"I told you, I kissed him!"
"It's hardly the same. I kissed you, after all. That wasn't love, Mr. Sharp."
"Aye, and what exactly was it?"
"Curiosity." Lilit smiled. "And as I said, you're quite a dashing boy."
"But I'm pretty sure Alek doesn't want a dashing boy!"
"You can't be sure until you ask."
Deryn shook her head. "You were raised to throw bombs. I wasn't."
"Were you raised to wear trousers and be a soldier?"
"Maybe not. But those are both dead easy compared to this!" One of the schoolgirls glared back at them, and Deryn lowered her voice. "At any rate it doesn't matter what he wants. He's the heir to the Austrian throne, and I'm a commoner."
"That throne may not exist once this war is over."
"Well, that's cheery."
"That's war." Lilit pulled out a pocket watch and read it in the jittering light from the screen. "We should get back."
Deryn nodded, but as she followed Lilit up the aisle, she took one last glance over her shoulder. The Leviathan was soaring again across the desert, its engines repaired.
She promised herself then to make everything clear, the very next time she was alone with Alek. After all, she'd made a solemn vow never to keep secrets from him.
Of course that moment might not come until the war was over, years from now, when the world would be a very different place.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Alek's next two weeks were a whirl of cocktail parties, press conferences, and scientific demonstrations. Money had to be raised, reporters entertained, and diplomats introduced to the young prince with a shaky claim to the throne of Austria-Hungary. It was all so different from the rhythms of the Leviathan, the patterns of watches and bells and mealtimes. Alek missed the steady thrum of engines and the gentle sway of the deck beneath his feet.
He missed Deryn as well, even more than he had in those awful days after learning her secret. At least then the two of them had been walking the same corridors, but now the Leviathan was missing as well, all connections with his best friend and ally severed.
Instead of Deryn he had Nikola Tesla, a draining man to spend long days with. Tesla wrestled with the secrets of the universe, but he also spent hours selecting the right wines for dinner. He lamented the war's daily toll of lives, but wasted time flattering had toters, wringing every drop of fame from these moments in the spotlight.
He lived in the grip of odd passions, none stranger than his love of pigeons. A dozen of the gray, warbling creatures inhabited Tesla's rooms at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. He was overjoyed to see them again after his months in Siberia, during which the hotel staff had looked after them dutifully, and at great cost.
And yet Tesla knew how to turn his eccentricities into charm, especially when investors were present. He put on electrikal shows in his Manhattan laboratory and presided over lavish dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria, swiftly raising enough money to make the necessary improvements to his weapon.
But it felt like ages before Tesla and Alek completed their journey to Long Island. In a Pinkerton armored walker paid for by Hearst-Pathe Newsreels, the inventor finally brought Alek and his men to a huge tower looming over the small seaside town of Shoreham.
Goliath stood as tall as a skyscraper, a giant cousin to the sultan's Tesla cannon in Istanbul. Four smaller towers surrounded the central structure, which was crowned with a copper-sheathed hemisphere that shone brilliantly in the sun. Workmen scrambled over it, making the final adjustments before tonight's test. Beneath the towers was the brick powerhouse of the complex, its chimneys huffing.
"VISITING THE SECOND TOWER."
The Pinkerton walker entered the compound through a tall barbed wire fence. The fence was enough to keep away tourists and trespassers, but Alek saw nothing that would stop a military walker.
Two days after the Leviathan's departure, a messenger eagle had arrived bearing a letter from Deryn. She had passed on Lilit's warning, along with a promise that the Leviathan would be lurking off the coast, secretly watching for any sign of U-boats - or "water-walkers," whatever they were.
Deryn had asked Alek not to tell anyone about the German threat. But as Alek watched the pair of guards closing the gate again, with their antique rifles leaning against the guardhouse, secrecy didn't seem like such a good idea. If he and his men were going to sit here in harm's way, a bit more information might be useful.
Alek jostled the great snoozing form beside him.
"Master Klopp? We're here."
Klopp's sleepy eyes peered up at Goliath. "Looks like a child went mad with a mechanikal set."
"A child with very wealthy admirers," Volger muttered. He was fussing with the abundance of luggage he'd brought, dividing its weight between Hoffman and Bauer.
Alek glanced at Tesla, who was riding in front with the pilot, and lowered his voice. "Have you ever heard, Master Klopp, of something called a water-walker? A U-boat that can come onto land?"
"Water-walker," Bovril said.
The old man wned, wiping sleep from his eyes. "I've seen a working model, quarter scale. But it's the other way round, young master."
"How do you mean?"
"A water-walker isn't a U-boat with legs. It's a land machine that's waterproof. It walks across the bottom of a river or a lake, like a metal crab."
Alek frowned. "A machine like that could never cross an entire ocean, right?"
Klopp looked at Hoffman, who said, "Impossible, sir. It would be crushed at a few hundred meters."
"Crushed!" Bovril said.
"So it's an empty threat," Alek said to himself, breathing a sigh of relief.
But then Hoffman spoke up again. "Of course, sir, you could take it across by ship. Then drop it onto the continental shelf."
Klopp thought a moment, then nodded. "And let it walk in from, say, fifty kilometers out?"
"I see." Alek doubted the Germans could sneak that large a ship past the British blockade, but the water-walker could be carried on some sort of U-boat.
"You see what, exactly?" Count Volger said. "Where did you hear of this machine?"
"In the newspapers." Alek found that lying had come easier lately. It was distressing but quite useful. "They were discussing the kaiser's threats against Tesla."
"And this penny paper knew of secret German weapons?" Volger asked.
Alek shrugged. "Only rumors."
Volger narrowed his eyes as the machine came to a halt. The gangway door opened, and Alek jumped out to help Klopp down. The reporters were piling out of the motorcar that had followed the walker, pointing their cameras up at Goliath.
The smell of salt was heavy in the air. The open sea was on the far side of the island, twenty kilometers distant, but Long Island Sound was a short walk away. According to the nautical maps Alek had checked, the sound was shallow, child's play for a water-walker to navigate.
Alek stared into the sky, though he knew the Leviathan was too far away, lurking near the narrow passage between the ocean and the sound. But perhaps from the top of Goliath's central tower, with a pair of good field glasses, he could catch a glimpse . . .
Volger was staring at him, so Alek dropped his eyes and hurried ahead. Tesla was already bounding toward the tower, ready to put the weapon through its final paces. If the improvements to Goliath worked as expected, tonight's test would change the color of the sunrise in Berlin - fair warning for what was to come.
The Germans would have to take notice.
The control room of Goliath looked like a Clanker version of the Leviathan's bridge. It jutted out from the roof of the power station, with tall windows offering a sweeping view of the towers and the darkening sky. In the room's center stood a huge bank of levers and dials; around it were clustered black boxes on wheels, covered with glowing tubes and glass spheres.
Tesla called out orders to his men, making use of a dozen telephones connected to the other parts of the complex. Within a few minutes the smoke from the powerhouse chimneys had redoubled. An electrikal buzz filled the control room, and Bovril's fur began to stand on end.
"Rather intoxicating, isn't it, Your Highness?"
Alek turned, and was surprised to find Adela Rogers speaking to him. The Hearst reporter had spent the last two weeks angry at him for leaking the pope's letter to Eddie Malone, one of Pulitzer's men, instead of to her. But she looked caught up in the excitement of the moment, her eyes sparkling as the spheres and tubes began to glow around them.
"It's a relief more than anything," Alek said. "We may be coming to the end of this war at last."
"There's no maybe about it," Tesla boomed from his controls. "Your faith in me will be rewarded tonight, Your Highness."
Miss Rogers raised her writing pad. "Mr. Tesla, what can we expect the test to look like from here?"
"Goliath is an earth resonance cannon, using the planet itself as a capacitor. What you will see is a path of pure energy stretching from the ground below us all the way to the troposphere!"
Alek frowned. "Won't that be a danger to aircraft?"
"Not this test." Tesla's hands paused a moment on the controls. "But if I ever fire Goliath in earnest, we'll warn them to stay away. Ten kilometers in all directions, I should think."
"Let's hope that doesn't happen, sir," Miss Rogers said.
"Indeed," Alek said, and made a note to warn Deryn in his next letter.
Bovril was shifting nervously on his shoulder, trying to smooth its fur. Alek reached up and felt the crackle of static as he stroked the beastie. The air smelled of electricity, like when he and Deryn had been topside over the Pacific, facing the approaching storm. The night she'd kissed him.
"The kaiser can be quite cantankerous, you know," Miss Rogers said. "How long will you give him to submit?"
"That depends on tonight's experiment." Tesla gazed up at his machine, a smile on his face. "If Goliath works as it should, a single demonstration should prove convincing enough."
Even a test firing required vast amounts of energy, and it would be hours before the weapon's capacitors were full. So while the chimneys smoked and the dials nudged slowly upward, Mr. Tesla served his guests supper in an ornate dining hall just beneath the control room.
The inventor sat at the head of the table, as always ordering up several courses and wines, though it was quite late already. Alek had suffered through laboratory asrations in Manhattan that had lasted until the wee hours.
He turned to Volger beside him. "This will take all night, won't it?"
Across the table, Bauer cleared his throat. "Actually, sir, sunrise in Berlin is at seven. That's midnight here."
"Of course," Alek said. "An excellent point, Hans."
"Did you think he'd end the war with a flick of a switch?" Volger asked.
Alek didn't answer, leaning back as the first course of the evening was served, a consomme of turtle soup. Hoffman and Bauer looked down at their bowls dubiously. They'd been spared Tesla's feasts in Manhattan, but out here in the wilderness of Long Island, there were fewer reporters and investors about, so they had been promoted to dinner guests. Tesla's head engineers were also present, as immaculate in their formal jackets as they'd been in white coats.
As always at the inventor's table, fabricated beasts were banned. Alek found himself missing Bovril's weight on his shoulder and its nonsense mutterings, especially the snatches of Deryn's Scottish lilt.
"You seem less than serene, Your Highness," Volger said. "Perhaps a seaside stroll after dinner?"
"It's a bit cold for that."
"I suppose. And so many unpleasant things in the water."