by Nate Crowley
Whether this was because he had been a political dissident (of all the things not to remember, this was particularly frustrating), or whether it was because he’d grown up reading books of war poetry that rattled on about the essential humanity of cannon fodder everywhere (there was no doubt about this), he had no idea.
Whatever the reason, any old prejudice was desperately easy to ditch in favour of the relief of having company. Still, he found himself utterly speechless when Aroha, whose eyes and voice had taken on the firmness of lucidity with remarkable speed, asked who the hell he was meant to be.
Unsure for a moment himself, he was just working his black-baked lips around the initial consonant of his old name when Mouana made a practical intervention.
“He started it,” she said. “He woke me. He’s going to lead a revolt here.”
Well, whyever not, thought the man who had been Schneider. If he had been a political criminal rather than a librarian, this was exactly the sort of thing he would have dreamed of doing. And if he hadn’t been a political criminal, then he had every reason to be one now. In any case, leading a slave revolt had to be better than lurching around waiting to fall into some machinery or a pair of hyperfaunal jaws.
“Yeah. I am,” he said, as casually as a corpse can really say anything.
And he felt it, more than he had felt anything since being dead. Even more than he’d known, looking up at the emerald glower of the bridge tower during the night, that this dreadful machine had to be stopped. Killing people would be one thing, but putting diminished life into their corpses to keep them working was quite another.
Even going by the brutal logic that some crimes deserved a worse punishment than death, inflicting that punishment on a fresh consciousness stuck in a dead brain was a new level of barbarism. Whatever the metaphysical situation, whoever he really was, this was not something he ever wanted to happen to anyone else.
“So what’s his name?” asked the commander, putting an end to the metaphysics.
“Wrack,” he said, telling himself it would be easier for newly-wakened tongues to pronounce, and very definitely choosing to forget that he had always felt his second name was much cooler than his first.
Whether he was feeling a surge of adrenaline, or just the ghost of one in whatever counted for his nervous system, the sluggishness had left his limbs: the hunger had been replaced by a yearning that was more than physical.
The zombies in the heap were looking at him. Or at least towards him. Registering on some viscous level of cognition that their fellows were having a conversation—were saying real words to each other—their faces were turning towards them like blind fungi following a gibbous moon. They might not be listening, but they were on the cusp. How much would it take to get them to accept their surroundings, to remember their names and their deaths, to get angry?
His tongue ached in his mouth like chewed meat, and death hung on the bottom of his thoughts like filthy water soaking the hem of a coat, but Wrack gathered his words to speak. This was where it started.
And this, he realised—as the brash clatter of mechanical legs sounded from the hangar door—was probably also where it ended. A jagged, lamniform shadow loomed on the faces of his congregation, cast by the rising sun.
It was good while it lasted, thought Wrack.
Then, to his bafflement, a slab of spongy white organ meat landed on the deck next to him with a sullen slap. He was just beginning to turn when a second chunk of half-liquified meat smacked into the back of his head.
“Come on, arseholes,” growled a voice like a heavy smoker wheezing into a metal balloon, “food.”
This did not, thought Wrack, as heavy boots kicked aside rusted detritus, sound like the prelude to a mauling. Taking care not to react directly to the meat that had hit him—blundering instead in a slow circle—he glanced slyly towards the hangar’s opening.
There, sitting down heavily on a ragged tyre, was a massive woman in a blood-caked oilskin, with the raw eyes and waxy face of an overseer. Her hair, clumped into sodden grey locks by rain, gore and oil, fell limply from her brows and hung over what he took at first to be a respirator, then registered was part of her head. From the bridge of her nose downwards, starting in a brutal ridge of scar tissue, her face was a heavy brass grille, like the front of a bus or the mouth of an industrial amplifier. It was cushioned beneath by rolls of fat, angles drowned in softness.
Her hand reached over the lip of a tin wheelbarrow, piled high with waxy gristle, and pulled free a length of bulbous gut, which she threw dismissively across the hangar towards the zombies.
Reaching in again for the mucus-strung back half of an isopod, she issued a curt whistle and held it out at arm’s length. Skidding slightly as it lunged, a twelve foot thresher shark with an ugly gash in the side of its head snapped at the meat, twisted its head from side to side as the overseer engaged in a half-arsed game of tug-of-war with it.
Pulling the rotten crustacean from her grasp, the shark loped off under the wing of a dead jetplane to gnash at its prize, while the brass-faced woman dug into the barrow for more gloppy offal. She emitted a piercing whistle from her faceplate: all across the pile of dead, flesh rustled on flesh and bandaged feet thudded on rust, as the hungry zombies made for their meal.
With a sinking sensation, Wrack found he too was edging towards the meat, as were the two former soldiers. The thought of iron-rich matter, rising up against his driving teeth, was too much to resist.
He crept forwards, careful neither to overtake the shambling crowd nor look too directly at the overseer, and kept his face empty with slack despair even when her radio began trilling.
“Whēkau clearup three, this is Dakuvanga, what’s your status?” crackled the dull box. “Any stragglers?”
“Yeah, DV, plenty. Just like I told you. The old hangar’s a goldmine. But there’s a lot of shit back here too, over.”
The metal-faced woman thumbed off the radio to throw a stringy fish spine to the growing crowd, then raised it to her chin again.
“I mean it, DV. Most of these aren’t even good for refit. They’re not even getting up. You need to get Kaitangata back here. Soon. They’re clogging up the place. Not good to let ’em pile up.”
She flicked the radio off again, held it in her lap and, for a very long second, seemed to look straight at Wrack as he sank to his knees and fumbled for a sagging organ.
“They’ll get ideas,” she said dryly to herself, and huffed something that might have been a laugh.
A long pause of static followed, before a burst of pops and hisses heralded Dakuvanga’s croaking voice again.
“Whatever, WK3. We’re busy up here. Nine pinnaces loaded already for the hunt. You have numbers or what?”
“Fine. Probably forty functional, but you’ve got twice that on stumps and sticks, not even moving for guts.”
“Ten-four Whēkau; stow it. Just get ’em fed and move the ones you can move.”
Wrack pulled a shivering length of pallid tube to his mouth, felt it slide like cold jelly around his incisors. Thought seemed to slip backwards, somewhere deep under his champing jaws, as he sucked back mouthful upon mouthful of lumpy gut.
By the time he’d wrestled his mind back from the gelid orgy of consumption, the radio conversation had progressed. The thresher shark was close by, making slow circles of the mass of feeding zombies.
“Yes DV, I repeat,” snarled the woman. “Fed and ready, we’re almost good to move out.”
There was barely a second of static before the reply came back.
“Well hurry the fuck up, WK3, ET just smelled the Bahamut. It’s on. Out.”
The overseer closed her eyes, let out a gushing huff of irritation through her cheesegrater of a face, and stowed the radio.
“You heard the man,” she said to nobody in particular, as she rose ponderously to her feet. “We’ve got a monster to kill.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
THEY WERE HERDED down the s
tarboard side of the Tavuto, the thresher shark at their heels, with dreadful urgency. The overseer led the way, barking constantly into her radio, with thirty or so of the dead following in a loose, shambling pack.
Around them, the ship seemed to be moving into a higher gear of activity, like something terrible disturbed from sleep. From deep within the iron hill of its body the throb of engines rose, and steam poured from the throats of cooling towers to form a sweltering canopy high overhead.
The sun, still hauling itself up above the horizon, though it must have been hours since dawn, glared on their backs and began to burn the mist from the deck. Though they had not yet encountered any other work parties, or any other overseers, the sound of screaming metal and shouting ahead of them suggested they were heading back into the fray.
For now, it was just them—thirty corpse-prisoners with fresh blood on their chins, and one harried overseer. Soon, though, they would be back under the watchful eyes of the cranes, and the floodlights, and the battalions of dour watchers with their attack beasts. Wrack registered, with a lurch of panic, that they might be rapidly running out of time to make any kind of move.
Looking over slyly at Mouana, he found the haggard soldier looking back at him, a strand of white flesh from the feeding still dangling from her jaw. Had she had the same thought? Miming a stumble on a weak ankle, Wrack blundered heavily into her, disguising any sense of purpose lest he be spotted by the shark that skittered around them like an excitable dog.
He gestured towards the overseer, used the supposedly random flailing of his arms to mime them rushing forwards, overpowering her. This knot of baffled dead was their rebellion in embryo—surely they could tackle the brute woman, and maybe even her shark as well, if the other zombies noticed what was going on and joined in.
“Yes,” hissed Mouana curtly, and began to accelerate towards their supervisor. Wrack shuddered at the thought of how big a chance they were taking, but there was nothing to do but follow. Doing the best they could to lope up through the pack of dead without any sense of apparent purpose, they soon found themselves leading the way, just behind the grille-faced woman.
With no memories of having had a fight in his life—especially not against someone twice his size, wrapped in boiled leather—Wrack had no idea how they were going to overpower her. He was just hoping Mouana had years of close-quarters combat drilled into her muscle memory, when the overseer’s radio chattered and she stopped in her tracks. Wrack ran straight into her back, arms outstretched like a child pretending to be a monster.
“You have to be bloody kidding,” growled the overseer to herself, grunting with irritation and swiping Wrack and Mouana to the deck absent-mindedly, as if clearing cobwebs.
“All channels, we repeat. ET has ignored the lure and is closing,” barked the radio. “Six hundred yards and closing. Expecting major heat in bay one any minute now. All hands, pattern Kappa. Prepare to repel.”
Cutting through the swelling ambience of grinding steel, a thin, wailing siren rose from the mist ahead.
“Oh, shit,” said the overseer, looking up and shaking her head in disbelief.
Following her gaze from where he sprawled on cold metal, Wrack looked into the sky and saw, looming above him, the gigantic tower of scaffolding they had passed during the night trek. High up on its superstructure, stencilled on the side of a factory-sized chunk of crane-festooned superstructure, were the letters DV-1. This was Dakuvanga. If the bridge tower they had seen in the depths of the night had been the brain of the Tavuto, this had to be its heart. Or at least its gigantic, muscly arm.
If anything, it looked even more imposing by the light of day. Clumps of decking clung to the vertical immensity of the structure like bracket fungus encrusting an ancient tree, pocked with windows and sprouting booms, cables and pulley-clubbed cranes. As he watched, one of Dakuvanga’s subsidiary arms swung ponderously across the deck; in its grip, a boat that would have seemed enormous in a less insane context was lifted from its bracket on the central hull and into the mist-hidden chaos ahead.
Wrack found his attention torn from the huge boat’s progress by the throaty rumble of a diesel engine; a battered flatbed truck had pulled up beside their clump of stragglers, and the overseer in the cab was leaning out to engage in frantic conversation with their herder.
“We reeled out a chunk of the Bahamut as a decoy, but ET saw past it—it’s come for the whole thing,” shouted the truck’s driver, above the growing din of metal and klaxons.
“Is it going for the ship?” said the grille-faced woman, spreading her arms in bafflement.
“How the hell would I know?” snapped the driver. “Either way, we’re going to need all the meat we can get amidships, and we need it already there. So are you going to load up or what?”
The overseer leapt up into the cab with surprising agility, and the engine revved. Before he could look around for Mouana or the commander, Wrack found himself picked from the floor like a side of meat by the brutish arms of an overseer and tumbled into the back of the truck with a mass of other zombies. Two other bodies were lumped on top of him, arms and legs flailing like the flippers of turtles tossed into a barrel.
The vehicle lurched into motion just as Wrack was trying to right himself, sending him slamming back into the once-human meat pile on its back. Acceleration shoved his face against the mass of sores coating another zombie’s belly, and his neck made a noise that would have made him wince if he had been alive. Thrusting away from the rotting body, he managed to hook an arm over the truck’s side, and pulled himself out of the writhing mass of confused bodies to rest on the metal edge.
With another mechanical growl, the truck burst through the dissipating mist hanging above the Tavuto’s starboard flank and barrelled onto empty decking. A stray zombie folded under its bull-bars with a cracking thud; one side of the truck lurched into the air for half a second as it went under a wheel.
Wrack’s teeth clattered against his tongue as the truck hit the ground again, filling his mouth with the cloying reek of what passed for blood. Gripping the side of the speeding vehicle with trembling ferocity, he craned his neck and took in a scene of unreal proportions.
To their right, the Tavuto’s side opened up into a vast lagoon; a sea-filled bay at least half a mile long, steel-floored and encircled by tower-studded walls. Along its inner wall, a row of mighty cranes bristled with house-sized cutting equipment, while on its outer edge, enormous latticed gates stood open to Ocean.
Inside the lagoon was a corpse of incomprehensible scale. Filling the bay from end to end was a fish, or a whale, or something else, collapsed and flabby and distended in death. Swathes of its skin were crusted in barnacles, corals and tubeworm casts, while barbels and fins the size of streets rose and fell on the swell of the waves. The Bahamut, Wrack assumed.
A cloud of grey water hung from a sprawling wound in its belly, spilling indistinct clouds of innards and spawning a boil of lampreys, hagfish, saw-suckers and carrion skate. The bay’s gates were sliding slowly shut, but the hoary slick of filth flowed through their lattice, fountaining over the lip of the lagoon and into the currents beyond.
It had been smelled.
As the truck sped along the row of saw-cranes, Wrack watched, transfixed, as a gigantic claw the colour of green milk rose from the sea beyond the bay and hooked itself roughly over the closing sea-gate. For a moment, he could have sworn the entire vessel dipped inches as the ghastly thing tugged on its edge, before the metal sagged like tissue and tore away. Even as the gate collapsed, a second limb unfolded from the roiling sea, its tip groping over the edge of the bay and catching in the trailing guts of the Bahamut.
Over the crashing hiss of pouring water, whip-cracks popped from the lagoon as the cables anchoring the gigafauna in place stretched and snapped. The middle of the Bahamut was drawn out towards open water by the claw, as an armoured head rose at the edge of the abyss in sheets of rushing green water.
It was part mantis shrimp, pa
rt dragonfly nymph, part mountainside, part god; an edifice of compound eye and scissoring mouthparts. Something too weird to exist beyond rambling footnotes, even in the books of his youth. One of the ET clade.
The ETs were some of the least understood, the most feared, and the most profitable of Ocean’s fauna. Some held they had been the original inhabitants of this endless sea; others, that their ancestors had been carried here as larvae in ballast tanks, long years ago when the sky had been a way in and out of the world. Nobody even knew if they could breed here.
Either way, they were rare, and huge, and worth ten times their weight in meat. Despite being inedible, their strange aromatics, weird compounds, and cellular metabolism based on radioactive decay, made them prizes beyond measure. And they were bastard hard to kill.
As soon as the knotted immensity of the ET’s head broke water, the guns opened fire. From the corners of the steel lagoon clustered turrets blazed into life, dozens of muzzle flashes drowning the weak morning light in their actinic rage. An instant later the air filled with the hyperkinetic stutter of miniguns, the arrhythmic crump of AP shells, and the staccato thud of munitions raining into yard-thick chitin-analogue.
With a titanic screech that seemed to shiver the deep steel of the deck, the ET reared a full fifty yards into the air, twisting its segmented tower of a body even as its surface was drilled into clouds of splinters, then hurled itself sideways into the sea. Gouts of water leapt up from its vanishing, a swell of oil-souped brine washing over the walls of the lagoon, and then all was silent but for the slapping of the bullied water.
Then, pandemonium.
A new siren, deep and aggressive, blasted from horns all around Dakuvanga’s base. Boats were being hauled from their brackets by a swaying forest of cranes, while trucks carrying munitions, fuel and endless piles of the flailing dead swarmed to the muster points beside the lagoon.
“Code Three! Code Three!” screamed a static-blasted voice from the cab of the truck. “It’s holed and surface-bound; fleet C, all boats to pursuit, all boats!”