Behemoth (36 page)

“Hold on tight, Bovril,” Deryn said, and the beastie scampered up onto her shoulder. Its claws poked through her piloting jacket like wee needles.

Alek worked his feet, and the contraption took a huge step forward.

Deryn grasped the sides of her commander’s chair,
queasy as always in the lumbering machine. At least the djinn was still in parade mode, the top of its head split open, so she could see the stars and breathe fresh air.

“Turn left here,” she said. To keep this mission as secret as possible, the four walkers had no copilots. So Deryn was serving as Alek’s navigator and, once the shooting started, as range finder for the throwing arm. Deryn had never been a gunner before, but altitude practice had made her a dab hand at estimating distances—as long as she remembered to think in meters instead of yards.

Deryn looked at her map again. It showed four separate routes to the Tesla cannon, with Alek’s marked in red. These four walkers were headed out before the main attack began, so they couldn’t afford to raise suspicions by traveling together. The trick would be arriving at their target all at the same time.

Also marked on the map were the positions of the other forty-odd walkers pledged to the Committee, poised to spring into action an hour later. Deryn wondered if there were any spies among those crews, ready to sell the Committee’s plans to the sultan for a lump of gold.

At least she could be certain that this attack on the Tesla cannon had been kept secret. Zaven himself had heard about it only this afternoon. He’d fumed a bit about
being kept in the dark, until realizing that he wouldn’t have to face the big guns of the
Goeben
.

Unless the Admiralty had changed the night of the behemoth’s arrival, of course.

“Have you thought about how many things can go wrong?” Deryn said. “It’s like the bard says, ‘The best laid plans of mice and men.’”

“Fah!” said Bovril, imitating Zaven’s tone.

“You see?” Alek said. “Your perspicacious friend is confident.”

Deryn looked at the beastie. “I just hope it’s right.”

They made good time on the almost empty streets of Istanbul. The Committee’s walkers had been practicing night walking for the last month, pretending to patrol for robbers, so no one gave the djinn a second glance.

The buildings thinned out at the city’s edge, and soon the djinn was traveling down a dusty carriage road. The route was barely wide enough for the walker, and the skirt of steam cannon thrashed the tree branches on either side. When they passed a darkened inn at a crossroads, Deryn saw curious faces peering from the windows. Sooner or later someone would wonder what a walker from Istanbul’s ghettos was doing in the countryside.

But they were too close to their target for that to
matter now. The landscape climbed, growing rockier as the cliffs rose. The city came into view out the walker’s rear viewport, its glitter and brilliance garish in the moonless night.

A hundred masts and smokestacks were scattered across the water’s black expanse, and Deryn wondered again what would happen if the
Leviathan
were shot down. Would the behemoth simply swim away, or go mad among all those unarmed ships?

She shook her head. They couldn’t fail tonight.

They were only a few miles from the Tesla cannon when a spotlight lanced out of the dark.

Deryn squinted—her eyes caught a flash of steel, and the silhouette of a trunk and tail.

It was one of the sultan’s war elephants, blocking their path.

“Range?” Alek asked calmly.

“About a thousand yards. That is, nine hundred meters.”

Alek nodded, pulling a lever. A spice bomb rolled from the magazine into the djinn’s hand. Deryn caught a whiff of it and winced. Even wrapped in oiled burlap, the bombs let off eye-burning dust every time they moved.

“Top down, please,” Alek said.

“Aye, your princeliness.” Deryn set to work on the
hand crank, and the djinn’s forehead rolled slowly closed across the stars.

Alek stoked the engines, sending power to the steam boilers. The machine’s right arm drew slowly back.

Someone in the war elephant shouted at them through a megaphone. Deryn didn’t recognize any of the Turkish words, but it sounded more curious than angry. As far as the Ottomans knew, the djinn was unarmed.

“They’re just wondering what in blazes we’re doing here,” Deryn muttered. “No reason to be nervous.”

“Nervous,” said the beastie.

Alek laughed. “Perspicacious or not, the creature knows you.”

Deryn frowned at the loris. Of
course
she was a wee bit jittery. Only a fool wouldn’t be, heading into battle. Especially on a finicky Clanker contraption.

“Loaded and ready to fire,” Alek said.

“Hold on.” Deryn watched the ranging gauge that Klopp had installed, its needle slowly climbing as steam pressure built in the djinn’s shoulder joint.

The tricky bit was, Klopp hadn’t been able to test every throwing arm in the Committee’s army, so he’d marked the gauges using only math and guesswork. Until their first shot landed, there was no telling how far the bombs would actually travel.

The needle finally reached nine hundred meters.…

“Fire!” Deryn cried.

Alek pulled the release trigger, and the djinn’s giant hand swung overhead. Clouds of steam gushed from its metal shoulder, turning the air in the cabin scalding.

The spice bomb struck fifty yards in front of the elephant, exploding into a cloud of dust that swirled as red as blood in the spotlight.

“Master Klopp knows his sums,” Deryn said with a smile. “Next time we’ll hit the bum-rags dead-on!”

“More steam,” Alek ordered. “I’m loading another.”

Deryn pulled the stokers, and the engines roared beneath them, but the ranging needle was slow to climb. The djinn had exhausted every squick of shoulder pressure with its first throw.

“Come on!” she urged it. “They’ll be shooting back any second.”

“If this were a proper walker, we’d be taking evasive action,” Alek muttered. “What I wouldn’t give for a decent gun sight.”

“Or a decent gun!”

“These spice bombs were your idea, I seem to—”

The elephant’s main turret roared to life, sending a shell screaming overhead. The explosion came seconds later, rocking the djinn on its feet.

“They overshot us!” Alek cried. “But they have our range now. Can I fire yet?”

“Hold on!” Deryn watched the needle climb. The loris dug its claws deep into her shoulder, imitating the whistle and boom of the near miss.

The needle passed nine hundred meters, but she needed another fifty at least.…

“Fire!” she finally cried.

The great arm swung again, rocking the cabin backward. The moment the bomb had flown, Alek grabbed the controls and took them charging ahead.

Through the rocking viewport Deryn watched the war elephant disappear into a roiling cloud of red dust.

“Bull’s-eye!” she cried.

But the walker’s crew still managed to fire—the main gun blazed again, setting the dust cloud around the elephant into a massive whirlwind. The air cracked once more as the shot zoomed past.

The djinn reeled from the blast—the shell had landed right where they’d been standing, Deryn reckoned. Alek struggled with the controls as the walker staggered forward.

The machine gun on the elephant’s trunk opened up, setting the path ahead of them jittering with plumes of dirt. Then came a chorus of bullets striking metal, as loud as pistons misfiring.

“We need steam cover!” Alek cried.

“No chance!” Deryn stared at the motionless pressure
gauge. The engines were too busy keeping the walker moving to recharge its boilers.

But the elephant’s main turret didn’t fire again. Only its left front leg was moving, like a dog’s pawing at the ground. The searchlight swung away aimlessly into the sky.

“They’ve got a snootful!” Deryn cried. Even hundreds of yards away, her eyes were starting to prickle from the spices. She pulled the goggles up from around her neck and snapped them on.

“Snootful,” Bovril said, chuckling, then sneezed.

Alek twisted the saunters, putting the djinn’s hands out for balance. But he kept the walker charging ahead.

“I’m going to knock them over. Brace yourself.”

Deryn checked her straps. “Hold on, beastie!”

The elephant was stumbling in circles now, another of its legs trying to move. But the turret stayed motionless. Had the spice bomb struck it dead-on?

Then Deryn saw the airflow patterns made visible by red dust, and realized what had happened—the cannon’s recoil had sucked the spices right into the main turret. The elephant’s crew had done themselves in with their own shot.

“They must be positively gagging!”

“Not for long, though,” Alek said. “Hold on!”

The war elephant had turned sideways, stumbling
into a barbed wire fence just behind it. As the djinn charged into the swirling red clouds, Deryn’s throat began to burn, and she was glad for her goggles. But Alek didn’t waver—he tipped the djinn’s left shoulder down …

Metal crunched and tore around them, a shock wave thundering through the djinn’s huge frame. The world spun in the viewport, sky and ground and darkness flashing past. Alek swore, twisting at the controls, and a lungful of spices set Deryn coughing.

Finally the djinn stopped spinning; it was listing at a crazy angle. Deryn sprayed a squick of steam to clear the air, unstrapped herself, and leaned out the viewport.

The white clouds around them parted, revealing the elephant lying motionless on its side.

“We got them!”

“Snootful!” Bovril shouted.

“But why are we leaning like this?” Alek cried. “And what in blazes is holding us up?”

Deryn leaned out farther, and saw glittering metal everywhere. The djinn had stumbled through the barbed wire fence, pulling up a quarter mile of it.

“We’re tangled in that barking wire!”

Alek worked his foot pedals, and wires snapped and scraped. “There’s more of them ahead. We need steam cover—now.”

Deryn stoked the boilers, then looked through the viewport. Two miles in the distance the Tesla cannon rose up from the cliffs, half as tall as the Eiffel Tower.

Around its base three more war elephants stood waiting, their smokestacks belching to life.

“Are the others anywhere about?” Alek asked.

Deryn leaned out the viewport, looking backward. There was nothing on the horizon but the silhouettes of short salt-sheered trees along the cliff tops. Then she spotted them—a trio of smoke trails against the starlight, no more than two miles away.

“Aye, all of them! Three kilometers or so behind us.” She glanced at the pressure gauge, which was only now beginning to climb again. “And a good thing too. It’ll be a few minutes before we can throw again.”

“We don’t have that much time. Give us some cover while I shake this wire off.”

As Deryn reached for the steam cannon lever, one of the war elephants fired. The shell landed short, but close, and Deryn was thrown backward from the controls. Gravel and dirt spat through the viewport, leaving a scratch on her goggles.

“If you please, Mr. Sharp?” Alek asked.

“
Mr.
Sharp,” Bovril repeated with a chuckle.

Deryn scrambled up from the floor to pull the lever, and hissing filled her ears. The pilot’s cabin was suddenly as hot and humid as a greenhouse.

Outside the viewport the world disappeared behind a veil of white.

Alek worked the pedals and saunters, blindly tearing at the tangle of barbed wire. More gunfire boomed beyond the steam cloud, but the answering explosions sounded in the distance.

“They’re shooting at the others,” Deryn said.

“Then now’s the time to attack! Get me some pressure in my throwing arm.”

“I’d be happy to, Your Highness.” Deryn pulled the engine stokers again. “But we’ve emptied the boilers to make this steam, and now you’re dancing about like a loon, which is taking even more power!”

“Fine, then,” Alek said, bringing the djinn into a crouched halt. As the engines idled, the ranging gauge began to climb again.

Through the whiteness came the clatter of machine guns—the Ottomans were firing into the bank of steam clouds, listening to see where their bullets hit metal.