She tightened the rig across her shoulders, glancing up at the Huxley. The beastie looked healthy, its membrane taut in the thin mountain air.
Good for a mile of altitude at least. If Alek’s family lived anywhere in this valley, Deryn would spot them in a squick.
“Mr. Sharp!” a voice called from halfway down the flank. It was Newkirk, smiling as he climbed toward her. “It’s true—you’re alive!”
“Of course I am!” Deryn called back, cracking a smile. Mr. Rigby had told her Newkirk was unhurt, but it was good to see him with her own eyes.
He ran the rest of the way up, carrying a pair of field glasses in one hand. “The navigator sends these with his compliments. They’re his best pair, so don’t break them.”
Deryn frowned at the maker’s mark on the leather case: Zeiss Optik. Everyone said Clanker binoculars were the best, but it was annoying to be reminded of it. At least Alek wasn’t here to make some stuck-up remark. Orphan or not, she’d had enough of his Clanker arrogance for one day, and the sun wasn’t even up yet.
“Mr. Rigby and I were beginning to think you’d fallen off before the crash,” Newkirk said. “I’m happy to see you were just dawdling.”
“Get stuffed,” Deryn said. “If it weren’t for me, you’d both be wee splotches in the snow. And I haven’t been dawdling. I’ve been escorting important prisoners about the ship.”
“Aye, I’ve heard about your mad boy.” Newkirk narrowed his eyes. “Is it true he says an army of abominable snowmen are coming to his rescue?”
Deryn chuckled. “Aye, his attic’s a wee bit scrambled. But he’s not that bad, I suppose.”
Seeing Mr. Rigby with his shirt cut open around the wound, Deryn had realized how lucky she’d been. If Alek hadn’t woken her up, it might have been her laid out on a bed in sick bay. And even if it had only been a squick of frostbite, the surgeons might’ve stripped off her uniform…and seen exactly what was hidden beneath.
She owed the boy for that, Deryn reckoned.
A whistle sounded, and the two fell silent.
On the glacier below, all hands were assembling, sheltered by the huge crescent of the airbeast’s bulk. The captain was going to address the crew at first light.
To the east the sun was just cresting the mountains, bringing a squick of warmth to the air. The Leviathan’s membrane was already turning black, ready to absorb the heat of the day.
“I hope the captain’s got good news,” Newkirk said. “Don’t want to be stuck on this iceberg too long.”
“It’s a glacier,” Deryn said. “And the lady boffin seems to think we might be.”
There was a stir among the men below, and attention was called as the captain came out onto the snow.
“The last patch went on at six a.m. this morning,” he announced. “The Leviathan is airtight once again!”
The riggers arrayed along the spine raised a cheer, and the two middies joined them.
“Dr. Busk has checked her insides, and the beast seems healthy enough,” the captain continued. “What’s more, our Clanker friends hardly dented the gondolas. There may be a lot of broken windows, but our instruments are in fine shape. Only the motivator engines need serious repairs.”
Deryn glanced down at the port engine pod, riddled with bullet holes and leaking black oil onto the snow. The tail engines looked bad as well. The Germans had focused most of their fire on the mechanical parts of the ship—typical Clanker thinking. The starboard pod lay beneath the whale, of course, smashed against the glacier.
“We’ll need two working engines to control the ship,” the captain said. “At least we have no shortage of parts.” He paused. “So our greatest test will be reinflating the ship.”
Here it comes, Deryn thought.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have enough hydrogen.”
An uncertain murmur spread through the crew. The wee beasties in the whale’s gut made hydrogen, after all, the same way people breathed out carbon dioxide. Even after a long winter’s hibernation the ship always swelled back to her old size within a few days.
“THE CAPTAIN ADDRESSES THE CREW.”
It was normally so simple that everyone had missed the obvious—hydrogen didn’t come from out of the blue. It came from the airship’s bees and birds.
The head boffin stepped forward.
“The Alps were once the bedrock of an ancient sea,” he said. “But now these peaks are the highest in Europe, not fit for man or beast. If you look around, you’ll see no insects, plants, or small prey for our flocks. For the moment our fabs are living off the ship’s stores. As long as they remain alive, the ship will process their excreta and slowly refill her hydrogen cells.”
“Excreta?” Newkirk whispered.
“That’s boffin-talk for ‘clart,’” Deryn replied, and Newkirk snorted a laugh.
“But when the Leviathan was designed,” Dr. Busk continued, “none of us imagined landing in a place so bleak. And I’m afraid that the equations are indisputable: All the hydrogen in our ship’s stores isn’t enough to lift us into the air.”
Another murmur spread through the crew. They were getting the picture now.
“Some of you may be wondering,” Dr. Busk said with half a smile, “why we don’t simply take hydrogen from the snow around us.”
Deryn frowned. She’d been wondering no such thing, but it seemed like a fair question. Snow was just water, after all—hydrogen and oxygen. It’d always seemed a bit suspect to her, that two gasses mixed up made a liquid, but the boffins were dead certain on the issue.
“Unfortunately, separating water into its elements requires energy, and energy requires food. The ecosystem that is our home depends on sustenance from nature to repair itself.” Dr. Busk’s gaze swept across the glacier. “And in this awful place, nature herself is empty.”
As the captain stepped forward again, Deryn heard no sound but the wind in the rigging and the panting of hydrogen sniffers. The crew had gone dead silent.
“Early this morning we loosed a pair of homing terns to carry our position to the Admiralty,” the captain said. “No doubt one of our sister ships will reach us soon enough, provided the war doesn’t get in the way.”
A chuckle rose up from the crew, and Deryn began to feel a squick of hope. Maybe things weren’t as bleak as Dr. Barlow thought.
“But mounting a rescue mission for a hundred men in wartime may take weeks.” The captain paused, and the head boffin beside him looked grim. “We don’t have much food in our stores—a little more than a week at half rations. Longer if we use the other resources at our disposal.”
Deryn raised an eyebrow. What other resources? The head boffin had just said there was nothing on the glacier.
The captain drew himself up taller. “And my first responsibility is to you, the men of my crew.”
The men—not the fabricated creatures. Did he mean taking the beasties’ food? But surely the captain wasn’t saying…
“To save ourselves we may have to let the Leviathan die.”
“Barking spiders!” Newkirk hissed.
“It won’t come to that,” Deryn said, pulling the Clanker field glasses from his hands. “My mad boy’s going to help us.”
“What?” Newkirk asked.
“Tell the men at the winch to give me some rope,” she said. “I’m ready to go up.”
“Don’t you think it’s a bit rude,” Newkirk whispered, “taking off while the captain’s talking?”
Deryn looked out across the glacier—nothing but blank white snow, turning brilliant as the sun rose. But somewhere out there were people who knew how to survive in this awful place. And the captain had said to go up at first light….
“Quit your dawdling, Mr. Newkirk.”
The boy sighed. “All right, your admiralship. Will you be wanting a message lizard?”
“Aye, I’ll call one,” Deryn said. “But fetch me some semaphore flags.”
As Newkirk went for the flags, Deryn took out her command whistl
e, blowing for a message lizard. A few heads turned in the crowd below, but she ignored them.
Soon a lizard crested the wilting airbag and scuttled toward her along the spine. Deryn snapped her fingers, and it climbed up her flight suit, nestling on her shoulder like a parrot.
“Stay warm, beastie,” she said.
The winch had started to turn, a length of slack rope coiling down the airbeast’s flank. Newkirk handed her the semaphore flags and stood ready at the tether line.
Deryn gave him a thumbs-up, and he let the knot spill.
The air became clearer as she rose.
Down near the surface, icy particles flurried on the constant wind, swirling across the glacier like a freezing sandstorm. But up here, above the haze of airborne snow, the whole valley spread out below her. Mountains rose on either side, covered under a patchy blanket of white. The strata of the ancient seabed jutted up through the snow in a broken sawtooth pattern.
Deryn pulled the field glasses from their case. Where to start?
First she scanned the perimeter of the wreck, looking for fresh tracks in the snow. Several spindly trails led away from the ship and back, where crewman had snuck off to smoke a pipe or relieve themselves. But one set was wider and shuffly looking—Alek’s funny shoes at work.
Deryn followed the tracks away from the wreck. They wandered back and forth, crossing exposed rock whenever possible. Alek had been clever, trying to confuse anyone trying to follow him home. But he hadn’t reckoned on someone tracking him from the sky.
By the time the footprints had faded into the distance, she was certain he’d come from the east, where Austria lay.
The sun was fully up now, making the white snow glare. But Deryn was glad for the warmth. Her eyes were watering from the cold, and the message lizard clenched her shoulder like a vise. Fabricated lizards weren’t properly cold blooded, but freezing air slowed them down.
“Hang on there, beastie. I’ll have a mission for you soon.”
Deryn swept her glasses back and forth across the eastern end of the valley, looking for anything out of place. And suddenly she saw them…tracks of some kind.
But they weren’t human. They were huge, as if a giant had shuffled through the snow. What had Newkirk said about abominable snowmen?
The tracks led to an outcrop of rocks, or what looked like rocks. As Deryn stared, the shapes of broken walls came into focus, along with stone buildings huddled around an open courtyard.
“Blisters!” she swore. No wonder Alek talked so posh. He lived in a barking castle.
But she still hadn’t found whatever had made those tracks. The courtyard was empty, the stables too small to hold anything so massive. Deryn slowly scanned the structure until she found the gate in the castle walls…. It was open.
Her hands shaking a little, she followed the tracks away from the castle again, and saw what she’d missed the first time. Another set branched off, heading toward the wrecked airship.
And these tracks were fresh.
Deryn remembered her argument with Alek about animals and machines. He’d mentioned walkers, hadn’t he? Those crude Clanker imitations of beasties. But what sort of barking mad family had its own walker?
Deryn swept her gaze across the snow faster now, until a glint of metal flashed across her vision. She blinked, backtracking until…
“Blisters!”
The machine bounded across the snow, shimmering with heat in the cold, like a monstrous, angry teakettle on two legs. The ugly snout of a cannon thrust from its belly, and two machine guns sprouted like ears from its head.
It was running straight for the Leviathan.
She pulled the semaphore flags from her belt, waving them hard. A light flashed in response from the airship’s spine—Newkirk was watching.
Deryn whipped the flags through the letters, spelling out…
E-N-E-M-Y—A-P-P-R-O-A-C-H-I-N-G—D-U-E—E-A-S-T
She squinted, watching for confirmation from below. The light flashed in answer: W-H-A-T—M-A-N-N-E-R-?
W-A-L-K-E-R—T-W-O—L-E-G-S, she answered.
Another confirmation flashed, but that was all. They’d be scrambling now, trying to mount some defense against an armored attack. But what could the Leviathan’s crew do against an armored walker? An airship was defenseless on the ground.
They needed more details. She raised the glasses to her face again, trying to read the markings on the machine.
“Alek, you bum-rag!” she cried. Two steel plates hung down to protect the walker’s legs, both painted with the Iron Cross. And a double-headed eagle was painted on its breastplate. Alek was no more Swiss than he was made of blue cheese!
“Beastie, wake up,” Deryn snapped. She took a breath to steady herself, then said in a slow, clear voice, “Alert, alert. Regards to the Leviathan from Midshipman Sharp. The approaching walker is Austrian. Two legs, one cannon, type uncertain. It must be Alek’s—that boy we caught—family on their way. Maybe he can talk to them….”
Deryn paused for a moment, wondering what else to say. She could think of only one way to stop the machine, and it was too complicated to cram into a lizard’s drafty wee attic.
“End message,” she said, and gave the beastie a shove. It scuttled away down the ascender’s rope.
As she watched its progress, Deryn let out a soft groan. Away from her body heat the freezing air was slowing it down. The beastie would take long minutes to deliver the message.
She peered across the glacier again, using only her naked eyes. A tiny flash of metal winked at her from the snow, closer to the airship every second. The charging walker was going to arrive before the lizard.
Alek was the key to stopping the machine, but in all the ruckus would anyone think of him?
The only way to make sure was to go down herself.
This was Deryn’s first sliding escape.
She’d studied the diagrams in the Manual of Aeronautics, of course, and every middy in the Service wanted an excuse to try one. But you weren’t allowed to practice sliding escapes.
Too barking dangerous, weren’t they?
Her first problem was the angle of the cable stretching down to the airship. Right now it was much too steep; she’d wind up a splotch in the snow. The Manual said that forty-five degrees was best. To get there the Huxley needed to lose altitude—fast.
“Oi, beastie!” she yelled up. “I think I’ll light a match down here!”
One tentacle coiled serenely in the breeze, but otherwise the airbeast didn’t react. Deryn growled with frustration. Had she found the one Huxley in the Service that couldn’t be spooked?
“Bum-rag!” she called, bouncing in the saddle. “I’ve gone insane, and I’m keen to set myself on fire!”
More tentacles coiled, and Deryn saw the venting gills softly ruffle. The Huxley was spilling hydrogen, but not fast enough.
She kicked her legs to swing herself back and forth, yanking on the straps that connected her harness to the airbeast. “Get down, you daft creature!”
Finally the smell of hydrogen filled her nose, and Deryn felt the Huxley descending. The tether line looked less steep every second, like the string of a falling kite.
Now came the tricky part—reconfiguring the pilot’s harness into an escape rig.
Still yelling at the beast, Deryn began to take apart the harness. She loosened the straps around her shoulders, wriggling one arm free, then the other. As the belt around her waist unbuckled, the first wave of dizziness hit. Nothing was keeping her in the saddle now except her own sense of balance.
Deryn realized she’d been awake almost twenty-four hours—if you didn’t count lying unconscious in the snow, which was hardly quality sleep. Probably not the best time for risky maneuvers…
She stared at the undone straps and buckles, trying to remember how they went back together. How was she meant to reassemble them while clinging to her perch?
Sighing, Deryn decided to use both hands—even if that meant she was one Huxl
ey twitch away from a long fall.
“Forget what I was saying earlier, beastie,” she murmured. “Let’s just float calmly, shall we?”
The tentacles stayed coiled around her, but at least the creature was still descending. The tether line had almost reached forty-five degrees.
After a long minute’s fiddling, the escape rig looked right—the buckles forming a sort of carabiner in the center. Deryn gave the contraption a jerk between her hands, and it held firm.
Now came the scary part.
She clenched the rig between her teeth and pulled herself up with both hands. As her bum left the saddle, a fresh wave of dizziness hit. But a moment later Deryn was standing in a half crouch, her rubber-soled boots gripping the curved leather seat.
She reached up and clipped the buckles onto the tether line, then took one end of the strap in each hand, winding the leather several times around her wrists.
Deryn glanced down at the glacier. “Blisters!”
While she’d been getting ready, the walker had closed almost half the distance to the airship. Worse, the tether line had gotten steeper. The wind was tugging the Huxley higher. At this angle she’d slide down the rope much too fast. The Manual was full of gruesome tales about pilots who’d made that mistake.
Deryn stood to her full height, her head inches from the Huxley’s membrane.
“Boo!” she cried.
The airbeast shivered all over, venting a bitter-smelling wash of hydrogen right into her face. The saddle jerked beneath Deryn, and her boots slipped from the worn leather…
A fraction of a second later the straps around her wrists snapped, yanking her shoulders hard. And she found herself sliding down toward the massive bulk of the airship below.
She felt nothing but a roar in her ears, like staring into a headwind on the spine. Tears streamed from her face, freezing to her cheeks, but Deryn found herself letting out a wild, exultant scream.
This was real flying, better than airships or ascenders or hot-air balloons, like an eagle zooming down toward its prey.
Leviathan 01 - Leviathan Page 18