Behemoth
Page 21

She was well and truly stuffed.
A yip came from the door of her cabin, and Deryn turned to see Tazza bouncing happily on his hind legs, a fresh bone in his mouth. That was one benefit of Dr. Barlow's mad scheme of pretending to give the Leviathan away - the beasties were eating better. Over the last two days the crew had made more trips to the markets and smithies of Istanbul, trading the airship's ambergris for food and parts. Except for Deryn's uniform, the ship was fit to receive a foreign emperor, which it shortly would.
The lady boffin appeared, right behind her thylacine. She'd managed to dig another dazzling dress out of her luggage, and a hat with abundant ostrich feathers that matched her long white gloves. Even Tazza was wearing a fancy collar, a band of diamonds glittering around his neck.
"Mr. Sharp," she said, and tutted. "Once more I find you in a state of disrepair."
Deryn held up her dress shirt. "Sorry, ma'am. But this is ruined, and I haven't got another!"
"Well, it's lucky you won't be serving the sultan this evening. Mr. Newkirk will be stepping in for you."
"But the whole crew is meant to be in full dress!"
"Not those with more important matters to contend with." Dr. Barlow handed over the thylacine's leash. "After you walk Tazza, please join me and the captain in the navigation room. I think you'll find our conversation interesting."
Tazza tried to pull her out the door, but Deryn stood firm. "Pardon me, ma'am. The barking captain wants to see me? Is this about your alternate plan for the Ottomans?"
The lady boffin smiled coolly. "Partly. But it also concerns your recent behavior. If I were you, I wouldn't dawdle on your way there."
The navigation room was at the bow of the ship, just below the bridge. It was a small, quiet cabin where the captain sometimes retreated to think, or to have an awkward conversation with a wayward crewman.
Deryn felt her stomach tighten as she drew near. What if the officers had noticed her fencing lessons with Count Volger? Whenever Deryn brought him a meal, she stayed for twenty minutes or so, practicing swordplay with mop handles.
But the captain himself wouldn't issue a reprimand for mere dawdling, would he? Unless he also knew that she'd been supplying Volger with newspapers, and had even told him about Admiral Souchon and the Goeben. Or how she'd looked the other way while the Clankers had been planning to escape!
But when the lady boffin had announced this meeting, she'd been smiling....
The late afternoon sun was slanting in through the windows that curved around the navigation room. Dr. Barlow and the captain were already there, along with the bosun and Dr. Busk, the officers all in resplendent dress uniforms for the sultan's visit.
Deryn frowned. If she was about to receive a reprimand, why in blazes was the ship's head boffin here?
When she clicked her heels, the four of them clammed up quickly, like children caught telling secrets.
"Ah, Mr. Sharp, glad you could join us," Captain Hobbes said. "We need to discuss your recent exploits."
"Um ... my exploits, sir?"
The captain raised a dispatch. "I have communicated with the Admiralty about the matter, and they concur with my recommendations."
"The Admiralty, sir?" Deryn managed. If the Admiralty was involved, this had to be a hanging offense! She looked at Dr. Barlow, racking her brain for what had given her treason away.
"Don't look so surprised, Mr. Sharp," the bosun said. "Even in all the recent ruckus, your rescue of Mr. Newkirk has not been forgotten."
The rest of them broke into broad smiles, but Deryn's brain ground to a halt.
"Pardon me, sir?"
"I wish we had time to do this properly," Captain Hobbes said, "but other duties await."
He lifted a velvet jewelry case from the map table, opened it, and produced a rounded silver cross that dangled from a sky blue ribbon. The face of Charles Darwin was engraved upon its center, the Air Service wings at its top.
Deryn stared at it, wondering what the captain was doing with her father's medal, and how it had got so shiny and new....
"Midshipman Dylan Sharp," the captain began, "I hereby award you the Air Gallantry Cross for your brave and selfless actions of August 10, wherein you saved the life of a fellow crewman at great risk to your own. Congratulations."
As he pinned the medal to Deryn's chest, Dr. Barlow applauded softly with gloved hands. The captain stepped back, and the officers saluted as one.
A realization meandered its slow way through Deryn's brain - this wasn't her father's medal ...
It was hers.
"Thank you, sir," she said at last, barely remembering to return the officers' salutes. Instead of charging her with treason, they'd gone and decorated her?
"Now, then," Captain Hobbes said, turning back to the map table. "We have other matters to discuss."
"Well done, Mr. Sharp," the lady boffin whispered, patting Deryn on the shoulder. "If only you were properly dressed!"
Deryn nodded dumbly, trying to gather her thoughts. She was a decorated officer now, pinned with the same medal her father had won. And unlike him, she was still alive. She could still hear her own heart beating, sure enough, like a drummer marching her off to war.
Part of her wanted to weep, to let all the nightmares of the last week spill out of her. And another part wanted to shout aloud that this was madness. She was a traitor, a spy - a girl, for heaven's sake. But somehow she managed to hold the jumble of feelings inside by staring down at the table as hard as she could.
On it was a map of the Dardanelles, with mines and fortifications drawn by hand in red. As Deryn took slow breaths, her brain gradually focused on the matter at hand.
The Dardanelles strait was the heart of the Ottoman defenses. It squeezed all ships headed for Istanbul into a channel less than a mile wide, which was stuffed with sea mines and lined with forts and cannon on high cliffs.
Whatever the lady boffin's alternate plan was, Deryn had a feeling it didn't involve more diplomacy.
"We're forbidden to fly down the strait," Captain Hobbes was saying. "The Ottomans don't want us spying on their fortifications during the sultan's joyride. But they've given us permission to travel down the ocean side - so the sultan can watch the sunset, we've told them."
The bosun chuckled as the captain's finger traveled down the western edge of Gallipoli, the rocky peninsula that separated the strait from the Aegean Sea.
"Just here is a ridge known as the Sphinx, a natural landmark. We can find our way back to it easily, day or night. So can your landing party, Mr. Sharp."
"Landing party, sir?"
"That's what I said. You'll have to keelhaul drop from cruising altitude."
Deryn raised her eyebrows. A keelhaul drop meant sliding down a cable to the ground. But according to the Manual of Aeronautics, drops were only for abandoning ship.
The bosun saw her expression, and smiled. "A bit lively, eh, Mr. Sharp? Especially for your first command."
"I'll be in command, sir?"
The captain nodded. "Can't have a full officer in charge, in case you're captured. Better a middy, so it's less of an incident."
"Oh." Deryn cleared her throat, realizing why they'd been in such a rush to give her the barking medal. In case she didn't make it back. "I mean, yes, sir."
The captain's finger slid across Gallipoli. "From the Sphinx your landing party will cross the peninsula to Kilye Niman - a bit more than two miles away." He pointed at a narrow passage at a bend in the strait, which was marked with a dotted red line. "That's where the Ottomans have their heavy kraken nets, according to our best dolphinesques."
"Pardon me, sir," Deryn said, "but if the dolphins have already scouted them, what am I going for? To take photographs?"
"Photographs?" The captain chuckled. "This isn't a sightseeing trip, Mr. Sharp. Your job is to bring those nets down."
Deryn frowned. Heavy kraken nets were strong enough to stop even the largest beasties from getting through. How was her landing party meant to cut them up? With a pair of clippers?
"Allow me to explain," Dr. Barlow said, gesturing to two jars on the map table. They were crowded with tiny beasties, a honeycomb of white shells clinging to the interior of the glass. She twisted off the top of one, and the smell of salt water filled the room. "Did you know, Mr. Sharp, that my grandfather was an expert in the field of barnacles?"
"Barnacles, ma'am?"
"Amazing creatures. They spend their humble lives clinging to ships, to whales, to rocks and driftwood, and yet they are implacable. Enough of them can foul even the largest dreadnought's engines." She pulled on heavy gloves and lifted a pair of tongs from the table, then fished out a single beastie from the jar. "Of course, these are no ordinary barnacles. They're a species of my own devising, prepared in case the Ottomans proved troublesome. You shall have to be careful with them."
"Don't worry, ma'am. I won't hurt your beasties."
"Hurt them, Mr. Sharp?" the lady boffin asked, and Dr. Busk laughed.
Suddenly Deryn smelled something besides seawater. It was a dark scent, like smoke from a smithy. Then she realized that the tongs were slowly drooping in Dr. Barlow's hand.
The metal itself was ... melting.
Dr. Barlow maneuvered the tongs carefully, so that they dropped the barnacle back into the jar of brine before disintegrating altogether. "I call them vitriolic barnacles."
"Of course, Midshipman Sharp, you must keep this mission secret from the rest of the crew," the captain said. "Even the men in your landing party won't know the entire plan. Is that clear?"
Deryn swallowed. "Perfectly clear, sir."
Dr. Barlow carefully screwed the top back onto the jar. "Once the vitriolic barnacles are on the kraken nets, they'll begin to multiply, interbreeding with the natural barnacles already there. In a few weeks the colony will be overcrowded, like these in the jar. Then they shall begin to struggle, trying to dislodge each other's relentless grip. Their vitriolic ooze will tear away at the nets, turning the cables into a stringy paste of metal at the bottom of the sea."
"We'll return a month from now," the captain said. "In the dark of the new moon, the Leviathan will guide a creature down the strait by searchlight. The Ottoman coastal artillery won't be able to hit us in the air, and the beastie will swim deep underwater, unharmed by magnetic sea mines."
"But won't the Ottoman navy have plenty of warning, sir?" Deryn asked - the strait was almost a hundred miles from Istanbul.
"Indeed," Dr. Busk said. "But Admiral Souchon won't guess what sort of creature the Leviathan is bringing. It's a new species, more formidable than any of our navy krakens."
Deryn nodded, remembering what Dr. Barlow had told her on the sultan's airship.
"It's called a behemoth," the head boffin said.
By the time she left the navigation room, Deryn felt unsteady on her feet.
First a decoration for gallantry, when she'd half expected to be hanged for treason. Then her first command, a secret attack against an empire that Britain was at peace with. That didn't seem right at all. It was more like being a spy than a soldier!
And the final shock was the drawing of the behemoth that Dr. Busk had shown them. It was a huge creature, with tentacles like a kraken and a maw big enough to swallow one of the kaiser's submarines. The body was nearly as big as the Leviathan, but made of muscle and sinew instead of hydrogen and fragile membranes.
No wonder Lord Churchill hadn't wanted to hand it over!
As Deryn neared the central stairs, she frowned - a civilian was lurking about in the corridor ahead of her. She recognized the shapeless hat and the bullfrog on his shoulder. It was Eddie Malone, the reporter she'd met aboard the Dauntless, no doubt here to cover the sultan's joyride.