Behemoth

Newkirk was twisting in the pilot’s rig, still alive somehow. Then Deryn saw a misting in the starlight around the Huxley. Newkirk had spilled the water ballast to keep himself from burning. Clever boy.

The dead husk of the airbeast billowed out like a ragged parachute, but it was still falling fast.

The Huxley was a thousand feet up, and if it missed crashing against the Leviathan’s topsides, it would drop another thousand feet before the cable snapped it to a halt. Best to make that trip as short as possible. Deryn reached for the winch—but her hand froze.

Did electricity linger?

“Dummkopf!” she cursed herself, forcing herself to grasp the metal.

No sparks shot from it, and she began to turn as fast as she could. But the Huxley was coming down faster than she could reel it in. The cable began to coil across the airship’s spine, tangling in the feet of crewmen and sniffers running past.

Still spinning the crank wildly, Deryn looked up. Newkirk was hanging limply beneath the burned husk, which was drifting away from the Leviathan.

The engines had stopped, and the searchlights had gone dead too. The crewmen were using electric torches to call the bats and strafing hawks back from the black sky—the Clanker lightning contraption had knocked everything out.

But if the airship was powerless, why was the wind pushing Newkirk away? Shouldn’t they all have been drifting together?

Deryn looked down at the flank, her eyes widening.

The cilia were still moving, still carrying the airship away from danger.

“Now, that’s barking odd,” she muttered.

Usually a hydrogen breather without engines was content to drift. Of course, the airbeast had been acting strangely since the crash in the Alps. All the old crewmen said that the crash in the Alps—or the Clanker engines—had rattled its attic.

But this was no time to ponder. Newkirk was gliding past only a hundred feet away, close enough that Deryn could see his blackened face and soaking uniform. But he didn’t seem to be moving.

“Newkirk!” she yelled, her hand raw on the winch’s handle. But he fell past without answering.

The coils of slack cable began to rustle, like a nest of snakes strewn across the topside. The Huxley was dragging its cable behind as it dropped below the airship.

“Clear those lines!” Deryn shouted, waving off a crewman standing among the slithering coils. The man danced away, the cable snapping at his ankles, trying to drag him down as well.

She went at the crank again, till the line snapped tight with a sickening jerk. Deryn hit the brake and checked the cable markings—just over five hundred feet.

The Leviathan was two hundred feet from top to bottom, so Newkirk would be dangling less than three hundred feet below. Strapped into the pilot’s rig, he was probably all right. Unless the fire had got him, or he’d been jolted to a neck-breaking stop …

Deryn took a deep breath, trying to stop her hands from shaking.

She couldn’t crank him back up. The winch was designed for a hydrogen-filled Huxley, not to haul dead weight.

Deryn followed the taut cable, climbing down the ratlines on the airbeast’s flank. From the ship’s waist she could just see the Huxley’s dark shape fluttering against the whitecaps of the waves.

“Barking spiders,” she murmured. The water was much closer than she’d expected.

The Leviathan was losing altitude.

Of course—the great airbeast was trying to find the strongest wind to pull itself away from the German ironclads. It wouldn’t care about smacking poor burnt Newkirk against the ocean’s choppy surface.

But the officers could drop ballast, and drag the ship up against its will. Deryn pulled out her command whistle and blew for a message lizard, then stared again at the Huxley below.

There was no human movement that she could see. Newkirk had to be stunned, at least. And he wouldn’t have the right equipment to climb the cable. No one expected to climb up from an ascender.

Where was that barking message lizard? She saw one scrambling across the membrane, and whistled for it. But the lizard just stared at her and jabbered something about an electrical malfunction.

“Brilliant,” she murmured. The bolt of Clanker lightning had scrambled the wee beasties’ brains! Down below, the dark water looked closer every second.

She was going to have to rescue Newkirk herself.

Deryn searched the pockets of her flight suit. In airmanship class Mr. Rigby had taught them about how riggers “belayed,” which was Service-speak for sliding down a rope without breaking your neck. She found a few carabiners and enough line to make a pair of friction hitches.

After attaching her safety clip to the Huxley’s cable, Deryn twisted the carabiner tight. She couldn’t wind the rope around her hips because the weight of the dead Huxley would snip her in half. But after a moment’s fiddling, she attached the extra carabiners to her harness and strung the cable through them.

Mr. Rigby wouldn’t approve of this method, Deryn thought as she kicked herself away from the membrane.

She slid down in short jerks, the carabiners’ friction keeping her from falling too fast. But the rope was hot beneath her gloves, its fibers fraying wherever she snapped to a halt. Deryn doubted this cable was designed to hold the weight of a dead Huxley and two middies.

The ocean thundered below Deryn, the wind growing colder now that the sun had fully set. The peak of a tall wave smacked against the Huxley’s drooping membrane, cracking like a gunshot.

“Newkirk!” Deryn shouted, and the boy stirred in his pilot’s rig.

A shudder of relief went through her—he was alive. Not like Da.

She let herself fall the last twenty yards, the rope hissing like mad and spilling a burnt smell into the salt air. But her boots landed softly on the squishy membrane of the dead airbeast, which smelled of smoke and salt, like jellyfish cooked on a hearth fire.

“Where in blazes am I?” Newkirk mumbled, barely audible over the rumble of the waves. His hair was scorched, his face and hands blackened with smoke.

“Almost in the barking ocean, that’s where! Can you move?”

The boy stared at his blackened hands, wriggling his fingers, then unstrapped himself from the harness. He stood up shakily on the frame of the pilot’s rig.

“Aye. I’m just singed.” He ran his fingers through his hair, or what was left of it.

“Can you climb?” Deryn asked.

Newkirk stared up at the Leviathan’s dark belly. “Aye, but that’s miles away! Couldn’t you have cranked faster?”

“You could have fallen slower!” Deryn shouted back. She unclipped two carabiners and shoved them into his hands, along with a short length of line. “Tie yourself a friction hitch. Or don’t you remember Mr. Rigby’s classes?”

Newkirk stared at the carabiners, then up at the distant airship.

“Aye, I remember. But I never thought we’d be ascending that far.”

“Ascending,” of course, was Service-Speak for climbing up a rope without breaking your neck. Deryn’s fingers worked fast with her own line. A friction hitch slid freely up a rope, but held fast when weight was hanging from it. That way, she and Newkirk could stop and rest without relying on their muscles to keep them from sliding back.

“You go first,” she ordered. If Newkirk slid down, she could stop him.

He pulled himself up a few feet, then tested his hitch, swinging freely from the rope. “It works!”

“Aye. You’ll be conquering Mount Everest next!” As she spoke, another wave slapped at the Huxley, splashing across them both. Deryn lost her footing, but her friction hitch held.

She spat out salt water and yelled, “Get going, you Dummkopf! The ship’s losing altitude!”

Newkirk started climbing, scrambling with feet and hands. He had soon cleared enough distance that Deryn could haul herself off the dead Huxley.