The Sea Hates a Coward

by Nate Crowley

  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

  MOUANA 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 a
nd 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.

  On the monitors, Tavuto was in chaos. Claustrophobic battles raged in the ship’s underdeck, open combat sprawled across acres of open deck, and muzzle flashes set the last of the morning fog alight as cranes and turrets blasted away at each other.

  One screen showed the docks; overseers were crowding the piers, shoving each other into the choppy water in their haste to pile aboard the last remaining cargo boats. At their backs, zombies were swarming onto the quays.

  Another screen showed the Tartarean swelter of the trying sheds, where a dwindling platoon of overseers held the gantries over the rendering vats against an onslaught of the dead. As Wrack watched, a strapping corpse on the shed floor heaved on a rusted chain, joined by a dozen of his fellows even as bullets rattled into them. The chain came down and a huge vat tilted overhead, spilling tons of molten tallow onto the catwalk where the overseers were packed. Above their screams, the chain-puller’s triumphant cry of “fack off!” was unmistakable.

  They watched as Osedax arrived in Dakuvanga’s control deck, the lift doors opening on his death squad like the lid on a tin of weaponised sardines. They made chillingly short work of clearing the place: most of the overseers had presumably gone down to defend the god-crane at its base, and only a skeleton crew remained. As Osedax began to cut the spine from a thrashing, downed overseer, Wrack looked away.

  In one of the great barracks belowdecks, where the zombies were massed in steel pens between deployments, something like a rally was underway. Even as debris fell from the roof of the metal cavern, shaken free by the impacts of shells on the deck far above, the horde in the filthy pit raised their arms, chanting, squeezing their own hearts in their hands.

  At the head of the chamber, borne aloft by a crowd, Once-Fat Man boomed through a loudhailer and jabbed his sagging arm at the vault’s bent, broken doors. The roar that rose from the new recruits drowned out the sounds from the other monitors, flattening the speakers’ output to a flat buzz as the army boiled from the depths.

  Then a fusillade of deep cracking noises shook the bridge, and Wrack’s attention was snatched by a blossoming of fire on the feed from Dakuvanga. Realising the command centre was no longer under friendly control, the lagoon’s turrets, still held by the overseers, had switched their aim to the heart of the ship and had begun a fearsome artillery duel.

  The floor shook as Dakuvanga’s own guns fired; on the monitor, Wrack watched as zombies, blackened and glistening with shrapnel, leapt into the control cradles of the crane’s defence mounts. Osedax survived the blast—a spar of metal had been driven through his abdomen, but he was still walking, his footsteps kissing the deck with gummy pools of hydraulic fluid.

  Then another shell hit the crane tower, halfway up this time, and a moan that would have made even the Bahamut sound like a squeaking child shuddered through the ship. Another couple of shots like that, and Dakuvanga would fall.

  But then, on a wall-sized map of the ship, a green light winked off at the prow, came back blinking crimson, and Mouana erupted into harsh, barking laughter.

  “Look, look!” she cackled, shoving two corpses out of the way and diving on the controls for the main screen. As she wrestled with a dial, the monitor flickered through scenes of dismemberment, raging static, lenses caked red with blood or cracked into grey kaleidoscopes, then settled on a red-lit bunker. The last of its defenders were being dragged down under dead flesh; zombies were flocking to consoles and firing seats.

  Wrack glanced over to the feed from the bridge’s summit, aimed down the length of the ship’s forward hull. Out past the trying sheds, the rows of cranes and the flensing yards, through the mist and the gunsmoke, a grey block began to swivel slowly on its fortress mount.

  It was something from the ancient ship’s deep past: a relic too terrible to relinquish. A trophy from Tavuto’slife under another name, a flagship in some forgotten war. The turret’s hundred-yard horns swung round into profile, glinting in a shaft of weak sunlight, and Mouana shook Wrack’s shoulder in delight.

  “Look, man! Look!” she cawed, and pointed back to the feed from the turret’s interior. There, settling herself into a tarnished throne at the heart of the ancient gun, was Kaba. Wrack rubbed his mangled jaw in wonder and empathy, not quite believing this was the same broken thing that had been bailing out a sinking pinnace with him just days before.

  As the turning turret rumbled on its mount, and its interior began to glow with the demonic energies of its charging guns, a song began. The song. It came from Kaba’s smashed mouth first.

  “I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea,” she piped from the gunmaster’s throne, with far too fine a voice to be coming from her rotting husk, and her crew answered. In a hundred voices and a dozen tongues, they joined together with the whine of the guns in the beautiful mess of the omnishanty, and the song took on a life of its own.

  Another shot hammered into Dakuvanga’s foundations from the lagoon. The ship’s bridge rumbled as the structure shifted, man-thick cables snapping and ricocheting against the hull, but it was too late to stop what
had begun.

  Audible through the walls of the bridge, the twinned siegebreakers jutting from the bow turret sang with stored energy, the lights on their barrels glowing brighter than noon.

  Then, as the turret crew reached a sustained peak, dead lungs quaking with the memories of their homes, Kaba yanked back the firing grip. The paired railguns, built to knock cities into surrender from miles offshore, coughed metal at a speed that made the air catch light, and obliterated the lagoon turrets.

  For a moment, every light in the bridge winked off, every monitor flickered black, the radios were silenced, as the thunder of the guns echoed across the endless sea. Even the violence on the decks was stilled.

  In the aching pause after impact, the Tavuto lurched. With a wobble that led every soul on the bridge to thoughts of sinking, the deck canted slightly to the side. A low, tortured sound rang through the deep fabric of the ship, and built to a shearing shriek. The sea crashed as if accepting the calving of an iceberg, and the ship righted itself with a shudder that sent the bridge crew sprawling.

  The radios came back on first, and every channel was identical; a wall of rapturous noise from the dead. The monitors came back on soon after, as Mouana’s crew were struggling to their feet. The starboard deck cameras showed a ragged hole where the lagoon had been, waves leaping at the charred edges of the hull.

  All over the rest of the ship, the dead ran riot. The overseers were in full rout. At the docks, escaping boats foundered as they were overloaded with corpses, while deck cameras showed desperate figures in flapping coats, pumping off their last shotgun rounds before disappearing under writhing bodies. At the flensing yards, a terrible fight was reaching its conclusion: squads of the dead, many of them in the livery of the Blades, were closing in on overseers huddled in the belly of a Benthocetus.