Behemoth
Page 23

"I'm fine, Mr. Rigby. Just can't wait to get started." She turned toward her men. "How about you lot?"
The three men in her landing party put on brave faces, but their eyes stayed glued to the passing landscape. As the Sphinx drew closer, the airship slowed, turning into the stiff breeze coming off the ocean. But the officers couldn't come to a full halt without giving the sultan and his men too clear a view of the ground beneath them.
A bit cheeky, committing espionage right in front of a nation's sovereign.
The bosun consulted his watch. "Twenty seconds, I'd say."
"Clip your lines!" Deryn ordered. Her heart was starting to race now, driving out her gloomy thoughts. Volger and his threats could get stuffed. She could always toss him out his stateroom window.
The terrain was rising beneath the ship now, turning from trees to scrub grass and rock, then finally sand. To her right was the Sphinx, a natural formation thrusting up like an ancient statue of some pagan god.
"Get ready, lads." She shouted, "Three, two, one ..." ... and jumped.
The rope hissed through her safety clip, angry and piping hot in the sea breeze. She heard her comrades descending around her, a chorus of whirring cables slicing through the air.
The ground came up fast, and Deryn snapped on a second clip. The friction doubled, jerking her into a slower fall. But solid rock and scrub grass still blurred beneath her, too fast for comfort.
Then she felt it, a sway in her line. The airship was slowing just a squick. Her rope swung forward with her momentum, then began a slow swing backward, so that her position was almost static with the ground below.
"Now!" Deryn cried, and pulled her second clip from the line.
She dropped fast, hitting hard sand and loose, flat rocks that crunched and powdered under her boots. The impact shook her spine, but she stumbled along, managing to keep her feet. The rest of the cable whipped through her safety clip, smacked her hand spitefully, then skipped across the beach toward the sunset.
As the Leviathan slid away into the distance, its engine noise faded into the crash of the waves. Deryn felt her gloom descend again, along with a lonely feeling of being left behind.
She turned around, counting three other figures on the ridge. At least none of her command had been dragged into the sea.
"Everyone all right?" she called.
"Aye, sir!" two calls from the growing darkness, followed by a soft groan.
It was Matthews, ten yards away and still not on his feet. Deryn scrambled across the loose rocks, and found him curled into a tight ball.
"It's my ankle, sir," he said, teeth clenched. "I've turned it."
"All right. Let's see if you can stand." Deryn waved for the other men, then shrugged out of her heavy pack. She knelt and checked the glass case that held the vitriolic barnacles; it hadn't broken.
When Airmen Spencer and Robins had made their way over, she had them lift Matthews to his feet. But the moment his weight settled on the twisted right ankle, he cried out in pain.
"Set him down," she ordered, then let out a slow breath.
The man's ankle was stuffed. There was no way he could walk two miles across the rocky peninsula and back.
"You'll have to wait here, Matthews."
"Aye, sir. But when are they picking us up?"
Deryn hesitated. Of the four of them, only she knew exactly when the Leviathan would return to the Sphinx. That way, if the men were captured, the Ottomans couldn't set a trap for the airship.
As for Deryn herself, well, she was a decorated hero, wasn't she? The Ottomans would never drag the truth from her.
"I can't tell you, Matthews. Just wait here, and don't let anyone see you." The man winced in pain again, and she added, "Trust me, the captain won't leave us behind."
They knelt and divided the four packs among the three of them, giving Matthews most of the water and a little bully beef. Then Deryn, Robins, and Spencer headed down the ridge toward the strait, leaving him all alone.
A few minutes into her first command, and she was already one man down.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Two miles hadn't looked very far on the map, but the real Gallipoli was a different matter.
The peninsula was crisscrossed by high steep-sided ridges, as if mountains of limestone had been raked to pieces by giant claws. The valleys between were choked with dry, brittle undergrowth. And whenever Deryn and her party rested, ants made their way out of the sandy ground to torment their ankles.
To make things worse, the Royal Navy's maps of Gallipoli were useless, showing only a fraction of the ridgelines and overgrown ravines. Deryn kept an eye on her compass and on the stars overhead, but the tangled geography still forced her into tortured zigzags.
By the time they reached the other side of the peninsula, it was after midnight.
"I reckon this has to be Kilye Niman, sir," Spencer said, dropping his heavy pack to the ground.
Deryn nodded, peering down at the beach through her field glasses. Two lines of buoys stretched across the narrow strait, bobbing gently on the waves. The giant metal barrels were covered with cruel-looking barbs and phosphorous bombs. Hanging unseen beneath them would be the kraken nets, a thick lattice of metal cables threaded with more spikes and explosives.
Rising from the water at either end of the nets were tall towers, their searchlights sweeping slowly across the water. Deryn made a quick sketch of the fortifications she could see - at least a score of twelve-inch guns aiming down from the cliffs, all sheltered in bunkers cut deep into the limestone.
Impossible for ships to get past, but the behemoth could slip by beneath the water's surface.
"I reckon the navy will owe us a few favors after this, sir," said Robins.
"Aye, but it's the Russians who'll really thank us," Deryn said, spotting a cargo ship waiting for daylight to arrive so it could sail past the nets. "This is their lifeline."
When she'd told Volger about the Goeben and the Breslau, he'd agreed that the Germans' ultimate plan was to close The Straits. Starving the Russian army's fighting bears was worth giving the sultan a pair of ironclads.
She pulled the diving gear from their packs, and knelt in the brush to put the suit together. It was a Spottiswoode Rebreather, the first underwater apparatus created from fabricated creatures. The suit had been woven from salamander skin and tortoise shell. The rebreather itself was practically a living creature, a set of fabricated gills that had to be kept wet even in storage.
In short, the suit was a Monkey Luddite's nightmare. Deryn felt a squick of jitters herself as she crawled inside, the wrinkled skin of reptiles slithering over her own. At least it made Spencer and Robins nervous too; they were happy to turn away as she put it on. Even as dark as it was, it would have been tricky stripping down to her skivvies in front of two airmen.
When Deryn was ready, she and Spencer crept down to the beach, leaving Robins to guard the packs. At the water's edge the tides had carved a yard-high bank of sand to hide behind. They waited there for the searchlights to sweep past, then slapped across the luminous wet sand of the beach, wading into the cool salt water of the strait.
"Here you go, sir," Spencer said, handing her the rebreather. "I'll stay right here by the water."
"Just stay hidden." Deryn dipped her goggles and strapped them on. "If I'm away longer than three hours, go back and see to Matthews before it's light. I can get back on my own."
"Aye, sir." Spencer saluted and crept back to the shadows. When he was out of sight, Deryn finally unwrapped the glass cases of vitriolic barnacles. As per the captain's orders, she hadn't let the men catch even a glimpse of them.
The searchlight was sweeping around again, and she sank down to her neck, pressing the rebreather to her mouth.
Just as in Dr. Busk's office a few hours before, the feeling was uncanny and a bit horrid. The tendrils of the beastie crept into her mouth, seeking a source of carbon dioxide. A fishy taste covered her tongue, and the air she breathed turned warm and salty, like in the Leviathan's galley when the cooks were frying up anchovies.
Deryn bent her knees, dropping beneath the surface.
The searchlight flickered past overhead, and then it was very dark. She squatted on the sand for a moment, forcing herself to take slow and even breaths.
When she'd stopped shivering from the cold, Deryn pushed out toward the first line of nets, staying just beneath the surface. She'd swum in the ocean plenty of times, but never at night. The blackness around her seemed full of huge shapes, and the strange taste of the rebreather was a constant reminder that she didn't belong in this cold and inky realm. She remembered her first sea training exercise aboard the Leviathan, watching a kraken crush a wooden schooner into matchsticks.
But there would be no krakens in this strait, not yet. This was Clanker territory, where the worst beasties were sharks and jellyfish, neither of which could harm her through the Spottiswoode armor.
After a long swim she reached one of the buoys, which bobbed in the water like a spiky metal hedgehog. Deryn took hold of one of the spurs gingerly. They were sharp enough to puncture kraken skin, and tipped with phosphorous bombs that would automatically ignite when the beastie tried to struggle free.
She clung there, resting before heading down. The vitriolic barnacles had to be placed deep beneath the waterline, so the colony wouldn't gobble up the buoys and give away their presence too soon.
When Deryn had caught her breath, she let herself sink, descending until the last glimmer of the waning moon disappeared above. The net was easy to find even in the blackness, its cables as thick as her arm and studded with spurs the size of boat hooks. But it was tricky opening the glass cases while blind and wearing thick gloves of salamander skin, and it took Deryn long minutes to deposit six of the wee beasties a few feet apart. They had to be close enough to create a colony, Dr. Barlow had explained, but not so close that the fighting would start right away.
Deryn kicked her way back to the surface, partly to orient herself and partly to recover from the cold of the deeper water. She stared tiredly down the line of buoys stretching across the half mile to the other shore. The job would take a dozen more dives, at least.
It was going to be a long, cold night.
Her fingers were dead numb by the time the last barnacle was in place. The cold had seeped through the salamander skin and deep into her bones, and Deryn realized that this was her second lost night of sleep in three days.
On top of the cold and her exhaustion, the rebreather seemed to be slowly sucking the life from her. It felt as though she hadn't had a proper gulp of air since its tendrils had crept into her mouth. So when she came up for the last time, Deryn decided to risk the searchlights and swim back on the surface.
The rebreather came out a bit stickily, like pulling toffee stuck between her teeth. But it was worth a moment of irksomeness to taste the pure night air again. She headed back, ducking low in the water whenever the searchlights swung round.
Halfway back to shore, the sharp slap of a gunshot rolled across the strait.
Deryn's exhaustion vanished in a flash, and she sank down until her eyes were just above the surface. A large black shape was lumbering across the sand, perhaps twenty yards from where she'd left Spencer waiting.
It was a walker, a machine in the form of a scorpion, with six legs and two grasping claws in front. The long tail curled up into the air, the beam of a spotlight flaring from its tip.
Deryn swam closer, hearing shouts and another gunshot. The spotlight was trained on a lone figure in a British flight suit, while a dozen or so men scrambled across the sand in pursuit. The searchlight from the nearest tower left its slow path and swung toward the beach, forcing Deryn underwater again.
She stuffed the rebreather back into her mouth, then swam closer beneath the surface, her heart pounding in her ears. One of her men had obviously been caught, but perhaps the other was still hidden. If she could find him, they could swim away, sharing the rebreather between them.