Leviathan

ELEVEN

Even though Mr. Rigby had said not to, Deryn Sharp looked down.

A thousand feet below, the sea was in motion. Huge waves rolled across the surface, the wind tearing white moonlit spray from their peaks. And yet up here, clinging to the Leviathan’s flank in the dark, the wind was still. Just like in the airflow diagrams, a layer of calm wrapped around the huge beastie.

Calm or not, Deryn’s fingers clutched the rigging tighter as she gazed at the sea. It looked cold and wet down there. And, as Mr. Rigby had pointed out many times over the last fortnight, the water’s surface was as hard as stone if you were falling fast enough.

Tiny cilia pulsed and rippled through the ropes, tickling her fingers. Deryn slipped one hand free and pressed her palm against the beast’s warmth. The membrane felt taut and healthy, with no whiff of hydrogen leaking out.

“Taking a rest, Mr. Sharp?” called Rigby. “We’re only halfway up.”

“Just listening, sir,” she answered. The older officers said the hum of the membrane could tell you everything about an airship. The Leviathan’s skin vibrated with the thrumming of the engines, the shufflings of ballast lizards inside, even the voices of the crew around her.

“Dawdling, you mean,” the bosun shouted. “This is a combat drill! Get climbing, Mr. Sharp!”

“Yes, sir!” she replied, though there wasn’t much point in rushing. The other five middies were still behind her. They were the ones dawdling, pausing to clip their safety harnesses to the ratlines every few feet. Deryn climbed free, like the older riggers, except when she was swinging from the airbeast’s underside—

Ventral side, she corrected herself—the opposite of dorsal. The Air Service hated regular English. Walls were “bulkheads,” the dining room was a “mess,” and climbing ropes were “ratlines.” The Service even had different words for “left” and “right,” which seemed to be going a bit far.

Deryn hooked the heel of her boot into the ratlines and pushed herself up again, the feed bag heavy across her shoulder, sweat running down her back. Her arms weren’t as strong as the other middies’, but she’d learned to climb with her legs. And maybe she had been resting, just a squick.

A message lizard scampered past her, its sucker-feet tugging at the membrane like fingers caught in taffy. It didn’t stop to squawk orders at the lowly midshipmen, but flitted past on its way up to the spine. The whole ship was on combat alert, the ratlines swaying with scuttling crew, the night air full of fabricated birds.

In the distance Deryn could make out lights against the dark sea. The H.M.S. Gorgon was a Royal Navy ship, a kraken tender that had tonight’s practice target in tow.

Mr. Rigby must have seen it too, because he shouted, “Keep moving, you sods! The bats are waiting for their breakfast!”

Deryn gritted her teeth, reached for the next rope— that’s a ratline, you sod!—and pulled as hard as she could.

The middy’s test, of course, had been easy.

Service regulations said the test was supposed to be taken on the ground, but Deryn had begged shamelessly, in order to become a temporary middy on the ship. Her third day aboard the Leviathan, the ship’s officers had relented. With the towers of Paris drifting past the windows, she’d blazed through a few sextant readings, a dozen strings of signal flags to decode, and map reading exercises that Da had taught her ages ago. Even the sour-faced bosun, Mr. Rigby, had shown a glimmer of admiration.

Since the test, though, Deryn’s smugness had faded a bit. It turned out she didn’t know everything about airships. Not yet, anyway.

Every day the bosun called the Leviathan’s young middies to the ship’s wardroom for a lecture. Mostly it was airmanship: navigation, fuel consumption, weather predicting, and endless knots and command whistle tunes to learn. They’d sketched the airship’s anatomy so often that Deryn knew its innards as well as she knew the streets of Glasgow. On lucky days it was military history: the battles of Nelson, the theories of Fisher, the tactics of airbeast against surface ships and land forces. Some days they played out tabletop battles against the lifeless zeppelins and aeroplanes of the kaiser.

But Deryn’s favorite lectures were when the boffins explained natural philosophy. How old Darwin had figured out how to weave new species from the old, pulling out the tiny threads of life and tangling them together under a microscope. How evolution had squeezed a copy of Deryn’s own life chain into every cell of her body. How umpteen different beasties made up the Leviathan—from the microscopic hydrogen-farting bacteria in its belly to the great harnessed whale. How the airship’s creatures, like the rest of Nature, were always struggling among themselves in messy, snarling equilibrium.

The bosun’s lectures were merely a fraction of what she had to cram into her attic. Every time another airship flew past, the middies scrambled to the signals deck to read the messages strung on distant fluttering flags. Six words a minute without error, or you were in for long hours of duty in the gastric regions. Every hour they ran drills to check the Leviathan’s altitude, firing an air gun and timing the echo from the sea, or dropping a glowing bottle of phosphorescent algae and timing how long till it shattered. Deryn had learned to reckon in a squick how many seconds an object took to plummet any distance from a hundred feet to two miles.

But the strangest thing was doing it all as a boy.

Jaspert had been right: Her diddies weren’t the tricky part. Water was heavy, so bathing on an airship was done quick with rags and a pail. And the toilets aboard the Leviathan (“heads” in Service-speak) were in the dark gastric channel, which carried off clart to turn it into ballast and hydrogen. So hiding her body was easy… . It was her brain she’d had to shift.

Deryn had always reckoned herself a tomboy, between Jaspert’s bullying and Da’s balloon training. But running with the other middies was more than just punch-ups and tying knots—it was like joining a pack of dogs. They jostled and banged for the best seats at the middies’ mess table. They taunted each other over signal reading and navigation scores, and whom the officers had complimented that day. They endlessly competed to see who could spit farther, drink rum faster, or belch the loudest.

It was bloody exhausting, being a boy.

Not that all of it was bad. Her airman’s uniform was miles better than any girl’s clothes. The boots clomped gloriously as she stormed to signals practice or firefighting drills, and the jacket had a dozen pockets, including special compartments for her command whistle and rigging knife. And Deryn didn’t mind the constant practice in useful skills like knife throwing, swearing, and not showing pain when punched.

But how did boys keep this up their whole barking lives?

Deryn eased the feed bag from her sore shoulders. For once she’d reached the airship’s spine ahead of the others, and could take a moment’s rest.

“Dawdling again, Mr. Sharp?” a voice called.

Deryn turned to see Midshipman Newkirk climbing into view over the curve of the Leviathan, his rubber-soled shoes squeaking. There were no waving cilia up here, just hard dorsal scales for mounting winches and guns.

She called back, “Just waiting for you to catch up, Mr. Newkirk.”

It always felt odd calling the other boys “mister.” Newkirk still had plooks on his face and hardly knew how to tie his necktie. But middies were supposed to put on airs like proper officers.

When he reached the spine, Newkirk dropped his feed bag and grinned. “Mr. Rigby’s still miles back.”

“Aye,” Deryn said. “He can’t call us dawdlers now.”

They stood there for a moment, panting and taking in the view.

The topside of the airbeast was alive with activity. The ratlines flickered with electric torches and glowworms, and Deryn felt the membrane tremble from distant footsteps. She closed her eyes, trying to feel the airship’s totality, its hundred species tangling to make one vast organism.

“Barking brilliant up here,” Newkirk murmured.

Deryn nodded. These last two weeks she’d volunteered for open-air duty whenever possible. Being dorsal was real flying—the wind in her face, and sky in all directions—as prized as her hours up in Da’s balloons.

A squad of duty riggers rushed by, two hydrogen sniffers straining on their leashes as they searched for leaks in the membrane. One snuffled Newkirk’s hand as it passed, and he let out a squeak.

The riggers laughed, and Deryn joined in.

“Shall I call a medic, Mr. Newkirk?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he snapped, staring at his hand suspiciously. Newkirk’s mum was a Monkey Luddite, and he’d inherited a nervous stomach for fabrications. Why he’d volunteered to serve on a mad bestiary like the Leviathan was a flat-out mystery. “I just don’t like those six-legged beasties.”

“They’re nothing to be scared of, Mr. Newkirk.”

“Get stuffed, Mr. Sharp,” he muttered, hoisting his feed bag. “Come on. Rigby’s right behind us now.”

Deryn groaned. Her aching muscles could’ve done with another minute’s rest. But she’d laughed at Newkirk, so the endless competition was on again. She hoisted her feed bag and followed him toward the bow.

Barking hard work, being a boy.