The Sea Hates a Coward

by Nate Crowley

  Wrack smiled, and nodded. “You say the sweetest things. Bye, mate.”

  Mouana hit the switch. Light fizzed, death actinic in the ceiling, and for a moment Wrack was annihilated.

  Along a mile of metal crenellations, flak turrets rising, turning. Rain in reverse; tungsten flechettes sleeting through wood, iron, gears and flesh. A speeding aircraft, one motor seized in flight, yaws wildly and carves into the side of the leviathan, raising a bloom of sparks. The carcass skids, splintering at last into the side of a crane with a jolt that snaps necks.

  Its partner fares better, staying aloft and returning fire, but something in it is broken: as it soars past the stern of the ship it cannot turn, and heads out over empty sea. It will never return.

  A third trireme, weaving hungry circles around the ship’s central crane-mast, shudders as a battery of missiles streak from nowhere into its ventral armour. Still firing, it begins to lose altitude, black smoke gouting from its stacks like blood from the spout of a stricken whale.

  As it reaches the level of the crane’s largest boom, a vast figure matches pace, piston legs thundering as it races alongside the sinking warcraft. Shells rattle on red iron, thump into flesh, but the figure reaches the end of the boom and leaps out into space, a sharpened pole raised as a harpoon above its head. The pole strikes and sticks, and its bearer swings itself onto the back of the craft.

  Below on the deck, steel grates rise in shudders, emptying the salt-stinking tunnels of the vivisection labs. Steel chitters on steel, a thicket of teeth shiver, a glistening torrent of hunger breaks into the light. Sharks, squid, rays and wolf eels, lampreys, hatchets and sprödewurm, skidding and gnashing in their haste for meat. The dead, limping and pressed to the fringes of the deck, step aside to let them pass.

  Soldiers backpedal before the tsunami of needle teeth, their destriers skitter, guns rattle in disarray. But before they can be marshalled, something black and vast and unseen sweeps down over them, bringing a terrible anger with it. The dead cheer at its passing. Then it crashes over the soldiers, doubling them over with clawed hands and sobbing hearts. Their regrets swarm to them, and their wailing has barely started when they start to be eaten.

  Overhead, the giant has forced his way into the dying trireme. He is in the cockpit, and it cannot contain his rage. As the ship tilts out of control, a hatch spins off from its side like a tossed coin, and the body of its captain is hurled out in two pieces. The battered titan leans from the ragged hole and pumps his fist at his comrades as they flash by below; the roaring salute they offer in return ends only when the trireme smashes into the sea.

  A little later, and the last of the soldiers are rallying around the downed hulk of the last trireme, right on the lip of the deck. They are those too composed to have gone down to the black pulses, along with the last few destriers, but they have nowhere to retreat to but the sea. They reload the last of their guns and cry out the name of their regiment, but a wall of meat is closing on them.

  Dead women, dead men, stride, lurch and drag themselves with fingertips across the red deck, voices joined in a boisterous song of joy. Dead-eyed fishes caper through their ranks; some way to the rear, towering crustaceans raised from cold storage plod along with murder in their stonelike eyes. At the front of the mass and breaking into a charge now, an orca, riddled with holes, thunders towards the soldiers with a dozen merry dead on its back.

  After the last shot is fired, when the last soldier is driven over the side of the ship, a click reverberates from loudspeakers across the ship, and a voice speaks from the bridge. It says one word, and is echoed by an army, chanting it again and again until the noise of it rolls like thunder across a silent world.

  “Wrack! Wrack! Wrack! Wrack! WRACK!”

  EPILOGUE

  UNDER AN EMBER-RED dawn, the reactors of the Tavuto growled into life. The chains of her sea anchors had taken all the long night to cut through, and figuring out how to marshall the dead to man the engine halls had been even more of a challenge.

  But the ship had known when things were ready, and had started the beat of its nuclear heart as the sun shivered into being above the horizon.

  Mouana leaned on the wheel as the city-ship rumbled into motion, looking out over the deck where zombies swarmed to cut weapons from the downed triremes. Crabs plodded across the steel plain, dragging artillery to be mounted on the prow, while sharks bent crouched over the battle’s debris, clearing the deck with their wet chomping.

  The ship was turning slower than the hands of a clock, but turning it was: inch by inch, the purple stain on the edge of the world where the gate stood was creeping towards the prow, and soon they would be steaming straight for it.

  The first scout vessels had returned before dawn, had reported warships mustered on its far side: cruisers, carriers and gun platforms drawn from siege defence.

  But she had six million tons of steel on her side, accelerating by the minute, and crewed by an uncountable number of angry dead. Let them bring as many ships as they like, thought Mouana, and reached for the ship’s foghorn.

  The sound blasted from Dakuvanga’s highest castle, flew over the waves like the song of a war god. She imagined the people of the city, waking to the remnants of that shout, and quaking in their beds for fear of what was coming. She hissed in anticipation, and narrowed her eye in hunger at the storm above the gate.

  A chime from her dashboard told her that one of the crew stations was reporting in, and she looked over to see where the message was coming in from. But on the screen which would usually display the location of the caller, a line of text was flickering.

  EASY ON THE FOGHORN MATE, IT’S BEEN A LONG NIGHT.

  OH, AND LOOK WHAT I’VE WORKED OUT HOW TO DO.

  DID YOU MISS ME?

  Mouana rolled her eye, broke out in a smile unlike anything that belonged on the face of a corpse, and sounded the horn again.

  A mile ahead of her, lashed to the point of Tavuto’s prow like an animate figurehead, a one-armed corpse cackled for joy.

  “We’ll find out!” it shrieked, as devilworms arced in the bow wave a hundred yards below. “We’ll find out, won’t we!”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THIS IS A long list of thanks for what is, essentially, not a very long book, but I am desperately grateful to quite a few people. I’m also near to certain that I will have missed someone vital: if that’s you, I apologise profusely and will buy you a pint instead. So, thanks to:

  Daniel Barker, who let me take over his birthday for ten weeks, and who is a desperately decent human. @sasooli, @amuchmoreexotic, @ndSMDee and plenty of other smart folk on twitter who helped me with some planetary maths, plus Emma Southon for helping me invent a word. Ashleigh Timmins, for looking after me throughout the whole process, helping me solve a squid problem, and bringing chicken leftovers to the attic. There will be more lizard men in the next one. Mark Kuggeleijn, for the idea of the Scrimshawed Man and for endlessly fascinating conversations, despite being very wrong about Robocop. Dave McIsaac, for being—as ever—a tirelessly good mate. Guy and Cat Kelly, for being utter treats to spend time with. Josh Fortune, a very old friend who snapped at my heels to keep me working throughout, and who gave a fine alpha read. Anna Fruen, a very new friend who took it upon herself to give me heaps of feedback on the first draft and was a tremendous cheerleader. Joy Taney for her marvellous penwork. At Abaddon, Jon for giving it the first pass, Rob for helping me grandstand, and David Moore, who not only did an astonishing job of smoothing the lumps out of my manuscript, but has been a proper Gandalf to a baffled newcomer. Lydia Gittins, for kicking all of this off with a highly surprising DM. Dara Ó Briain, for a beast of a cover line. Ewa, for knowing an enormous amount of things, and for being a brilliant sounding board and critic. Hazel, for sorting me out at Nine Worlds. Jen Williams and Mishell Baker for being proper authors who offered their encouragement. Robert MacFarlane, for making probably more of an impact on my education than he realised at the time. Kerry, for lo
ng and marvellous conversations about the sea and everything in it, that I shall never forget.

  And above all, thanks to Mum and Dad, for always being convinced I’d write a book one day, and being so happy now I’ve managed.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NATE CROWLEY LIVES in South East London, and knows too much about the history of public aquaria. Once, he accidentally punched a wrasse while wearing a diving suit from the 1800s. He keeps a List of Animals. He is the author of Daniel Barker’s Birthday, and can be found on twitter as @frogcroakley. This is his first wossname.

  David Larkin can see ghosts. It’s a blessing – or a curse – that’s been part of his life since his eleventh birthday. It’s not much use to him, and he mostly just tries to ignore them and get on with life, travelling around and keeping to out of the way places where not too many people have died.

  Until the ghost of Melissa appears to him, in a forgettable truck-stop diner on a highway in the American Midwest, warning him about the flood of zombies heading his way. Melissa offers him a deal: she’ll help David escape the zombie horde – in exchange for finding her zombified body and destroying it...

  www.abaddonbooks.com