The Sea Hates a Coward (9 page)

At once, every boat in the flotilla increased speed. A third volley of charges went tumbling into the water, and the weaponised dead on the
Akhlut
’s flanks raised their enormous arms, as if prompted by an unheard signal. The overseer at the helm leaned forwards in his saddle and twisted his huge wrists, opening the throttle to full.

They pulled out ahead of the fleet, engine screaming, and the other corpse-carriers pulled out beside them. Smoke blasted from the backs of the black barges, and they advanced in a loose knot, smashing through the tips of waves and raising curtains of spray.

Beneath them the water turned pale as the speeding body of the ET ascended like a rising beach. It could only have been fifty feet from the surface, its plates, tubercules and jointed limbs visible as patches of shifting colour. They matched its speed, and jockeyed on the surface to surround its mass with a loose ring of boats.

The
Akhlut
’s horn sounded once again, a call for blood, and was answered from below by a subsonic scream that rattled the teeth in Wrack’s jaw.

Joining the cacophony, the machinery at the heart of the pinnace began to thrum, building to an aggravated whine. All around the circle, the other boats’ machines were coming to life, a swelling chorus that crackled with electric menace. Wrack began to feel lightheaded.

The overseer’s radio burst into life with an urgent string of exclamations, and he reached hastily for an iron helmet, sliding it over his head with obvious urgency. A warning klaxon began blaring from the
Akhlut
, and the sound of the generators ascended to a barely-audible shriek.

Then the blackness came. Wrack felt it an instant before it hit, like a flash of lightning seen in the heartbeat before its passing tore the air apart. It came from beyond the horizon, a shockwave of invisible dread with only one possible source. That spiteful tower on the
Tavuto
, squat and glowing with baleful green light, the source of the awful sleep that he had slipped from back in the flensing yards.

Back on the ship it had been a conquerable presence, like tar tugging on his heels; this was something violently physical, a wall of angst that advanced across the windswept distance at impossible speed and knocked his mind aside like a flower before a tsunami.

The world went away.

His lips touched hers, an instant before they thought they would, and began moving softly, making strange, tiny wet crackles. His thumb rubbed a slow circle in the soft hair at her temple, and he was surprised at how her mouth didn’t really taste of anything. His eyes flickered open, saw her eyelids tremble above heavy lashes, and closed again. What had they even been saying, before their eyes had gone out of focus and their mouths had dipped in together?

The firelight danced through the bottle’s green glass as he swirled the whisky in its bottom. Cool air, the last breath of a summer sunset, ruffled the hair on his brow as he leaned back into the coarse grass. Laughter blossomed in the shadows, twigs crackled in the flames. He leaned over to answer Tom’s question with a joke, but he had forgotten the question.

Oof, but it was cold. Groggily, he pulled the thick duvet over his shoulder and up to his chin, wriggling down into the body-hot cavity beneath. Warm hips cupped his arse, and he slid his shin in between sleeping legs, a shiver passing through him at the pleasure of the snug contact. Who were they, again?

He couldn’t believe he still had half the book left to read. Better yet, there were three more to go in the series once it was done. As he turned the page the torch slipped from its crook between his head and shoulder, and he rummaged on the mattress to retrieve it, eager to get back to the story. As he grabbed the light, he looked for a while at the way the light shone through the webs at the base of his fingers, translucent and pink with warm blood. The book had closed on itself. What page had he been on?

His father showed him again, defining the horse’s jaw with a swoop of his pencil and then blocking in the curve of its neck. He scribbled out his own effort, which looked like a sort of ill crocodile, and reached for a new sheet of paper. Frowning in concentration, he put his pencil to paper and drew a wobbly line to define the horse’s nose, but he was pressing too hard and the tip broke off, leaving a black starburst on the page. He turned to his father to ask whether he should start a new drawing, but his dad didn’t really have a face.

Sunlight fell in an orange stripe across the stuffed toy rabbit, motes pirouetting in front of its worn smile. Its woollen ears flopped across his shoulder as he picked it up and hugged it. Then it was gone, and his hands were white, cold claws, branded with the mark of a violent rebellion. He was a wretched thing, on a monster-haunted ocean, clutching the fading memories of a dead man.

Schneider Wrack howled at the sky, the sound tearing from his throat as if it could take him with it, and the world howled along. All around him the dead screamed as their former selves were snatched away from them forever, and their horror shook the miserable boat, drawn to the generator like lightning grounding through a rod. The generator whined and overloaded with a deafening crack, blasting everything it had gathered downwards in a single black pulse. All around the ring the other boats did likewise, their machinery cooking off and sending shockwaves of grief into the fathomless sea.

It was despair, weaponised.

The ET reacted immediately, and violently. With a bellow of confused rage that seemed to come from the whole of Ocean, its great pale back began surging up through the water like an onrushing storm. The overseer turned hard, nearly capsizing them as the boat banked to avoid the breaching monstrosity, and only just made it in time: it erupted from the sea like a fist through paper, a tower of ragged wounds with claws spread like vengeful wings.

Empty, broken, standing only because of the pressure of other bodies, Wrack looked up with a strange serenity at the leviathan’s jaws, hanging high above in a halo of crashing water.

The
Akhlut
opened fire. Harpoons as thick as treetrunks slammed into the ET’s neck from ports in the killship’s grinning mouth, while a fusillade of smaller projectiles whistled across from its hull, each trailing a thick steel line. Half bounced off the otherworldly armour, but enough lodged between the plates and spines. The beast writhed as spearheads detonated beneath its skin, twisting in a mass of cables like some fiendish marionette, then began to shudder as the gun-limbs of the turret zombies sounded at close range.

It crashed back into the sea, obliterating a weapon-pinnace that had made too close a pass under its bulk, and put on a terrible burst of speed. Its twin tails thrashed beneath the surface, kicking up titanic waves in its bid to evade its pursuers, and the immensity of the
Akhlut
was dragged behind it like a sledge.

Its tails rose above the surface, fanned planes as wide as city streets, and it dived. A few of the harpoon-zombies broke free of their mounts and were sucked into the abyss, and the whole prow of the
Akhlut
dipped almost to its tip in the surging water.

Then the rockets came on. Without warning, the squat cylinders along the
Akhlut
’s hull roared into life, two dozen tongues of plasma jetting straight into cold sea with a force intended to fight hundreds of tons of surging muscle. Instantly the world filled with steam, intensely thick and scalding hot even at a hundred yards’ distance. No wonder the weapon-zombies arrayed on
Akhlut
’s flanks had looked as though they’d been cooked: they had been.

With the world obscured by the boiling ocean, it was impossible to tell how the battle was progressing. The rocket burst came to a halt, and all that could be heard was the breaking of steel cable under tension, the revving of motors and the popping of gunfire, all muffled by the blanket of steam.

In the boat around Wrack, bobbing motionless now its purpose was done, the spent dead leaned against each other, faces even emptier than they had been. Beside him, the broken-jawed woman had slumped to a half-crouch, head still craned to the sky as if waiting for her shout to fall back into her mouth. The commander was invisible through the mist.

After a few minutes of unseen chaos, a weapons pinnace swung past them, its pilot leaning from his seat to gesture at theirs. The engine started up again. Seconds later, the
Akhlut
’s horn sounded from the fog; long, triumphant and tired like a wounded animal over a fallen rival. The radio chatter was clear, even from the back of the boat: “
It’s dead! It’s dead! It’s dead!
”

The
Akhlut
swam into view as a dark shape, resolving into predatory angles as they drew alongside. Beside it, a great armoured carcass bobbed peacefully in the water, strung to the killship by a forest of cables. The leviathan had been hooked. Atop the ship’s forecastle an overseer stood, leaning on a radio mast, and raised his fist in salute to the pilots of the circling boats, as steam swirled around his pillar-like legs.

He was unaware of the ghost-white shape, almost invisible against the rolling mist, looming behind him with mantis claws raised as if in greeting. With a singular, final crunch, the hooked limbs of the
second
ET clamped onto the superstructure of the
Akhlut
, and pulled it over onto its side like a child’s toy.

The wave hit Wrack’s pinnace like a wall, and he was shoved into the water.

CHAPTER TEN

W
RACK HAD ALREADY
sunk thirty feet before he really thought to do anything about it. The dark wave from the
Tavuto
had left him feeling robbed of all agency, empty of anything but the sense of dreadful, hopeless lethargy he had first come to awareness with. He had watched the triumph and death of the
Akhlut
with a sort of muffled detachment, and things felt exactly the same from below the waves.

Falling slowly into the deep on his back, he looked up at the roiling underside of the surface, and at the other wave-struck bodies drifting down into the darkness along with him. By instinct he was holding his breath, but what did it matter if he let the brine flood in? Even if had needed to breathe air, he doubted he would have gotten to the end of even a single lungful before something from below devoured him. With the aftermath of the despair bomb still throbbing beneath his skull, the thought was a welcome relief.

As he opened his mouth a crack and let the first bubbles drift up towards the light, however, he realised exactly why it would be a terrible idea to let the air out of his body.

Because without air in him, he might never stop sinking. He would drop like a stone, down past the reach of the sun, down past the abysses where great black things slithered, forever hungry, and on into fathomless dark.

Nobody could quite agree whether Ocean had a bottom at all, or if it did, how far down it was or what it was made of. City-sized islands of crinoid-wreathed
Natans holosericum
were occasionally found floating a few hundred yards down—Wrack had seen them sketched in his book—but between them was the
barathrum
, the great bottomless expanse. Chains stretching dozens of miles had been dropped and not touched anything, or had come up with their lower reaches limned in strange, hot ice.

If he let out his breath, and if he wasn’t snatched up by some devil on the way down, he might never stop sinking.

Sod that, thought Wrack. Anything had to be better than that. Clamping his mouth shut, he began kicking his legs, and struggled back towards the surface. Back on the
Tavuto
he had come to understand there was more good he could do by struggling than by giving up, and that hadn’t changed. Even without hope, admitting defeat now and sinking into Hadal dark out of grief for a dead man’s memories would be a miserable way for it all to end. He would swim.

A
S HE DRAGGED
the water past him, clawing upwards, other zombies fell slowly past, hair and tattered clothes fluttering in the water like flags of surrender. With a jolt he recognised the face of Mouana’s commander, bubbles trickling from his lips as he slid past with his head slumped against his wounded chest. Aroha; that had been his name. Strange what you recall when it’s no use to you.

Remembering how Mouana had held him back in the hangar, had brought him out of the black dream, Wrack knew he could not abandon him to Ocean. He surged toward the sinking man, horrified at the thought of one of the two people he knew in the world enduring the endless descent he had been about to resign himself to.

Kicking madly, he reached the other corpse, grabbed it by the shirt collar, and shook frantically. The commander’s face tilted sluggishly towards him, but displayed nothing but an expression of profound loss. Wrack forced himself under Aroha’s armpit, worked his legs with every ounce of strength he could find, but the light of the surface only grew more distant above them. Aroha was too heavy, had already leaked too much of his air from the open wound in his chest.