Tesla glanced up at their sword tips, and laughed. “Too late for seif the who thoughts, Prince.”
With a rubber-gloved hand he spun a dial, then ducked behind the panel. The crackling in the air suddenly built to a snap, and a spiderweb of lightning leapt out of the smoke from all directions, striking the tips of the drawn swords.
The hilt of Alek’s weapon turned searing hot, but he couldn’t drop it—every muscle in his hand was suddenly clenched tight. A wild and unstoppable force seized him, twisting his heart in his chest. A lance of agony shot from his right hand down through his body, down to the soles of his feet.
Alek stumbled backward until he slipped, the dancing cord of electricity breaking as he fell to the ground. His lungs were seared by the smoke, and the palm of his sword hand was charred and stinging. The smell of burned hair and flesh filled his nose.
Alek lay there on his back a moment, but there wasn’t time to be stunned. The floor was still shaking beneath him, stronger every second. He staggered to his feet, looking about for his sword, but the control room was a mass of smoke and flickering lights.
He stumbled over a prone form—Bauer, clutching his burned sword hand to his chest.
“Are you all right, Hans?”
“There, sir!”
Bauer pointed his blackened fingers at a silhouette in the smoke. It was Tesla, his long arms working the levers, and propped beside him on the controls was his electrikal walking stick. Alek lurched toward him and grasped the stick, then rose to his full height.
He nestled his finger around the trigger and pointed it straight at Tesla.
“Stop, sir.”
The man stared at the metal tip a moment, then gave an arrogant snort and calmly reached for the largest lever among the controls. . . .
“No,” Alek said, and pulled the trigger.
Lightning slashed out across the room. It took Tesla’s body and shook him like a puppet. Fingers of white flame spilled out of the cane to dance across the controls. Sparks spat in all directions, and the smell of burned metal and plastic filled the room.
In seconds the walking stick sputtered out. Tesla lay slumped across the controls, not moving. Tiny bolts of lightning skittered across his body, and his hair twitched and quivered.
The rumble in the floor beneath Alek began to shudder, surging and falling, rattling the whole building in shock wave after shock wave, as if a giant were staggering past. Alek’s vision blurred with every pulse, and he heard the windows shattering all around him.
He called out Volger’s name, but the trembling air itself seemed to shred the sound apart. The smoke thinned as the smell of salt water rolled in through the broken windows, and Alek staggered toward the nearest one, his lungs crying out for fresh air. His boots skidded, shards of glass cutting him through his burned boot soles. But at least he could breathe.
He stared up at Goliath looming over the compound. The pulsing beat beneath his feet was ecd in the crackles of electricity coursing the tower’s length. The whole machine was bursting with power, and Alek realized what he’d done. . . .
Goliath was like a steam boiler under pressure. It was ready to fire, but he had stopped Tesla from loosing the massive energies building up inside it. The chimneys were still spitting smoke, the generators sending more power to the already brimming capacitors. As Alek watched, he saw more windows shattering across the compound.
In the middle of it all, the German corvette stood over the wreckage of the Pinkerton walker. It had torn two of the smaller machine’s legs off, and seemed to be performing a bizarre victory dance. Its legs were shivering, its body lurching back and forth.
Then Alek saw the webs of lightning on its metal skin—the walker’s control systems had been addled by the wild energy that was setting the air aquiver. He looked into the sky.
The Leviathan itself was glowing, like a cloud catching the setting sun. The airship’s cilia were rippling, slowly pulling it away, but the engines were silent, their electrikals also overwhelmed.
Would the hydrogen catch fire? Alek grasped the edge of the window, hardly feeling the broken glass against his palms.
“Deryn,” he sobbed. Anything but this.
Then another shape loomed in the distance, something huge lurching over the horizon. It was the first walker, four times the size of the corvette, a tattered German naval jack fluttering from its spar deck. The machine was advancing slowly, its two right legs swinging uselessly. But the kraken-fighting arms were flailing at the ground, dragging the walker across the dunes as though it were a dying beast.
Alek wondered for a moment how its electrikals hadn’t shorted yet, but then the walker stumbled onto the tangled metal of the perimeter fence, and a circuit was completed. A single jittering finger leapt from the nearest small tower, striking an upraised kraken-fighting arm of the German machine.
The lightning from the other towers followed, their built-up charges hungry for a way out, and within an eyeblink five streams of electricity were pouring into the huge water-walker. The machine shuddered for a moment, its limbs rattling mindlessly as sparks swept across its metal skin. The air itself tore open in one long peal of thunder. The scrub trees around the walker burst into flame, the white fire consuming even the soil and sand beneath it.
The ammunition magazines must have caught then. The walker began to shake harder, and jets of fire burst from its hatches. Flames spat from the smokestacks as the fuel tanks caught all at once, and black smoke roiled out of the engine vents.
When the thudding of explosions had finally faded, Alek could hardly hear, but he could feel that the trembling beneath his feet was gone. The control room behind him was dark and silent, save for dazed human voices. Goliath had expended itself on the German walker.
Alek looked up again. The Leviathan’s glow was fading, the airship whole and alive with all its ew.
He shook with another sob, sinking to one knee and realizing that the survival of that one ship—one girl, really—had been for a moment more important than the war itself, or a city’s millions. Then the wind shifted, and Alek breathed in the burnt-meat smells that filled the room behind him.
Important enough for him to kill a man, it seemed.
In their infinite wisdom, the Admiralty approved Alek’s medal for bravery in the air on the very same day the United States entered the war.
The timing seemed suspicious to Deryn, and of course the medal wasn’t for anything useful, like shutting down Tesla’s weapon to save the Leviathan. Instead Alek was to be decorated for blundering about on the ship’s topside during a storm, and for his great skill in falling over and knocking himself silly. That was the Admiralty for you.
But at least it meant that the Leviathan was headed back to New York, and she would see Alek one last time.
After fighting the German water-walkers on Long Island, the airship had been invited to Washington, DC. There the captain and his officers had testified before the Congress, whose members were debating how to respond to this outrageous attack on American soil.
It took a bit of droning and dealing, but finally the case was made that the Germans had gone too far, and Darwinist and Clanker politicians voted together to join the war. Already young men were swarming the enlistment offices, clamoring to go and fight the kaiser. As the Leviathan headed north, the streets below were choked with flags and parades and newsboys shouting war.
Deryn was on the bridge when a second message from London arrived, this one marked Top Secret.
She’d healed enough to put her cane aside, but Deryn hadn’t dared the ratlines yet. She spent her time assisting the officers and Dr. Barlow. Being stuck in the gondola was still dead annoying, but bridge duty had taught Deryn more than a bit about how the Leviathan was run.
It would all be quite useful, if she ever got to command an airship herself.
The messenger eagle arrived just as the skyscrapers of New York City came into sight, on the day Alek was to receive his medal. The beastie shot past
the bridge windows, then angled to the bird port on the starboard side.
The watch officer called out a moment later, “For Dr. Barlow’s eyes only, sir.”
The captain turned to Deryn and nodded.
She saluted him, then made her way to the lady boffin’s stateroom with the message tube in hand. It rattled a bit.
Her knock was answered by Tazza whining from inside, which Deryn took as permission to go in.
“Afternoon, ma’am. Message from London for you.” She squinted at the writing the tube. “From a P. C. Mitchell.”
The lady boffin looked up from a book. “Ah, at last. Please open it.”
“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but it says ‘Top Secret.’”
“I’m sure it does. But you have proven yourself adept at keeping secrets, Mr. Sharp. Proceed.”
Her loris chuckled, then said, “Secrets!”
“Aye, ma’am.” Deryn pulled open the message tube. It contained a single piece of translucent avian-mail paper scrolled around a small felt bag with something tiny and hard inside.
She unrolled the paper and read, “ ‘Dear Nora, it is as you suspected: iron and nickel, with traces of cobalt, phosphorous, and sulfur. All quite natural in formation.’ And it’s signed, ‘Regards, Peter.’ “
“Just as I thought,” the lady boffin sighed. “But too late to save him.”
“Save who?” Deryn asked, but then realized the obvious—Nikola Tesla was the only person who’d needed saving lately. No one knew exactly what had happened the night he’d died. But it was fairly certain that the great inventor had been electrocuted by Goliath itself, the machine malfunctioning thanks to German shells and the general chaos of battle.
Deryn upended the felt bag onto her palm, and there it was—the tiny piece she’d cut from the object under Tesla’s bed.
“So this is about that mad boffin’s rock?” She looked at the letter again. “Nickel and cobalt and sulfur? What does it all mean?”
“Meteoric,” the loris said.
Deryn stared at the creature. She’d read the word somewhere in the Manual of Aeronautics’s natural philosophy chapters, but couldn’t quite place it.
“It means, Mr. Sharp, that Tesla was a fraud.” Dr. Barlow shrugged. “Or perhaps a madman—he seemed to think he could destroy Berlin.”
“You mean Goliath wouldn’t have worked?” Deryn shook her head. “But what about Siberia?”
Dr. Barlow pointed at Deryn’s hand. “In Siberia a stone fell from the sky.”
“A wee stone did all that?”
“A meteor, to be precise. And not a small one but a giant piece of iron traveling at many thousands of miles per hour. What Mr. Tesla found was only a fraction of the whole.” Dr. Barlow placed her book aside. “I suppose he was testing his machine when the meteor struck, and he took it into his head that he himself wielded cosmic power. Quite typical of him, really.”
Deryn looked at the tiny piece of iron in her hand. “But he had that metal detector sent to him, so he was looking for iron. He must have known it was a meteor!”
“The greater part of madness is hiding the truth from oneself. Or perhaps Tesla imagined that his machine could call down iron from the sky.” She picked up the stone for a closer look. “In any case, what happened in Tunguska was merely an accident. A cosmic joke, so to speak.”
Deryn shook her head, remembering the fallen trees stretching mile after mile in all directions. It was too much to believe that a mere accident could have created such ruination.
“It is fitting, though,” the lady boffin said with a sad smile, “that Goliath should have been felled by a stone.”
“But Tesla’s machine made the sky change color. Lord Churchill himself saw it happen!”
The lady boffin laughed outright at this. “Yes, Tesla made the sky change color . . . at sunrise. Not such a difficult trick, if one has a gullible audience. Or perhaps Goliath really could change atmospheric conditions. But that’s a far cry from destroying a city, Mr. Sharp.”
“Gullible,” her loris said with a snicker.
“You mean it was all rubbish? Everything we did, everything that Alek . . .”
Deryn closed her eyes. Alek had been duped, just as she’d always feared.
“An interesting point, Mr. Sharp. If a meteor falls in the forest and no one realizes it, does it end the war?” The lady boffin handed back the stone. “The Germans believed in Goliath, and in their belief they have propelled the United States to join our cause. That falling stone may have brought us peace, one way or another.”
The black piece of iron suddenly felt uncanny in Deryn’s hand. It was something from another world, wasn’t it? She put it back into the bag, rolled the letter up, and slipped them both into the message tube. With a step forward she placed the tube on the lady boffin’s desk.
“This will stay top secret, won’t it, ma’am?”
“Of course,” Dr. Barlow said. “With Goliath being rebuilt, the Zoological Society will have to keep the truth under wraps. Even His Majesty’s Government mustn’t know.”
Deryn frowned. “But what about Alek? He’s still raising money for the Tesla Foundation.”
“Repairing Goliath will make the Germans anxious to sue for peace.” Dr. Barlow fixed Deryn with her stare. “Telling Alek would be a mistake.”
“But he’s not your puppet, Dr. Barlow! Can you imagine what he’s feeling? He thought the war would be over by now.”
“Indeed,” the lady boffin said. “So why make matters worse by revealing that Tesla made a fool of him?”
Deryn started to protest, but the lady boffin had a point. It would crush Alek to discover that his destiny was a lie, nothing but a cosmic accident.
“But Alek thinks it’s his fault the war’s still going, because he shut down the machine after Tesla was killed!”
“Ny orf this is his fault, Deryn,” the lady boffin said. “And the war will end one day. Wars always do.”
They pinned the medal on Alek in the cargo bay, with half the crew in formal dress and standing at attention. Captain Hobbes read the honors while a score of reporters snapped photographs, including a certain bum-rag from the New York World. Klopp, Hoffman, and Bauer were there in fresh civilian clothes, while Count Volger still wore his cavalry uniform. Even a few diplomats from the Austro-Hungarian consulate appeared, hedging their bets in case Alek’s claim to the throne prevailed.
Deryn managed not to roll her eyes during the ceremony, even when the captain spoke of the grave injuries Alek had sustained.
“He fell and knocked his head,” she muttered.
“Pardon me?” came a whisper from behind her, and Deryn turned. It was Adela Rogers, the Hearst reporter.
“Nothing.”
“Surely it’s something.” The woman stepped closer. “The bell captain never speaks without reason.”
Deryn bit her lip, wanting to explain that she was not a bell captain but a midshipman, a decorated officer. And soon a secret agent in the employ of the barking Zoological Society of London!
But she turned away, saying quietly, “He’s done better things, that’s all.”
“You may be right about that. I was there the night Tesla died.”
Deryn looked at Miss Rogers again, wondering what this was about.
“The last I saw of him,” the woman said, “His Highness seemed very determined to stop Mr. Tesla.”
“Alek saved this ship that night.”
“And Berlin, too, I hear.” The woman’s notepad came out. “In fact, some people are saying the war might have been over already if Goliath had been fired, but Prince Aleksandar didn’t want that. He is a Clanker, after all.”
“No one even knows if that contraption—,” Deryn began, but halted herself. That was too close to Dr. Barlow’s new secret to say aloud.
Why couldn’t everyone see that Alek had done more to end the war than anyone else? He’d given his gold to the Ottoman Revolution and his engines to the Leviathan, which had re
scued Tesla from being eaten in the wilderness. That had all made a difference, hadn’t it?
“You know something secret, don’t you, bell captain?” the woman said. “You always have.”
Deryn shrugged. “All I know is that His Serene Highness Aleksandar wants peace, just like he says. You can quote me on that.”
After the ceremony, once all the photographs had been taken and the diplomats and notables had offered their congratulations, Alek went in search of Deryn. But before he could take two steps into
the crowd, he found himself trapped between Captain Hobbes and the lady boffin.
“Your Serene Highness, congratulations again!” the captain said, and he offered a salute instead of bowing. As Alek returned the gesture, he imagined himself for a fleeting moment as a member of the crew. But that dream was over.
“Thank you, sir. For this and . . .” He shrugged. “For never throwing us into the brig.”
Captain Hobbes smiled. “It was tricky for you in those first days, wasn’t it? And a bit strange for us, having Clankers on the ship.”
“But I always knew we’d make a proper Darwinist of you in the end,” Dr. Barlow said, staring pointedly at Alek’s medal.
He had been awarded the Air Gallantry Cross, the highest honor the British armed services could give a civilian, and right there on its face was a portrait of old Charles Darwin himself.
“A proper Darwinist,” the lady boffin’s loris said, and Bovril chuckled.
“I’m not sure what I am, these days,” Alek admitted. “But I shall try to live up to this honor.”
“A fine watchword in these strange times, Your Highness,” the captain said. “If you’ll excuse me, I must attend to our American guests. Their Clanker airships will be joining us on our way back to Europe. Most extraordinary.”