“I’ve been climbing on walkers since I was ten, Volger,” he said, sticking the scabbard through his belt.
Volger placed his hand on Alek’s shoulder. “That sword is two centuries old! Your father—”
“Can’t help us,” Alek said. “Reload the machine guns in case those scouts come back.”
Without waiting for a reply he pulled himself up and out.
Up top, branches slapped at his face, and the machine rocked beneath him like an unbroken horse. Klopp was doing his best serpentine. The hot metal of the engine casing burned Alek’s fingers even through his piloting gloves.
The marker flare was stuck among the Stormwalker’s exhaust pipes, hissing and spitting, driven brighter by the machine’s speed. Red smoke trailed out, spreading as it rose into the brilliant sky.
Alek drew the saber and clutched it with one hand, holding the scabbard with the other. He raised the sword high, then brought the blade down hard.
The flare split open under his blow, but only blazed brighter, like a burning log jabbed with a poker.
Alek raised the sword again and saw flames running along his blade—the fire was clinging to the metal! He
“AN HEIRLOOM SAVES THE HEIR.”
swallowed, wondering what would happen if the infernal substance were stuck to someone’s skin.
Lights flickered through the trees. Alek looked up and glimpsed the frigate in the distance, smoke pouring from her guns. As he knelt for a firmer handhold, the cannon’s rumble followed at the tardy speed of sound.
Long seconds later the shells hit. The shock wave battered his ears, spraying dirt into his face and lifting the walker beneath him.
Alek felt its massive feet hit the ground again, the machine staggering like a newborn colt. He opened his eyes—just in time to duck beneath a tree branch whipping across the walker’s head.
Now there was no sound except the ringing in his ears, and his eyes stung with debris and smoke. But he could feel Klopp righting the walker, regaining control.
The frigate would have their range now. Each time they fired, the shells would land closer.
Alek stooped again and raised the saber, hacking at the sticky flare, sending up sparks and angry gouts of smoke. Embers fell from the blade onto his uniform, burning into the leather piloting jacket like hot coals. He smelled his own hair singeing in the heat.
A volley of flares shot past, the retreating scouts taking one last shot at the Stormwalker. Alek ignored the near misses and kept battering at the flame.
Finally a big chunk came free, sticking to his saber like honey on a stick. He waved the blade back and forth in the wind, but that only drove the flare brighter.
Alek swore. The frigate’s guns would be loaded again in another few seconds. There was only one thing to do.
He rose into a half crouch, one arm wrapped around an exhaust pipe.
“Sorry, Father,” he whispered, and threw the ancient saber as hard as he could into the forest.
He kicked at the last few burning pieces clinging to the Stormwalker’s armor, then crawled toward the open hatch.
“Klopp!” he shouted down. “Go straight ahead, as fast as you can!”
Alek glanced back before climbing inside. The ancient sword was still burning back among the trees, sending up red smoke. The gunners on the frigate would think that the Stormwalker had staggered to a halt, or fallen after that last barrage. Hopefully they’d pound the spot a few more times before sending the scouts back in to check.
And by that time the walker would be kilometers away.
As Alek’s adrenaline faded, his body began to throb with pain. His hands and knees were bruised and burned, and the leather of his uniform smelled like scorched meat. He hoped Volger had something for burns along with his supply of family heirlooms and pointless secrets.
As Alek lowered himself into the hatchway, Volger’s eyes widened, taking in his singed hair and smoldering uniform.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said, collapsing into the commander’s chair. “Just keep moving.”
The mountains were rising taller in the viewport. The border couldn’t be far now; the sky up ahead was empty of flares. Soon they’d been in friendly darkness again.
The frigate’s guns rumbled again, but the shells hit far behind them, hardly breaking the Stormwalker’s stride. The Germans were still firing at his father’s sword.
Alek smiled—so much for their secret weapons.
He let his eyes close. After a month of running, finally he could rest. Maybe his life would begin to make sense again, once the Stormwalker had reached safety.
No more surprises for a while.
NINETEEN
“I should like to see your bees, Mr. Sharp.”
Deryn looked up tiredly from the sketch pad, putting her pencil aside. Her last watch of the day had just ended—four nervous hours of keeping an eye out for German aircraft—but Dr. Barlow never seemed to sleep. She looked well spruced in traveling coat and bowler hat, and Tazza bounced at the boffin’s side, always happy to be exploring the ship.
“My bees, ma’am?”
“Don’t be tiresome, Mr. Sharp. I meant, of course, the Leviathan’s bee colonies. Do you always draw while shaving?”
Deryn glanced at her straight razor in its mug, remembering that half her face was covered in lather. She’d been waiting for someone to pass the open cabin door and witness the deception. But after a few minutes she’d given up posing by the mirror. Even copying sketches from the Manual of Aeronautics’s chapter on thermal inversions was more interesting than pretending to shave.
She wiped her face with a towel. “That’s the life of a middy, ma’am. Always studying … and giving tours to visiting boffins, of course.”
“Of course,” Dr. Barlow said sweetly. In her two days aboard she’d toured practically every inch of the airship, dragging Newkirk and Deryn from deck to deck, onto the topside, even to the Huxley rookeries in the gut of the whale. There was no fobbing the duty off. Only two middies remained aboard, thanks to the weight of Dr. Barlow’s pet thylacine, her numerous outfits, and the mysterious cargo secured in the machine room.
Deryn missed having the others about, if only to share the work of altitude readings and feeding the fléchette bats. The only brilliant thing—besides that bum-rag Fitzroy being gone—was that Deryn and Newkirk each had a private cabin now. Of course, Dr. Barlow’s boffin studies didn’t seem to have covered the subject of privacy.
“Come on, Tazza,” Deryn muttered, taking the beastie’s leash as she slipped into the corridor.
She led Dr. Barlow up the aft stairs to the top deck of the gondola. The riggers and sailmakers slept up here, though Deryn couldn’t see how they managed. The airbeast’s gastric channel filled the air with a smell like rotten onions and cow farts.
The off-duty watch swung in hammocks on either side of the corridor, some of them curled up with their hydrogen sniffers for warmth. The airship was cruising at eight thousand feet, hopefully too high for the German aeroplanes that had been stalking them all day, and the air up here was as cold as a brass monkey’s bum.
None of the riggers glanced at Dr. Barlow or the thylacine as they passed. The ship’s officers had announced that anyone making a fuss over the lady passenger would be put on report. This was no time for navy superstitions, after all. Germany had declared war on France yesterday and had gone after Belgium today. The rumor was that Britain would be in it tomorrow unless the kaiser put a stop to the whole mess by midnight.
And nobody thought that very likely.
At the gut hatch Deryn took Tazza into her arms and climbed up and out. In the cold, narrow gap between airbeast and gondola, the ventral camouflage cells shone a dull silver, taking on the color of the snowy moonlit peaks below. The Swiss Alps were rising beneath them. The Leviathan was a third of the way to the Ottoman Empire, Deryn reckoned.
Tazza scrambled out of her arms and up, curious to explore the st
range mix of smells: clart from the gastric channel, the bitter almond of leaking hydrogen, and the salty scent of the airbeast’s skin.
Deryn followed the beastie up into the gut, then knelt to lend Dr. Barlow a hand. They paused for a moment in the warm darkness, their eyes adjusting to the dim green light of glowworms.
“I’ll take this opportunity to remind you not to smoke, Doctor.”
“Very amusing, Mr. Sharp.”
Deryn smiled and scratched Tazza’s head. Open flames weren’t allowed anywhere on the Leviathan. Matches and firearms were kept under lock and key, and the airmen’s boots had rubber soles to prevent sparks of static. But according to regulations, passengers were to be reminded of the smoking rules whenever the crew thought necessary.
Even if they were fancy-pants boffins and being reminded of the barking obvious happened to annoy them.
Walking forward, Tazza slunk closer to the ground, always a little twitchy inside the whale. The walkway underfoot was aluminum, but the walls of the gastric channel were alive—warm and pulsing with digestion, aglow with worms. The hydrogen bladders overhead were taut and translucent, the whole ship swelling in the thin air of high altitude.
As they approached the bow, a humming sound grew: millions of tiny wings churning the air, drying the nectar gathered that day over France. A little farther and the walls
“IN THE GUTS OF THE SHIP.”
were covered with a seething mass of bees, their small round bodies buzzing around Deryn’s head, bouncing softly against her face and hands. Tazza let out a low hiss and pressed closer to her legs.
Deryn could appreciate the thylacine’s nervousness. Seeing the hives for the first time, she’d assumed they were weapons, like strafing hawks or fléchette bats. But the Leviathan’s bees didn’t even have stingers. As the ship’s head boffin liked to put it, they were simply a method for extracting fuel from nature.
In summer the fields passing beneath the airship were full of flowers, each containing a tiny squick of nectar. The bees gathered that nectar and distilled it into honey, and then the bacteria in the airbeast’s gut gobbled that up and farted hydrogen. It was a typical boffin strategy—no point in creating a new system when you could borrow one already fine-tuned by evolution.
A bee came to an inquisitive midair halt in front of Deryn’s face. Its body was fuzzy and yellow, its dorsal regions as shiny and black as dress boots, the wings a blur. She squinted, memorizing its shape for sketching later.
“Hello, wee beastie.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Sharp?”
Deryn waved away the curious bee and turned. “Anything in particular you wanted to see, ma’am?”
Dr. Barlow was tucking a black veil under her bowler, like a boffin at a funeral. “My grandfather fabricated one of these species. I wanted to taste his handiwork.”
Her grandfather? Dr. Barlow had to be even younger than she looked.
“You seem surprised, Mr. Sharp. The honey is edible, is it not?”
“Aye, ma’am. Mr. Rigby makes all us middies try some.” Fitzroy had made a show of screwing up his face, and Newkirk had looked ready to spew. But the taste was as good as any natural honey, really.
Deryn drew her rigging knife and reached out to the expanse of hexagonal comb, prizing a bit of honey onto its blade. She offered the knife to Dr. Barlow, who loaded a fingertip, then reached under her veil to place it between her lips.
“Hmm. Just like honey.”
“Water, mostly,” Deryn said. “With a few squicks of carbon for flavor.”
Dr. Barlow nodded. “A very sound analysis, Mr. Sharp. But you’re frowning.”
“Pardon me, ma’am. But did you say your grandfather was a Darwinist? He must have been one of the first.”
Dr. Barlow smiled. “He was indeed. And he had rather a fascination with bees, especially how they connected cats and clover.”
“Cats, ma’am?”
“And clover, yes. He noticed that red clover flowers abundantly near towns but only thinly in the wild.” Dr. Barlow rubbed her finger along the knife for another taste. “You see, in England most cats live in towns—and cats eat mice. These same mice, Mr. Sharp, attack the nests of bees for their honey. And red clover cannot grow without bees to pollinate it. Do you follow?”
Deryn raised an eyebrow. “Um, I’m not sure, ma’am.”
“But it’s very simple. Near towns there are more cats, fewer mice, and thus more bees—resulting in more red clover. My grandfather was good at noticing webs of such relations. You’re frowning again, Mr. Sharp.”
“It’s just that … he sounds like a rather eccentric gentleman.”
“Some think so.” Dr. Barlow chuckled. “But at times eccentrics notice things that others do not. You must sharpen your razor very well.”
Deryn swallowed. “My razor, ma’am?”
The lady boffin reached out to hold Deryn by her chin. “Both sides of your face are equally smooth. But didn’t I interrupt you halfway through your shave?”
As Dr. Barlow waited for an answer, the buzzing of the hives roared in Deryn’s head, and the walkway seemed to tilt beneath her feet. She’d been such a ninny to muck about with razors. This was how she’d always been caught out in lies—making things too barking complicated.
“I … I’m not sure what you mean, ma’am.”
“How old are you, Mr. Sharp?”
Deryn blinked. She couldn’t speak.
“With a face that smooth, not sixteen,” Dr. Barlow continued. “Perhaps fourteen? Or younger?”
A squick of hope began to trickle through Deryn. Had the lady boffin guessed the wrong secret? She decided to tell the truth: “Barely fifteen, ma’am.”
Dr. Barlow released her chin, giving a shrug. “Well, I’m sure you’re not the first boy to come into the Service a bit young. Your secret is safe with me.” She handed back the rigging knife. “You see, my grandfather’s true realization was this: If you remove one element—the cats, the mice, the bees, the flowers—the entire web is disrupted. An archduke and his wife are murdered, and all of Europe goes to war. A missing piece can be very bad for the puzzle, whether in the natural world, or politics, or here in the belly of an airship. You seem like a fine crewman, Mr. Sharp. I’d hate to lose you.”
Deryn nodded slowly, trying to take all of this in. “I’m in agreement with that, ma’am.”
“Besides …” A hint of a smile played on Dr. Barlow’s lips. “Knowing your little secret makes it easier, should I wish to tell you some of mine.”
Before Deryn had a chance to wonder what that could mean, she noticed a distant clanging over the roar of the hives.
“Do you hear that, ma’am?” she said.
“The general alarm?” Dr. Barlow nodded sadly. “I’m afraid so. It would appear that Britain and Germany are finally at war.”
TWENTY
The Klaxon was ringing in triplets, the signal for an aerial attack.
“I have to run, ma’am,” Deryn said quickly. “Can you make it back to your cabin alone?”
“I’d think not, Mr. Sharp. I shall be with my cargo.”
“But—but … this is an alert,” Deryn sputtered. “You can’t go to the machine room!”
Dr. Barlow took Tazza’s leash from her. “That cargo is more important than your regulations, young man.”
“But passengers are supposed to stay—”
“And midshipmen are supposed to be sixteen years old.” Dr. Barlow waved her hand. “Don’t you have some sort of battle station to get to?”
Deryn let out a pained growl, but gave up in disgust and turned away. She’d done her best—the lady boffin could hang herself out the windows if she wanted.
As Deryn ran back toward the main gondola, the aluminum walkway trembled under her feet. The whole crew was scrambling, filling the passageways of the ship. She dodged past a squad of men in gastric suits and reached the gut hatch, dropping halfway through for a peek outside.
The icy wind between gondola an
d airbeast rumbled with an unfamiliar sound. Not the hum of motivator engines—the angry snarl of Clanker technology. A winged shape caught a flash of moonlight in the distance, an Iron Cross painted on its tail.
The German aeroplanes could fly this high after all.
Deryn dropped the rest of the way down, landing hard enough to bang her teeth together. The middies’ battle station was topside with the bats, so she’d need a flight suit to keep from freezing. Deryn’s suit was back in her cabin, but the riggers always had spares hanging in their bunk room. She dodged through the press of men and hydrogen sniffers, looking for a suit with a pair of gloves stuffed into the pockets. There wasn’t time to find goggles; Dr. Barlow’s pigheadedness had delayed her long enough.
As she buttoned the coverall up to her neck, Deryn felt dizzy for a moment. The rush of battle had come too soon after the shock of Dr. Barlow’s near discovery. The lady boffin had promised not to tell, but she didn’t know the whole story—not yet. With those sharp eyes of hers, she’d have to guess the truth eventually.
Deryn took a deep breath and shook her head clear. This wasn’t the time to fret about secrets. The war was finally here.
She gave her safety line a yank to test its strength, then headed for the rigging hatches.
There were at least a half dozen flying machines hunting the Leviathan. They were hard to count, staying in the distance to keep clear of the strafing hawks and their aeroplane nets.
Deryn was halfway to topside, climbing fast in the freezing wind. Men and fabricated animals swarmed the ratlines, the ropes pressing hard against the membrane with their weight.
She heard the motivator engines change pitch, and the world began to tilt. As the airship rolled, Deryn found herself on the underside again, hanging from the ratlines by two hands. The crewmen around her swung from their safety harnesses, but Deryn’s clip dangled unused from her belt.
“Blisters!” she swore, looking up at her aching hands— possibly Mr. Rigby had been right about using safety clips in battle.
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