Leviathan

THIRTY-NINE

“Off your bums, beasties!” Deryn shouted, sending another cluster of bats fluttering into the air.

Mr. Rigby had sent the middies forward to lighten the bow. Something heavy was holding the airship’s nose down. Either that or the forward hydrogen cells were leaking like mad. But the sniffers hadn’t found the slightest rip.

From up here Deryn could see the whole valley, and the view was barking dire. The Clanker walking machine had come to a halt a few miles away. Its scouts stretched in a line across the glacier, waiting for the airship to fly into their guns.

Suddenly the membrane reared beneath Deryn’s feet. The nose had tipped up a bit.

“Did you feel that?” Newkirk yelled from across the bow.

“Aye, something’s working,” she called back. “Keep rousting the beasties!”

Deryn unclipped her safety line and ran toward another cluster of bats, shouting and waving her arms. They turned to stare at her skeptically before scampering—they hadn’t been fed their fléchettes yet.

And they wouldn’t be anytime soon. When the ballast alert had sounded, Mr. Rigby had tossed two whole bags of spikes over the side. If the zeppelins caught up, the Leviathan would be defenseless, her flocks stuffed with plenty of food—but no metal—and now scattered to the winds.

At least the borrowed Clanker engines were working, so far. They were noisy and smelly, and threw out enough sparks to give Deryn the mortal shivers, but blisters could they push the ship along!

The old motivator engines had only nudged the airbeast in the right direction, like a plowman flicking a donkey’s ears. But now that was upside down: The cilia were acting like a rudder, setting the course while the Clanker engines propelled the ship.

Deryn hadn’t realized the whale could be such a clever-boots, adapting to the new engines so quickly. And she’d never seen an airship move this fast. The pursuing zeppelins—some of them small, nippy interceptors— were already falling behind.

But the German land machines still waited dead ahead.

The ship bucked again, and Deryn lost her footing, skidding down the slope. Her foot caught in a ratline, jerking her to a nasty halt.

“Safety first, Mr. Sharp!” Newkirk called, snapping the shoulder straps of his harness like suspenders.

“Pretty smug, for a bum-rag,” Deryn muttered, snapping her clip back onto a ratline. She gave the bats another halfhearted shout, but the ship didn’t seem to need it anymore. The airbeast’s nose was pulling up in starts, another jolt skyward coming every ten seconds or so.

It felt as if they were chucking officers out the bridge front window! But at least the ship was climbing.

Deryn eased forward a bit, until she had a good view of the Germans.

The little scout craft, skittering machines like metal daddy longlegs, were shooting off their mortars. But the barrage was only flares, which weren’t designed to climb very high. They arced a few hundred feet up and burned there uselessly, singeing the air beneath the gondola’s belly.

But now the big eight-legged walker’s guns were elevating, tracking the airship but holding their fire. At the speed the Leviathan was making, they’d only get one shot before she flew past them.

A command whistle began to scream, one long note, pitched almost too high to hear. The all-hands-aft signal!

Deryn turned and ran. On either side of her, sniffers scuttled along the membrane, headed toward the tail. The spine was crowded with men and beasts all running in the same direction, the air gun crews pulling up their weapons to carry them along.

It was a last, desperate attempt to move every squick of weight to the rear of the ship. Done all at once, it would tip the ship’s nose up, driving her still higher into the air.

Halfway back, Deryn saw flickers on the snow below, and glanced over her shoulder. The muzzles of the walker’s guns were blazing, smoke billowing out in clouds.

Before the rumble even reached her ears, the airship bucked again—harder this time, as if someone had tossed a grand piano overboard. The nose flew up, hiding Deryn’s view of the German walker, and the deck rolled hard to starboard. Whatever they’d tossed away, it had been on the port side.

She heard the tardy thunder of the guns then, and shells started arcing past. They were huge incendiaries, igniting the sky like gouts of frozen lightning.

One flew past so near that Deryn felt its heat on her cheeks and forehead. The air was instantly burned dry, her eyes forced half shut by the shell’s fury. The light from the flaming missiles threw the shadows of men and beasts across the membrane, stretched and misshapen by the airship’s curves.

But the entire barrage was flying too far to port.

The sudden loss of weight, whatever it had been, had rolled the airship out of the way just in time. And the riggers’ work over the last few days had held—not a squick of hydrogen was flaring from the skin.

But Deryn kept running for the ship’s tail, as did the rest of the topside crew. Not just to pull the ship up harder, but to see behind them.

There it was again, the eight-legged walker, now sliding into the distance astern. Its guns were swiveling, trying to spin around and fire once more. But the Leviathan’s new Clanker engines were carrying her away too fast.

By the time the guns blazed again, the burning shells fell hundreds of feet short. They dropped into the snow and expended their anger there, the walking machines vanishing behind a veil of steam.

Deryn joined the cheer that rose up along the spine. The hydrogen sniffers howled along, half mad from all the ruckus.

Newkirk appeared, panting and covered with sweat, and clapped her on the shoulder. “Blistering good fight! Eh, Mr. Sharp?”

“Aye, it was. I just hope it’s over.”

She raised her field glasses to gander at the zeppelins, now silhouetted by the setting sun. They’d fallen still farther behind, hopelessly outmatched by the Stormwalker engines.

“They’ll never catch up now,” she said. “Not with night falling.”

“THE HERKULES’ SHELLS GO WIDE.”

“But I thought those Predators were fast!”

“Aye, they are. But we’re faster, now that we’ve got those engines on us.”

“But haven’t they got Clanker engines too?” Newkirk asked.

Deryn frowned, looking down at the Leviathan’s flanks. The cilia were stirring madly, weaving the airflow around the ship, somehow adding the currents of the sky to the raw power of the engines.

“We’re something different now,” she said. “A little of us and a little of them.”

Newkirk thought a moment, then hmphed and clapped her on the back again. “Well, frankly, Mr. Sharp, I don’t care if the kaiser himself gives us a push, as long as it gets us clear of this iceberg.”

“Glacier,” Deryn said. “But you’re right—it’s good to be flying again.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath of freezing air, feeling the strange new thrum of the membrane beneath her boots.

Already, her air sense told her, the beast was veering south, setting course for the Mediterranean. The zeppelins behind were an afterthought; the Ottoman Empire lay ahead.

Whatever sort of tangled crossbreed the Clankers had made her into, the Leviathan had survived.