The Sea Hates a Coward (16 page)

Osedax gaped in confusion, but Wrack gave him no time to think. “Come on, then!” he yelled to his pack of cadavers. “Let’s get some boltcutters over here, look sharp! And when you’re done with that, there’s some huge weapons lying around the sides of the room that I think would look better bolted to these arseholes. Chop-chop!”

Wrack pulled a flensing knife from his belt and pushed it into Osedax’s palm, even as one of his pack shuffled up and cut the big man’s chains free. Ignoring the insanity of what he had just done, Wrack leaned in to the side of the giant’s head and whispered as if he was sharing a naughty joke.

“Alright, then, you big bastard. Here’s what I’m thinking...”

As he spoke, Wrack’s army bustled around the chamber, carrying nailguns, launchers and harpoon mounts over to the ruined prisoners. When he finished explaining, he was amazed to see Osedax looking at him with a grin like a dog given freedom to leap into a stream.

“Sounds good?” said Wrack, and the giant nodded.

“Yeah,” said Osedax, and the tension melted like ice shards on hot sand.

“Come on, then,” said Wrack, “you’re a man after my own heart.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
HEY CAME SLOWLY
up the ramps and out of the underdeck, more than a thousand strong. Not in the wild dash of apes on the hunt, but at a measured stalking pace, ready to wade into bullets if need be.

Wrack led the vanguard, comprising the dozen war-built and a hundred or so of the most together of his pack. They came up a slipway used to send craft like the
Akhlut
belowdecks from their mounts on the ship’s central ridge, treading over wooden sleepers as they emerged.

As they trudged up into the light, Wrack half expected one of the mammoth whaleboats to come sliding down the metal rails and over them, turning his march into paste with one rumbling stroke. But nothing came. In fact, not a single overseer awaited them as they emerged.

The sky above them was white, choked with vapour as the sun approached Ocean’s slow noon. Wrack looked to either side: from ramps and slipways and hatches for hundreds of yards to each side, zombies were walking, shambling, crawling into the daylight, all silent. No work gangs stood in their way; all was empty deck, for as far as the eye could make out until fog stole the distance.

They were almost exactly amidships, on the
Tavuto
’s starboard flank. To their right sat the steel lagoon and the disassembled Bahamut at its side; the flensing yards and their row of cranes sprawled beyond, hazy behind walls of smoke from the trying vats. Ahead and immediately to their left, looming like a cliff, was the stark iron mount of Dakuvanga, rising hundreds of yards into thick cloud.

Straight across the deck from them, perhaps three hundred yards away and shadowed by the gaze of the god-crane, was the meat hill that Mouana and he had passed on their first night; a wobbling mound of offcuts piled to be hacked apart before being ferried down to the docks. From memory, it was overlooked by the saturnine carbuncle of the
Tavuto
’s bridge, where Mouana had told him their silent collaborator was ready and waiting. So that was where they needed to go.

He fixed his eyes on the top of the meat pile and began walking, looking neither to right nor left, expecting every second for bullets to begin sleeting down from the cranes above. But nothing came.

The ship’s vile, bald-headed birds screamed and wheeled in the fog overhead. Overseers watched in the distant mist, silent, holding rifles.

Wrack twiddled with his radios. While Dead Air crackled with murmured, potentially accidental broadcasts, the main channels were silent. The whole ship, dead and alive, was waiting for something to happen. Well, he thought, there was no point in subtlety now. Grabbing the shoulders of zombies from his pack as he walked, he hissed at them to run as far as they could and tell any other dead people they saw that now was the time. Then he got on the radio.

“Hello
Tavuto
, this is Wrack. Looks like this is happening.”

Immediately after he let go of the broadcast switch, a volley of wordless roars came back in response on Dead Air. Still the main channel was silent. But still the bullets didn’t come, and so he walked on, Osedax’s war-built clanking and hissing behind him.

As they approached the meat hill he saw it was surrounded by the dead, working listlessly. They carried on hacking and sawing, but almost every head turned towards him as he approached. Fifty yards out, he clocked Mouana in their midst, but did nothing to acknowledge her presence beyond the briefest flicker of a smile. If a sniper’s bullet was headed for him it would all be on her to work things out, so there was no worth in pointing her out as a target.

Ploughing through the mob of bowed, salt-stained cadavers around the mound, he saw one of them had picked up a loudhailer, and plucked it from their unprotesting hand. Surely now there was no mistaking him—and he was in full view of the bridge tower. As the outer scraps of the meatpile began to squelch under his feet, Wrack imagined a dozen crosshairs floating over his scalp, and lost his nerve.

He sprinted up the meat pile. Today it was skinned sharks, embryos taken from the birth canal of some pelagic matriarch, their teeth glinting like nubs of sharpened pearl in a slick of pink bodies. They caught on the bandages wrapping his feet as he climbed; his heels sank into the raw gashes in their gutted bellies. They slipped down, tore at his shins, made five steps achieve the distance of one, but he pounded to the top. When he arrived, he was not out of breath.

With the loudhailer raised halfway to his lips, Wrack stood and took it all in. Around him, a ring of the dead, thousands strong, watched him with a fire in their cataracted eyes. Mouana, surrounded by a mob of Blades, looked on with her arms folded. Osedax and his posse remained motionless, a monstrous wedge standing some way back from the crowd.

And there above him, like an emperor’s box in the arena, the ship’s bridge glowered. At its glassless windows stood a row of overseers, backlit by green even in daylight, their faces passionless as they stared down at him.

Only one of them moved. Sat in an ornate steel chair at the centre of the bridge, skull plugged with wires and grimacing as if through a migraine: the pilot of Teuthis. And to their side, just a foot away, stood Whina. His eyes slid across hers, and she gave a barely perceptible nod.

A bird honked dismally, far above. Wrack raised the loudhailer and opened his mouth.

“
Tavuto
,” he began, then fell silent.

Thousands of eyes were staring at him, but he hadn’t the faintest idea what words to use. What could he say that wasn’t stating the obvious? It wasn’t as if the overseers were expecting him to thank them for their hospitality on behalf of the ship’s workforce. And if the watching dead still needed talking round to the thought of violence, there was no hope for them anyway. And in any case, every time he opened his mouth to give an inspiring speech, he was interrupted—it had happened twice in the hangar, and once on the radio in the Bahamut’s guts. Holding forth now would just be tempting a bullet.

So Wrack decided to let his actions speak for him.

He threw down the loudhailer, letting it bounce down the pile of skinless sharks, and reached down to the ghastly hole Osedax had carved below his sternum. Gritting his teeth, he reached in with his right hand, nuzzling beneath the cartilage of his sternum, and rummaged between the hanging dead weights of his lungs.

He had rehearsed this motion in the dark of the killer’s cell, but it became much harder with the ship’s overseers and countless potential rioters watching him. He fumbled, fingertips slipping against surfaces only a surgeon should touch, thumb pushing aside rotten membranes as rib-tips grated against his wrist.

Then he gripped it. It was smooth, hard in his hand, like a wax pouch. His thumb traced over the fatty sheath built up by a lifetime of fried food, and his fingers curled round, hooking over the stiff tubes of major veins. Then, looking Whina right in the face, he yanked.

I
T WAS THEN,
as he felt arterial tissue stretch and snap at the centre of chest, that he silently thanked himself for having Osedax cut halfway through his aorta during the rehearsal. The human body really was a robust thing; it was really stuck in there. Gurning as he felt something rip horribly out of place, Wrack gave a mighty tug, and tore out his own heart.

Screaming wordlessly, Wrack held the bruised organ out in front of him, presenting it to the overseers as if in tribute. Then he turned to face his crowd and squeezed, wringing black juice from the long-dead ventricles and into the hill of city-bound sharkmeat.

At that point, everything went completely mental. A wall of crashing human rage rose from the masses surrounding the pile, and the crowd erupted into motion. Zombies reached into their own chests where there were wounds, or drove whatever blades they could find into their neighbours to open them up.

Within the first few seconds, a forest of arms rose into the air, hearts in hands, and more followed. Wrack caught sight of Mouana grinning madly, a flensing blade rammed into her solar plexus by her own hand, and he shook his heart at her, dark clots raining through the air.

With the signal unequivocally given, Wrack turned back to the bridge and nodded at Whina, his face twisted into an expression of unmistakable threat.

But even as the world went mad, the overseer’s face was entirely placid. While the bottom half of Whina’s face was static, an emotionless grille, her eyes creased in a smile colder than the currents below him.

It all became clear. He should have known from the encounter at the hangar, from the way she had reacted to the threat of death. She had faked compassion, had tried to ingratiate herself, even as she had been caked in the hungry drool of her captors. Only terror, the idea of there being no way out but to collaborate, had swayed her. It should have told Wrack everything he needed to know about her.

After all, thought Wrack, the overseers were prisoners too—consigned to life on the edge of death rather than death on the edge of life, as he had been. And in Whina’s smile, the difference in their fates became caustically clear. Each of her caste had seen their sentences commuted over the barrier of mortality because they had made a deal, had received a boon in exchange for valuable information.

They were snitches.

Soldiers who had given away troop movements, thieves who had shared heist plans, Pipers who had named their sisters and brothers. Betrayers. Wrack knew the type: even with most of his memory locked in cold meat, he knew he had seen it seen that mix of guilt and triumph and relief before, and he saw it again in Whina.

He had been an idiot not to see its embryo back in the hangar. Now, looking at Whina as she leaned over to Teuthis’ pilot and spoke in its ear, eyes still fixed on his, he knew what a dreadful thing it could grow into.

The pilot, twitching with whatever coursed through his grey skull, nodded, and Whina turned back to him. With an expression both predatory and haunted, she threw him a middle finger. Before he could begin to formulate a response, the pilot slammed down an enormous lever, and the world burst.

It could not be
felt
at first; it was visual. The white sky became black, and the only colour in the world was the deep, phosphorescent green that swelled behind the pilot’s seat. It shone out, infinitely bright, searing the pilot’s slumped outline into Wrack’s retinas, then vanished all at once. It left darkness.

The darkness shrieked with memories.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

H
IS MOTHER’S GRAVE.
Men with scars, shaking hands with his father as he wept. The soft toy rabbit, her gift, forlorn with rain on the graveside.

Smoke rising from the docks. Hangings at the harbour. Worried talks in the study late at night while he drove his model of
Tavuto
blissfully across the carpet.

Midnight at the library, much later. A tall figure, face indistinct beneath the hood of an oilskin, handing him a bundle of rain-sodden paper at the back door.