Goliath

FIFTEEN

“Quick, lads, to the strafing hawks!” shouted Mr. Rigby.

He picked up a coil of rope and flung it into Deryn’s arms, then set off for the aft end of the ship. The two middies followed, lugging the heavy line as fast as they could.

As the three headed for the airship’s tail, the spine sloped away beneath them. They hurtled down the decline, Mr. Rigby roaring at the other crewmen to jump aside.

Directly above the rookery he slid to a halt and pulled the rope from the middies’ arms. Kneeling to tie one end off, the bosun clutched his side in pain. He’d taken a bullet there two months before, just before the Leviathan’s crash landing in the Alps.

“Are you all right, sir?” Deryn asked.

“Aye, but I won’t be sliding down with you.” Mr. Rigby thrust a handful of carabiners at her and Newkirk. “Half the hawks are fitted with aeroplane nets, which are barking useless against zeppelins. Get down there and help the rook men switch them into talons. And hurry!”

“Aye, sir,” Deryn said. “Me first!”

Snapping her safety harness to the rope with three carabiners, she turned and ran straight for the edge. The great whale was narrow here, halfway to the tail, and within seconds she was flying off into thin air.

Rope hissed through the carabiners like an angry viper, and Deryn let herself fall fast. The first moments of descent were glorious, her worries about Tesla, his iron football, and barking Prince Aleksandar of Hohenberg all left behind. But soon Deryn twisted in midair, tightening the grip of the carabiners, and came to a long and skidding halt. Momentum swung her inward toward the airship’s underbelly, where she reached out and grabbed the ratlines with one gloved hand.

As she climbed down toward the rookery, the cilia were in furious motion beneath her hands. The Leviathan was nervous about the zeppelins closing in. Deryn wondered how the great whale saw the Clanker airships. Did they look like a pair of fellow airbeasts? Or like inexplicable things, in a familiar shape but queerly devoid of life?

“Don’t worry, beastie,” she said. “We’ll take care of them.”

The rookery was in a state, the birds squawking like mad inside their cages. Somehow they always knew when battle or bad weather was afoot. As she hauled herself through the aft window, Deryn called out to rearm the hawks.

“Aye, the bridge sent orders!” answered Higgins, the head rook man. He was inside one of the cages already, pulling an aeroplane net harness from a large and fluttering bird. “We’ve launched all the hawks we had in talons, and we’re switching the rest!”

“I’ll give you a hand, then.” Deryn slid down the access ladder, fighting a squick of nerves. She’d handled birds of prey before, but only one at a time. And she’d never set foot in a cage full of stirred-up strafing hawks.

With a deep breath Deryn opened a cage door and stepped into a blizzard of wings. It was hard to keep her eyes open, hard not to leap back out, but she managed to grab one of the hawks and smooth its wings. She worked quickly then, unclipping the tiny harness that held a folded net of spider silk. Its acidic strands would slice through the fragile wings of an aeroplane in an instant but had little effect on a huge and stately airship.

Once the harness was off, she moved on to the next bird, leaving it to the rook men to attach the talons. Every rook man she’d ever met carried nasty-looking scars from handling razor-sharp steel, and she wasn’t keen to learn the art in the heat of battle. As Deryn moved on to her third hawk, she saw Newkirk at work in the cage beside hers.

Long minutes later the first aerie of hawks had been fitted, and Mr. Higgins opened a chute to discharge them into the air. The rook men gave a quick cheer before setting back to work. Deryn felt the ship climbing, and she wondered if the captain had turned tail and run, or stayed to guard the kappa from the Clanker zeppelins.

Suddenly a boom shook the floor beneath her feet, and the frenzy of the birds redoubled. Deryn was blinded by beating wings but managed to grope her way out of the cage. She climbed up to the rookery windows and peered sternward.

One of the zeppelins was a few miles behind and a thousand feet below, a horde of strafing hawks swirling around it, tearing at its skin with their talons. But as Deryn watched, a streak of red fire shot from its gondola straight at her. The distance was too great, though—the rocket began to arc away before it could reach the Leviathan. It burst well below the ship, throwing out burning tendrils in all directions.

“Another close one, but they missed!” Deryn cried down to the rook men, but as she turned back to the window, her eyes went wide.

One of the sputtering tendrils was reaching up from the center of the explosion, climbing straight toward the rookery!

At the last moment the bright ember veered away, drawn toward the ventral engine pod by its whirling propeller. Fire struck metal, and a sheet of sparks shot out from the pod. The engine ground to a halt, spilling a cloud of smoke into the ship’s wake.

The Clanker airship was losing altitude quickly now, its shredded gasbag fluttering in the breeze. The other zeppelin was much farther back, hovering over the Kaiserin Elizabeth and raining metal darts onto the frenzied kappa.

The Leviathan was safe from the two zeppelins, but the ventral engine was still spitting smoke and flame. Deryn spun about and called to Newkirk, “We’re hit! I’m headed aft. But keep those birds coming!”

Not waiting for an answer, she hoisted opened the window and looked down. A stabilizing boom connected the gondola to the engine pod, wide enough to walk on in a pinch. But it was a good ten yards below the rookery, and Deryn didn’t fancy jumping. If she missed the boom, nothing would stop her fall but the open sea.

Luckily Mr. Rigby had made her draw the ship in profile a hundred times, and she remembered a steel cable connecting the rookery to the boom. It was anchored just overhead, almost close enough to reach….

Almost, but not quite.

Deryn swore. With smoke still pouring from the ventral engine pod, this was no time for caution. Crawling out the window, she saw a set of handholds leading up to her goal—some poor blighter had done this trick before!

Deryn grabbed the nearest hold and swung off into the air. She pulled herself hand over hand up to the cable and threw out her legs to wrap them around it. Then she was sliding down fast, the steel cable as hot as a teakettle in her gloves. Half a mile below, the plummeting zeppelin fired again, but the rocket burst uselessly low, sending a dozen sizzling threads into the sea.

Her boots landed with a clang against the boom.

Ahead of Deryn the hatches and windows of the engine pod were all thrown open, and smoke was gushing out and spilling back into the Leviathan’s wake. She entered through the nearest hatch, her eyes stinging.

“It’s Middy Sharp. Report!”

An engineer appeared from the smoke, wearing goggles and an ember-tattered flight suit. “It’s bad, sir—we’ve called for a Herculean. Grab on to something!”

“You called for a…,” Deryn began, her voice fading. A rushing sound was building overhead. She stared up at the belly of the airbeast, and saw the ballast lines swelling.

She’d never seen a Herculean inundation before. They were called only when the ship was in serious danger of burning, because they were barking dangerous themselves.

“It’s coming!” Deryn cried, pushing into the pod to look for a handhold.

The engineer turned and stepped through the thick smoke to a rack of gears and parts, where another man with engineering patches stood. Deryn knelt behind the main turbine, taking hold as the first spume of water exploded into the engine pod. The inundation came straight from the gut, briny and fouled with the clart of a hundred species. The torrent grew, the burning engine spitting white steam to mingle with the smoke and brackish water.

The inundation lifted Deryn from her feet for a moment, trying to sweep her out the open hatch and into the void. The water filled her boots, churning up to force itself into her nose and eyes. But she held fast until the last sparks in the engine sputtered out and the flood finally began to slacken. The briny water slowly drained from the engine pod, dropping below her waist, then her knees.

One of the engineers let out a sigh of relief, letting go to take a step toward the blackened mass of gears.

“Keep hold, man!” Deryn said. “We’ve lost our rear ballast!”

He grabbed the rack again just as the ship began to tilt. With thousands of gallons of ballast gone from its stern, the Leviathan was out of balance, tipping the airship into a steep dive.

The remaining water coiled past Deryn’s feet, pouring out the forward hatch. She heard the creak of the ratlines overhead as the airbeast strained, bending its nose upward against the dive. But out the nearest porthole she saw the glittering sea rushing toward them.

Then Deryn heard a growl like a pair of hungry fighting bears—the Clanker engines shifting into reverse. The whole ship shuddered, its descent slowing to a crawl. The Leviathan hovered aslant in the air for a moment, until the ballast lines began to swell again with water pumping toward the tail. Gradually the floor of the engine pod leveled off.

A lizard popped its head from a message tube and spoke with the captain’s voice. “Ventral engine pod, help is on the way. Please report your status.”

The two engineers looked at Deryn, perhaps a bit nervous that they’d just sent the whole ship plummeting toward the sea.

She cleared her throat. “Middy Sharp, sir, just arrived here from the rookery. The pod was set aflame, so the engineers called for a Herculean. The fire’s out, but by the looks of things, we won’t be giving you any power for a while. End message.”

The lizard blinked, then scampered away. Deryn turned to the men. This was her station for the rest of the battle, it seemed.

“Don’t look so sheepish,” she said. “You may have saved the ship. But if you want to be proper heroes, let’s get this engine running again!”