Scott Westerfeld: Behemoth

Deryn took a deep breath, trying to stop her hands from shaking.

She couldn’t crank him back up. The winch was designed for a hydrogen-filled Huxley, not to haul dead weight.

Deryn followed the taut cable, climbing down the ratlines on the airbeast’s flank. From the ship’s waist she could just see the Huxley’s dark shape fluttering against the whitecaps of the waves.

“Barking spiders,” she murmured. The water was much closer than she’d expected.

The Leviathan was losing altitude.

Of course—the great airbeast was trying to find the strongest wind to pull itself away from the German ironclads. It wouldn’t care about smacking poor burnt Newkirk against the ocean’s choppy surface.

But the officers could drop ballast, and drag the ship up against its will. Deryn pulled out her command whistle and blew for a message lizard, then stared again at the Huxley below.

There was no human movement that she could see. Newkirk had to be stunned, at least. And he wouldn’t have the right equipment to climb the cable. No one expected to climb up from an ascender.

Where was that barking message lizard? She saw one scrambling across the membrane, and whistled for it. But the lizard just stared at her and jabbered something about an electrical malfunction.

“Brilliant,” she murmured. The bolt of Clanker lightning had scrambled the wee beasties’ brains! Down below, the dark water looked closer every second.

She was going to have to rescue Newkirk herself.

Deryn searched the pockets of her flight suit. In airmanship class Mr. Rigby had taught them about how riggers “belayed,” which was Service-speak for sliding down a rope without breaking your neck. She found a few carabiners and enough line to make a pair of friction hitches.

After attaching her safety clip to the Huxley’s cable, Deryn twisted the carabiner tight. She couldn’t wind the rope around her hips because the weight of the dead Huxley would snip her in half. But after a moment’s fiddling, she attached the extra carabiners to her harness and strung the cable through them.

Mr. Rigby wouldn’t approve of this method, Deryn thought as she kicked herself away from the membrane.

She slid down in short jerks, the carabiners’ friction keeping her from falling too fast. But the rope was hot beneath her gloves, its fibers fraying wherever she snapped to a halt. Deryn doubted this cable was designed to hold the weight of a dead Huxley and two middies.

The ocean thundered below Deryn, the wind growing colder now that the sun had fully set. The peak of a tall wave smacked against the Huxley’s drooping membrane, cracking like a gunshot.

“Newkirk!” Deryn shouted, and the boy stirred in his pilot’s rig.

A shudder of relief went through her—he was alive. Not like Da.

She let herself fall the last twenty yards, the rope hissing like mad and spilling a burnt smell into the salt air. But her boots landed softly on the squishy membrane of the dead airbeast, which smelled of smoke and salt, like jellyfish cooked on a hearth fire.

“Where in blazes am I?” Newkirk mumbled, barely audible over the rumble of the waves. His hair was scorched, his face and hands blackened with smoke.

“Almost in the barking ocean, that’s where! Can you move?”

The boy stared at his blackened hands, wriggling his fingers, then unstrapped himself from the harness. He stood up shakily on the frame of the pilot’s rig.

“Aye. I’m just singed.” He ran his fingers through his hair, or what was left of it.

“Can you climb?” Deryn asked.

Newkirk stared up at the Leviathan ’s dark belly. “Aye, but that’s miles away! Couldn’t you have cranked faster?”

“You could have fallen slower !” Deryn shouted back. She unclipped two carabiners and shoved them into his hands, along with a short length of line. “Tie yourself a friction hitch. Or don’t you remember Mr. Rigby’s classes?”

Newkirk stared at the carabiners, then up at the distant airship.

“Aye, I remember. But I never thought we’d be ascending that far.”

“Ascending,” of course, was Service-Speak for climbing up a rope without breaking your neck. Deryn’s fingers worked fast with her own line. A friction hitch slid freely up a rope, but held fast when weight was hanging from it. That way, she and Newkirk could stop and rest without relying on their muscles to keep them from sliding back.

“You go first,” she ordered. If Newkirk slid down, she could stop him.

He pulled himself up a few feet, then tested his hitch, swinging freely from the rope. “It works!”

“Aye. You’ll be conquering Mount Everest next!” As she spoke, another wave slapped at the Huxley, splashing across them both. Deryn lost her footing, but her friction hitch held.

She spat out salt water and yelled, “Get going, you Dummkopf ! The ship’s losing altitude!”

Newkirk started climbing, scrambling with feet and hands. He had soon cleared enough distance that Deryn could haul herself off the dead Huxley.

Another wave hit the airbeast, snapping the line tight, and Newkirk skidded down till he was almost on top of her. If the Leviathan dropped any lower, the beastie’s carcass would be dragging in the water. If the membrane filled up, it would pull on the rope like a barrel full of stones.

Enough to break any cable … She had to cut the Huxley loose.

“Higher!” she yelled, and started climbing madly.

About twenty feet above the Huxley, Deryn halted, hanging just above a badly frayed spot. She pulled out her rigging knife, reached down, and started hacking at the line. Huxley cable was barking thick, but when the next tall wave struck the airbeast, the fibers unraveled in a blur and snapped.

Without the beastie’s dead weight anchoring them, suddenly they were swinging across the black sea, cast about by the wind. Newkirk cried out with surprise overhead.

“Sorry!” Deryn yelled up. “Should have warned you.”

But with the Huxley’s weight gone, the rope wouldn’t snap … probably.

She started climbing again, wishing for the hundredth time that she had the arm strength of a boy. But soon the waves no longer threatened her dangling boots.

Halfway up, Deryn took a long breather, searching the dark horizon for the two German ironclads. They were nowhere to be seen.

Maybe the Royal Navy was close by, and had kept the ships running. But Deryn couldn’t see any sign of surface ships. The only shape on the water was the Huxley’s carcass, a lonely black smear on the waves.

“Poor beastie,” she said, shivering. The whole airship and its crew might have wound up like that—burnt black, as lonely as driftwood on the dark sea. If the hydrogen sniffers had missed a single leak, or if the airbeast hadn’t spun itself around just in time, they’d all have been done for.

“Barking Clankers,” Deryn murmured. “Making their own lightning now.”

She closed her eyes to shut her dark memories away, the roar of skin-prickling heat and the smell of burnt flesh. This time she’d won. The fire hadn’t taken anyone she loved.

Deryn shuddered once more, then started to climb again.

“This is entirely unacceptable!” Dr. Barlow cried.

“I’m s-sorry, ma’am,” the guard sputtered. “But the captain said the Clanker boy wasn’t to have visitors.”

Deryn shook her head—the man’s resistance was already faltering. He was backed up against Alek’s stateroom door, sweat breaking out on his forehead.

“I am not a visitor, you imbecile,” Dr. Barlow said. “I’m a doctor here to see an injured patient!”

Tazza’s ears perked up at the lady boffin’s sharp tone, and he let out a low growl. Deryn held his leash a squick tighter. “Shush now, Tazza. No biting.”