The airship continued its descent, until she and Newkirk were no more than twenty yards above the ground. He yelped as his boots skimmed the top of a tall pine tree, sending off a burst of needles shiny with ice.
Deryn looked ahead . . . and saw the fighting bear.
She and Alek had spotted a few that morning, their dark shapes winding along the Trans-Siberian Trailway. They’d looked impressive enough from a thousand feet, but from this altitude the beast was truly monstrous. Its shoulders stood as tall as a house, and its hot breath coiled up into the freezing air like chimney smoke.
A large cargo platform was strapped to its back. A pallet waited there, a flattened loop of metal ready for Newkirk’s grappling hook. Four crewmen in Russian uniforms scampered about the bear, checking the straps and netting that held the secret cargo.
The driver’s long whip flicked into the air and fell, and the bear began to lumber away. It was headed down a long, straight section of the trailway aligned with the Leviathan’s course.
The beastie’s gait gradually lengthened into a run. According to Dr. Busk, the bear could match the airship’s speed only for a short time. If Newkirk didn’t get the hook right on the first pass, they’d have to swing around in a slow circle, letting the creature rest. The hours saved by not landing and loading in the normal way would be half lost.
And the czar, it seemed, wanted this cargo at its destination barking fast.
As the airship drew closer to the bear, Deryn felt its thundering tread bruising the air. Puffs of dirt drifted up from the colhard-packed ground in its wake. She tried to imagine a squadron of such monsters charging into battle, glittering with fighting spurs and carrying a score of riflemen each. The Germans must have been mad to provoke this war, pitting their machines not only against the airships and kraken of Britain, but also the huge land beasts of Russia and France.
She and Newkirk were over the straightaway now, safe from treetops. The Trans-Siberian Trailway was one of the wonders of the world, even Alek had admitted. Stamped flat by mammothines, it stretched from Moscow to the Sea of Japan and was as wide as a cricket oval—room enough for two bears to pass in opposite directions 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. Fléchette 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.”
As the treetops slowly dropped away, Deryn climbed back up, leveling the pallet again. As they were winched higher, she took a closer look at what was beneath the cargo nettin. It appeared to be nothing but dried beef, slabs and slabs of it all crushed together.
“What does this smell like to you?” she asked Newkirk.
He took a sniff. “Breakfast.”
She nodded. It did smell just like bacon waiting to be tossed into a pan.
“Aye,” she said softly. “But breakfast for what?”
“We’re still traveling west-northwest.” Alek looked at his notes. “On a heading of fifty-five degrees, if my readings can be trusted.”
Volger scowled at the map on his desk. “You must be mistaken, Alek. There’s nothing along that course. No cities or ports, just wilderness.”
“Well . . .” Alek tried to remember how Newkirk had put it. “It might have to do with the earth being round, and this map being flat.”
“Yes, yes. I’ve already plotted a great circle route.” Volger’s index finger swept along a line that curved from the Black Sea to Tokyo. “But we left that behind when we veered north over Omsk.”
Alek sighed. Did everyone but him understand this “great circle” business? Before the Great War had changed everything, Wildcount Volger had been a cavalry officer in the service of Alek’s father. How did he know so much about navigation?
Through the window of Volger’s stateroom, the shadows were stretching out ahead of the Leviathan. The setting sun, at least, agreed that the airship was still angling northward.
“If anything,” Volger said, “we should be headed southwest by now, toward Tsingtao.”
Alek frowned. “The German port in China?”
“Indeed. There are half a dozen Clanker ironclads based there. They threaten Darwinist shipping all across the Pacific, from Australia to the Kingdom of Hawaii. According to the newspapers that Dr. Barlow has so kindly provided me, the Japanese are preparing to lay siege to the city.”
“And they need the Leviathan’s help?”
“Hardly. But Lord Churchill won’t let the Japanese be victorious without British assistance. It wouldn’t be seemly for Asians to defeat a European power all alone.”
Alek groaned. “What a colossal exercise in idiocy. You mean we’ve come all this way just to wave the Union Jack?”
“That was the intent, I’m certain of it. But since the czar’s message arrived, our course has changed.” Volger drummed his fingers on the map. “There must be a clue in that cargo we picked up from the Russians. Has Dylan told you anything about it?”
“I haven’t been able to ask him. He’ngl taking the pallet apart, because of the ballast alert.”
“Because of the what?” the wildcount asked, and Alek found himself smiling. At least he understood something that Volger didn’t.
“Just after we picked up the cargo, an alert sounded—two short rings of the Klaxon. You may remember that happening in the Alps, when we had to throw my father’s gold away.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“I shouldn’t have to,” Alek said. Volger had almost doomed them all by smuggling a quarter ton of gold aboard. “A ballast alert means the ship is overweight, and Dylan has been in the cargo bay with Dr. Barlow all afternoon. They must be taking apart the cargo, to find out why it’s heavier than expected.”
“All very logical,” Volger said, then shook his head. “But I still don’t see how one cargo pallet can matter to a ship three hundred meters long. It seems absurd.”
“It isn’t absurd at all. The Leviathan is aerostatic, which means it’s perfectly balanced with the density of the—”
“Thank you, Your Serene Highness.” Volger held up one hand. “But perhaps you could recount your aeronautics lessons another time.”
“You might take an interest, Count,” Alek said stiffly. “Seeing as how aeronautics is keeping you from crashing into the ground at this very moment.”
“Indeed it is. So perhaps we’d best leave it to the experts, eh, Prince?”
Several sharp retorts came to mind, but Alek held his tongue. Why was Volger in such a foul mood? When the Leviathan had first turned east two weeks ago, he’d seemed pleased not to be headed toward Britain and certain imprisonment. The man had gradually adapted to life aboard the Leviathan, exchanging information with Dr. Barlow, even taking a liking to Dylan. But for the last day Volger had seemed cross with everyone.
For that matter, Dylan had stopped delivering breakfast to the wildcount. Had the two of them had a falling-out?
Volger rolled up his map and shoved it into a desk drawer. “Find out what was in the Russian cargo, even if you have to beat it out of that boy.”
“By ‘that boy’ I assume you mean my good friend, Dylan?”
“He’s hardly your friend. You’d be free now if it weren’t for him.”
“That was my choice,” Alek said firmly. Dylan might have argued for Alek to return to the ship, but it was no use blaming anyone. Alek had made the decision himself. “But I’ll ask him what they found. Perhaps you could inquire with Dr. Barlow, since you two are on such good terms.”
Volger shook his head. “That woman tells me only what she finds it convenient for us to know.”
“Then, I don’t suppose there are any clues in your newspapers. Anything ab20;Fe Russians needing help in northern Siberia?”
“Hardly.” Volger pulled a penny paper from the open desk drawer and shoved it at Alek. “But at least that American reporter has stopped writing about you.”
Alek picked up the paper—the New York World. On its front page was a story by Eddie Malone, an American reporter that he and Dylan had met in Istanbul. Malone had learned certain secrets of the revolution, so Alek had traded his life story for the man’s silence. The result was a stream of articles about Alek’s parents’ assassination and his escape from home.
It had all been most distasteful.
But this story wasn’t about Alek. The headline read A DIPLOMATIC DISASTER ABOARD THE DAUNTLESS!
Below those words was a photograph of the Dauntless, the elephant-shaped walker used by the British ambassador in Istanbul. German undercover agents had taken it on a rampage during the Leviathan’s stay there, causing a near-riot for which the British had been blamed. Only Dylan’s quick thinking had saved the situation from total calamity.
“PONDERING.”
“But that was, what, seven weeks ago? Is this what they call news in Amer
ica?”
“This paper took its time getting to me, but yes, it was old news from the start. Apparently this man Malone has run out of your secrets to spill.”
“Thank heavens,” Alek murmured, following the story to a page inside. Another photograph was printed there: Dylan swinging from the metal trunk of the elephant, flailing at one of the Germans.
“ ‘A Daring Midshipman Handles the Situation,’” he read aloud, smirking. For once it was Dylan in the limelight instead of him. “May I keep this?”
The wildcount didn’t answer—he was glaring at the ceiling, where a message lizard had appeared.
“Prince Aleksandar,” the creature said in Dr. Barlow’s voice. “Mr. Sharp and I would like the pleasure of your company in the cargo bay, if possible.”
“The cargo bay?” Alek said. “Of course, Dr. Barlow. I’ll join you shortly. End message.”
Volger waved his hand to shoo the lizard away, but it had already scuttled off into a message tube. “Excellent. Maybe now we’ll get some answers.”
Alek folded up the newspaper and slipped it into a pocket. “But why would they need me?”
“For the pleasure of your company, of course.” The wildcount shrugged. “Surely a lizard wouldn’t lie.”
The cargo bay smelled like a tannery, a mix of old meat and leather. Long strips of dark brown were piled everywhere, along with a few wooden crates.
“Is this your precious cargo?” Alek asked.
“It’s two tons of dried beef, a hundredweight of tranquilizers, and a thousand rounds of machine-gun ammunition,” said Dylan, reading from a list. “And a few boxes of something else.”
“Something unexpected,” Dr. Barlow said. She and Tazza were in the far corner of the bay, staring down into an open crate. “And quite heavy.”
“Quite,” the loris on her shoulder said, eyeing the crate with displeasure.
Alek looked around for Bovril. It was hanging from the ceiling above Dylan’s head. He held his hand up, and the creature crawled down onto his shoulder. Count Volger, of course, did not permit abominations in his presence.