The Sea Hates a Coward (13 page)

“Where is it kept?” demanded Wrack, moving his face closer to the overseer’s.

The huge woman was silent for a moment, hesitating, perhaps wondering if she had said too much. Wrack disabused her of the notion by pulling his arms from Mouana, letting his friend surge forward to within an inch of the overseer’s jowls. Then the words flowed.

“On the bridge. It’s just a brain, and some other bits, kept in a glass tank. Drugged way beyond high and plugged into the ship’s servers. It’s got a pilot seat, where we direct it. It controls the cranes, the drones, the forges. Creates the signal that controls—ah, guides, the—ah... you.” Her voice petered out in a grating squeak.

Those zombies in the pile able to follow the conversation hissed in awed fear. Even Mouana paused, turning her head slowly toward Wrack. The black signal. The green light. The marsh of despair and grief that sucked at them as they wandered, lost in consciousness.

“Let’s go kill it,” said Mouana, her anger at the overseer replaced by something deeper, something hotter.

“You’d never get halfway up,” the overseer insisted, less a taunt than a statement of fact. “The tower’s fortified, full of us.”

“So that’s our deal,” said Wrack. “You’re going to do it for us.”

The overseer’s eyes lit up above her ruined face.

“And if I do?”

“You get to live, you bloody idiot,” said Wrack. “And so do the others, if they don’t fight us. You said you’re prisoners. We’ll free you.”

The ogre’s eyes turned sly and she nodded, grumbling her assent. Wrack felt suddenly outmanoeuvred. Despite being on top of her with a pack of raging ghouls, he was desperately aware that any promise the overseer made to buy her way out of the hangar would last as long as it took her to find a radio and call in a team of shark handlers.

He was going to have to do some really solid lying, and do it quick enough so it didn’t sound like he was making things up on the spot. He started by standing up, and stepping off the overseer’s chest. Every head in the circle snapped up to look at him; Mouana in particular looked as if she was going to gut him herself. But he just nodded back at them, and waved his hand, carefree.

“Go on, you heard her. She severs the link with this squid thing, we let her and her mates live afterwards.”

Even the overseer looked suspicious at how relaxed he was—though Wrack quickly turned his attention from her, as if she was a problem solved. In fact, he was desperately trying to meet Mouana’s eyes, doing everything he could to say
trust me
with a casual glance. It worked. The soldier stood up, expression wary, and the others followed her lead.

The overseer soon found herself prone and unpinned, surrounded by a circle of retreating cadavers. Giving Wrack a very queer glance, she rose to her feet, and brushed corpse-slime from her lapels. Then with a nod she turned, shouldered her way through the watching ghouls, and walked slightly too quickly to the hangar’s exit.

“Oh,” said Wrack as she walked into the swelling dawn, “I should point out—you’re welcome to turn us in, but you’re pretty much buggered if you do.”

That was when Wrack heard the crackle of the radio, and turned to see Mouana holding it up with a grin. He was relieved beyond measure, because he had just run out of plan.

“It’s been on the whole time,” gloated Mouana, her chest wound dripping with the exertion of speech. “And broadcasting.” She was a magnificent liar. “To two dozen more radios. Stolen, hidden away all over the ship. There’s lots and lots of us who can talk, you see. And we’ve been talking.”

She paused to wheeze for a moment, before spluttering through gritted teeth and carrying on. “We told them we were going to have a word with you. Now they’ve heard. They know who you are, ‘WK3.’ They’ll be watching you very, very closely. And they’ll be very cross if we tell them you’ve snitched on us.”

“So see that you do help us,” added Wrack. “This ship is going to change, and you have a chance to determine how bloody things get in the changing. Even if you do call us in for slaughter, and even if you run fast enough when you do, the rest of us are going to riot.”

Wrack paused for a moment, as if he had said his piece, then continued.

“And granted, we might not win. But if we all get cut down, if we wreck the place in the process... well, either way, you’re not going to hit quota. And what’ll they do with your medicine then? You’ll be the next batch.”

“But we will win,” cautioned Mouana, stalking forward, wound bubbling. The overseer actually backed away. “We’ll overtake this place. And whether it’s me or someone else, we’ll find you, and we’ll get you. We’ll get you worst of all. I don’t even know how we work, but you had better hope that if we bite you, you’ll become one of us. Because if you don’t, we’ll eat you. One bite at a time.”

The overseer quaked, frozen on the spot. The power they had over her now was far greater than it had been when they were propped inches from her face, slavering. The work was done.

“What’s your name?” asked Wrack, doing all he could to seem reasonable in the aftermath of Mouana’s terrorising.

“Whina,” yelped the overseer, too quickly to be a lie.

“Well then, Whina: help us,” concluded Wrack. “Station yourself at the bridge. Find a reason to be there as often as you can. And watch for our signal—I promise you, you won’t miss it. Sever Teuthis from the ship, and we will free you. But don’t you dare ask for a guarantee.”

“Now fack off,” interjected the pub bruiser, and put a neat end to the meeting. Whina fled.

The second she was gone Wrack doubled over into silent, hysterical laughter, completely unable to process what had just happened. It was the most human he had ever felt. He staggered over to the hangar’s edge with his head in his hands, and collapsed against the wall by the skeletal man, whose ecstatic gape threw him into a fresh fit of giggles.

He came to his senses when Mouana delivered a wet slap across his jaw, nearly putting it out of joint.

“It’s no time for laughing,” she warned, as he mumbled grinning apologies. “We’ve got until she calls our bluff to make all of that bullshit into reality. And I’ve done enough talking. Your move.”

“I know, Mouana,” sighed Wrack, wiping away tears that would not come. “Just give me a minute.”

He breathed in deep, not caring whether it did anything for him, and looked around at the mass of alert, upright corpses waiting on his next words, silhouetted against the dawn.

Then he looked to his left, and saw the skeletal man in sunlight for the first time.

Every inch of exposed bone on his wasted body was covered in carvings. Intricate scrimshaw covered his pelvis, his ulnae, his radii and his sternum; abstract patterns dancing with serpents and sea-devils, tendons and streaks of grime. His scapulae rippled with tobacco clouds, steaming from the bowls of long-stemmed pipes; Wrack’s eyes narrowed in wonder.

But the scraped bone of his brows crowned the work—for there, inscribed blindly by a frail, patient hand, was the image of a vast ship, half-sunk in a raging storm. Behind the stricken hulk, rising like a wicked moon, was the image of a grinning skull.

“We’ll find out!” shrieked One-Arm, capering in the dawn light while all the other zombies remained still. “We’ll find out, won’t we!”

PART THREE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

T
HEY WORKED AS
quickly as they could. They finally had a plan and, so long as Whina remained too scared to interfere with it, the freedom to make it happen. Their first priority while that freedom lasted was to spread the idea of rebellion beyond one easily-sterilised cave at the arse end of the ship.

To that end, interviews were held, of a sort. Wrack would ask questions of the zombies one by one, testing how much they had taken in of the makeshift interrogation. As soon as one’s eyes slid out of focus, or as soon as they resorted to singsong repetition of familiar words instead of making a sensible answer, he shoved them aside.

Those that seemed to have worked out what was going on, he shoved towards Mouana, who started telling them, punctuating her speech by shaking their shoulders, how to wake their fellows—and where the overseers kept their radios. After all, the fiction she had come up with on the spot, of knots of conscious dead clustered around stolen radios, seemed a workable plan once they thought about it, and so was worth putting into practice.

Groups were clustered together around those dead that seemed to have a clue, and were sent from the hangar, under instructions to look clueless and defeated lest they be suspected of having purpose. Each went off with a radio frequency to remember, and instructions to listen out for a plan coming together. Until then, the only priority was to spread the word, and look inconspicuous.

The groups went willingly away; they understood there was a high likelihood of being caught and torn apart, but it was a rare zombie for which this was a terrifying fate: they genuinely had nothing to lose.

The Blades were the most useful among them as group leaders; whether it was some sense of cohesion borrowed from their living memories, or something to do with the way they had died, they seemed more together than a lot of the others.

Of course, there were exceptions. Broken-Jaw Kaba took one group of ten or so (Wrack wasn’t keeping count), and they even let the bruiser take a rowdy knot of cadavers. Sure, his comprehension wasn’t up to much, but he’d proved he had spirit at least, and that was worth sending him out with a team, even if the best he could do was swear into the faces of his fellow dead.

Even some of the people from the dreg pile, those too broken to be roused by the prospect of Whina’s food on that other morning, went out on the hunt. They went out slowly, or dimly, or hobbling along on knuckles and a single leg, but they went out.

When they thought the hangar was empty of the cogent dead, Wrack and Mouana were approached by Once-Fat Man, with his teenage saviour in tow. His voice was almost polished, his attitude impossibly calm, as he told them how impressed he had been by their bluff against Whina, and how he wondered if he could help.

For someone who had been so recently struggling to achieve more than wordless screams of anger, he was strangely eloquent. And while Mouana balked, unsure of how to react to his odd sincerity, Wrack figured that everyone took death differently, and urged the sagging man to take his wordless squire and find others like himself. They would need talkers.

In fact, of all the dead to return with them from the ET hunt, only poor, gibbering One-Arm elected to stay in the hangar with those too decayed to move. It seemed the best place for the capering, grinning cadaver. And in any case, thought Wrack, with the sort of logic that would have seemed callous with lives on the line, if they were betrayed and the overseers did come to the hangar to exterminate the rebel threat, how foolish would they feel in finding One-Arm in command.

When their oddest charge had scampered over to the dreg pile to engage the listless dead in enigmatic winks and thumbs-ups, Wrack and Mouana found themselves the only speaking people left in the hangar.

“Which way do we go?” asked Wrack, shrugging in the dawn.

“You’re taking the starboard side, where the Bahamut is. I’m taking port, where the bridge is. I’m going to get them worked up, right in the shadow of this bloody squid thing.” Wrack opened his mouth to argue, but Mouana was already thrusting the stolen radio into the inside of his shirt.

“You said to the fat bloke: we need talkers. And you’re a talker, Wrack. Just make sure you talk to those boiled bastards with the weapons, if there’s more of them left. Talk, and listen. Keep one ear on the radio,” she said, repeating the frequency she had told the others. “See who else calls in, keep them on plan, and let’s talk when we’ve got some work done.”

“But you’re the soldier,” protested Wrack. “Why give me the radio? How are you going to get—”

“Exactly, I’m the soldier,” snapped Mouana. “I’ll get my hands on a new one quicker than you will. And then we can talk.” She began walking towards the open deck, even as Wrack opened his arms to reason with her.