Goliath

without annoying each other.

Tricky beasties, ursines. All last night Mr. Rigby had regaled Newkirk with tales of them eating their handlers.

The Leviathan soon caught up to the bear, and Newkirk signaled for Deryn to pull him to port. She angled her wings, feeling the tug of airflow surround her body, and she briefly thought of Lilit in her body kite. Deryn wondered how the girl was doing in the new Ottoman Republic. Then shook the thought from her head.

The pallet was drawing near, but the loop Newkirk was preparing to grab rose and fell with the bounding gait of the giant bear. Newkirk began to lower the grappling hook, trying to swing it a little nearer to its target. One of the Russians climbed higher on the cargo pallet, reaching up to help.

Deryn angled her wings a squick, drawing Newkirk still farther to port.

“HOOKING THE PACKAGE.”

He thrust out the grappling hook, and metal struck metal, the rasp and clink of contact sharp in the cold wind—the hook snapped into the loop!

The Russians shouted and began to loosen the straps that held the pallet to the platform. The bear’s driver waved his whip back and forth, the signal for the Leviathan’s pilots to ascend.

The airship angled its nose up, and the grappling hook tightened its grip on the loop, the thick cable going taut beside Deryn. Of course, the pallet didn’t lift from the fighting bear’s back—not yet. You couldn’t add two tons to an airship’s weight and expect it to climb right away.

Ballast began to spill from the Leviathan’s ports. Pumped straight from the gastric channel, the brackish water hit the air as warm as piss. But in the Siberian wind it froze instantly, a spray of glittering ice halos in the air.

A moment later the ice stung Deryn’s face in a driving hail, pinging against her goggles. She gritted her teeth, but a laugh spilled out of her. They’d hit on the first pass, and soon the cargo would be airborne. And she was flying!

But as her laughter faded, a low growl came rumbling through the air, a sovereign and angry sound that chilled Deryn’s bones worse than any Siberian wind.

The fighting bear was getting twitchy.

And it stood to reason. The frozen clart of a thousand beasties was raining down onto its head, carrying the scents of message lizards and glowworms, Huxleys and hydrogen sniffers, bats and bees and birds and the great whale itself—a hundred species that the fighting bear had never smelled before.

Its head reared up and let out another roar, and the great brown shoulders rippled with annoyance, tossing the Russian crewmen into the air. They landed safely, as surefooted as airmen in a storm.

The grappling hook clanked in its loop as the bear jerked about, and the cargo line snapped and quivered beside Deryn. She threw her weight to the left, trying to pull herself and Newkirk to safety.

The driver’s whip rose and fell a few times, and the bear settled a little. As more ballast glittered in the air above, the cargo finally began to lift.

The last one of the fighting bear’s crewmen leapt from the pallet, then turned to wave. Deryn saluted him back as the bear slowed to a halt. The cargo spun in the air now, skimming just above the ground.

Deryn frowned. Why wasn’t the Leviathan climbing faster? They didn’t have much time before the next bend in the trailway, and she, Newkirk, and the cargo were still below treetop level.

She looked up. The spray of water had stopped. The ballast tanks were empty. The Clanker engines were roaring and belching smoke, trying to create aerodynamic lift. But the airship was climbing too slowly.

Deryn frowned. Dr. Busk, the head boffin himself, had done the calculations for this snatch-up. He’d cut it close, to be sure, with a long trip still ahead of them. But Deryn and Mr. Rigby had supervised the ejecting of supplies over the tundra, bringing the ship to exactly the right weight. . . .

Unless the cargo pallet was heavier than the czar’s letter had promised.

“Barking kings!” Deryn shouted. Divine right didn’t change the laws of gravity and hydrogen, that was for certain.

She heard the shriek of a ballast alert above, and swore. If anything tumbled from the bay doors now, she and Newkirk would be plumb in its path.

“We’re too heavy!” she shouted down.

“Aye, I noticed!” the boy cried back, just as the trailway veered to the right beneath him.

Instantly the pallet clipped the top of an evergreen, and Newkirk was swallowed by an explosion of pine needles and snow.

“We need to toss some of that cargo!” Deryn cried, and angled her wings to the right. When she and Newkirk were over the pallet, she snapped a safety clip onto the cargo line, then shrugged out of the gliding harness.

She and Newkirk slid down, screaming, their boots thudding against the cargo as they landed.

“Blisters, Mr. Sharp! Are you trying to kill us?”

“I’m saving us, Mr. Newkirk, as usual.” She unclipped herself and rolled onto the pallet. “We have to throw something off!#8221;

“Full marks for stating the obvious!” Newkirk shouted, just as the pallet smashed into another treetop. The collision sent the world spinning, and Deryn fell flat, grasping for handholds.

Pressed against the cargo, her nose caught a whiff of something meaty. Deryn frowned. Was this pallet full of dried beef?

She raised her head and looked about. There was nothing obvious to toss overboard, no boxes to cut free. Just heavy netting covering the shapeless brown mass. It would take long minutes to cut into it with a couple of rigging knives.

“Blisters,” Newkirk cried.

Deryn followed his gaze upward, and swore again. The ballast alert was in full swing. Flechette bats were taking to the air, and dishwater was being flung from the galley windows. A barrel emerged from the cargo bay door and came tumbling down at them.

Deryn tightened her grip in case the barrel hit and sent them spinning—or would the whole pallet simply break apart?

But the barrel flashed past a few yards away, exploding into a white cloud of flour against the hard-packed tundra.

“Over here, Mr. Sharp!” Newkirk called. He had scrambled to the far side of the pallet, one foot dangling off the edge.

“What’ve you found?”

“Nothing!” he shouted. When Deryn hesitated, he added, “Just come here, you blithering idiot!”

As she headed toward Newkirk, the pallet began to tip beneath her weight. Her grasp on the netting slipped for a moment, and she skidded toward the edge.

Newkirk’s hand shot out and stopped her.

“Grab hold!” he shouted as the pallet tipped farther.

Finally Deryn understood his plan—their weight was pulling the carefully balanced pallet sideways, turning it into a knife blade skimming through the trees. It was a much smaller target for the debris raining down, and the bulk of the cargo was above the two middies, protecting them from any direct hits.

Another barrel went by, barely missing, shattering in the airship’s wake. A few ice-laden treetops shot past, but the Leviathan was finally climbing, lightened enough to pull them a few crucial yards higher.

Newkirk grinned. “Don’t mind being saved, do you, Mr. Sharp?”

“No, that’s quite all right, Mr. Newkirk,” she said, shifting her hands for a better grip. “You owed me one, after all.”

“RETURNING WITH THE GOODS.”