The Sea Hates a Coward (18 page)

Just as they were preparing to storm the doorway, a horizontal sleet of lead exploded from the mist and did the job for them; after several seconds of sustained fire, no further movement came from the entrance to the bridge tower.

The clanking of steel feet came next, and Osedax emerged from the pale murk, flanked by four other hulks and a swarm of lesser dead. Even as they passed under the shadow of the bridge, sniper fire hammered against their carapaces, and one—Kuphus, perhaps?—slumped to its knees with a wet hole in its face.

Smoke seeped from the barrels clustered on Osedax’s right arm, and the giant nodded to them. For a moment Wrack held the gaze of the brute’s camera lenses, wondered how best to address the chaos of the last half hour, but decided instead upon sweeping an arm towards the open tower and asking, “Shall we?” in the manner of a host inviting guests into a party. The moment was somewhat ruined by the fact Wrack used his bad arm, its lower half swinging like a sodden pendulum as he gestured, but Osedax paid no heed.

“Sure,” he rumbled, taking a crunching stride onto the heap of bodies jammed in the blast doors. “We need more bullets.” His three surviving monsters followed him into the dark, pulling along a hunched tail of the dead, and he was gone.

Mouana went to follow them up, but Wrack laid a hand on her shoulder—his good one, this time.

“What?” she asked, turning to face him. Guns thundered in the distance, and loudhailers barked in the fog.

“Before we head up, could you get rid of this for me?” said Wrack, indicating his flopping mess of a left arm.

“Of course,” said Mouana, unable to keep a smile from her face, and bent to pick a cleaver from the belt of a dead overseer. “Point to where you want it cut.”

With the impromptu surgery completed, they soon caught up with Osedax, overtaking him on the stairs and spilling onto the bridge with the first of the rabble.

The cavernous space was near-abandoned: smoke from a recently extinguished fire hung in the air like incense, while monitors, dials and warning lights flickered like a joyless carnival. The green glow was nowhere to be seen. The ship’s wheel, an arc of mahogany broader than a person’s reach, lay still under the slumped corpse of an overseer blown ragged by lead during the gunfight with the war-built. More overseers lay dead by the windows, their weapons and ammunition spilled beside them.

As Mouana had expected, those surviving—perhaps a dozen—were trying desperately to install a new pilot; the poor sod chosen for the job had been tied to the chair with steel cable, his mouth dripping with foam as his panicked shipmates hammered peg-like contacts into plugs trepanned into his skull. The overseers argued and grumbled and cuffed each other, grunting belligerence like walruses jostling over barren rock.

Around them, the floor was a mess of machine parts, blood-soaked bandages—and more bodies. At the feet of his unwilling successor lay
Tavuto
’s former pilot, the side of his head caked black, his neck stripped virtually to the spine. Around him, still resplendent with ships and skulls, lay the scattered bones of the Scrimshawed Man. His head, despite being split to the maxillae by a boarding axe, still grinned at Wrack from where it rested in a corner.

The dead began to join them at the doorway in their dozens, clotting in a malevolent pack. They were anything but quiet, though with the cacophony of alarms, the crackling panic of two dozen radios, and the hellish roar of battle outside, the frantic bridge crew hadn’t noticed they’d been invaded.

Then one of the overseers turned to search for a tool, and her face collapsed in horror, like tallow at a furnace door. Her bark of shock raised the heads of the others, and their resonant bickering dissolved into breathless shock. The overseers looked at the zombies, and they looked back, like starved hounds locking eyes over a bone at the end of the world. Weapons emerged, pitch-caulked carbines and hissing knives.

Somewhere out in the battle-stirred fog, Kaitangata’s hunting cry echoed.

There was no time to wait for Osedax—the dead were charging. Mouana sprinted as soon as the first gun was drawn, and Wrack followed, stumbling into her side as he forgot to compensate for his missing arm. The mistake saved his friend; as he blundered into Mouana, a shotgun blast aimed square at her caught him in the side, shredding half of his abdomen. He felt bits of him tumble out sideways but kept on his feet, staggering towards the mob of overseers with his remaining arm outstretched.

Another shotgun sent half his right leg across the room, but he managed to grab an overseer by the shirt, and clung to its side like a conscience. Wrack hung there with one fist, wasted muscles bunched, and snarled even as the ogre’s clublike arm swept across his mouth and popped teeth out of their sockets. The arm slammed back, cracking his jaw clean in two, but still he hung on. Then other arms were clinging alongside his—two, three, five pairs, and the overseer went down yowling.

Even with his jaw smashed, with one hand gone, Wrack gave in to the same instinct that had overtaken him when he had taken down the overseer at the lagoon. He joined the other zombies in their queasy frenzy of teeth, digging his fingers into the wounds that opened with nightmarish speed across the overseer’s torso. He barely noticed when Osedax waded past, a huge blade extended from his right fist, to mop up the last of the bridge crew.

“They’re all dead,” said Mouana eventually, calling his attention back from the mess of the overseer’s chest. She was still on her feet, but her eye was ruined, and a falchion was embedded a good four inches into her clavicle. Wrack did his best to prop himself up into a seated position, but the wreckage of his leg skidded on the ground, and his right side gave way horribly due to not having much left inside it.

“We acshually got them?” he croaked, mumbling through his broken jaw as he shuffled back to lean himself against a toolbox.

“Looks that way,” nodded Mouana, wrenching the blade free from her shoulder with an irritated grunt. Then there was a scrabbling, like a mouse scurrying for cover, and her one eye flickered, hawklike, to the back of the bridge. “Oh, hang on...”

Wrack turned his neck, wincing as something inside it crunched, and craned to see what Mouana was looking at. There, in the shadowed wreckage at the back of the room, a bulky figure was scrabbling at the controls of a door daubed with the letters
DV-1
in white stencilling: the elevator up to Dakuvanga. They were tapping urgently at a combination lock, breath coming in tinny sobs as shaking hands repeatedly flubbed the code.

It was Whina, Wrack realised, just as the control panel lit up in amber and the door slid open. “Oi!” he shouted as she forced herself through the door, and was about to curse himself for letting her get away when there was a blast of compressed air and a four foot harpoon appeared in her leg, pinning it to the doorway.

“Get over here,” boomed Osedax, and jerked back the massive launcher that underslung his arm. The harpoon tore from the wall and rattled back on a heavy chain, hauling the shrieking overseer with it. Her hands scrabbled against the deck as she came.

Once she had been dragged into the ring of slavering dead, Osedax put a huge foot on her hip, grabbed the harpoon in her leg and tugged, ripping it through her with an awful sound of grating bone. Whina screamed, the sound blasted to static by the speakers inside her grille, and looked across the floor at Wrack, eyes flooding with terror.

Her metal throat growled with the start of another howl of agony, but then something shifted in her expression, and she choked down the noise.

“Listen,” she began, but Wrack cut straight across her.

“Nope,” he interrupted, and turned to Osedax. “I couldn’t care lessh. Throw her out the window.”

Whina babbled as the war-built and two of his fellows hefted her onto the windowledge, but nobody was listening. As the cyborgs swung her legs up onto the edge of the precipice, however, Mouana launched herself forward and grabbed the overseer’s coat.

“Wait!” she blurted, teeth gritted in fury, turning on Wrack. “You heard what we promised her back in the hangar. Slow death.”

“Yesh,” agreed Wrack, slurring against his cracked mandible. “She broke her promish, sho we can break ourzh. Won’t make you feel any better, mate, chewing shomeone up, and beshides, you know well enough, we really don’t have time to eat someone.”

“We do it later, then,” snarled Mouana, a knife in her hand.

“No, we don’t,” said Wrack, and gave her a look to match any she’d shot him since they’d met. “Now get her out.”

As the cadaverous titans forced her flailing body over the edge, her eyes caught his for a second.

“I wish you a long and fruitful life,” remarked Wrack pleasantly, and Whina fell.

Mouana stared at him, lips tight with rage, for a long moment. And then the air was split by a long, keening wail, maybe fifty yards out from the bridge. Kaitangata. Not long after, metallic screams rose from the deck, then cut off.

“Happy now?” smirked Wrack, drooling black mucus from his battered mouth.

“Piss off,” retorted Mouana, her cheeks twitching up in an involuntary shadow of a smile, and turned away irritably.

“We’re not done,” she warned, back still to Wrack. “We’ve got no idea whether we’re winning or losing on the rest of the ship. And our chances are a lot worse while they’re still holding Dakuvanga.”

“Lift’s right there,” nodded Eunice, her voice unexpectedly high-pitched, as she emptied an overseer’s shotgun into one of her shell hoppers.

“Well I’d lead the way myshelf,” spat Wrack, gesturing at his wreck of a body and letting an extremely sarcastic ‘but’ linger unsaid, until Osedax ground into motion.

“Thought you’d never ask,” he cackled, and led the three survivors of his pack towards the open lift, hydraulics whining. The more bloodthirsty half of the regular dead followed, boisterous as a sports crowd, chanting violent gibberish as they wove among the war-built like remoras. Wrack wished them luck; Osedax acknowledged him with a raised hand as he led the mob into the freight elevator.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

M
OUANA WORKED QUICKLY
with the crowd that remained; most were sent downstairs to get the doors closed, while others—the Blades among them, mostly—were set to finding radios, helping her work out what was going on throughout the rest of the ship. They rushed around the room, trying to make sense of things; maps blinking with red symbols, camera feeds and burbling speakers, flickering screens shattered by bullets.

Wrack closed his eyes and lay back against the toolbox. Even if he hadn’t had half his mass blown off, amputated or removed in a ritual act of protest, he would have been useless now. This was a time for a military engineer to shine, not a seditious librarian.

He listened as Mouana directed her impromptu bridge crew, setting them to keep watch over various monitors and readouts as she worked out what they were for. Once or twice, he couldn’t help but chuckle as the dead muttered “yes, ma’am!” or “aye, captain!” like boys and girls playing at pirates—he almost suggested Mouana find herself an eye patch, but rapidly thought better of it.

Here they were, just days after he had woken up screaming inside a monster, as near as anything to being in control of the ship.

But then they weren’t, really, were they? The realisation caressed Wrack’s thoughts like cold, salt-puckered tentacles, as it occurred to him they had forgotten one extremely significant element of taking command of the
Tavuto
.

His eyes snapped open and it was there, above him. Cradled in the vault of the bridge’s ceiling, an armourglass cylinder some forty yards from end to end, a sepulchre of dark liquid. Shreds of atrophied matter swirled slowly within, tumbling viscous across its crystal belly on sluggish currents.

As he stared, deep green light swelled, revealing a vivisection in silhouette. Silent it hung, a pleated mass of tissue in cream and puce, bloated and rubbery, yet stirred by faint, huge movement. At its front, a torus pulsed between webs of bloated filigree, tapering into bulbous dendrites and ragged lobes along its draconic length.

Teuthis stared down at him, eyeless and bodiless, an angel cast in flaking viscera. The sight of it pressed down on him like a mile of water, reduced the world to muted, distant rumbles. Mouana’s voice was calling, somewhere in the viscous distance, but Wrack only wanted to stare up into that cathedral gloom. He was miles down. Fingers brushed on his shoulder like benthic worms, but his skin felt as far away as the surface, up where the light was.

Then, abruptly, he was looking at Mouana’s face from inches away, as she shook him violently by the shoulders.

“Fuck’s sake, Wrack, I said come and look at this,” she bellowed, grabbing his head and forcing him to meet her remaining eye.

Wrack gaped like a fish on a harbour slab, making a tiny noise at the base of his throat as he struggled to form language.

“Yeah, the squid brain, I know. I already saw it. Sod that, come and look at this.”

Before he could come up with the words to explain how vital it was that he be allowed to keep looking up, he was manhandled onto a trolley by three burly corpses and wheeled over to a bank of monitors. He tried to look back, but Mouana’s pitted hands guided his head towards the screens, gently, yet offering no chance of resistance. Somewhere in the back of his head, Wrack realised she probably had a point, and blinked hard to focus.