky, dancing on every squick of metal on the Leviathan’s topside. The Huxley winch had thrown out a blinding flock of white sparks, knocking her half silly in the process.

  Deryn looked in all directions, terrified that she would see fires bursting willy-nilly from the membrane. But it was all dark except for the jaggy shimmers burned into her vision. The sniffers must have done their jobs brilliantly before the battle. Not a squick of hydrogen had been leaking from the skin.

  Then she remembered—the Leviathan had spun around just in time, the whole airship twisting like a dog chasing its own tail.

  Hydrogen …

  She looked up into the dark sky, and her jaw dropped.

  There was Newkirk, his arms waving madly, the Huxley blazing over his head like a giant Christmas pudding soaked with brandy.

  Deryn felt sick, the way she had in a hundred nightmares replaying Da’s accident, so close to the awful sight above her. The Huxley tugged at its cable, carried higher by the heat of the flames, spinning the winch’s crank.

  But a moment later, its hydrogen expended, the airbeast began to drop.

  Newkirk was twisting in the pilot’s rig, still alive somehow. Then Deryn saw a misting in the starlight around the Huxley. Newkirk had spilled the water ballast to keep himself from burning. Clever boy.

  The dead husk of the airbeast billowed out like a ragged parachute, but it was still falling fast.

  The Huxley was a thousand feet up, and if it missed crashing against the Leviathan’s topsides, it would drop another thousand feet before the cable snapped it to a halt. Best to make that trip as short as possible. Deryn reached for the winch—but her hand froze.

  Did electricity linger?

  “Dummkopf!” she cursed herself, forcing herself to grasp the metal.

  No sparks shot from it, and she began to turn as fast as she could. But the Huxley was coming down faster than she could reel it in. The cable began to coil across the airship’s spine, tangling in the feet of crewmen and sniffers running past.

  Still spinning the crank wildly, Deryn looked up. Newkirk was hanging limply beneath the burned husk, which was drifting away from the Leviathan.

  The engines had stopped, and the searchlights had gone dead too. The crewmen were using electric torches to call the bats and strafing hawks back from the black sky—the Clanker lightning contraption had knocked everything out.

  But if the airship was powerless, why was the wind pushing Newkirk away? Shouldn’t they all have been drifting together?

  Deryn looked down at the flank, her eyes widening.

  The cilia were still moving, still carrying the airship away from danger.

  “Now, that’s barking odd,” she muttered.

  Usually a hydrogen breather without engines was content to drift. Of course, the airbeast had been acting strangely since the crash in the Alps. All the old crewmen said that the crash in the Alps—or the Clanker engines—had rattled its attic.

  But this was no time to ponder. Newkirk was gliding past only a hundred feet away, close enough that Deryn could see his blackened face and soaking uniform. But he didn’t seem to be moving.

  “Newkirk!” she yelled, her hand raw on the winch’s handle. But he fell past without answering.

  The coils of slack cable began to rustle, like a nest of snakes strewn across the topside. The Huxley was dragging its cable behind as it dropped below the airship.

  “Clear those lines!” Deryn shouted, waving off a crewman standing among the slithering coils. The man danced away, the cable snapping at his ankles, trying to drag him down as well.

  She went at the crank again, till the line snapped tight with a sickening jerk. Deryn hit the brake and checked the cable markings—just over five hundred feet.

  The Leviathan was two hundred feet from top to bottom, so Newkirk would be dangling less than three hundred feet below. Strapped into the pilot’s rig, he was probably all right. Unless the fire had got him, or he’d been jolted to a neck-breaking stop …

  Deryn took a deep breath, trying to stop her hands from shaking.

  She couldn’t crank him back up. The winch was designed for a hydrogen-filled Huxley, not to haul dead weight.

  Deryn followed the taut cable, climbing down the ratlines on the airbeast’s flank. From the ship’s waist she could just see the Huxley’s dark shape fluttering against the whitecaps of the waves.

  “Barking spiders,” she murmured. The water was much closer than she’d expected.

  The Leviathan was losing altitude.

  Of course—the great airbeast was trying to find the strongest wind to pull itself away from the German ironclads. It wouldn’t care about smacking poor burnt Newkirk against the ocean’s choppy surface.

  But the officers could drop ballast, and drag the ship up against its will. Deryn pulled out her command whistle and blew for a message lizard, then stared again at the Huxley below.

  There was no human movement that she could see. Newkirk had to be stunned, at least. And he wouldn’t have the right equipment to climb the cable. No one expected to climb up from an ascender.

  Where was that barking message lizard? She saw one scrambling across the membrane, and whistled for it. But the lizard just stared at her and jabbered something about an electrical malfunction.

  “Brilliant,” she murmured. The bolt of Clanker lightning had scrambled the wee beasties’ brains! Down below, the dark water looked closer every second.

  She was going to have to rescue Newkirk herself.

  Deryn searched the pockets of her flight suit. In airmanship class Mr. Rigby had taught them about how riggers “belayed,” which was Service-speak for sliding down a rope without breaking your neck. She found a few carabiners and enough line to make a pair of friction hitches.

  After attaching her safety clip to the Huxley’s cable, Deryn twisted the carabiner tight. She couldn’t wind the rope around her hips because the weight of the dead Huxley would snip her in half. But after a moment’s fiddling, she attached the extra carabiners to her harness and strung the cable through them.

  Mr. Rigby wouldn’t approve of this method, Deryn thought as she kicked herself away from the membrane.

  She slid down in short jerks, the carabiners’ friction keeping her from falling too fast. But the rope was hot beneath her gloves, its fibers fraying wherever she snapped to a halt. Deryn doubted this cable was designed to hold the weight of a dead Huxley and two middies.

  The ocean thundered below Deryn, the wind growing colder now that the sun had fully set. The peak of a tall wave smacked against the Huxley’s drooping membrane, cracking like a gunshot.

  “Newkirk!” Deryn shouted, and the boy stirred in his pilot’s rig.

  A shudder of relief went through her—he was alive. Not like Da.

  She let herself fall the last twenty yards, the rope hissing like mad and spilling a burnt smell into the salt air. But her boots landed softly on the squishy membrane of the dead airbeast, which smelled of smoke and salt, like jellyfish cooked on a hearth fire.

  “Where in blazes am I?” Newkirk mumbled, barely audible over the rumble of the waves. His hair was scorched, his face and hands blackened with smoke.

  “Almost in the barking ocean, that’s where! Can you move?”

  The boy stared at his blackened hand
s, wriggling his fingers, then unstrapped himself from the harness. He stood up shakily on the frame of the pilot’s rig.

  “Aye. I’m just singed.” He ran his fingers through his hair, or what was left of it.

  “Can you climb?” Deryn asked.

  Newkirk stared up at the Leviathan’s dark belly. “Aye, but that’s miles away! Couldn’t you have cranked faster?”

  “You could have fallen slower!” Deryn shouted back. She unclipped two carabiners and shoved them into his hands, along with a short length of line. “Tie yourself a friction hitch. Or don’t you remember Mr. Rigby’s classes?”

  Newkirk stared at the carabiners, then up at the distant airship.

  “Aye, I remember. But I never thought we’d be ascending that far.”

  “Ascending,” of course, was Service-Speak for climbing up a rope without breaking your neck. Deryn’s fingers worked fast with her own line. A friction hitch slid freely up a rope, but held fast when weight was hanging from it. That way, she and Newkirk could stop and rest without relying on their muscles to keep them from sliding back.

  “You go first,” she ordered. If Newkirk slid down, she could stop him.

  He pulled himself up a few feet, then tested his hitch, swinging freely from the rope. “It works!”

  “Aye. You’ll be conquering Mount Everest next!” As she spoke, another wave slapped at the Huxley, splashing across them both. Deryn lost her footing, but her friction hitch held.

  She spat out salt water and yelled, “Get going, you Dummkopf! The ship’s losing altitude!”

  Newkirk started climbing, scrambling with feet and hands. He had soon cleared enough distance that Deryn could haul herself off the dead Huxley.

  Another wave hit the airbeast, snapping the line tight, and Newkirk skidded down till he was almost on top of her. If the Leviathan dropped any lower, the beastie’s carcass would be dragging in the water. If the membrane filled up, it would pull on the rope like a barrel full of stones.

  Enough to break any cable … She had to cut the Huxley loose.

  “Higher!” she yelled, and started climbing madly.

  About twenty feet above the Huxley, Deryn halted, hanging just above a badly frayed spot. She pulled out her rigging knife, reached down, and started hacking at the line. Huxley cable was barking thick, but when the next tall wave struck the airbeast, the fibers unraveled in a blur and snapped.

  Without the beastie’s dead weight anchoring them, suddenly they were swinging across the black sea, cast about by the wind. Newkirk cried out with surprise overhead.

  “Sorry!” Deryn yelled up. “Should have warned you.”

  But with the Huxley’s weight gone, the rope wouldn’t snap … probably.

  She started climbing again, wishing for the hundredth time that she had the arm strength of a boy. But soon the waves no longer threatened her dangling boots.

  Halfway up, Deryn took a long breather, searching the dark horizon for the two German ironclads. They were nowhere to be seen.

  Maybe the Royal Navy was close by, and had kept the ships running. But Deryn couldn’t see any sign of surface ships. The only shape on the water was the Huxley’s carcass, a lonely black smear on the waves.

  “Poor beastie,” she said, shivering. The whole airship and its crew might have wound up like that—burnt black, as lonely as driftwood on the dark sea. If the hydrogen sniffers had missed a single leak, or if the airbeast hadn’t spun itself around just in time, they’d all have been done for.

  “Barking Clankers,” Deryn murmured. “Making their own lightning now.”

  She closed her eyes to shut her dark memories away, the roar of skin-prickling heat and the smell of burnt flesh. This time she’d won. The fire hadn’t taken anyone she loved.

  Deryn shuddered once more, then started to climb again.

  “This is entirely unacceptable!” Dr. Barlow cried.

  “I’m s-sorry, ma’am,” the guard sputtered. “But the captain said the Clanker boy wasn’t to have visitors.”

  Deryn shook her head—the man’s resistance was already faltering. He was backed up against Alek’s stateroom door, sweat breaking out on his forehead.

  “I am not a visitor, you imbecile,” Dr. Barlow said. “I’m a doctor here to see an injured patient!”

  Tazza’s ears perked up at the lady boffin’s sharp tone, and he let out a low growl. Deryn held his leash a squick tighter. “Shush now, Tazza. No biting.”

  “But the surgeon was already here,” the guard squeaked, staring wide eyed at the thylacine. “Said the boy only bruised a rib.”

  “On top of suffering from shock, no doubt,” Dr. Barlow said. “Or did you fail to notice our recent encounter with a prodigious amount of electricity?”

  “Of course not, ma’am.” The guard swallowed, still eyeing Tazza nervously. “But the captain was quite specific—”

  “Did he specifically forbid doctors from seeing the patient?”

  “Er, no.”

  Just give up, thought Deryn. It didn’t matter that Dr. Barlow was a boffin—a fabricator of beasties—and not a pulse-taking stick-out-your-tongue doctor. She’d be seeing this particular patient one way or another.

  Deryn hoped that Alek really was all right. The Clanker lightning had danced across the whole ship, but it must have been worst in the engine pods, with all that metal about … Well, second to worst, anyway. Newkirk’s hair was half burnt off, and he had a knot on his head the size of a cricket ball.

  But how had Alek bruised a rib? That didn’t sound like something an electric shock would do.

  Finally the guard surrendered his post, slinking off to check with the watch officer and trusting Dr. Barlow to wait till he got back. She didn’t, of course, just pushed the door straight open.

  Alek lay in bed, his ribs wrapped in bandages. His skin was ashen, his dark green eyes glistening in the dawn light streaming through the portholes.

  “Barking spiders!” Deryn said. “You’re as pale as a mealyworm.”

  A wan smile spread across the boy’s face. “It’s good to see you, too, Dylan. And you, Dr. Barlow.”

  “Good morning, Alek,” the lady boffin said. “You are pale, aren’t you? As if you’ve lost some blood. An odd symptom for electrocution.”

  Alek grimaced as he struggled to sit up higher. “I’m afraid you’re right, ma’am. Mr. Hirst shot me.”

  “Shot you?” Deryn cried.

  Alek nodded. “Luckily it was one of your feeble compressed air guns. Dr. Busk said the bullet hit a rib and bounced off, but nothing’s broken, thanks partly to my fencing armor. I should be walking about soon enough.”

  Deryn stared at the bandages. “But what in blazes did he shoot you for?”

  “He was aiming for Klopp. They had a … disagreement. Klopp realized what was about to happen—what the Tesla cannon was—and decided to turn us around.”

  “A Tesla cannon?” Dr. Barlow repeated. “As in that awful Mr. Tesla?”

  “That’s what Klopp says,” Alek said.

  “But you Clankers didn’t turn us around,” Deryn said. “Everyone says that the beastie itself turned, because it got scared.”

  Alek shook his head. “Klopp reversed the port engine first, then the airbeast followed suit. It seems the Leviathan has more sense than its own officers.”

  “You said they had a disagreement?” Dr. Barlow asked. “You mean you changed course without orders?”

  “There wasn’t time to wait for orders,” he said.

  Deryn let out a low groan. No wonder Alek was under guard.

  “That’s barking mutiny,” she said softly.

  “But we saved the ship.”

  “Aye, but you can’t disobey orders just because the officers are being daft. Especially not in battle—that’s a hanging offense!”

  Alek’s eyes widened, and the room was silent for a moment.

  Dr. Barlow cleared her throat. “Please don’t say alarming things to my patient, Mr. Sharp. He’s no more a membe
r of this crew than I am, and is therefore not subject to your brutish military authority.”

  Deryn bit down a reply. She doubted Captain Hobbes would see it that way. This had probably been his worry since the Clankers had come aboard, that they’d ignore the bridge and pilot the ship whichever way they wanted.

  Changing course wasn’t like skylarking or learning to fence on duty. It was mutiny, pure and simple.

  The lady boffin sat primly on the stateroom’s only chair, snapping her fingers for Tazza to come to her.

  “Now, Alek,” she said, stroking the thylacine’s striped flank. “You say that Klopp was operating the engine. So this ‘mutiny’ wasn’t your idea?”

  The boy thought for a moment. “I suppose not.”

  “Then, pray tell, why are you under guard?”

  “When Mr. Hirst pulled the pistol, I tried to take it from him.”

  Deryn shut her eyes. Striking an officer—another hanging offense.

  “Very sensible of you,” Dr. Barlow said. “This ship won’t get very far without its master of mechaniks, will it?”

  “Where is Klopp now?” Alek asked.

  “I reckon he’s in the brig,” Deryn said.

  “And not at work on the engines, thus further delaying my mission.” Dr. Barlow stood up, straightening her skirts. “Don’t you worry about Master Klopp, Alek. Now that I have all the facts, I’m sure the captain will see reason.”

  She handed the leash to Deryn.

  “Please walk Tazza and then check on the eggs, Mr. Sharp. I don’t trust that Mr. Newkirk, especially with his head swelling up like a melon.” She turned. “In fact, I’d much rather that you were watching them, Alek. Please do get better soon.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll try,” the boy said. “But if you don’t mind, could Dylan stay a moment?”

  The lady boffin’s eyes measured them both, and then she smiled. “Of course. Perhaps you could amuse Mr. Sharp with whatever you know about this … Tesla cannon? I have some familiarity with the inventor, and it seemed a most intriguing device.”