And together they'd won.īut here aboard the Leviathan he was deadweight - a waste of hydrogen, as the crew called anything useless. The rebels had welcomed Alek's counsel, his piloting skills, and his gold. Two weeks ago he'd helped lead a revolution against the Ottoman sultan, ruler of an ancient empire. But Alek hadn't followed a word of it - not that he'd expected to. "Then it's the other way round."īovril chuckled, as if great circle routes were quite amusing. You always wind up going farther north than you'd think." "The earth is round, but paper is flat, right? So a straight course looks curved when you draw it on a map.
He breathed on the window glass before him, then drew an upside-down smile with one fingertip.
"It's a navigator's trick," Newkirk explained. Rigby made us plot a great circle route last week, and it took us all the way up to Omsk." "It'll get much colder as we angle north," Dylan said around a mouthful of his breakfast. He was a Clanker prince and they were Darwinists, and the Great War between the two technologies was spreading faster every day. Even though he'd helped the British cause back in Istanbul, the airship's officers still saw Alek and his men as little better than prisoners. The Leviathan was still headed east, probably toward the empire of Japan, though no one would confirm their destination. Farther from Europe and the war, and from his destiny. The window had a lace of frost around its edges, left over from a frigid night.Īnother week of flying across this wasteland, Alek thought. In early October no snow lay on the ground below. The creature clutched Alek's shoulder a little tighter, and a shiver went through its body. He stood next to Alek at the window of the middies' mess, both hands wrapped around a cup of tea. "And it'll take almost a week to cross it. "We won't be over Siberia till tomorrow." Dylan sat at the table, still attacking his breakfast. The word slipped cold and hard from his tongue, as forbidding as the landscape passing below.
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