was making, they'd only get one shot before she flew past them.
A command whistle began to scream, one long note, pitched almost too high to hear. The all-hands-aft signal!
Deryn turned and ran. On either side of her, sniffers scuttled along the membrane, headed toward the tail. The spine was crowded with men and beasts all running in the same direction, the air gun crews pulling up their weapons to carry them along.
It was a last, desperate attempt to move every squick of weight to the rear of the ship. Done all at once, it would tip the ship's nose up, driving her still higher into the air.
Halfway back, Deryn saw flickers on the snow below, and glanced over her shoulder. The muzzles of the walker's guns were blazing, smoke billowing out in clouds.
Before the rumble even reached her ears, the airship bucked again - harder this time, as if someone had tossed a grand piano overboard. The nose flew up, hiding Deryn's view of the German walker, and the deck rolled hard to starboard. Whatever they'd tossed away, it had been on the port side.
She heard the tardy thunder of the guns then, and shells started arcing past. They were huge incendiaries, igniting the sky like gouts of frozen lightning.
One flew past so near that Deryn felt its heat on her cheeks and forehead. The air was instantly burned dry, her eyes forced half shut by the shell's fury. The light from the flaming missiles threw the shadows of men and beasts across the membrane, stretched and misshapen by the airship's curves.
But the entire barrage was flying too far to port.
The sudden loss of weight, whatever it had been, had rolled the airship out of the way just in time. And the riggers' work over the last few days had held - not a squick of hydrogen was flaring from the skin.
But Deryn kept running for the ship's tail, as did the rest of the topside crew. Not just to pull the ship up harder, but to see behind them.
There it was again, the eight-legged walker, now sliding into the distance astern. Its guns were swiveling, trying to spin around and fire once more. But the Leviathan's new Clanker engines were carrying her away too fast.
By the time the guns blazed again, the burning shells fell hundreds of feet short. They dropped into the snow and expended their anger there, the walking machines vanishing behind a veil of steam.
Deryn joined the cheer that rose up along the spine. The hydrogen sniffers howled along, half mad from all the ruckus.
Newkirk appeared, panting and covered with sweat, and clapped her on the shoulder. "Blistering good fight! Eh, Mr. Sharp?"
"Aye, it was. I just hope it's over."
She raised her field glasses to gander at the zeppelins, now silhouetted by the setting sun. They'd fallen still farther behind, hopelessly outmatched by the Stormwalker engines.
"They'll never catch up now," she said. "Not with night falling."
"THE HERKULES' SHELLS GO WIDE."
"But I thought those Predators were fast!"
"Aye, they are. But we're faster, now that we've got those engines on us."
"But haven't they got Clanker engines too?" Newkirk asked.
Deryn frowned, looking down at the Leviathan's flanks. The cilia were stirring madly, weaving the airflow around the ship, somehow adding the currents of the sky to the raw power of the engines.
"We're something different now," she said. "A little of us and a little of them."
Newkirk thought a moment, then hmphed and clapped her on the back again. "Well, frankly, Mr. Sharp, I don't care if the kaiser himself gives us a push, as long as it gets us clear of this iceberg."
"Glacier," Deryn said. "But you're right - it's good to be flying again."
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath of freezing air, feeling the strange new thrum of the membrane beneath her boots.
Already, her air sense told her, the beast was veering south, setting course for the Mediterranean. The zeppelins behind were an afterthought; the Ottoman Empire lay ahead.
Whatever sort of tangled crossbreed the Clankers had made her into, the Leviathan had survived.
FORTY
The pistons were the trickiest bits to draw. There was something about the way they fit together - the Clanker logic of them - that blistered Deryn's brain.
She'd been sketching the new engines all afternoon, imagining the drawings in some future edition of the Manual of Aeronautics. But even if no one ever saw them, the warm day was excuse enough for lounging here. The airship was only a hundred yards above the