FIFTEEN

Just after morning altitude drills the middies were all at breakfast, chattering about signal scores, the duty roster, and when war would finally come.

Deryn had already finished her eggs and potatoes. She was busy sketching the way the message lizard tubes coiled around the Leviathan’s walls and windows. The beasties always poked their heads out as they waited for messages, like foxes in a burrow.

Then suddenly Midshipman Tyndall, who’d been staring dreamily out the windows, shouted, “Look at that!”

The other middies sprang up, scrambling to the port side of the mess. In the distance, across the patchwork of farmlands and villages, the great city of London was rising into view. They shouted to each other about the ironclads moored on the River Thames, the tangle of converging rail lines, and the elephantine draft animals that choked the roads leading to the capital.

“BLASÉ ABOUT OLD SIGHTS.”

Deryn stayed in her seat, taking the opportunity to spear one of Middy Fitzroy’s potatoes.

“Haven’t you plook-heads seen London before?” she asked, chewing.

“Not from up here,” Newkirk said. “The Service never lets us big ships fly over cities.”

“Wouldn’t want to scare the Monkey Luddites, would we?” Tyndall said, punching Newkirk’s shoulder.

Newkirk ignored him. “Look! Is that Saint Paul’s?”

“Seen it,” Deryn said, stealing a piece of Tyndall’s bacon. “I flew over these parts in a Huxley once. An interesting story, that.”

“Quit your blethering, Mr. Sharp!” Fitzroy said. “We’ve heard that story enough.”

Deryn flicked a piece of potato at Fitzroy’s dorsal regions. The boy always assumed superior airs, just because his father was an ocean navy captain.

Feeling the projectile hit home, Fitzroy turned from the view and scowled. “We’re the ones who rescued you, remember?”

“What, you sods?” she said. “I don’t remember seeing you at the winch, Mr. Fitzroy.”

“Perhaps not.” He smiled and turned back to the view. “But we watched you float past these very windows, swinging from your Huxley like a pair of trinkets.”

The other middies laughed, and Deryn sprang up from her chair. “I think you might want to rephrase that, Mr. Fitzroy.”

He turned away and gazed serenely out the window. “And I think you might learn to respect your betters, Mr. Sharp.”

“Betters?” Deryn balled her fists. “Who’d respect a bum-rag like you?”

“Gentlemen!” Mr. Rigby’s voice came from the hallway. “Your attention, please.”

Deryn snapped to attention with the others, but her glare stayed fixed on Fitzroy. He was stronger than her, but in the two tiny bunk rooms that the middies shared, there were a hundred ways to take revenge.

Then Captain Hobbes and Dr. Busk entered the mess behind Mr. Rigby, and her anger faded. It wasn’t often that the master of the Leviathan, much less the ship’s head boffin, addressed the lowly middies. She exchanged an anxious glance with Newkirk.

“At ease, gentlemen,” the captain said, then smiled. “I’m not bringing you news of war. Not today, at least.”

Some of the other middies looked disappointed.

A week ago Austria-Hungary had finally declared war on Serbia, vowing to avenge their murdered archduke with an invasion. A few days later Germany had started up with Russia, which meant that France would be next into the fray. War between the Darwinist and Clanker powers was spreading like a vicious rumor, and it didn’t seem that Britain could stay out for long.

“You may have noticed London underneath us,” the captain continued. “An unusual visit, and that’s not the half of it. We’ll be setting down in Regent’s Park, near His Majesty’s London Zoo.”

Deryn’s eyes widened. Flying over London was bad enough, but coming down in a public park was going to stir the pot for sure. And not just for Monkey Luddites. Even old Darwin himself might have got antsy about a thousand-foot airbeast landing on his picnic.

The captain crossed to the windows and looked down. “Regent’s Park is at best a half mile across, a bit more than twice our length. A tricky business, but the risk is a necessary one. We’re taking aboard an important guest, a member of the zoo’s staff, for transport to Constantinople.”

Deryn wondered for a moment if she’d heard right. Constantinople was in the Ottoman Empire, clear on the other side of Europe, and the Ottomans were Clankers. Why in blazes would the Leviathan be headed there now?

The airship had spent the last month preparing for war— combat drills every night, and daily musters of the fléchette bats and strafing hawks. They’d even flown within sight of a German dreadnought in the North Sea, just to show that a living airship wasn’t scared of any pile of gears and engines.

And now they were headed off on a jaunt to Constantinople?

Dr. Busk spoke up. “Our passenger is a scientist of great renown, who’ll be undertaking an important diplomatic mission. We will also be bringing cargo aboard, of a delicate nature. It must be treated with the utmost care.”

The captain cleared his throat. “Mr. Rigby and I may have to make a difficult decision about weight.”

Deryn took a slow breath. Weight … so that’s what this was about.

The Leviathan was “aerostatic,” Service-speak for being the same density as the air around it. Maintaining this balance was a fussy business. When rain collected topside, water had to be dumped from the ballast holds. If the ship expanded in the hot sun, hydrogen had to be vented off. And when passengers or extra cargo came aboard, something else had to be taken off—usually something useless.

And there was nothing more useless than a new midshipman.

“I shall be reviewing your signals and navigation scores,” the captain was saying. “Mr. Rigby will weigh in on which of you are paying the most attention in lectures. And, of course, any missteps during this landing will be frowned upon. Good day, gentlemen.”

He turned and strode from the room, the head boffin leaving with him. There was a moment of silence as the middies absorbed the news. In a few hours some of them might be gone from the Leviathan for good.

“All right, lads,” Mr. Rigby snapped. “You heard the captain. We’re about to land on an improvised airfield, so look smart! They’ve got a ground crew in from the Scrubs, but no landing master with them. And our passenger is going to need help down there. Mr. Fitzroy and Mr. Sharp, you two are the best with the Huxleys, so you’ll head down first… .”

As the bosun gave his orders, Deryn looked at the other middies’ faces. Fitzroy returned her gaze coolly, and she didn’t have to guess what that bum-rag was thinking. She’d been aboard the Leviathan barely a month, and it was only by freak chance that she was here at all. Not much better than a stowaway, as far as Fitzroy was concerned.

Deryn glared right back at him. The captain hadn’t said anything about who’d been aboard longest. He was looking at airmanship, so he wanted to keep his best men.

And that’s exactly what she was, man or not.

Maybe all the competition on the Leviathan would serve her well now. Thanks to Da’s training, Deryn had always beat the other middies with knots and sextants. And even Mr. Rigby would admit that her behavior hadn’t been as rowdy lately, and he’d just complimented her work with the Huxleys.

As long as the landing went brilliantly, there was nothing to worry about at all.

Regent’s Park spread out beneath Deryn, its grass thick from the August rains.

Squads of ground men ran across it, shepherding the last few civilians out of the landing area. A thin line of policemen clung to the edges, holding back hundreds of gawkers. The Leviathan’s shadow lay across the trees, and the air trembled with the engines’ hum.

Deryn was descending fast, aiming for the intersection of two footpaths, where a local chief constable was awaiting orders. A message lizard rode on her shoulder, its sucker-feet tugging at her uniform like the claws of a nervous cat.

“We’re almost there, beastie,” she said soothingly. She didn’t fancy arriving on the ground with a panicked lizard, the captain’s landing orders garbled beyond understanding.

Deryn was a bit nervous herself. She’d ridden ascenders a half dozen times since joining the Leviathan’s crew—she weighed the least of all the middies, and could always coax her beasts the highest. But that had been on U-boat spotting duty, with the Huxley cabled to the airship. This was the first time she’d free-ballooned since her wild ride as a recruit.

So far, at least, it had been a textbook descent. The airbeast’s extra ballast was bringing it down fast, guided by a pair of gliding wings attached to her rig.

Deryn wondered who was so important, to warrant all this trouble. They were ruining a hundred picnics and risking disaster by landing here in the park, and probably scaring the clart out of every Monkey Luddite in London. And all just to get some scientist to Constantinople a bit quicker?

This fellow must be some kind of clever-boots, even for a boffin.

The ground was rushing closer, and Deryn let out a slosh of ballast. Her descent slowed a squick, the spilled water sparkling in the sun as it cascaded down. The message lizard squeezed a little tighter.

“Don’t you worry, beastie,” Deryn murmured. “It’s all under control.”

Mr. Rigby had told her to get down fast, with no nonsense. She imagined him watching from above, timing the descent with his stopwatch, pondering who should be cut from the crew.

It didn’t seem fair to lose this feeling, not after those two long years of missing Da’s balloons. Surely Rigby could see that she’d been born to fly.

A crosswind ruffled the Huxley, and as Deryn pulled it back on course, a horrible notion struck her. If she were the unlucky middy, would this be her last time in the air? With war coming, surely they’d stick her on another airship. Maybe even the Minotaur, where Jaspert was serving.

But the Leviathan felt like part of Deryn now, her first real home since Da’s accident. The first place where no one had ever seen her in a skirt, or expected her to mince and curtsy. She couldn’t lose her position here just because some boffin needed transportation!

The ground men were running along in the Huxley’s shadow, ready to reach up and grab its tentacles. She tipped the gliding wings back to slow the descent, easing the air-beast down into their grasp. There was a jolt as they pulled her to a halt, and the message lizard made a squawk.

“Constable Winthrop?” it babbled.

“Hang on another minute!” she pleaded. The lizard made a tut-tut noise, sounding just like Mr. Rigby when the middies were squabbling. She hoped it wouldn’t start jabbering. Message lizards could babble old snatches of conversation when they were nervous. You never knew what embarrassments they’d repeat.

The ground men pulled the Huxley steady and drew it quickly down.

She unstrapped herself from the pilot’s rig and saluted the chief constable. “Midshipman Sharp reporting with the captain’s lizard, sir.”

“That was a smart landing, young man.”

“Thank you, sir,” Deryn said, wondering how to ask the constable to pass this sentiment on to Mr. Rigby. But the man was already tugging the lizard from her shoulder. The beastie started to babble about landing ropes and wind speeds, rattling off instructions faster than a dozen signalmen.

The constable didn’t look as though he understood half of what the lizard was saying, but Fitzroy would be here soon to help. She spotted his ascender landing not far away, and was pleased that she’d beaten him down.

The airship’s shadow fell across them then, and men began to scramble in all directions. This was no time to dally. Fitzroy was in charge here; it was Deryn’s job to prepare the boffin’s cargo for loading.

She saluted the chief constable again, glanced up at the airship looming overhead, and took off for the zoo at a run.