Goliath

NINETEEN

The Pacific Ocean was nearly half the world, as Mr. Rigby liked to say. It certainly looked vast now, spread out beneath the ship like a rippling sheet of silver. The Japanese home islands were less than a day behind them, but already the very notion of land seemed distant and obscure.

The Leviathan was at full-ahead, making airspeed of sixty miles an hour. The wind blew down the spine at whole gale force, thrumming along the ship’s surface like a surging river.

“Is it always like this?” Alek shouted over the wind.

“Aye,” Deryn replied. “Brilliant, isn’t it?”

Alek just scowled at her. His gloved hands clutched the ratlines in a death grip, and Hoffman’s eyes were wide with fear behind his goggles. The two Clankers had been at full-ahead in their engine pods before, but never out here on the open spine.

“This is real flying!” Deryn leaned closer. “But if you’re afraid, your princeliness, you can go back down.”

Alek shook his head. “Hoffman needs a translator.”

“My German’s good enough,” Deryn said. “I had a whole month of your Clanker jabbering in Istanbul!”

“Weißt du, was ein Kondensator ist?”

“That’s easy. You asked me if I know what a Kondensator is!”

“Well, do you?”

Deryn frowned. “Well, it’s some sort of… condenser. Obviously.”

“No,” Alek said. “A capacitor. You just blew up the ship, Dummkopf.”

She rolled her eyes. It seemed a bit unfair, expecting her to know German words for contraptions she’d never seen before. But she couldn’t argue the point. Hoffman was the engineer best able to follow Tesla’s orders, and only Alek could translate Clanker technical jargon into English.

This whole trip topside was at the bidding of the great inventor. He wanted a radio antenna stretching the length of the Leviathan, but he didn’t want the ship slowing down. The captain had little choice but to obey—the Admiralty’s orders were to cooperate with Tesla, and to get him to America as quickly as practical.

Working on the spine at top speed wasn’t impossible, after all, just a bit tricky. And also dead good fun.

“Take the wire to the bow, Sharp!” Mr. Rigby shouted above the wind. “And before you head back, make sure that end is secure.”

“I’ll go along,” Alek said.

“No you won’t, boy!” Mr. Rigby shouted. “It’s too dangerous for princes up there.”

Alek scowled, but didn’t argue. Up here on the spine, the bosun was the only royalty.

Deryn waved for Hoffman, then began to make her way toward the great airbeast’s head. Reattaching her safety clip every yard or so made progress slow, and the spool of wire was barking heavy. But the trickiest thing was crawling into a sixty-mile-an-hour headwind.

Hoffman followed, carrying his tools and a small device that Mr. Tesla had been tinkering with all day. He claimed that with a thousand-foot-long antenna at this altitude, he could detect radio signals from anywhere in the world—even beyond.

“So he can talk to bloody martians,” Deryn cried. “That’s what we’re up here for!”

Hoffman didn’t understand, or chose not to comment.

At full-ahead the bow was bare of life. The fléchette bats were all hidden away in their nooks and crannies, the birds safe in the rookery. Soon the last set of ratlines disappeared, and Deryn crawled still more slowly, lying flat, her palms spread across the rough, hard surface of the airbeast’s bowhead.

She was glad for the weight of the spool now. At least with sixty pounds of wire strapped to her back, the wind was less likely to blow her into the ocean. She yelled at Hoffman to keep himself flat. At this speed, rushing air could find a grip in any space between a crewman’s body and the airbeast’s skin, like a knife prying up a barnacle, and fling him off into the sea.

At last Deryn reached the mooring yoke, the heavy harness at the extreme bow of the airship. She snapped her safety clip to it and sighed with relief. Hoffman joined her there, and together they began to secure one end of the wire.

As they worked in the relentless wind, Deryn found herself wondering if Hoffman knew what she really was. She doubted Volger would have told anyone; the man always kept secrets for his own uses. But what about Alek? He’d promised not to tell anyone that she was a girl, but did that include hiding the truth from his own men?

When the wire was tied fast and Tesla’s device attached, Hoffman clapped Deryn on the shoulder, muttering a few choice German curses into the wind. She smiled, suddenly certain that he didn’t know.

Alek might be a Dummkopf sometimes, but he was always true to his word.

The two started back, unspooling wire as they went, securing it to the ratlines every few yards, to keep it from flapping about. Crawling was much quicker with the wind at their backs, and they soon reached Alek and Mr. Rigby again. Together the four of them headed aft.

The journey grew easier as they neared the tail. The roar of the Clanker engines lessened with distance, and past the airbeast’s middle its body narrowed, the great hump sheltering them from the wind. When the first spool emptied, they halted. Mr. Rigby and Hoffman spliced it to another five-hundred-foot wire.

While they waited, Alek turned to Deryn. “Are you excited about seeing America?”

“A bit,” she said. “But it sounds like an odd place.”

The United States was another half-Darwinist, half-Clanker country. But unlike Japan, the technologies weren’t happily combined there. The two halves of America had been fighting a vicious civil war when old Darwin had announced his discoveries. The South had adopted Darwinist agricultural techniques, while the industrial North had stayed loyal to the machine. Even fifty years later the nation remained split in two.

“Isn’t that why people join the Air Service?” Alek asked. “To see the world?”

Deryn shrugged. “Me, I just wanted to fly.”

“I’m beginning to see the appeal,” Alek said, smiling. He stood up halfway, the airflow thrashing at his hair and flight suit, and he leaned forward at a precarious angle, letting the force of the wind keep him upright.

“Blazes, Alek. Sit yourself down!”

The boy just laughed, splaying his hands like a bird’s wings. Deryn leaned forward to grab the safety harness of his flight suit.

The bosun looked up from his work. “Quit that skylarking!”

“Sorry, sir!” Deryn pulled at Alek’s harness. “Come on, you dafty. Sit down!”

Alek stopped laughing, dropping to one knee. He pointed ahead. “Is that what I think it is?”

Deryn turned to face the wind. The Leviathan’s nose was tipping down a bit, and the great hill of the whale’s hump seemed to descend before them, revealing the sky ahead.

“Mr. Rigby!” Deryn called, pointing at the bow. “You should see this, sir.”

A moment later the bosun swore, and Hoffman let out a low whistle. Ahead of the airship was a towering mass of thunderclouds, framed by a dark wall that stretched across the horizon. It was a huge storm, right in the Leviathan’s path.

Deryn caught the scent of rain and felt lightning in the air. “What should we do, Mr. Rigby?”

“We finish this job, lad, unless we get new orders.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but there’s no way they’d send a message lizard up. Even a hydrogen sniffer would be blown off at this speed!”

“The captain can always send up a team of riggers, if he wants.” The bosun pointed at the second spool of wire, still full. “In any case we can’t stop now, or we’ll hit that storm with loose wire flying about!”

Deryn swallowed. “Aye, of course, sir.”

Hoffman finished off the splice, and the four of them headed toward the tail again. Crawling along the spine was even trickier now. The wind was shifting unpredictably, the currents of the storm mixing with the airflow of the ship’s great speed.

Deryn felt the membrane moving beneath her, rolling to one side. She glanced over her shoulder at the bow.

“We’re turning, sir,” she said. “Angling to starboard.”

Mr. Rigby swore, waving them on.

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Alek asked her. “They’re aiming to avoid the center of the storm.”

Deryn shook her head. “Hurricanes always spin anticlockwise, so we’re headed into a massive tailwind. We’re not missing the storm—we’re using it to move faster. A brilliant idea from Mr. Tesla, no doubt.”

“Is that dangerous?”

“The ship should be fine. It’s us I’m worried about.” Deryn snapped her safety clip down with a vengeance. “If they’d just slow down a bit, we could get this barking job done!”

“Settle yourself, Mr. Sharp,” came the bosun’s grumble. “We have our orders, and the captain has his.”

“Aye, sir,” Deryn said, then set herself to crawling as fast as she could.

Having a boffin in charge was getting to be annoying.

They were still out in the open when the airship hit the storm. The rain didn’t build gradually but arrived in a silvery wall hurtling down the Leviathan’s length at sixty miles an hour.

“Take hold!” Deryn cried as the chattering tumult surrounded them. The membrane rippled beneath her, stirred by the wave of cold air that came with the rain, no doubt pulled down from the northern Pacific by the great spinning engine of the storm. Suddenly the driving wind seemed full of ice and nails, the freezing drops hitting her goggles like tiny stones.

“Don’t anyone move!” Mr. Rigby shouted. “The captain should slow down for us now!”

Deryn clung to the ratlines with both hands, gritting her teeth, and it was only moments later that the roar of the Clanker engines went silent.

“Aye, I didn’t think the officers had gone mad,” the bosun muttered. He rose slowly, holding his side where he’d been shot two months before. A wave of fresh annoyance swept through Deryn. It was all very well for Tesla to send men up topside at full-ahead, when he was safe and sipping brandy in his cabin!

With the engines off, the airship quickly matched the speed of the wind, and a strange calm settled around the four of them. They headed for the steering house at a jog, the membrane slick with rain beneath their feet. Deryn kept one eye on Mr. Rigby, ready to grab him if he slipped. But the old man was as surefooted as always, and soon they were crowding into the dorsal steering house, the aft-most shelter on the ship.

“Get that wire secure,” Mr. Rigby ordered.

Alek translated for Hoffman, who set to work. The bosun plunked down heavily on a box of spare engine parts, and Deryn pulled off her gloves and rubbed her hands together, then whistled for glowworm light.

The dorsal steering house wasn’t luxurious. It was full of parts for tending the ship’s rear engines, and had its own master wheel if the bridge somehow lost rudder control. Thankfully it was connected by passageways to the airbeast’s gut, so a squick of warmth rose from an open hatchway in the floor.

Once the wire was tied fast, Hoffman said a few words to Alek, then descended into the airship, unspooling still more wire behind him.

“Where’s he off to?” Deryn asked Alek.

“Mr. Tesla wants the antenna to run down through the ship, all the way to his laboratory.”

“Aye, anything to keep him dry,” Deryn muttered. She wondered exactly what the Clanker boffin was up to. Back in Tokyo he’d proven he could send radio waves around the world. What more could he do from up here in the sky?

The bosun still wore a pained expression, so the three waited a few minutes before moving on. Every gust of wind made the steering house shudder, the rain-spattered windows rattling in their frames. Deryn felt the floor shifting beneath her. The airbeast was flexing its body, turning its face away from the force of the storm. This close to the tail, it was easy to feel the giant body shift, like being at the end of a vast, slow whip.

The ratlines creaked around them, and an unfamiliar metal groan came through the sounds of wind and rain. The wire leading out into the storm went taut beside Deryn, then shuddered and fell slack.

“Blast it,” the bosun sighed. “That wire must have been too short.”

“But Mr. Tesla’s measurements were quite precise!” Alek said.

“Aye, of course they were.” Deryn shook her head. “Too precise. He was thinking of the Leviathan as a zeppelin, a dead thing, rigid from bow to stern. But an airbeast bends, and more than usual in this barking storm.”

Alek stood up, looking out. “Perhaps someone might have mentioned that to him!”

“Your Mr. Tesla never bothered to ask,” the bosun said flatly. “But repairs will have to wait. They’ll be starting the engines up again soon.”

Alek looked as though he were going to argue, but Deryn put a hand on his shoulder.

“They’re idle for now, Mr. Rigby.” She stepped to the windows, shielding her eyes with her hands. “And the break might be close by.”

The bosun snorted. “All right. Pop out and take a look.”

Deryn opened the door a bit and squeezed out onto the blustery expanse of the topside. A moment later something caught her eye. At least five hundred feet away, near the base of the hump, a glimmer of silver danced in the rain.

“One end of the wire’s got loose, sir,” she called over her shoulder. “Maybe twenty yards of it. And it’s flailing about in the wind!”

Mr. Rigby got to his feet and joined her at the door, then swore.

“When the engines come back, that’ll get a bit lively! Could even cut into the membrane!” He crossed to the gut hatchway. “I’m afraid you’ve got to go back out, lad, and secure both loose ends. I’ll find a message lizard and tell the bridge to hold the engines still for a bit longer.”

“Aye, sir.” Deryn pulled her gloves back on.

The bosun paused halfway down into the hatch. “Wait a few minutes to make sure they’ve got the message, then get it done fast. Whatever happens, I don’t want you out there at full-ahead!”

The bosun dropped away, and Deryn began to search the parts drawers. All she needed was some pliers and a short length of wire.

“I’m going with you,” Alek said.

She started to say no. The bosun hadn’t given orders one way or the other, and she could handle the job herself. But if Mr. Rigby’s message arrived too late and the ship went to top speed again, anyone alone out there could be swept away into the sea.

Besides, who knew what Alek would get up to if she left him here alone?

“I’m not afraid,” he added.

“You should be,” Deryn said. “But you’re right, it’s better if we stick together. Hand me that rope.”