Scott Westerfeld - Leviathan

Still … at least she was flying. If she ever came down alive, the boffins would have to admit as how she’d passed this test.

Boy or not, Deryn Sharp had shown a squick of air sense after all.

The storm felt strangely still.

She remembered the sensation from Da’s hot-air balloons. Cut free from its tether, the medusa had exactly matched the speed of the wind. The air felt motionless, the earth turning below on a giant lathe.

Dark clouds still boiled around her, giving the Huxley an occasional spin. But worse were the flickers in the distance. One sure way to set a hydrogen breather aflame was to hit it with lightning . Deryn distracted herself by watching London pass beneath, all matchbox houses and winding streets, the factories with their sealed smokestacks.

She remembered how Da had said London looked in the days before old Darwin had worked his magic. A pall of coal smoke had covered the entire city, along with a fog so thick that streetlamps were lit during the day. During the worst of the steam age so much soot and ash had decorated the nearby countryside that butterflies had evolved black splotches on their wings for camouflage.

But before Deryn had been born, the great coal-fired engines had been overtaken by fabricated beasties, muscles and sinews replacing boilers and gears. These days the only chimney smoke came from ovens, not huge factories, and the storm had cleared even that murk from the air.

Deryn could see fabs wherever she looked. Over Buckingham Palace a flock of strafing hawks patrolled in spirals, carrying nets that would slice the wings off any aeroplane that ventured too close. Messenger terns crisscrossed the Square Mile, undeterred by the weather. The streets were full of draft animals: hippoesques and equine breeds, an elephantine dragging a sledge full of bricks through the rain. The storm that had almost snuffed out her Huxley had barely slowed the city down.

Deryn wished she had her sketch pad, to capture the tangle of streets and beasts and buildings below. She’d first started drawing up in one of Da’s balloons, trying to capture the wonders of flight.

As the clouds gradually broke apart, the Huxley slid across a shaft of light. Deryn stretched in the warmth, and set to squelching water out of her cold, damp clothes.

The houses below were getting smaller, the teeming umbrella tops blurring into the wet streets. As it dried, the Huxley was climbing.

Deryn frowned. To descend in a balloon, you vented hot air from the top. But Huxleys were primitive ascenders, designed to be tethered at all times.

What was she supposed to do, talk the beastie down?

“Oi!” she shouted. “You there!”

The nearest tentacle curled a bit, but that was all.

“Beastie! I’m talking to you !”

No reaction.

Deryn scowled. An hour ago the Huxley had been so easy to spook! Perhaps one annoyed lassie’s cries didn’t amount to much after the terrific storm.

“You’re a big, bloated bum-rag!” she shouted, swinging her feet to rock the pilot’s rig. “And I’m getting bored of your company! Let! Me! Down!”

The tentacles uncurled, like a cat stretching in the sun.

“That’s just brilliant,” she grumbled. “I’ll add rudeness to your defects.”

Passing through another patch of sun, the medusa made a soft sighing noise, expanding its airbag to dry itself.

Deryn felt herself drifting higher.

She groaned, looking at the blue skies ahead. She could see all the way to the farmlands of Surrey now. And past that would be the English Channel.

For two long years Deryn had wanted nothing more than to go aloft again, like when Da had been alive— and here she was, marooned in the sky. Maybe this was punishment for acting like a boy, just like her mum had always warned.

The wind steadied, pushing the beast toward France.

It was going to be a long day.

The Huxley noticed it first.

The pilot’s rig jolted under Deryn, like a carriage going over a pothole. Shaken from a catnap, she glared up at the Huxley.

“Getting bored?”

The airbeast seemed to be glowing, the sun shining straight down through iridescent skin. It was noon, so she’d been aloft more than six hours. The English Channel sparkled not far ahead, set against a perfect sky. They’d left London’s gray clouds far behind.

Deryn scowled and stretched.

“Barking lovely weather,” she croaked. Her lips were parched and her bum was very, very sore.

Then she saw the tentacles coiling around her.

“What now?” she moaned, though she’d have welcomed a flock of birds attacking them, as long as it brought the beastie down. A bumpy landing was better than hanging here till she died of thirst.

Deryn scanned the horizon and saw nothing. But she felt a trembling in the leather cords of her pilot’s rig and heard the thrum of engines in the air.

Her eyes widened.

A huge airbeast was emerging from the gray clouds behind her, its reflective silver topside glistening in the sunlight.

The thing was gigantic—larger than St. Paul’s Cathedral, longer than the oceangoing dreadnought Orion that she’d seen in the Thames the week before. The shining cylinder was shaped like a zeppelin, but the flanks pulsed with the motion of its cilia, and the air around it swarmed with symbiotic bats and birds.

The medusa made an unhappy whistling sound.

“No, beastie. Don’t fret!” she called softly. “They’re here to help!”

At least, Deryn assumed they were. But she hadn’t been expecting anything quite so big to come hunting her down.

The airship drew closer, until Deryn could make out the gondola suspended from the beastie’s belly. The foot-tall letters under the bridge windows came slowly into focus… . Leviathan .

She swallowed. “And barking famous, these friends are.”

The Leviathan had been the first of the great hydrogen breathers fabricated to rival the kaiser’s zeppelins. A few beasties had grown larger since, but no other had yet made the trip to India and back, breaking German airship records all the way.

“THE LEVIATHAN APPROACHES.”

The Leviathan ’s body was made from the life threads of a whale, but a hundred other species were tangled into its design, countless creatures fitting together like the gears of a stopwatch. Flocks of fabricated birds swarmed around it—scouts, fighters, and predators to gather food. Deryn saw message lizards and other beasties scampering across its skin.

According to her aerology manual, the big hydrogen breathers were modeled on the tiny South American islands where Darwin had made his famous discoveries. The Leviathan wasn’t one beastie, but a vast web of life in ever shifting balance.

The motivator engines changed pitch, nudging the creature’s nose up. The airbeast obeyed, cilia along its flanks undulating like a sea of grass in the wind—a host of tiny oars rowing backward, slowing the Leviathan almost to a halt.

The huge shape drifted slowly overhead, blotting out the sky. Its belly was all mottled grays, camouflage for night raids.

In the sudden coolness of the huge shadow, Deryn stared up, spellbound. This vast, fantastic creature had actually come to rescue her .

The Huxley shuddered again, wondering where the sun had gone.

“Hush, beastie. It’s nothing but your big cousin.”

Deryn heard calls from above, and she saw movement.

A rope tumbled into view, unrolling past her. Another followed, then a dozen more, until Deryn was surrounded by an upside-down forest of swaying ropes.