Steampunk World

The Leviathan of Trincomalee Lucy A. Snyder

Thilini Rothschild saw the green fireball streaking across the sky above the coconut palms before her father did. “Look, Papa!”

“Why, that’s an extraordinary meteor! I’ve never seen one of such color.” He peered out at the night sky through his workshop window. “Good thing that will crash far out in the Indian Ocean and not in a city!”

Thilini gazed at the fireball’s sparkling emerald tail, entranced and yet feeling a bit crestfallen. “I hoped it was falling star so I could wish upon it.”

“Why, I’m sure a fine meteor such as that is just as wish-worthy!”

So she closed her eyes and thought, I wish for an adventure!

Three years later, Thilini had forgotten all about the meteor. She woke before the first crows of her mother’s junglefowl, wound on her favorite green sari, and slipped out to the kitchen to gather some cold chickpea fritters and jackfruit in a basket. Her father would still be at his workshop by the harbor; no doubt he’d been working on his wireless telegraph machine all night. He’d probably forgotten to eat.

Excitement jittered in her stomach. Today was the day the Southwind would return, her hold creaking with goods. If the special gears and glass panels her father had commissioned from his partners in Switzerland arrived with it, that meant they might finally be able to assemble the submarine prototype she and her father had been working on for the past year. Thilini couldn’t wait to see the ocean from beneath the waves.

She hefted the reed basket over one shoulder, slipped into the sandals her mother made her leave by the front door, and ran down the wagon-rutted road to the harbor shops. To her surprise, a stout, balding man was standing in the shop, arms crossed. Her father frowned up at him from his workbench, his eyes shadowed in the flickering candlelight. Biting her lip, she pushed open the front door, quietly so the bells wouldn’t jingle.

“You’re wasting your talents here,” the stranger lectured in German. “You need to go back to Europe. Or at least come to our estate in Kandy.”

Her father pulled off his wire-framed round glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. His long curly brown hair had come loose from its queue. He looked exhausted. “I’m fine, Martin. The clean air here suits me more than the noise and stink of Frankfurt or London.”

He looked past Martin and his eyes focused on Thilini.

“Ah, you brought breakfast?” he asked her in Tamil.

“Yes, Papa. Who is this?”

“Your uncle Martin,” he continued, still speaking in her native language. “Pay him and his unpleasantness no mind.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“‘Attān’?” Martin said, repeating her endearment, staring at Thilini. Recognition seemed to dawn; he grimaced in disgust. He stared back down at her father, eyebrows raised. “Are you this little pickaninny’s sire?”

Her father turned red as a berry, his fists clenching in his lap. “I’ll not have you speak about my daughter in such a debased fashion.”

“Debased?” Martin exclaimed. “It is you who have debased our family! Rothschilds dance in the courts of every ruler in Europe, and yet here you are, tinkering in the sand, breeding like a mongrel with the first brown bitch who wiggles her tail at you.”

It was Thilini’s turn to feel the blood rise in her face. She could bear insults to herself with all the quiet grace her parents had taught her, but she would not stand by while this stranger spoke so badly of her mother. But her father responded before she could open her mouth.

“I have lived upon five continents.” Her father’s voice shook with rage. “And Thilini’s mother is the finest woman I have ever met. None of the simpering court ladies you and your brothers deemed so suitable as matches have half the beauty, intelligence, or courage of my dear Anula.”

“Indeed,” Thilini replied in her best German. “If my mother is such a poor match for my father, I should be a useless idiot, should I not? So, test me. Ask me any question you like, in any language you like.”

Martin was clearly surprised she knew German at all. “Who’s the tsar of Russia?”

“Alexander the Third.”

“And the President of the United States?”

“Grover Cleveland. Please, do ask me something difficult, dear Uncle.”

Martin frowned. “What’s the square root of eighty-one?” he asked in French.

“Nine,” she replied in English.

“What are the components of black powder?” he asked in German.

“Sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter,” she replied in French. “I can make you some if you like. The recipe is easier than my mother’s fish soup.”

“Why doesn’t your father’s wireless telegraphy machine work?”

She smiled at him. “And now you’re fishing for trade secrets, Uncle.”

Her uncle stared at her. “How old are you?”

“I shall be thirteen in two months.”

After Martin left, her father fussed at her a bit for speaking so boldly to her uncle, but clearly he was proud of her. They ate the breakfast she brought, and then he sent her down to the docks with their portable telegraph prototype. It was based on some of the correspondences he’d had with the American inventor Brooks. The device almost worked, but the power supplies they’d tried were insufficient for the components.

“I’m sure the new electrochemical cells will do the trick. It’s just a matter of fine-tuning the equipment,” he said as he loaded the sixty-pound rig onto her little palmwood wagon.

“Can we make it smaller?” she asked doubtfully.

He laughed. “Reliability first. Miniaturization second.”

Thilini hauled the wagon down to the docks and took up a vantage point where she could keep watch for the tall sails of the Southwind. Occasionally, part of a telegraph would come through; she’d transcribe the message and jot down the time in her notebook. The first time they’d gotten anything at all to transmit and be received through thin air, they’d both been overjoyed. But getting an entire message to go through over distances more than ten feet or so had proved a confoundingly difficult challenge.

Science, she mused, involved an awful lot of waiting and doing-over.

Her reverie was broken by the shouts of men. She stood. The Southwind had sailed into view … but she was too low in the sea, and listing so far to one side she looked in danger of capsizing. Had the ship broken its hull on a coral reef?

“She’s taking on water fast!” the stevedore shouted. “Every man with a boat, get out there! We need to get that cargo off!”

Two hours later, Thilini stood with her father as two deeply tanned dockworkers pulled the precious Swiss crates from the deck of a patamar that had been pressed into rescue duty. The crates were so waterlogged that she would not have been surprised to hear fish flopping inside them. The glass would be fine, provided it had not been mishandled, but she cringed at the corrosion the seawater would wreak on the delicate gears if they were not carefully rinsed, dried, and re-oiled.

“Please, get these back to my shop as quickly as you can,” her father told the men of the hired wagon.

“Yes, Herr Rothschild.” They quickly set to loading up the crates.

The stevedore approached them, shaking his head. He was a small, wiry man who looked Tamil but he wore a Catholic rosary over his loose cotton shirt and had a slight Portuguese accent. “A third of the cargo lost, and five sailors sent to the Almighty. The ship can’t be repaired in the water, so we need to find some way to haul ‘er in to dry-dock before she sinks. And I ain’t convinced she won’t just sink.”

“Was it a reef?” Thilini asked.

“If only!” the stevedore replied. “We could dodge a reef, but this … well, come see. Perhaps your papa can make heads or tails of this deviltry.”

Further down, another boat had come in bearing a broken plank from the hull. Not broken, she realized. Something had bitten it in half! Imbedded in the stout English timber was a shark’s tooth of far greater size than any she’d imagined. The biggest one she’d seen until then was about the size of a gold sovereign coin.

“Mein gott,” her father breathed. He laid his hand beside the protruding tooth; it was larger than his palm and outstretched fingers. “What leviathan could grow such a fang? Some type of cachalot whale?”

“Carcharodon carcharias,” came a voice behind them.

Thilini turned. Trincomalee’s resident naturalist, the retired physician Edward Kelart, was gazing at the tooth with grave concern. He leaned heavily against his silver-filigreed cane, which he’d needed to use ever since a hard voyage to England had nearly killed him two decades before.

“That tooth’s far too large to come from a great white shark,” her father countered.

“Indeed,” Dr. Kelart said. “But the tooth shape is distinct, and unmistakable. If it is not some ancient great white grown to immense size, it is a close cousin.”

The imported glass was in fine shape, and Thilini and her father were able to clean all the gears they needed for their submersible prototype. In just a few months, they had his latest invention ready to test in the waters. The gleaming fifteen-foot submarine was skinned in copper and steel, courtesy of the fine craftsmanship of the local metal smiths. The sub was sleek as a dolphin, with round fore and aft windows and triangular fins for stability. Her father’s patented, self-contained steam engine powered the screw-shaped propellers at the rear of the sub and electric headlights.

“This is just a miniature version of what I propose to build later,” her father remarked to the stevedore, who helped them guide the sub down the wooden ramp into the water. “We must test every aspect of the craft, of course.”

“You’re letting the girl pilot this thing?” Astonishment was plain on the stevedore’s face.

Thilini ignored him and focused on buttoning up her black rubber suit. The feel of the tight material against her legs was strange; she was used to airy saris and sarongs, but skirts would drag her down in the water if she needed to abandon ship. She hoped the coolness of the sea would help counteract the heat from the steam engine. Otherwise, she’d be stewed like a whiting in a parchment bag before her three hours of air were depleted.

“She knows every rivet and gear of this craft, and she is a far better swimmer than I,” her father said. “Further, we had to build the sub at such a limited scale that I can scarcely fit in it myself!”

The men helped her squeeze through the top hatch of the sub.

“Don’t go out of the shallows at first, and if the craft is sound, don’t take her farther than Pigeon Island,” her father admonished.

“I won’t,” she promised.

They sealed the hatch above her, and moments later the sub lurched as the men pushed it into the water. Thilini said a quick prayer and pulled the lever to start the steam engine. The whole craft shook as the fire ignited in the belly of the sub and the boiler began to steam. She busied herself checking pressure and temperature gauges, then went around the inside of the craft, checking all the brass and copper pipe fittings and wall panels for leaks.

After a half-hour, she was certain the engine was operating as expected and the craft was watertight. She settled in the leather-padded pilot’s chair and cautiously steered the craft toward Pigeon Island.

The undersea coral reefs were breathtakingly beautiful; Thilini had seen plenty of brightly-colored fish pulled up by fishermen, but she had never imagined the coral itself would be such a gorgeous wonderland. She felt as though she had been transported to an entirely different world, and that she was not traveling through water but soaring above a dazzling forest on a planet lit by a foreign star.

A pod of curious porpoises swam along next to her craft. Their squeals and clicks echoed through the cabin. The sea mammals seemed to smile at her through the windows, and she could not help but smile back at them as they somersaulted and cavorted.

One porpoise paused and let out a squeal. She and her sisters swam together and huddled with their snouts pointed at each other for a moment; Thilini had the impression they were urgently discussing something. Then they broke away from the sub, swimming fast toward the shallows, all traces of playfulness gone.

What had alarmed them? She peered out through the front window into the deeper water beyond the island. And there swam a lone whale. Not a great blue whale, but a younger toothy orca she guessed was not much longer than the five yards of her submarine. No doubt he was what frightened off her cetacean friends.

I should like to see a whale up close, she thought. She’d seen plenty of dead whales brought to the harbor, but that wasn’t nearly the same as seeing one in its natural world. The engine is fine; a quick look won’t hurt anything.

She pushed the craft forward, gently, to prevent frightening the creature. It was certainly big enough to ram the submarine if it deemed her a threat. The orca turned and gazed at her curiously when she was about a hundred yards away. She stopped the craft, holding her breath, hoping the creature was not territorial.

Suddenly, a huge dark shape torpedoed up from the murky depths below the orca. Thilini saw a jagged maw as wide as her craft open in a flash, sucking the orca down into it, and close with a sickening crack of bone. The force of the bite cut the orca right in two. Blood stained the water in scarlet clouds.

The leviathan shark wolfed the orca down in two gulps, and then righted itself to face the submarine. It looked roughly like the great whites the fishermen had speared in the shallows, but this creature’s skin about its head and jaws was armored with thick denticle scales; its snout looked more like a medieval battering ram. And this monster was far, far larger than any shark she’d ever seen. It was easily four times the length of her submarine.

The monstrous creature began to swim toward her.

Thilini shrieked and pulled the sub around, shoving the steam engine into full speed. She ignored the groaning of the boiler and the rattling of metal as she forced the sub faster and faster, convinced the dire monster was right behind, jaws opening, ready to snap the sub in two.

In her panic, she grounded the sub in the shallows several hundred yards north of the harbor. She killed the engine, got the hatch open with numb, shaking hands, and splashed to land where she collapsed on the sand and gave in to her desire to weep.

Herr Rothschild believed his daughter’s story straight away. But since she was merely a girl and deemed subject to frivolous flights of fancy, most others were skeptical and, despite the evidence from the Southwind, claimed she’d been frightened by a common cachalot whale or even a mere barracuda.

But in the following week, an East India Company cargo ship was attacked and most of the crew drowned or eaten. And the week after that, they got word of similar disastrous attacks on ships near Colombo and Batticaloa. More and more people heard and believed Thilini’s account of the leviathan shark; townsfolk and visiting officials asked her to tell her story so many times that the repetition almost sapped the terror from her memory. Almost. The terrible shark swam through nightmarish seas in her mind when she tried to sleep, and she’d start awake, feeling herself drowning, feeling those awful teeth closing down on her body.

“Our family has lost three ships,” her Uncle Martin fretted one day. “I cannot take my tea to Europe! The sailors fear this monster like nothing else. We must kill the beast, or drive it away, or else we will be paupers!”

“What would you have me do?” her father asked.

“I would have you build a mighty version of the submersible you tested. Something armed with a powerful harpoon, and a hull built to withstand the pressures of the depths. I would have you build a craft fit to hunt this leviathan down and kill it in its lair.”

“If it’s a harpoon you need, why not gird a whaling ship in iron and send her and her crew after the shark?”

Uncle Martin shook his head. “The Bombay and British navies have tried that very thing, to no avail. I read survivor’s reports; only the head of the shark is visible during its attack, and that part is so well-armored that even harpoons fired from cannons cannot harm it.”

“What about a harpoon down its gullet?” her father asked.

“No man who has tried such a shot has lived. The naturalists speculate that the shark may have a softer underbelly that is vulnerable, but there is no way to reach it from the surface of the sea.”

“What about explosives?” Thilini asked.

“That, too, has been tried,” her uncle replied gravely, “with no better result.”

He turned to her father. “We need a working version of your machine.”

Her father paused, chewing on a corner of his moustache thoughtfully. “I could build a submarine such as you describe, but I haven’t the materials or craftsmen to attempt it.”

“I will get you anything you need. Anything at all. I have spoken to officers in the British Navy, and they have agreed to fund your enterprise. Glass, metals, workers … tell me what you need and I shall get it to you even if I have to strip every estate in Kandy for materials and manpower. We can bring in specialists from Europe by airship.”

“All right, then,” her father replied. “If it’s a fearsome submersible you want, then that’s what you shall get.”

Thilini and her father put their heads together for several days to figure out what they’d need to build the new craft. Herr Rothschild presented their list to his brother; within days carpenters, welders and masons arrived by balloon to Trincomalee from all around Ceylon to build a fabrication complex at the northern end of the harbor.

Her father hired foremen from a group of engineers his brother recruited, and everyone went to work. Once the construction was underway, it was non-stop. Thilini feared that her father might abandon her now that he had so many educated men at his beck and call, but he kept her close, showing her every engineering novelty his new staff had to show him and every interesting failure.

Further, he introduced her to a brilliant young Serbian engineer named Nikola Tesla, fresh from Edison’s laboratory, who helped her solve the problems with their wireless telegraph within a month. She went home to bathe, bolt down quick meals and catch naps away from the noise of the machinery, but otherwise she stayed in the factory and worked and studied and listened and worked some more.

Nine months after Martin Rothschild demanded her construction, the HMS Makara was ready. The completed submarine measured 120 feet in length and weighed over 80 tons. The cabin was equipped with compressed air and chemical scrubbers to enable the craft to stay under for up to five days at a time, though they hoped the shark could be found much sooner than that.

Thilini’s mother was dead-set against her daughter joining the crew and scolded her husband mightily when she found out about the plan to include the girl as the sub’s telegraph operator.

“Isn’t it bad enough you let her go out into the water in the first place by herself?” her mother asked.

“She’s a brave girl, and she’s fine,” her father replied.

“Fine? She’s not fine! She’s barely slept since she saw that monster! I can hear her cry out at night.”

“Mama, listen —” Thilini began.

But her mother carried on: “I will not have you take my daughter to her death in that metal casket of yours!”

“We have tested it, over and over. The submarine is as safe as any seagoing vessel.”

“She’s too young for such things!”

“Too young?” her father replied. “Girls her age are already celebrating their weddings; I saw a procession for one girl just this afternoon! How many of them will soon be pregnant, and dying in childbirth next year? Or strangled or beaten by raging drunken husbands who have forgotten their wedding vows? There are so many ways for a girl to die in this world, my dear, and you have seen them all. How many friends did you lose, eh?”

Her mother was silent at that, her eyes downcast. “I lost far too many.”

“I do not want to die, and I certainly do not want our child to die,” he replied. “But if the worst happens on this venture, her name will be written down alongside mine in the history books. Men years from now will know who she was and what she tried to help us do. And other Tamil girls will hear her tale, and maybe some of them will realize that they, too, could be people of importance in the world.”

“Mama,” Thilini said. “I am afraid of the shark. I see it in my dreams. I don’t want it to haunt me when I’m old, but if I do not face it again, I am sure it will be with me forever.”

“Oh, my baby.” Her mother pulled her in for a tight hug. “Do what you feel you must. But please go to the Koneswaram temple with me first. We must pray to Ganesha to remove all obstacles in the way of your success and safety.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Four days later, the HMS Makara launched with minimal fanfare to go hunting for the ship-killing shark. Her father was the craft’s engineer; once they were in the water, he was to focus entirely on making sure the steam engines ran properly. Two British naval men — Hart and Dawes — who were experienced with handling submersibles served as pilot and co-pilot. A third British sailor — Jacoby — manned the triggers for the massive harpoon cannons mounted to the sides of the craft.

Thilini took up her station in front of the gleaming brass wireless telegraph. Her job would be to send back as many details of the hunt as she could. In the event that they failed, at least there would be an account of what happened. Technicians had taken one of the wireless telegraphs down the road to Kantale and the transmission back to Trincomalee was a success, so Herr Rothschild was confident it should function well for at least part of the journey.

She took a small mahogany statuette of Ganesha out of the pocket of her rubber suit and set it on the instrument panel. Her mother had given her the figurine after their visit to the temple. Thilini never had much religious fervor, but she felt better knowing the jolly elephant-headed god was there with her.

As her father started the steam engines, Thilini tapped out a test message to the technician manning the telegraph back at the factory; she quickly received her acknowledgement. So far, so good. She began to transcribe the orders the men shared amongst themselves.

“Steady forward,” said Hart.

“Aye,” replied Dawes. “Ten knots, cabin temperature 80 degrees, boiler temperature 240 degrees.”

“All systems fair!” her father called from the rear.

They passed through the area where the orca had been taken by the shark. The crew was silent; all Thilini could hear was the pounding of her own heart. She took Ganesha off the instrument panel and held him tightly in her fist to steady her shaking hand. The porpoises had seemed to be able to find their way in the water not so much by sight as through sound; she wished they had something similar on the submarine so they could better find their way in the dark.

Jacoby the harpooner shifted in his seat a few feet away from her, mumbling a tuneless sea chantey under his breath. His leg jittered, making the metal panel beneath him squeak. His teeth were bad and his breath terrible.

In fact, all the Britons were starting to sweat and stink inside their rubber suits. Thilini decided the best tactic was to breathe shallowly through her mouth.

“Hoy!” Jacoby sat up straight. “I saw something down low off the port bow.”

“Taking her around now,” said Hart. “Bait the water.”

Dawes pulled the lever that released a half barrel of salt pork from a compartment below one of the harpoons.

Thilini watched with growing horror as a dark form rose and rose toward the submarine. When it was 100 yards from the craft, it was clearly the shark and not a whale. Its armored snout was scarred and lumpy from dozens of attacks on ships. It swam closer, attracted by the meat.

Jacoby pulled the trigger on the first harpoon; it struck a glancing blow on the shark’s thick gills and tumbled off into the depths. The huge shark veered away and began swimming west. The harpooner swore long and hard.

“I’m after it!” exclaimed Hart. “He’ll not escape us!”

“Twenty knots … twenty five ….” said Dawes.

They followed the shark for hours. The engines were able to keep up with the shark’s prolonged speed, but the interior of the submarine became a steampot. Thilini had to fetch a flannel cloth to clean the condensation off the windows every half hour.

Shortly after they lost telegraph contact with Trincomalee, the shark dove down into a valley on the seafloor. Dawes turned on the bright electric headlamps so they could better see. The twin beams cut through the murk, and they illuminated a scene none of them would ever be able to forget.

A huge figure sat there in the middle of the sea floor. At least thirty of the gargantuan sharks circled it; they looked like minnows next to it. At first glance, Thilini thought it was a colossal statue of ten-armed Ganesha. If it sat in the sea beside the cliffs of Swami Malai, she guessed it would be able to peer over the temple built upon those high rocks. But as her eyes better focused, she realized that what she took for elephant ears were really fanning gills, and what she thought was a trunk was a bundle of enormous tentacles hanging down on the figure’s distended belly. The arms, yes, those were certainly giant limbs, although jointed in all the wrong places and ending in too many clawed fingers. And other arms were not arms at all, but massive boneless tentacles.

Surrounding the huge figure for at least two miles around were enormous shards of metal, like pieces of a giant shattered eggshell. They gave off a faint green glow that she instantly recognized.

“The meteor,” she breathed. “You were inside it!”

As if it heard her, the hideous colossus turned its gilled, tentacled head toward the submarine and fixed them all in its gaze. Its four eyes were each bigger than their craft, each blacker than the deepest ocean trench.

A sudden vertigo took hold of Thilini, and she could feel the terrible darkness of those eyes spreading through her mind, could feel a cold, alien intellect trying to probe the corners of her consciousness. She clutched her Ganesha figure tightly and began to pray.

She could hear her father reciting a Hebrew prayer behind her; there was so much fear in his voice she thought her heart would break. Jacoby had gone slack in his seat, his eyes rolling up into his skull and a trickle of blood running from his left nostril. Hart had fallen to the floor, jerking as though he suffered some kind of seizure. Dawes just sat there staring at the colossus, muttering “No … no … no ….” under his breath over and over.

Thilini watched as the colossus casually plucked one of the circling sharks with a facial tentacle. The shark obediently opened its maw, and the colossus reached inside it with another tentacle, pulling out half a whale carcass. It popped the whale into its tentacle-obscured mouth and ate it as a man would munch a buttered cashew.

The colossus blinked and turned its head ever so slightly toward the sharks. Five of them peeled away from their formation and began swimming toward the submarine.

Thilini swore and leaped over Hart into the pilot seat. She quickly turned the sub around and tried to put as much distance as she could between them and the pursuing leviathans. She glanced at the pressure and temperature gauges. Both were climbing dangerously high.

“Papa! Papa, check the engines!” she cried.

His praying stopped. “What?” he stammered, sounding confused.

“The engines! Attend to the engines!”

“Yes, of course.”

She heard him making adjustments and releasing valves, and soon the needles on the gauges were dropping into their safe zones again.

“The sharks!” she called back to her father. “Are they gaining on us?”

“Oh no.”

She took that as a ‘yes’ and pushed the accelerator lever as far as it would go. Forty knots … forty-five … fifty. An unhealthy vibration began to spread throughout the sub, the steam engines clearly laboring under the load. She heard her father cursing and twisting handles behind her.

“Dawes! Dawes!” she shouted, trying to rouse the Englishman from his terrified fugue. When her words made no impression, she slapped his cheek.

His eyes popped open. “Ow!”

“I need a navigator, Mr. Dawes. We’re headed back to Trincomalee. Can you help me get us there?”

“Aye, Miss.” His voice shook and his eyes seemed unfocused. Thilini hoped for the best.

“They’re still gaining,” her father called. “I have done all I can here to improve the efficiency of the engines.”

She thought hard. “Mr. Dawes, do we still have bait aboard?”

“Yes, two barrels worth.”

“Dump it. Dump it all. And pray it distracts them,” she said, gripping the Ganesha figurine.

He did as she ordered, pushing buttons to release the salt pork into the chilly water.

“Ah!” her father cried, jubilant. “They’re stopping! They’re stopping!”

Thilini kept the engines hot and pressed the submarine on to land. An hour after they distracted the sharks, she reduced speed and Dawes took over piloting duties so she could send a brief telegraph back to shore.

Martin Rothschild and an array of British naval officers were waiting for them at the harbor when they docked. The morning light was just breaking over the horizon.

“Did we receive your telegraph properly? You said thirty of the blasted sharks?” her uncle Martin asked.

She nodded, unbuttoning her rubber jacket to cool off in the morning air. Her cotton undershirt was soaked. “Perhaps even more. And they are but sardines compared to the leviathan who controls them.”

Martin looked to her father. “Is this true?”

Her father nodded gravely, watching medics pull Hart and Jacoby from the submarine; both were completely insensible. “Every word.”

“They will eat anything they can devour,” she said. “No ship is safe here. No one on Earth has a weapon strong enough to combat the leviathan. I am terrified to imagine the weapon that could, for it would surely endanger all other life on the planet as well.”

Martin twisted his gloves in his hands and stared out at the sea. “What shall we do? If we cannot take our tea and timber out on the water —“

“— you can take it by airship,” Thilini said. “My father and I thought on this. We have the means to create larger and faster airships suitable for all manner of cargo. Just give us a week or so to draw up new plans, and we may begin building in the factory here.”

“What shall we do when that monstrosity has devoured the whole of the ocean?” Dawes was still sheet-pale. “What will we do when it decides to come up on land?”

“Then we will do what we must. But in the meantime, I say give the monster the sea, and we can take the sky.”

Her father left to discuss the details with her uncle. Thilini stood on the docks, staring out at the gray expanse of water, remembering the cold touch of the leviathan’s mind in hers. She did not know whether it was a solitary conqueror, a lost traveler, or an exile marooned by its own kind on her planet.

But she did know that if it ever emerged from the depths, she would sense it. As she kissed the top of tiny Ganesha’s head, she vowed she would move Heaven and Earth to stop it.