by Nate Crowley
With the signal unequivocally given, Wrack turned back to the bridge and nodded at Whina, his face twisted into an expression of unmistakable threat.
But even as the world went mad, the overseer’s face was entirely placid. While the bottom half of Whina’s face was static, an emotionless grille, her eyes creased in a smile colder than the currents below him.
It all became clear. He should have known from the encounter at the hangar, from the way she had reacted to the threat of death. She had faked compassion, had tried to ingratiate herself, even as she had been caked in the hungry drool of her captors. Only terror, the idea of there being no way out but to collaborate, had swayed her. It should have told Wrack everything he needed to know about her.
After all, thought Wrack, the overseers were prisoners too—consigned to life on the edge of death rather than death on the edge of life, as he had been. And in Whina’s smile, the difference in their fates became caustically clear. Each of her caste had seen their sentences commuted over the barrier of mortality because they had made a deal, had received a boon in exchange for valuable information.
They were snitches.
Soldiers who had given away troop movements, thieves who had shared heist plans, Pipers who had named their sisters and brothers. Betrayers. Wrack knew the type: even with most of his memory locked in cold meat, he knew he had seen it seen that mix of guilt and triumph and relief before, and he saw it again in Whina.
He had been an idiot not to see its embryo back in the hangar. Now, looking at Whina as she leaned over to Teuthis’ pilot and spoke in its ear, eyes still fixed on his, he knew what a dreadful thing it could grow into.
The pilot, twitching with whatever coursed through his grey skull, nodded, and Whina turned back to him. With an expression both predatory and haunted, she threw him a middle finger. Before he could begin to formulate a response, the pilot slammed down an enormous lever, and the world burst.
It could not be felt at first; it was visual. The white sky became black, and the only colour in the world was the deep, phosphorescent green that swelled behind the pilot’s seat. It shone out, infinitely bright, searing the pilot’s slumped outline into Wrack’s retinas, then vanished all at once. It left darkness.
The darkness shrieked with memories.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HIS MOTHER’S GRAVE. Men with scars, shaking hands with his father as he wept. The soft toy rabbit, her gift, forlorn with rain on the graveside.
Smoke rising from the docks. Hangings at the harbour. Worried talks in the study late at night while he drove his model of Tavuto blissfully across the carpet.
Midnight at the library, much later. A tall figure, face indistinct beneath the hood of an oilskin, handing him a bundle of rain-sodden paper at the back door.
Meetings in the stacks, rough men. Taking slips of paper from him, whispering messages in his ear. Other men, just as rough, nodding as he passed the messages on.
More rain, years and years ago. Pattering on the windows of his father’s office, as they slid the mass of horse drawings off the table.
“This one is very important,” said Schneider’s father, as he drew, in one fluid curve, the figure of a tobacco pipe.
The interrogation room, and the constable, asking him if he knew anyone else involved in the plot. The shake of his head.
His father at the trial, tear-streaked face silent with thanks.
Oh, thought Wrack, and forced his eyes open against the rushing dark. Bloody hell, Dad. Then he snarled to himself, and sat up. This time around, he was going to go down fighting.
He had slipped to the bottom of the pile. His skin torn from the teeth of the unborn carcharodons, his limbs splayed in their viscera. All around him were the fallen bodies of his people, many with hearts still in their hands. They thrashed, and screamed, and crunched into foetal curls as they were beaten over the head with their own memories.
The pulse had been stronger even than the one they’d used against the ET. It had ripped across the ship for as far as Wrack could see, and left none standing but the overseers, their brains left untouched by whatever strange meat frequency Teuthis had attacked on.
Mouana was nowhere to be seen, must have been somewhere hidden on the other side of the pile.
He craned his head sideways, looking for Osedax, and found him on his haunches, weeping thick tears from baked eyes. He was calling for his mother. The other killers lay prone. One of the three elders—Eunice, was it?—screamed an indistinct name over and over again, stared at her own clawed hands as if they dripped with guilty blood.
Voices, indistinct, boomed from high up on Dakuvanga, broadcast through loudspeakers. Teams of overseers moved, full of purpose now, throwing wide nets over the dead and dragging them aside to be recalibrated. They moved in concert, slick and practised; evidently, there was a drill for this. No wonder they had let them get this far, thought Wrack, the blackness billowing like smoke within him.
Why bother nipping at uppity dead piecemeal, when they could let everything come to a head and knock everyone down at once? After a stint under the steam hammer of Teuthis’ pulse, they would all return to a pliant state.
All but him, thought Wrack. Though as huge blast doors began to grind apart at the base of the bridge tower, it became clear the overseers had a plan for taking out troublemakers, too. Tremors ghosted through the deck as something enormous moved beyond the doors. They creaked further apart, and light shone on a grin from the nightmares of whales.
The gates parted, and man-high jaws glistening white with exposed bone slid into the light, followed by a mountain of flesh.
It was a devil-carcass, fifteen yards long, yoked to the leashes of at least eight overseers. Behind its snaggletoothed wedge of a head, skeletal flippers hung useless above monstrous steel forelimbs, while a tail sheathed in the remains of a coat of blubber hung behind it.
It emerged from the dark, elephantine legs stamping on the gore-slick deck, and threw back its head to give a wail meant to travel a hundred miles through icy sea. A hunting cry.
“Kaitangata!” roared the overseers. “Kaitangata! Kaitangata!”
Kaitangata, the Man-Eater, the beast—spoken of in whispers—sent to clean up the dead from the ship’s corners. It slunk onto the deck, an orca, half-skeletonised, dripping with rags of grey blubber.
Its twelve-ton mass sunk low between splayed legs, it pointed its head straight towards Wrack and advanced, wet pops and pings sounding from the grey heap of pipe-riddled meat crowning its terrible jaws.
Fair enough, thought Wrack, then lay back and waited for the huge bone vice to close around him. There was no fighting that thing. He let his face tilt up to look at where Whina stood, half-turned from him on the bridge, but she wouldn’t even look at him now. Arsehole.
Then Wrack had to keep himself from laughing in delight, as he saw what was happening right below the bridge windows. There, like a spider moving at the edge of vision, he saw a figure creeping up the face of Tavuto’s bridge tower. Limbs festooned with red-black tendon, it moved tremulously, hands clasping exposed bolts and feet shuddering in the rifts between hull plates. Its hips were crusted with carved whorls, its scapulae dappled with devil-faces, long-stemmed pipes and broken ships.
The scrimshawed man was just a couple of feet beneath the bulging opening where Teuthis’ pilot sat, lips flecked with foam, thrashing in its throne. That the zombie had been able to stand was wonder enough; that he had managed to make his grim way up the metal cliff was something else altogether.
“Tiny machines,” breathed Wrack in wonder, trying to hide his smile as Kaitangata approached.
The beast dipped its head to the deck and grabbed a body in its jaws, just thirty yards from Wrack; it threw the hapless corpse up into the air with a sickening crunch of dislocating hips, and gulped it down. The overseers on the bridge watched as it advanced; Wrack tried his best to look dismal and exhausted, Andromeda before Cetus, doing his utmost not to pump his fists and che
er for the scrimshawed man as he continued his tireless climb.
And then there was no point in theatre. Hanging by one bone-slim arm, reaching up with a shaking hand and grabbing onto the pipework surrounding Teuthis’ pilot, Scrimshaw got where he wanted to be. A skeletal fist curled round the pilot’s lapel, and the next few seconds unfurled with beautiful simplicity.
Wrack stood up, the only zombie on his feet, and stretched his arms as if greeting the dawn. Then he ran straight at the whale-corpse, heedless of its jaws splaying to meet him, and laughed. As he rushed towards Kaitangata he took in its shape: the matted flippers hanging uselessly in nests of hydraulics either side of its jagged mouth, the sagging mess slumped atop its forelimbs.
If he managed to fool it into lunging the wrong way, he could be on top of it in a matter of seconds. And somehow, before he could even work out how to do that—he had never been much of a sportsman—it had happened. The truck-heavy maw swung like thunder, snapped shut inches from his left hip, and he leapt, hands clawed and stretched.
Yelling in exhilaration, he crashed into the foetid pipework of Kaitangata’s left shoulder, just as screams began to sound from the bridge above. He imagined the grey teeth of the scrimshawed man, closing on flesh. Any second now, everything would fall apart. All Wrack had to do was keep hold of the bundled cabling, flexing to keep his hips away from the beast’s snapping jaws as they scissored at him, a parasite that no cetacean had been built to dislodge.
“Hang on for grim death,” he shouted to himself, before erupting into one of his bubbling fits of laughter. There was absolutely nothing grim about the moment. As he bucked and bumped on the shoulder of the monster, the sweet sound of a siren swelled from Dakuvanga’s distant limbs. The carved man had found his meal. Things had fallen apart.
Then it came. Like a bullet being sucked from his skull, like a headache boiling away in an instant, like gravity falling away; the black pulse came in reverse, sucked like milk through a straw. Beautiful scrimshaw; the connection had been severed.
All was still. Kaitangata stamped, snorting, but a confusion was upon it. The birds shrieked, mocking in the white sky. Overseers stood rigid with panic.
Then the most ghastly sound. A howl to ruin the mind of any whose throat it hadn’t come from; a quarter of a million voices released from despair, sounding all at once, drawing succour from each other across a mile and a half of deck.
Beneath Wrack the monster screamed out too, head raised and jaws preternaturally wide, as its grey shackles fell away. He swung round onto its neck and sat tall in a saddle of bone as it lunged sideways, taking an overseer square in the middle and biting down in a spray of preservative-yellowed blood.
Kaitangata reared, actually reared, twelve tons of meat and metal propelled skywards in fury, and as it reached its apex Wrack raised his fist, still black with his heart’s blood, into the air. The ship screamed again, and as he looked into the faces of the maddened throng, he knew the overseers had no drill for this.
Now, mayhem.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE DECK BOILED with a thousand battles. Overseers fired rifles and blunt, pitbull shotguns into seething tides of the dead, while others were pulled under, came apart in their clawing eddies. Cordite and brine, diesel and iron rolled across the crowds in heady billows, and the deck vanished under black claret. Where spaces opened in the maelstrom, the pounding of rotted feet on wet metal swelled like the sound of swarming birds as the dead charged their masters.
Sharks ran off their leads, wheeling and thrashing, making messes of handlers and zombies alike: they were the delegates of Ocean’s cold violence, with no care for sides or sense.
Kaitangata, their paragon, thundered through the charnel, smashing flesh to jagged slime beneath its feet and destroying bodies with its jaws. On its back Wrack fought to stay upright, knees clamped to either side of its filthy vertebrae, fingers dug into frayed sheets of blubber.
Black streaks creeping from his emptied chest, he cackled in rough glee as he caught sight of Osedax in the melee. The killer’s face was lost in a sort of bewildered ecstasy, slack as a lost child’s while he thundered shells into the windows of the bridge above. Eunice, Riftia, Kuphus, his sisters in arms, blasted away alongside him, while the rest of the war-built ploughed out into the wider carnage. The dead rallied around them, converging like starved dogs on the bodies of the overseers they felled.
Fog still clung to the ship, making a shrouded arena of the deck, its glowing depths shaken with gunfire and corpse-bawls. As Kaitangata stooped to tear off the head of a fallen war-built, the mist on Tavuto’s starboard flank erupted into searing light. A moment later, thunder shot through the murk, and deep crunches rumbled through the decking: the defence turrets on the lagoon’s perimeter had opened fire, laying waste to whatever insurrection had enveloped the Bahamut’s graveside.
Dakuvanga’s bridge crew rallied moments later—Wrack only realised it when bullets began smacking into Kaitangata’s wet hide, singing metal spite as they passed him by inches. He hurled himself from the demon’s neck, hitting the deck with a crack that told him something in his upper half was horribly broken, and scrambled into the nearest mob of zombies.
He had gotten both figuratively and literally carried away, thought Wrack, as the monster pounded off into the fray under a hail of bullets. It had been all very well riding through the battle on an incredibly conspicuous target, he considered, but it hadn’t held much water as a long term plan. Mouana would not have been impressed.
As he went to pull himself upright, beneath the comforting shelter of two dozen abhuman legs, Wrack discovered it was his left arm that had taken the brunt of the fall; as he went to lever himself onto two feet, it flopped aside with a pathetic crunch and displayed six inches of shattered ulna. Rolling his eyes, he shifted his weight and used the other one to push him up.
As he ascended to eye level, the zombies around him erupted into a raucous cheer like pissed mates greeting a latecomer to a pub. He tried his best to mime them into nonchalance, but as they slapped him companionably on the back, he gave up in favour of finding more solid cover as quickly as possible.
There was one obvious option: the semicircle of the deck sheltered from Dakuvanga’s looming bridge, in front of the doors where Kaitangata had emerged. Craning his head above his new, maddeningly congratulatory companions, Wrack saw the doors were still ajar, stopped from closing by a slick hill of bullet-ridden corpses. And beside the doors, of course, was Mouana, discarding a spent blunderbuss and looking incredibly impatient.
As soon as he got close enough to catch her eye, she was simmering. He ran over, out of his covering crowd, with a mouth full of greetings, but Mouana had no time for it.
“What the hell were you doing, Wrack?” she hissed. “They’ll be halfway to wiring themselves back in by now. We need to get up there.”
Wrack glanced at the doorway, where a crowd of overseers was beginning to drag the blockage away with billhooks, then snapped back at her.
“You could have made a move yourself, you know,” he snarled, and was taken aback by the look of shame on his comrade’s face.
“Not without you,” she grumbled, then looked as profoundly embarrassed as skin drawn taut over a skull can. “It’s you they’re following, after all.”
She turned. “Anyway. We need to get up there now.”
She made for the doors, and Wrack’s haggard retinue, despite having lost half a dozen to rifle fire on their way there, cheered once again at the prospect of carnage. Without Teuthis’ blackness dragging at their heels, the zombies were almost absurdly enthusiastic for violence.
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.