Scott Westerfeld - Behemoth

“Young master—,” Klopp began, but his words were drowned out by a crackling in the air.

With a painful heave Alek pulled himself up to look backward. The Goeben was falling behind them, but the Tesla cannon was blindingly bright. It flickered like a welding lamp, sending jittering shadows across the dark sea.

Beside him the airship’s cilia still seethed and billowed, pushing at the air like a million tiny oars.

Faster, Alek prayed to the giant airbeast.

A great fireball formed at the tower’s base, then swiftly rose, dancing and shimmering as it climbed. When it reached the top, a thunderous boom rang out.

Fingers of lightning, jagged and colossal, shot up from the Tesla cannon. They stretched across the whole sky at first, a tree of white fire, then leapt toward the Leviathan as if drawn by scent. The lightning spread a fiery web across the airbeast’s skin, a dazzling wave that surged down its length. In an instant the electricity flowed three hundred meters from tail to head, leaping eagerly across the metal struts that supported the engine pod.

The whole pod began to crackle, the gears and pistons flinging out radiant spokes of fire. Alek was seized by an invisible force; every muscle in his body tightened. For a long moment the lightning squeezed the breath from him. Finally its power wilted, and he slipped back to the metal deck.

The engine sputtered to a halt again.

Alek smelled smoke, and felt an awful pounding in his chest. His ribs ached with every heartbeat.

“Young master? Can you hear me?”

Alek forced his eyes open. “I’m all right, Klopp.”

“No, you aren’t,” the man said. “I’ll get you to the gondola.”

Klopp wrapped one big arm around Alek and pulled him up, sending a wave of fresh agony through him.

“God’s wounds, man! That hurts !”

Alek wavered on his feet, dumbstruck by the pain. Mr. Hirst didn’t lend a hand, his nervous eyes scanning the length of the Leviathan beside them.

Somehow, the airship was not aflame.

“The engine?” Alek asked Klopp.

The man sniffed the air and shook his head. “All the electrikals are cooked, and the starboard side is silent as well.”

Alek turned to Hirst and said, “We’ve lost the engines. Perhaps you could put that gun away.”

The chief engineer stared at the air pistol in his hand, then slipped it into his pocket and pulled out a whistle. “I’ll call a surgeon for you. Tell your mutinous friend to set you down.”

“My ‘mutinous friend’ just saved your—,” Alek started, but a fresh wave of dizziness passed over him. “Let me sit,” he muttered to Klopp. “He says he can get a doctor up here.”

“But he’s the one who shot you!”

“Yes, but he was aiming at you. Now please put me down.”

With an unkindly look at Hirst, Klopp leaned Alek gently against the controls. As Alek caught his breath, he glanced up at the airship’s flank. The cilia were still rippling like windblown grass. Even without the engines to motivate it, the great beast was still headed away from the ironclads.

Alek looked sternward through the motionless propeller. The ironclads were steaming away.

“That’s odd,” he said. “They don’t seem to want to finish us off.”

Klopp nodded. “They’ve gone back to their north-northeast heading. They must be expected somewhere.”

“North-northeast,” Alek repeated. He knew that was significant somehow. He also knew that he should be worried that the Leviathan was now drifting southward, away from Constantinople.

But breathing was worry enough.

Deryn stood up slowly, blinking away spots from her eyes.

A barking lightning bolt! That was what had fizzled up from the Clanker warship and leapt across the sky, dancing on every squick of metal on the Leviathan ’s topside. The Huxley winch had thrown out a blinding flock of white sparks, knocking her half silly in the process.

Deryn looked in all directions, terrified that she would see fires bursting willy-nilly from the membrane. But it was all dark except for the jaggy shimmers burned into her vision. The sniffers must have done their jobs brilliantly before the battle. Not a squick of hydrogen had been leaking from the skin.

Then she remembered—the Leviathan had spun around just in time, the whole airship twisting like a dog chasing its own tail.

Hydrogen …

She looked up into the dark sky, and her jaw dropped.

There was Newkirk, his arms waving madly, the Huxley blazing over his head like a giant Christmas pudding soaked with brandy.

Deryn felt sick, the way she had in a hundred nightmares replaying Da’s accident, so close to the awful sight above her. The Huxley tugged at its cable, carried higher by the heat of the flames, spinning the winch’s crank.

But a moment later, its hydrogen expended, the airbeast began to drop.

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 …