The Sea Hates a Coward (15 page)

Even presuming the near-dead supervisors of the
Tavuto
were aware they had a growing revolt on their hands, thought Wrack, it was not as if they could divert all their resources to defence. As Whina had said, the living crew of the ship depended on reaching quota in order to receive their shipments of medicine: it would take a full revolt for them to risk putting the ship on lockdown and shutting down production. What choice did they have, especially with the fresh disaster of the failed ET hunt on their hands, but to keep supervising the work crews, and hope that things didn’t get too out of hand?

And so they streamed into the underbelly of the ship without further resistance, although Wrack had no idea where they were going. As he directed the mob through the winding steel corridors and grated staircases, he avoided awkwardness by referring to himself in the third person. “Wrack wants us down here,” he would shout. “Wrack needs this corridor checked out.”

Were there anyone else listening, it would have seemed absurdly narcissistic. But to him it was a matter of pragmatism—the dead seemed much happier following instructions from an unseen third party, and became baffled and disquieted if he issued orders in the first person. Distancing himself from the person giving the instructions also made him feel very slightly less responsible when he commanded the tide to tear apart living people.

And once they got deep into the hull, there was plenty of tearing apart. Not long after they burst below decks, the main block of his rabble encountered a control room staffed by four overseers. By the time the men and women within had worked out that the dead coming down the corridor were not being shepherded by their colleagues, there were already hands clawing at their throats. Fingers grabbed at them, bodies piled over them until they sank to the floor, and then the wet noises began. Within a minute, it was all over.

Zombies stood back up with purple-black, stringy flesh hanging from their jaws. Those with the presence of mind to look haunted, Wrack gave radios from the freshly dead. As they took the units gingerly in their hands, he sent them out of the corridors and away, telling them to find other dead to organise into groups.

They moved through the corridors belowdecks, and found more of their miserable tribe. Zombies working on making ammunition, repairing weapons craft, working canneries and deep freezers. There were whole substegarian industries, thousands of workers, toiling by the dim light of sodium lamps. Just as it had been in the control room, their supervisors were unwarned, unready, when the tsunami of rotten mouths broke over them.

Wrack kept moving from chamber to chamber, trying to make sense of the maps on the walls, leaving his most cogent followers to begin the process of rabble-rousing. There was no time to linger and engage in the baffled chat of the newly undead. In any case, many of the dead down here were chained in place, ankles worn to bone by crude steel manacles—even when freed with boltcutters, many just shuffled in circles or remained at their stations, faces twisted in confusion.

As he led the growing pack through the orange metal gloaming, Wrack kept one radio tuned to what he had taken to calling ‘Dead Air,’ while he cycled the other through Dakuvanga’s various broadcast frequencies, listening for any idea of what was going on on the wider ship, and—hopefully—advance warning if he was about to be run down by a death squad.

The airwaves were getting crowded. Overseers were reporting their teammates missing, and Dakuvanga’s requests to copy were becoming increasingly frequent as Wrack cycled through the channels. Graffiti was appearing, strange symbols daubed in blood and bile on the
Tavuto
’s superstructure, bewildering the overseers. Wrack listened in on the reports of those who found it, wondering angrily what the weird symbols meant, and arguing with each other to the point of fisticuffs.

To his immense amusement, consensus among Dakuvanga’s radio operators seemed to be that all this was down to living human agitators—a cell of Pipers, they reckoned, come in on a stealthed trireme from Grand Amazon and armed with some sort of neural disruption tech. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the dead might be becoming less dead, that Teuthis hadn’t managed its job of keeping everyone under.

Because that was all it was. There was no code language, no hidden messages, the graffiti held no greater secrets than that its creators had remembered how to daub their anger on walls before remembering how to write.

Then there were the broadcasts on Dead Air, from the Bahamut lagoon, from the meat stacks, from the molten heat of the trying pots. Voices murmuring incoherently, yelling in challenge, repeating names of old comrades in the hope they might answer. Once on a broadcast from the flensing yard, he heard the omnishanty break out; a wonderful cacophony of half-formed voices, growing louder and louder as its component tunes diverged. It ended in gunfire, but he grinned all the same.

After a while, Wrack realised there was little point in trying to keep them quiet—he only had to hope enough of them were sticking to the plan, keeping inconspicuous and waiting, for there to be an army to rally once he made it back above deck. Besides, he thought, if the hotheads all cooked off now, the overseers might think the worst was over by the time he was ready to kick off the real trouble.

Wrack stopped in his tracks, poleaxed by the train of his own thoughts, and his pack steamed on into the next chamber without him. Somewhere in the journey between the ramp and the deep warrens, he had stopped thinking like an embarrassed librarian, and taken on the aspect of a violent revolutionary who spoke in the third person, and who thought about the mass annihilation of human consciousness purely in terms of its tactical benefit. It occurred to Wrack that his chin was caked black with human blood, and there were bits of somebody’s neck stuck between his teeth.

Once again, he considered that he had perilously little knowledge of his life before the day he had been dragged, protesting his innocence, from the wreckage of his library. Had he really been the scapegoat for someone else’s plot, or had he been the ringleader all along? It was, after all, beginning to feel horribly natural to lead a guerrilla army.

And then he clocked what was in the next chamber, and decided this would be a truly dreadful moment to talk himself out of becoming a monster. For he had just found the real monsters.

There were a dozen of them, wired into pedestals of chuntering machinery, in a room lit cold and blue by neon light. They were big to begin with, then made huge by the amount of metal, plastic, wood and rubber bolted onto their ruined bodies. They stood with heads bowed even as the hooting swarm invaded their prison-sanctum, chained into place with yards of black iron. But when Wrack entered the room, their heads snapped up to regard him. There was no sleep of death here.

At their heart was a colossus. There was no mistaking him, the weapon-laden horror he had beheld just before he had been sent to sea for the ET hunt. Wrack was looking straight into the blind eyes of another survivor of the
Akhlut
. Cracked lenses whirred on the rack of instruments bolted to the giant’s skull as Wrack approached, and scalded lips drew out into a blasted, carnivorous smile.

“Before you ask the obvious,” said the boiled hulk, “my name is Osedax: Bone-Eater.”

Once again, Wrack felt very much like a flustered librarian. Even without a half ton of weaponry fixed to his torso, menace and hate poured from the man like meltwater from a glacier. Wrack only hoped he could find something the puckered titan hated more than him. There was no point trying the soft approach here.

“You sank with the
Akhlut
,” stated Wrack, trying to sound as needlessly confrontational as he could.

“I did,” agreed Osedax, nodding. “But they build us with flotation machines, so they can always bring us back. They raised me up, towed me back, put me back together. Me and Riftia and Kuphus and Eunice. Isn’t that right, girls?” Three of the other monsters hissed in assent, chains clanking as they leaned forwards.

“You’re worth a lot of money to them, then?” asked Wrack, as the other dead in the room jostled in the shadows.

“Oh, no, it’s not just that,” replied Osedax, carcass grin still bared wide. “It’s the punishment. We’re killers, little man. We’ve been very bad. I’ve killed dogs, I’ve killed little kids. Just because I wanted to. Just for the sport of it.”

“You
were
killers, you mean,” corrected Wrack, faltering a little.

“No, boy. I was a bad man, and I still am a very bad man. So this is my sentence. I killed, and I kill, and I will kill. And they keep me conscious, and they keep me fixed up. So I can keep killing, and can’t forget.” Osedax shivered, chains clanking in their sockets as his huge chest shuddered, then his voice dropped to the whisper of graveyard mist. “Cute, though, that you’ve come to make me feel better, to...
wake me up
, to talk me into your little support group.”

Wrack felt anger surge through him. He thought of Once-Fat Man, roaring in dismay at the back of the boat, of Mouana whimpering in the rain, of Aroha’s pitiful eyes as he sank into the jaws of a devil. None had been so pathetic as this swollen mess of self-hatred.

“Well done,” said Wrack softly, as he bent for a wrench on the blood-smeared deck. “Well done!” he screamed, smashing the length of iron against Osedax’s thorax and leaving a spongy dent. “You’re
terrifying!
” he barked, half meaning it, and half spitting the word in scorn.

“I don’t know how long you’ve saved up this speech, but it’s useless. It’s
shit
. For a start, I’m not remotely afraid of you killing me, because I’m dead. And my pain receptors are buggered too, so torture wouldn’t be much of a laugh for you either.” Wrack shook the wrench. “Beyond primate dominance displays, your grinning and your flexing, you’ve got nothing to scare me with. Nothing.”

The silence could have melted through the floor. Wrack wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, but it felt amazing, and he continued.

“You’re the worst self-pitier I’ve met, Osedax, and I know myself all too well. So you got pulled back from
Akhlut
? Well done, you dicking great
puppet
. Me too. I pulled
myself
back from Ocean, me and everyone who’s causing trouble right now. We extended our own bloody ‘punishment,’ without any of those grey gits having to lay a finger on us.”

Osedax’s blind eyes widened in surprise—his mouth worked, but Wrack jumped back in before words could form. Talk, Mouana had said.

He gestured to the radio, and launched into a fresh tirade. “And why did we stick it out? Not because we’re spooky bloody psychopaths like you, but because this,
all of this
, is dreadful, and we’re willing to throw ourselves away to make it stop.”

Wrack hefted the wrench again, and shook it an inch from Osedax’s lumpen brow.

“Call yourself a killer? You’ve had damned harpoon guns welded on and off of your chest for who knows how long, and you’ve just gone along with it without lifting a finger towards the bosses. Sounds like you reckon you deserve what you’ve got.”

Silence thundered for a long moment, before the giant answered in a low grumble.

“Maybe I do,” he said.

“Maybe you do, Bone-Eater,” agreed Wrack, before tossing the wrench to the ground. “The question is, are you willing to do more killing? Because it’s already obvious the answer is ‘yes.’ Or do you want me to leave you chained up and piss off, then come back and have another chat when it’s all done?”

There was no answer.

“I thought so,” grinned Wrack. “Now don’t be sad, you big daft sod. This’ll cheer you up—I’m about to get all your weapons out, and have this lot bolt them onto you and all your scary mates.” Wrack made patronising movements with his hands at the word
scary
, then slapped a hand on Osedax’s restrained shoulder.

“And guess what I want you to do in exchange for freeing you?”

More silence, and a growl. Then the radio, the one tuned into Dead Air, burst into life, and Wrack’s eyes went wide. It was Mouana, at exactly the wrong moment.

“Hold on,” said Wrack, jabbing a finger into Osedax’s chest, “I have to take this.”

When he turned away, Wrack found he was shaking in terror. He was thankful he had emptied his stomach earlier, or he’d have voided it there and then. Bullying a musclebound cyborg murderer was not something he would have considered himself capable of even at the best of times.

“Yep,” he croaked into the radio. “Wrack here.”

Mouana’s voice was hard-edged, with no room for affection, as it was when she’d first left the hangar. “Pretty sure it’s time, Wrack. She’s up on the bridge, right now. We’re waiting for things to kick off. Really hope you’ve figured a signal.”

“Glad you’re doing well too,” muttered Wrack, rolling his eyes, then thumbed the switch.

“Yes,” he continued, “as it happens, I’ve just worked it out. Oh, and I’ve got the boiled bastards on side. I think.”

“Well done,” said Mouana, and Wrack wasn’t quite sure what to make of her tone. He was about to sign off, but hesitated. Whether it was because he was unsure of his chances of leaving the next conversation in one piece or not, he felt the need to be candid.

“Mouana,” he blurted. “I’m really glad you’re still alive. Or in one piece. You know what I mean. I’m so glad. Anyway, I’ll be there as soon as I can—I just need to clear things up here.”

“OK,” said Mouana, as if she was ordering sandwiches, and the channel went dead.

“Bye,” whispered Wrack, before forcing his face into an overconfident grin and turning round, desperately hoping the tremor in his legs wasn’t visible.

“That’s our cue!” he shouted convivially, waiting for a moment before pantomiming sudden remembrance. “Sorry!” he cried, after no reply came, “and there was I thinking you were a talker. Never mind.” He cleared his mucus-gummed throat. “I was going to tell you what you could do in exchange for your freedom, wasn’t I?”

“Yes,” snarled Osedax from his pump-station of a chest, his shoulders slumped.

“What I want you to do, Bone-Eater, is carve me right up,” said Wrack, as he ripped off his shirt. “You’ll love it—I’ll explain as we go along. And while you’re doing it, we’ll get your team here tooled up.”