Scott Westerfeld - Goliath

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!”

“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.”

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 netting. 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’s still 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.