The Sea Hates a Coward (11 page)

“I wish I could have a massive drink,” said Wrack, looking into his lap. A long silence passed, making him wonder if he had only made himself seem more of a fool, before Mouana answered.

“I found something else with the beef,” she said, and he heard glass slide against metal. A moment passed, and then an open-necked glass bottle was being held in front of him.

“Overseer’s rations,” assured Mouana, wiggling the dirty liquid in front of his face. Abandoning caution, he took a slug, and immediately retched.

“It tastes like preservative,” he hissed.

“I think it actually is,” replied Mouana. “But it still feels good to pass a drink around, eh?”

As the oily, petrochemical stench withdrew from his nostrils, Wrack found he agreed, and clamped his hands around the bottle for another swig.

“Well,” he choked, after another mouthful. “It can’t kill us, and our entire life is by definition a hangover, so what harm can it do?” He drank.

The bottle changed hands twice more before he asked his next question.

“What are we?” said Wrack, wondering whether the soft heat pressing on the back of his eyes was the questionable booze, or a symptom of necrochemical exhaustion.

“Zombies,” answered Mouana, before upending the bottle casually to her lips.

“I had gathered,” said Wrack, remembering their first meeting with a strange sort of nostalgia, and smiling. “But what’s the mechanism? We’re rotting. Slowly, granted. But we are, and yet we can swim and think and tie boats together. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The questions were sincere. Wrack had read very little on the dead. While it was common knowledge that dead bodies could be used as machinery, there was very literature on how it really worked. What little there was had been burnt generations ago, after the failure of the Skeleton Economy on High Sarawak, and further enquiry had been severely discouraged.

There was another long silence before Mouana responded.

“Probably tiny machines,” she said. “That’s what Aroha used to say. When we had to deal with hard tech and couldn’t find a working. Tiny machines. The old stuff.”

The name of Mouana’s commander hung on the night breeze for a long time. Wrack felt he could have let it pass, but there was no way he could let it be word-weather.

“Aroha...” he murmured. “I have to tell you... he didn’t make it.”

The waves lapped at the side of the skiff. When she spoke again, her slashing whisper of a voice sounded almost carefree.

“It’s fine, he was dead anyway,” said Mouana. “I already missed him.”

There was silence. And then one of the zombies started singing.

It was a sea shanty. Or a river shanty, to be precise. Wrack knew it; one of the syncopated boat-loaders’ songs from the mud-black deltas of Grand Amazon, offworld and bungled with strange dialect, but no different in rhythm from the salt-stained songs of old. It came from the split mouth of the broken-jawed woman, and sang out into silence for a minute or so before another voice joined in.

Of course, the voice that joined the river song took no care to use the same lyrics, or the same tune; it was some dreadful kuiper miner’s dirge, full of lost love and slurred consonants, but hitting the harmonies where it mattered.

Once the solo had become a chorus, more joined in. A man in the shredded tunic of the Blades of Titan opened up with a crude soldier’s song about rutting, causing Mouana’s eyes to widen with delight in recognition, and a zombie with legs mangled to zig-zag tragedy piped up with an ode to forgotten woods.

The song was woven like a braid from a dozen minds, each captive to different memories, but allied in purpose, driving the oars on to cohesion. That is, thought Wrack, why sea shanties were invented.

It made their rowing stronger, and their husks of voices swelled to drown out the crash and hiss of the oars. Those with words bellowed them as loud as their worn pipes would manage, those without them hummed or shouted or stamped their salt-clotted feet in the bilge. Each sang their own song, but to the same rhythm, the same loose tune, the same rough, proud purpose. Dead men and women, rowing their own boat.

In time, even the two slumped zombies at the back of the boat began to sing too, or at least do something close to it. The skeletal teen began to keen in rough time to the song, while the withered fat man beside him took to roaring angrily whenever one of the other singers rose to a peak that called for a response. Whether their outbursts were expressions of solidarity or just bewildered pain, at least they were drifting towards consciousness.

The tune went on, as did the sweep of the oars, for a long while into the night. They had no lights, and so rowed in darkness, under a sky made black with clouds. Only the faintest glimmer of ugly light on the horizon told them the location of their home, and they kept on course with barely any need of nudging. Wrack and Mouana took to the oars, and found their own songs to add to the chorus. Warmed by the bottle, or at least what it represented, they shrank into themselves and fell away for a while.

Long into the journey, when the omnishanty had faded to little more than a rhythmic hum, a blue light began to flicker across them. Faint and ghostly, it brushed the undersides of their jaws and labouring arms with faint cerulean. Wrack rose from something like a trance; as his fellows were brought into focus with the phantom light, it was as if he were seeing them for the first time. It was like waking in the depths of the night to see bedside furniture looming like watching demons, unreal but threatening. He shook his head; there was no threat in the boat. Something was below them.

He looked over the side. There, wavering in the clear sea, were bright blue lights, like constellations cast down into the deep. He leaned down, blinked, and saw that the lights were shining from lengths of glass. Shreds of spectral white hung from them, wavering in the night currents, lit in gentle blue. They were hanging from man-sized needle teeth, in a mouth as wide as a valley.

Quiet and calm as if he were rising from picking up a dropped fork at dinner, Wrack sat upright. None of the other dead had noticed what they were rowing over. Knowing how long it would take to get to the skiff’s weapons, and how little chance they had of being able to coordinate a defence aimed straight down once they did, Wrack made a rash choice. He began to sing louder.

Working alongside the somnambulant hymn of the dead, Wrack opened his throat and belted out the first words he could remember, from the first maritime song he had learned.

“I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea!” he roared, and the dead sailors answered.

“Awaaaaay, down Rio!” some of them sang in reply, while others just screamed their own words. Forty oars hit the water at once with doubled force, and the boat surged forwards.

“I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea!” repeated Wrack, as he acknowledged to himself that he had no such song to sing, just the first line.

Luckily, that didn’t matter to the mariners. They shouted their own answers back at him, and drove their oars into Ocean with the ferocity of people with memories to excise. The song found its own tune, its own words, and the boat ploughed on.

Wrack hunched his shoulders and waited for the sepulchre jaws to close, but nothing rose from the brine but a great shrug of upwelling water and the dying of the blue light. The predator had left. He carried on singing.

Hours later, they reached the
Tavuto
. It was less a ship, more a country raised out of the sea. As they approached its starboard flank, Wrack saw it for the monster it was. At least a mile and a half from stern to bow, it glowed with the fire of its gargantuan try-pots, its rows of towering cranes, its encrustation of bridge decks, pricked with a thousand cold windows.

Mouana made sense of it, had a plan, long before he did. She had barely stirred when they had moved over the glass jaws, but now she was suddenly all over the boat, urging the sailors to be silent, to quiet the oars on one side and move them towards the great lagoon with the smashed gates where the Bahamut lay slowly rotting.

When they got within fifty yards of the lagoon, with the boat slipways in sight, it was time to take action. The aquiline immensity of Dakuvanga was dipping to take a mansion-sized chunk of Bahamut out of the lagoon; the dead were swarming over the corpse to free the lump. There was no way to get closer without drawing attention.

“Let’s swim,” said Mouana, without ceremony, and leapt into the water. Wrack waited a moment to make sure the dead had heard, and then moved for the front of the boat when he saw them leave their posts en masse. Even the wailing teen at the back of the boat was heading for the prow; this was no moment to hold back.

Wrack dived into the black, and swam. Bodies bumped against him in the water, slithered past him. Whether they were his fellows, or mean, whiptailed things come to snaggle at the leaking Bahamut, he had no idea. Frankly, after looking down into the bottomless water as the ET had taken Aroha, a speck of flesh above a carnivore god, he didn’t really care. In comparison with that moment, this was about as frightening as taking a drunken dip in the Fellows’ koi pond on a student dare.

After the brief, determined swim, he found himself on one of the shallow ramps leading up and out of the lagoon, clinging to the metal grates alongside two dozen other corpses. Mouana stood at the top of the ramp, a black shape against the floodlights of the Bahamut’s disassembly. Wrack climbed out of the surf and walked to meet her.

“Home again,” he remarked, the ice-cold wash of Ocean still swirling around his feet. A grey tentacle slithered out of the water, groped blindly at his ankles, but he stamped on it in annoyance and it slunk away. That made Mouana smile. Her lips began moving silently, as she counted the eager zombies hauling themselves up the ramp to join them.

One-Arm was there, and Broken-Jaw, whose name was Kaba, and the pub bruiser, who had only offered “fack off” in lieu of name. There were the three Blades, though Mouana knew none of them, and the woman who had sung the miner’s song, her teeth wrecked by biting into a metal can. Last of all, hobbling up the ramp slumped on the struggling shoulders of the wailing teen, came Once-Fat Man, his face now set in strange serenity.

“Huh,” said Mouana, turning to Wrack as the sagging pair made it up the ramp. “We only lost three.”

“Well then,” said Wrack, slapping her on the shoulder and offering a friendly grimace, “let’s go and find some more mates.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

G
RIM, SILENT, TOGETHER,
they crept through the industry of the lagoonside and into the silence of
Tavuto
’s aft decks. No overseer challenged them. With the aftermath of the failed ET hunt on their hands, the ship’s crew were doing all they could to move chunks of the gargantuan fish out of the lagoon and into the processing yards, with little heed paid to errant dead. As they snuck out of sight of the lagoon and into the ship, they met no human resistance.

Once, as they rounded a pitted cracking tower, one of the Sniffer Rays came to challenge them. Remembering his first encounter with one of the spider-legged elasmobranchs, Wrack had flinched when it came skittering out of the dark. But as he saw the way the other dead circled it, dashed in on its flanks, clamped wrinkled hands on its flapping skirt of ammoniac flesh, the fear fell out of him. With orgiastic relish, they tore it apart.

Its metal legs flapped, its tail thrashed, but the creature was nothing before the mob of dead. Before he could say a word, handfuls of stinking meat were being pulled from the central disc, flesh was sliding from cartilage, and dirty water poured from the creature’s spiracles as it shuddered in second death. In seconds, it was less than metal and halfbone.

The mob moved on, stringy nitrogen chemistry hanging from their gums, knuckles drumming on railings as they moved for the far decks of the ship. They were like chimps on the hunt: shaved, stinking apes with drawn gums and shaking claws. Wrack laughed; this clearly wasn’t stopping until someone made it stop.

This was an insurrection. They were in trouble, and they were going to be in trouble until they were put down or caused a lot more trouble. It felt good. Better enjoy himself while it lasted, he thought, as one of the zombies leading the mob started screaming its own name.

Wrack was amazed when they made it to the aft hangar where they had first been rounded up for the ET hunt. The dregs were still there, the drift of ruined dead still stacked against the wall, moaning, their arms outstretched. Their salt-sodden band of survivors rushed over, hollering their triumph over the ray, and began to chatter with the dead. The conversations grew from the shaking of shoulders to the exchange of names, through the agony of remembrance, and into companionable rage. The hangar filled with human speech.

Some time during the night, zombies went out for food. They came back, dragging something like beluga whales. Fires were lit. Who had matches? Fuel? Wrack had no idea; it was bewildering to be out of control, but wonderful. No longer being the one who worked out what to do next, at least for a while, made his rotten shoulders feel lighter. More zombies came to them, either dragged there by search parties or blundering, lost, as he and Mouana had done before. It was a strange sort of party.