Behemoth (23 page)

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.

A few yards from the beach, Deryn lifted her head above the water, letting herself rise and fall with the swell of the waves. Her eyes swept the shadows behind the shelf of sand, but she saw no one hidden there. She crawled closer, as slow as some primordial beastie taking its first steps on land.

The scorpion’s spotlight shifted closer to the tree line, revealing another figure in a flight suit lying on the ground. Two Ottoman soldiers stood nearby, watching the downed man with their rifles pointed at him.

Deryn swore silently—both her men had been captured. She clung to the darkness behind the shelf of sand, wondering what to do. The walker was moving now, making the sand tremble beneath her knees. How was she meant to take on a giant scorpion and a score of soldiers with nothing but a rigger’s knife?

She poked her head up. The two Ottomans were lifting the downed man now, helping him up from the sand. He was limping on his right foot.…

Deryn frowned. That was
Matthews
, the man she’d left at the Sphinx. The Ottomans must have captured him. Had he led them here? Or had the Ottomans simply guessed that the kraken nets were their objective?

And where was her third man?

Then the spotlight shifted again, and machine-gun fire erupted from the tip of the scorpion’s tail, raking the trees
along the beach. The branches thrashed madly in the hail of bullets, and sand sprayed into the air.

Finally the machine gun went silent, and a group of Ottoman soldiers charged into the brush. A moment later they dragged something out. It was a body, motionless and as white as a sheet except for the red stains on the flight suit.

Deryn swallowed. Her first command had been killed and captured down to the last man.

With a noisy grinding of gears, the scorpion moved closer to the dead body. One of its massive front claws dug into the sand, then came up, lifting the lifeless form into the air. The Ottomans were taking her men somewhere, probably to interrogate the survivors and take a closer look at their uniforms and equipment.

They would soon guess that the landing party had come from the
Leviathan
, even if they hadn’t forced it out of Matthews already. But her men knew nothing about the vitriolic barnacles, and even if the Ottomans inspected the nets, they wouldn’t notice a few more beasties among the millions already living along the miles of cable.

Hopefully they would think this had been a simple reconnaissance mission, and an utter failure. The Ottomans would probably lodge a protest with the
Leviathan
’s captain, but as far as they knew, this mission had not been an act of war. Deryn was the only one who could explain otherwise.

She had to get away from here, or risk everything. There could be no heroic attempt to rescue her men, and no heading back to the Sphinx now either. The Ottomans would be patrolling the whole peninsula for weeks to come.

There was only one place to go.

Deryn stared back out across the black water, to where the cargo ship she’d seen earlier waited to transit the strait. Once the sun rose, it would head for Istanbul.

“Alek,” she said softly, and slipped back into the sea.

The minarets of the Blue Mosque rose up behind the trees, six tall spires like thin freshly sharpened pencils standing on end. The graceful arc of the mosque’s dome stood out dark gray against the hazy sky, and sunlight shimmered from the spinning blades of gyrothopters and aeroplanes overhead.

Alek sat outside the small coffeehouse where Eddie Malone had taken him the day before. It was on a quiet side street, and Alek was sipping black tea and studying his collection of Ottoman coins. He had begun to learn their names in Turkish, and which ones to hide from shopkeepers if he wanted a fair price.

With the Germans handing out photographs of Bauer and Klopp, it was up to Alek to buy supplies. He’d learned a lot, though, wandering the streets of Istanbul on his own. How to bargain with merchants, how to slip through the
German parts of town unnoticed, even how to tell time by the prayers drifting down from the city’s minarets.

Most important of all, he’d realized something about this city—he was meant to be here. This was where the war would turn, either for or against the Clanker side. A slender strip of water glittered in the distance, the fog sirens of cargo ships wailing softly as they crept along it. This passage from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea was the Russian army’s lifeline, the thread that held the Darwinist powers together. That was why providence had brought him halfway across Europe.

Alek was here to stop the war.

In the meantime he’d also taught himself a little Turkish.

“Nasilsiniz?”
he practiced.

“
Iyiyim
,” came an answer from the covered birdcage on his table.

“Shush!” Alek looked about. Fabricated beasts might not be strictly illegal here, but there was no point in drawing attention to himself. Besides, it was insufferable that the creature’s accent was better than his own.

He adjusted the cage’s cover, closing the gap the creature had been peeking through. But it was already sulking in a corner. It was uncannily good at reading Alek’s mood, which at the moment was one of annoyance.

Where was Eddie Malone, anyway? He’d promised to
be here half an hour ago, and Alek had another appointment soon.

He was just about to leave when Malone’s voice called from behind him.

Alek turned and nodded curtly. “Ah, here you are at last.”

“At last?” Malone raised an eyebrow. “You in a hurry to get somewhere?”

Alek didn’t answer that. “Did you see Count Volger?”

“I did indeed.” Malone waved for a waiter and ordered lunch, consulting the menu and taking his time about it. “A fascinating ship, the
Leviathan
. The sultan’s joyride turned out to be more interesting than I expected.”

“I’m pleased to hear it. But I’m more interested in what Count Volger said.”

“He said a lot of things … most of which I didn’t understand.” Malone pulled out his notebook and readied his pen. “I’m curious if you know the fellow who helped me get in to see Volger. Name of Dylan Sharp?”

“Dylan?” Alek asked, frowning. “Of course I know him. He’s a midshipman aboard the
Leviathan
.”

“Did you ever notice anything odd about him?”

Alek shook his head. “What do you mean by odd?”

“Well, when Count Volger heard your message, he decided that joining you might be a good idea, and said so. I thought it was downright rash of him to talk about
escaping right in front of a crewman.” Malone leaned closer. “But then he
ordered
Mr. Sharp to help him.”

“He ordered him?”

Malone nodded. “Almost as if he were threatening the boy. Looked like a case of blackmail to me. Does that make any sense?”

“I … I’m not sure,” Alek said. Certainly Dylan had done a few things he wouldn’t want the ship’s officers to hear about—like keeping Alek’s secrets. But Volger could hardly blackmail Dylan on that subject without revealing to the Darwinists who Alek really was. “It doesn’t sound right, Mr. Malone. Perhaps you misheard.”

“Well, maybe you’d like to hear for yourself.” The man took the frog from his shoulder, set it on the table, and scratched it under the chin. “Okay, Rusty. Repeat.”

A moment later Count Volger’s voice emerged from the bullfrog’s mouth.

“Mr. Sharp, I hope you understand that this complicates things,” it said, then switched to Dylan’s voice. “What are you blethering about?”

Alek looked around, but the handful of other patrons didn’t seem to notice. They looked off into the distance, as if talking frogs came to dine at this establishment every day. No wonder Malone had insisted on meeting here.

The frog started up a whooping noise, like the
Leviathan
’s Klaxon sounding an alert. Then it continued in a
tangle of voices, with the wail of the Klaxon breaking in at odd times, most of the words flying by too fast for the frog to render clearly.

But then Count Volger’s voice came out of the muddle. “Perhaps, but if you don’t help us, I shall be forced to reveal your little secret.”

Alek frowned, wondering what was going on. Volger was talking cryptically about fencing lessons. At first Dylan sputtered that he didn’t understand, but his voice was shaky, almost as if he were about to cry. Finally he agreed to help the count and Hoffman escape, and with one last shriek of the Klaxon, the bullfrog went silent.

Eddie Malone lifted it from the table and placed it gently back on his shoulder. “Care to shed any light on the matter?”

“I don’t know,” Alek said slowly, which was the truth. He’d never heard such panic in Dylan’s voice before. The boy had risked being hanged for Alek. What threat of Volger’s could frighten him so much?

But it was no good thinking aloud in front of this reporter. The man knew too much already.

“Let me ask
you
a question, Mr. Malone.” Alek pointed at the frog. “Did they know this abomination was memorizing their words?”

The man shrugged. “I never told them otherwise.”

“How honest of you.”

“I never lied,” Malone said. “And I can promise you that Rusty isn’t memorizing now. He won’t unless I ask him to.”