Goliath l-3

by Scott Westerfeld

  Deryn frowned. The underwater fiber system, which stretched from Britain to Australia to Japan, was one of the more uncanny creations of Darwinism. Made from mile-long strands of living nervous tissue, it bound the British Empire together like a single organism, carrying coded messages along the ocean floor.

  “But they won’t be able to see anything,” Deryn said.

  “Mr. Tesla claims otherwise.” Dr. Barlow’s voice faded as the lights dimmed and a hush settled over the crowd.

  A familiar tall figure strode to the center of the darkened stage, holding a long cylinder in one hand. He flourished it in the air, like a swordsman saluting, and then his voice boomed across the theater.

  “Time is pressing, so I shall begin without prologue. I hold a glass tube full of incandescent gasses.” Tesla pointed at the ceiling. “And here is a wire conveying alternating currents of high potential. When I touch both…”

  He took the wire in one hand, and the glass tube suddenly illuminated in the other. There was a slight gasp from the audience, and then a scattering of laughter, as if some of them had known the trick was coming.

  Shadows shifted across Tesla’s features as he rested the glowing tube across his shoulder, like a phantasmal walking stick. “This is merely an electric light, of course, except for the novelty of using my body as a conductor. But it reminds us that electricity can travel through more than wires. Through the atmosphere, for example, or the Earth’s crust, and even the ether of interplanetary space.”

  “Oh, dear,” Dr. Barlow said softly. “Not martians again.”

  “Martians,” Bovril said, chuckling, and Deryn raised an eyebrow.

  Tesla placed the tube at the edge of the stage, the light extinguishing the moment his fingers left it. He let go of the wire and straightened his jacket.

  “In some ways our planet itself is a capacitor, a giant battery.” He reached up to touch the bulb hanging from the ceiling, and a light spread inside it. “In the center of this sphere is another, smaller, globe. Both are filled with luminous gases, and together they can show us the engine of our planet at work.”

  The man fell silent then, standing back and saying nothing. The globe stayed lit, but nothing else happened as minutes passed in silence. Deryn shifted in her seat. It was a bit uncanny to see so many important people sitting quietly for this long.

  Her mind began to drift, wondering why Dr. Barlow had mentioned martians. Did Tesla believe in them? It was one thing to call the great inventor a nutter, but quite another if he was truly mad.

  Alek wanted to stop the war so badly, he was willing to believe any promise of peace. And after all he’d lost—his family, his country, and his home—how would he carry on if this hope were dashed as well? But there was not much she could do, Deryn supposed, except show him that there were other things to life besides saving the world.

  A murmur went through the crowd, and she looked up. The light in the glass sphere had formed a shape, a tiny finger of lightning, just like those inside Tesla’s metal detector. The flicker was moving, sweeping slowly around the globe like the second hand on a clock.

  “The rotation is clockwise, as always,” Tesla said. “Though in the Southern Hemisphere it would go in the other direction, I suppose. You see, this finger of light is set in motion by the spinning of our planet.”

  Another murmur traveled across the room, a bit unsettled. Deryn frowned. How was that so different from a pendulum or a compass needle?

  “But we are not limited to the brute forces of nature.” Tesla took a step closer to the hanging light, a small object in his hand. “With this magnet I can wrest control of this flicker from the earth itself.”

  He stepped still closer, and the light stopped spinning. Tesla began to walk around the bulb, and the flicker began to move again, always pointing away from him, no matter how he paused or hurried.

  “Strange, isn’t it? To think that one can aim lightning as easily as a pistol.” He pulled out his pocket watch and checked it. “But now it is time for a larger demonstration. Much larger. A few days ago I sent a message from the Leviathan to Tokyo by courier eagle. The message was forwarded by underwater fiber to London, and finally by radio waves to my assistants in New York, more than halfway around the world. There, a few minutes from now, they will follow my instructions.”

  He signaled to Klopp, who began to make adjustments in one of the black boxes. A moment later all the devices onstage began to flicker and hum. Mr. Tesla stood among them, his hair standing on end like an angry cat’s. Deryn felt her own hairs tingle, as if a summer storm were in the air.

  “The results will be visible on these instruments here,” Tesla said, then turned toward the Royal Navy officer at the telegraph key. “And also in the early morning sky of London, if you would kindly ask Mr. Churchill and the Sea Lords to step to a window?”

  Another murmur went through the room, and Deryn whispered to the lady boffin, “What’s he on about?”

  “His machine in New York is going to send a signal into the air. Like a radio wave, but far more powerful.” Dr. Barlow leaned closer. “It’s daylight here, so we need instruments to see its effects. But in London the sun isn’t up yet.”

  “You mean, he thinks Goliath can change the sky?”

  The lady boffin nodded silently, and Deryn stared at the stage, where needles of light had begun to flicker from every object. Even Mr. Tesla’s pocket watch was glowing, and a buzzing filled the air, like the bees in the gut of the Leviathan when they needed feeding.

  “The transmission will begin in ten seconds,” Tesla said, then snapped his watch closed. “It will not take long to reach us.”

  “Transmission,” Bovril said, shifting unhappily. The loris began to keen softly, and suddenly the buzzing wasn’t so bad in Deryn’s ear. She reached up to scratch the beastie’s head gratefully.

  For a long moment nothing happened, and Deryn let herself hope that the experiment was failing. The great Tesla would be humiliated, and all this yackum about going to America would end.

  But then the fingers of lightning in the hanging globe grew stronger, flickering across the inside surface of the glass. Then they spun aimlessly for a moment, then turned strong and steady, pointing to the left side of the stage.

  All the other instruments had come to life, filling the theater with light. The glass tubes were filled with rainbows of color, the metal spheres covered with a thousand needles of electricity. The antennae on Klopp’s black box had erupted, sending shoots of lightning climbing up them, only to sputter out in the air. The officer at the telegraph still tapped away, the buttons on his coat alight with tiny sparks.

  Gradually the countless fingers of light began to align, all of them pointed to the left. Deryn could feel the hairs on her head pulling in that direction.

  “North-northeast,” Dr. Barlow muttered. “Directly toward New York, by great circle.”

  “As you can see,” Tesla cried above the buzzing, “I am able to control the currents in this room, even from ten thousand kilometers away. Imagine a thunderstorm brought to heel at such a distance. Or even the electrical charges of the earth’s atmosphere itself, focused and aimed like a searchlight!”

  Bovril was burbling madly. The creature’s fur stood on end, and its eyes were open wider than Deryn had ever seen.

  “Don’t worry, beastie,” she said. “He’s on our side.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Dr. Barlow said.

  Tesla lifted his hands into the air, waving them to and fro. Tendrils of lightning clung to his fingertips, but then went shooting off in the same direction—north-northeast.

  “This is the power of Goliath, that no one on earth, Clanker or Darwinist, can escape. So we all must learn to share the globe, or perish together!”

  He waved a hand, and Klopp cut a master switch. All the lightning disappeared at once, leaving the room in darkness. The silence was quickly filled with gasps and mutterings. Then came a halting applause that slowly grew in strength.
/>   A thousand flickers seemed to hover in the air, burned like sunbeams into Deryn’s vision. Through them she saw Tesla reaching up to grab the hanging wire again. He picked up the simple glass tube, which sprang to life.

  “Any word from the Admiralty?” he asked, silencing the applause.

  The Royal Navy officer stood up from his telegraph, a piece of paper in his quivering hand. “Lord Churchill and the Sea Lords send their greetings, and wish to report that your experiment was a success. Subtle but strange colors appeared in the dawn sky over London.”

  The crowd went dead silent.

  “They offer hearty congratulations.” The officer cleared his throat. “Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen, but the rest of the message is for the captain of the Leviathan.”

  Dr. Barlow leaned back into her seat. “Well, that’s not much of a mystery, is it, Mr. Sharp? It looks as though we’re headed for New York.”

  “New York,” Bovril said thoughtfully, and began to smooth its frizzled fur.

  NINETEEN

  The Pacific Ocean was nearly half the world, as Mr. Rigby liked to say. It certainly looked vast now, spread out beneath the ship like a rippling sheet of silver. The Japanese home islands were less than a day behind them, but already the very notion of land seemed distant and obscure.

  The Leviathan was at full-ahead, making airspeed of sixty miles an hour. The wind blew down the spine at whole gale force, thrumming along the ship’s surface like a surging river.

  “Is it always like this?” Alek shouted over the wind.

  “Aye,” Deryn replied. “Brilliant, isn’t it?”

  Alek just scowled at her. His gloved hands clutched the ratlines in a death grip, and Hoffman’s eyes were wide with fear behind his goggles. The two Clankers had been at full-ahead in their engine pods before, but never out here on the open spine.

  “This is real flying!” Deryn leaned closer. “But if you’re afraid, your princeliness, you can go back down.”

  Alek shook his head. “Hoffman needs a translator.”

  “My German’s good enough,” Deryn said. “I had a whole month of your Clanker jabbering in Istanbul!”

  “Weißt du, was ein Kondensator ist?”

  “That’s easy. You asked me if I know what a Kondensator is!”

  “Well, do you?”

  Deryn frowned. “Well, it’s some sort of… condenser. Obviously.”

  “No,” Alek said. “A capacitor. You just blew up the ship, Dummkopf.”

  She rolled her eyes. It seemed a bit unfair, expecting her to know German words for contraptions she’d never seen before. But she couldn’t argue the point. Hoffman was the engineer best able to follow Tesla’s orders, and only Alek could translate Clanker technical jargon into English.

  This whole trip topside was at the bidding of the great inventor. He wanted a radio antenna stretching the length of the Leviathan, but he didn’t want the ship slowing down. The captain had little choice but to obey—the Admiralty’s orders were to cooperate with Tesla, and to get him to America as quickly as practical.

  Working on the spine at top speed wasn’t impossible, after all, just a bit tricky. And also dead good fun.

  “Take the wire to the bow, Sharp!” Mr. Rigby shouted above the wind. “And before you head back, make sure that end is secure.”

  “I’ll go along,” Alek said.

  “No you won’t, boy!” Mr. Rigby shouted. “It’s too dangerous for princes up there.”

  Alek scowled, but didn’t argue. Up here on the spine, the bosun was the only royalty.

  Deryn waved for Hoffman, then began to make her way toward the great airbeast’s head. Reattaching her safety clip every yard or so made progress slow, and the spool of wire was barking heavy. But the trickiest thing was crawling into a sixty-mile-an-hour headwind.

  Hoffman followed, carrying his tools and a small device that Mr. Tesla had been tinkering with all day. He claimed that with a thousand-foot-long antenna at this altitude, he could detect radio signals from anywhere in the world—even beyond.

  “So he can talk to bloody martians,” Deryn cried. “That’s what we’re up here for!”

  Hoffman didn’t understand, or chose not to comment.

  At full-ahead the bow was bare of life. The fléchette bats were all hidden away in their nooks and crannies, the birds safe in the rookery. Soon the last set of ratlines disappeared, and Deryn crawled still more slowly, lying flat, her palms spread across the rough, hard surface of the airbeast’s bowhead.

  She was glad for the weight of the spool now. At least with sixty pounds of wire strapped to her back, the wind was less likely to blow her into the ocean. She yelled at Hoffman to keep himself flat. At this speed, rushing air could find a grip in any space between a crewman’s body and the airbeast’s skin, like a knife prying up a barnacle, and fling him off into the sea.

  At last Deryn reached the mooring yoke, the heavy harness at the extreme bow of the airship. She snapped her safety clip to it and sighed with relief. Hoffman joined her there, and together they began to secure one end of the wire.

  As they worked in the relentless wind, Deryn found herself wondering if Hoffman knew what she really was. She doubted Volger would have told anyone; the man always kept secrets for his own uses. But what about Alek? He’d promised not to tell anyone that she was a girl, but did that include hiding the truth from his own men?

  When the wire was tied fast and Tesla’s device attached, Hoffman clapped Deryn on the shoulder, muttering a few choice German curses into the wind. She smiled, suddenly certain that he didn’t know.

  Alek might be a Dummkopf sometimes, but he was always true to his word.

  The two started back, unspooling wire as they went, securing it to the ratlines every few yards, to keep it from flapping about. Crawling was much quicker with the wind at their backs, and they soon reached Alek and Mr. Rigby again. Together the four of them headed aft.

  The journey grew easier as they neared the tail. The roar of the Clanker engines lessened with distance, and past the airbeast’s middle its body narrowed, the great hump sheltering them from the wind. When the first spool emptied, they halted. Mr. Rigby and Hoffman spliced it to another five-hundred-foot wire.

  While they waited, Alek turned to Deryn. “Are you excited about seeing America?”

  “A bit,” she said. “But it sounds like an odd place.”

  The United States was another half-Darwinist, half-Clanker country. But unlike Japan, the technologies weren’t happily combined there. The two halves of America had been fighting a vicious civil war when old Darwin had announced his discoveries. The South had adopted Darwinist agricultural techniques, while the industrial North had stayed loyal to the machine. Even fifty years later the nation remained split in two.

  “Isn’t that why people join the Air Service?” Alek asked. “To see the world?”

  Deryn shrugged. “Me, I just wanted to fly.”

  “I’m beginning to see the appeal,” Alek said, smiling. He stood up halfway, the airflow thrashing at his hair and flight suit, and he leaned forward at a precarious angle, letting the force of the wind keep him upright.

  “Blazes, Alek. Sit yourself down!”

  The boy just laughed, splaying his hands like a bird’s wings. Deryn leaned forward to grab the safety harness of his flight suit.

  The bosun looked up from his work. “Quit that skylarking!”

  “Sorry, sir!” Deryn pulled at Alek’s harness. “Come on, you dafty. Sit down!”

  Alek stopped laughing, dropping to one knee. He pointed ahead. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Deryn turned to face the wind. The Leviathan’s nose was tipping down a bit, and the great hill of the whale’s hump seemed to descend before them, revealing the sky ahead.

  “Mr. Rigby!” Deryn called, pointing at the bow. “You should see this, sir.”

  A moment later the bosun swore, and Hoffman let out a low whistle. Ahead of the airship was a towering mass of thunderclouds, fr
amed by a dark wall that stretched across the horizon. It was a huge storm, right in the Leviathan’s path.

  “THE COMING STORM.”

  Deryn caught the scent of rain and felt lightning in the air. “What should we do, Mr. Rigby?”

  “We finish this job, lad, unless we get new orders.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but there’s no way they’d send a message lizard up. Even a hydrogen sniffer would be blown off at this speed!”

  “The captain can always send up a team of riggers, if he wants.” The bosun pointed at the second spool of wire, still full. “In any case we can’t stop now, or we’ll hit that storm with loose wire flying about!”

  Deryn swallowed. “Aye, of course, sir.”

  Hoffman finished off the splice, and the four of them headed toward the tail again. Crawling along the spine was even trickier now. The wind was shifting unpredictably, the currents of the storm mixing with the airflow of the ship’s great speed.

  Deryn felt the membrane moving beneath her, rolling to one side. She glanced over her shoulder at the bow.

  “We’re turning, sir,” she said. “Angling to starboard.”

  Mr. Rigby swore, waving them on.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” Alek asked her. “They’re aiming to avoid the center of the storm.”

  Deryn shook her head. “Hurricanes always spin anticlockwise, so we’re headed into a massive tailwind. We’re not missing the storm—we’re using it to move faster. A brilliant idea from Mr. Tesla, no doubt.”

  “Is that dangerous?”

  “The ship should be fine. It’s us I’m worried about.” Deryn snapped her safety clip down with a vengeance. “If they’d just slow down a bit, we could get this barking job done!”

  “Settle yourself, Mr. Sharp,” came the bosun’s grumble. “We have our orders, and the captain has his.”

  “Aye, sir,” Deryn said, then set herself to crawling as fast as she could.