Behemoth

TWENTY-FOUR

Two miles hadn’t looked very far on the map, but the real Gallipoli was a different matter.

The peninsula was crisscrossed by high steep-sided ridges, as if mountains of limestone had been raked to pieces by giant claws. The valleys between were choked with dry, brittle undergrowth. And whenever Deryn and her party rested, ants made their way out of the sandy ground to torment their ankles.

To make things worse, the Royal Navy’s maps of Gallipoli were useless, showing only a fraction of the ridgelines and overgrown ravines. Deryn kept an eye on her compass and on the stars overhead, but the tangled geography still forced her into tortured zigzags.

By the time they reached the other side of the peninsula, it was after midnight.

“I reckon this has to be Kilye Niman, sir,” Spencer said, dropping his heavy pack to the ground.

Deryn nodded, peering down at the beach through her field glasses. Two lines of buoys stretched across the narrow strait, bobbing gently on the waves. The giant metal barrels were covered with cruel-looking barbs and phosphorous bombs. Hanging unseen beneath them would be the kraken nets, a thick lattice of metal cables threaded with more spikes and explosives.

Rising from the water at either end of the nets were tall towers, their searchlights sweeping slowly across the water. Deryn made a quick sketch of the fortifications she could see—at least a score of twelve-inch guns aiming down from the cliffs, all sheltered in bunkers cut deep into the limestone.

Impossible for ships to get past, but the behemoth could slip by beneath the water’s surface.

“I reckon the navy will owe us a few favors after this, sir,” said Robins.

“Aye, but it’s the Russians who’ll really thank us,” Deryn said, spotting a cargo ship waiting for daylight to arrive so it could sail past the nets. “This is their lifeline.”

When she’d told Volger about the Goeben and the Breslau, he’d agreed that the Germans’ ultimate plan was to close The Straits. Starving the Russian army’s fighting bears was worth giving the sultan a pair of ironclads.

She pulled the diving gear from their packs, and knelt in the brush to put the suit together. It was a Spottiswoode Rebreather, the first underwater apparatus created from fabricated creatures. The suit had been woven from salamander skin and tortoise shell. The rebreather itself was practically a living creature, a set of fabricated gills that had to be kept wet even in storage.

In short, the suit was a Monkey Luddite’s nightmare. Deryn felt a squick of jitters herself as she crawled inside, the wrinkled skin of reptiles slithering over her own. At least it made Spencer and Robins nervous too; they were happy to turn away as she put it on. Even as dark as it was, it would have been tricky stripping down to her skivvies in front of two airmen.

When Deryn was ready, she and Spencer crept down to the beach, leaving Robins to guard the packs. At the water’s edge the tides had carved a yard-high bank of sand to hide behind. They waited there for the searchlights to sweep past, then slapped across the luminous wet sand of the beach, wading into the cool salt water of the strait.

“Here you go, sir,” Spencer said, handing her the rebreather. “I’ll stay right here by the water.”

“Just stay hidden.” Deryn dipped her goggles and strapped them on. “If I’m away longer than three hours, go back and see to Matthews before it’s light. I can get back on my own.”

“Aye, sir.” Spencer saluted and crept back to the shadows. When he was out of sight, Deryn finally unwrapped the glass cases of vitriolic barnacles. As per the captain’s orders, she hadn’t let the men catch even a glimpse of them.

The searchlight was sweeping around again, and she sank down to her neck, pressing the rebreather to her mouth.

Just as in Dr. Busk’s office a few hours before, the feeling was uncanny and a bit horrid. The tendrils of the beastie crept into her mouth, seeking a source of carbon dioxide. A fishy taste covered her tongue, and the air she breathed turned warm and salty, like in the Leviathan’s galley when the cooks were frying up anchovies.

Deryn bent her knees, dropping beneath the surface.

The searchlight flickered past overhead, and then it was very dark. She squatted on the sand for a moment, forcing herself to take slow and even breaths.

When she’d stopped shivering from the cold, Deryn pushed out toward the first line of nets, staying just beneath the surface. She’d swum in the ocean plenty of times, but never at night. The blackness around her seemed full of huge shapes, and the strange taste of the rebreather was a constant reminder that she didn’t belong in this cold and inky realm. She remembered her first sea training exercise aboard the Leviathan, watching a kraken crush a wooden schooner into matchsticks.

But there would be no krakens in this strait, not yet. This was Clanker territory, where the worst beasties were sharks and jellyfish, neither of which could harm her through the Spottiswoode armor.

After a long swim she reached one of the buoys, which bobbed in the water like a spiky metal hedgehog. Deryn took hold of one of the spurs gingerly. They were sharp enough to puncture kraken skin, and tipped with phosphorous bombs that would automatically ignite when the beastie tried to struggle free.

She clung there, resting before heading down. The vitriolic barnacles had to be placed deep beneath the waterline, so the colony wouldn’t gobble up the buoys and give away their presence too soon.

When Deryn had caught her breath, she let herself sink, descending until the last glimmer of the waning moon disappeared above. The net was easy to find even in the blackness, its cables as thick as her arm and studded with spurs the size of boat hooks. But it was tricky opening the glass cases while blind and wearing thick gloves of salamander skin, and it took Deryn long minutes to deposit six of the wee beasties a few feet apart. They had to be close enough to create a colony, Dr. Barlow had explained, but not so close that the fighting would start right away.

Deryn kicked her way back to the surface, partly to orient herself and partly to recover from the cold of the deeper water. She stared tiredly down the line of buoys stretching across the half mile to the other shore. The job would take a dozen more dives, at least.

It was going to be a long, cold night.

Her fingers were dead numb by the time the last barnacle was in place. The cold had seeped through the salamander skin and deep into her bones, and Deryn realized that this was her second lost night of sleep in three days.

On top of the cold and her exhaustion, the rebreather seemed to be slowly sucking the life from her. It felt as though she hadn’t had a proper gulp of air since its tendrils had crept into her mouth. So when she came up for the last time, Deryn decided to risk the searchlights and swim back on the surface.

The rebreather came out a bit stickily, like pulling toffee stuck between her teeth. But it was worth a moment of irksomeness to taste the pure night air again. She headed back, ducking low in the water whenever the searchlights swung round.

Halfway back to shore, the sharp slap of a gunshot rolled across the strait.

Deryn’s exhaustion vanished in a flash, and she sank down until her eyes were just above the surface. A large black shape was lumbering across the sand, perhaps twenty yards from where she’d left Spencer waiting.

It was a walker, a machine in the form of a scorpion, with six legs and two grasping claws in front. The long tail curled up into the air, the beam of a spotlight flaring from its tip.

Deryn swam closer, hearing shouts and another gunshot. The spotlight was trained on a lone figure in a British flight suit, while a dozen or so men scrambled across the sand in pursuit. The searchlight from the nearest tower left its slow path and swung toward the beach, forcing Deryn underwater again.

She stuffed the rebreather back into her mouth, then swam closer beneath the surface, her heart pounding in her ears. One of her men had obviously been caught, but perhaps the other was still hidden. If she could find him, they could swim away, sharing the rebreather between them.

A few yards from the beach, Deryn lifted her head above the water, letting herself rise and fall with the swell of the waves. Her eyes swept the shadows behind the shelf of sand, but she saw no one hidden there. She crawled closer, as slow as some primordial beastie taking its first steps on land.

The scorpion’s spotlight shifted closer to the tree line, revealing another figure in a flight suit lying on the ground. Two Ottoman soldiers stood nearby, watching the downed man with their rifles pointed at him.

Deryn swore silently—both her men had been captured. She clung to the darkness behind the shelf of sand, wondering what to do. The walker was moving now, making the sand tremble beneath her knees. How was she meant to take on a giant scorpion and a score of soldiers with nothing but a rigger’s knife?

She poked her head up. The two Ottomans were lifting the downed man now, helping him up from the sand. He was limping on his right foot.…

Deryn frowned. That was Matthews, the man she’d left at the Sphinx. The Ottomans must have captured him. Had he led them here? Or had the Ottomans simply guessed that the kraken nets were their objective?

And where was her third man?

Then the spotlight shifted again, and machine-gun fire erupted from the tip of the scorpion’s tail, raking the trees along the beach. The branches thrashed madly in the hail of bullets, and sand sprayed into the air.

Finally the machine gun went silent, and a group of Ottoman soldiers charged into the brush. A moment later they dragged something out. It was a body, motionless and as white as a sheet except for the red stains on the flight suit.

Deryn swallowed. Her first command had been killed and captured down to the last man.

With a noisy grinding of gears, the scorpion moved closer to the dead body. One of its massive front claws dug into the sand, then came up, lifting the lifeless form into the air. The Ottomans were taking her men somewhere, probably to interrogate the survivors and take a closer look at their uniforms and equipment.

They would soon guess that the landing party had come from the Leviathan, even if they hadn’t forced it out of Matthews already. But her men knew nothing about the vitriolic barnacles, and even if the Ottomans inspected the nets, they wouldn’t notice a few more beasties among the millions already living along the miles of cable.

Hopefully they would think this had been a simple reconnaissance mission, and an utter failure. The Ottomans would probably lodge a protest with the Leviathan’s captain, but as far as they knew, this mission had not been an act of war. Deryn was the only one who could explain otherwise.

She had to get away from here, or risk everything. There could be no heroic attempt to rescue her men, and no heading back to the Sphinx now either. The Ottomans would be patrolling the whole peninsula for weeks to come.

There was only one place to go.

Deryn stared back out across the black water, to where the cargo ship she’d seen earlier waited to transit the strait. Once the sun rose, it would head for Istanbul.

“Alek,” she said softly, and slipped back into the sea.