by Nate Crowley
There was a second ET.
With a harrowing crunch, the hooked limbs of the dead leviathan’s mate clamped onto the superstructure of the Akhlut, and pulled it over onto its side like a child’s toy.
The wave hit Wrack’s pinnace like a wall, and he was shoved into the water.
CHAPTER
TEN
WRACK HAD ALREADY sunk thirty feet before he really thought to do anything about it. The black pulse of despair from the Tavuto had left him feeling robbed of all agency, empty of anything but the sense of dreadful, hopeless lethargy he had first come to awareness with. He had watched the triumph and death of the Akhlut with a sort of muffled detachment, and things felt exactly the same from below the waves.
Falling slowly into the deep on his back, he looked up at the roiling underside of the surface, and at the other wave-struck bodies drifting down into the darkness along with him. By instinct he was holding his breath, but what did it matter if he let the brine flood in? Even if he had needed to breathe air, he doubted he would have gotten to the end of even a single lungful before something from below devoured him. With the aftermath of the despair bomb still throbbing beneath his skull, the thought was a welcome relief.
As he opened his mouth a crack and let the first bubbles drift up towards the light, however, he realised exactly why it would be a terrible idea to let the air out of his body.
Because without air in him, he might never stop sinking. He would drop like a stone, down past the reach of the sun, down past the abysses where great black things slithered, forever hungry, and on into fathomless dark.
Nobody could quite agree whether Ocean had a bottom at all, or if it did, how far down it was or what it was made of. City-sized islands of crinoid-wreathed Natans holosericum were occasionally found floating a few hundred yards down—Wrack had seen them sketched in his book—but beyond them was the barathrum, the great bottomless expanse. Chains stretching dozens of miles had been dropped and not touched anything, or had come up with their lower reaches limned in strange, hot ice.
If he let out his breath, and if he wasn’t snatched up by some devil on the way down, he might never stop sinking.
Sod that, thought Wrack. Anything had to be better than that. Clamping his mouth shut, he began kicking his legs, and struggled back towards the surface. Back on the Tavuto he had come to understand there was more good he could do by struggling than by giving up, and that hadn’t changed. Even without hope, admitting defeat now and sinking into Hadal darkness out of grief for a dead man’s memories would be a miserable way for it all to end. He would swim.
AS HE DRAGGED the water past him, clawing upwards, other zombies fell slowly past, hair and tattered clothes fluttering in the water like flags of surrender. With a jolt he recognised the face of Mouana’s commander, bubbles trickling from his lips as he slid past with his head slumped against his wounded chest. Aroha; that had been his name. Strange what you recall when it’s no use to you.
Remembering how Mouana had held him back in the hangar, had brought him out of the black dream, Wrack knew he could not abandon him to Ocean. He surged toward the sinking man, horrified at the thought of one of the two people he knew in the world enduring the endless descent he had been about to resign himself to.
Kicking madly, he reached the other corpse, grabbed it by the shirt collar, and shook frantically. The commander’s face tilted sluggishly towards him, but displayed nothing but an expression of profound loss. Wrack forced himself under Aroha’s armpit, worked his legs with every ounce of strength he could find, but the light of the surface only grew more distant above them. Aroha was too heavy, had already leaked too much of his air from the open wound in his chest.
They were easily sixty feet down now, still sinking, and darkness was beginning to gather. It was hopeless: Aroha had to do this for himself, or they would both end up in the abyss. Turning and grabbing the lost soldier by both lapels, Wrack shook the larger man like a ragdoll and stared into his face, mouthing his name and fighting the urge to lose his precious chestful of air in howling it.
But they were still sinking. Wrack pivoted in the water, legs up, arms outstretched, trying to use himself as a float to slow Aroha’s descent. The water grew colder, sliding icily around his teeth as he bared them in maddened, silent repetition of the commander’s name.
At last, Aroha’s eyes locked with his, and Wrack felt a surge of hope. If the commander started kicking now, Wrack told himself, they might both still reach the surface. But the only movement Aroha made was a slow, sad shake of his head, before closing his eyes. Whatever he had seen when the shockwave had hit their boat, it had been too much for him to bear.
Wrack let go, and the soldier dropped beyond arm’s reach. For an agonising moment he could not turn away, felt bound to watch as the man drifted further and further into the gloom. He was about to turn back to face the surface when a terrible lowing reverberated through his bones, and a pale shape loomed far below.
Silently and slow as cloud, the head of the second ET swung out of the darkness, ghastly jaws telescoping, and plucked Aroha from the water before disappearing back into the murk.
Wrack saw the tail of the monster flicker briefly in deep indigo as it dived, and then he turned and swam.
When he reached the surface, he gasped for air even though he knew he had no need of it—the relief of being above the surface was enough. It faded quickly enough when he took stock of the situation.
The Akhlut had vanished without a trace, sunk or at least abandoning its catch, and the wall of steam was rapidly dissipating. The surviving support craft were motoring at full speed back in the direction of the Tavuto, their exhaust plumes visible intermittently as surface waves slapped at Wrack’s face. They had left just a handful of stricken craft foundering in the slick of ichor around the dead ET, evacuated of overseers but left with cargoes of the marooned dead.
One of them was the pinnace Wrack had been swept from. It was sinking fast, full halfway to the gunwales, its engine silent and the overseer gone from the pilot’s saddle. It was still home to a couple of dozen zombies, either slumped with their heads in their hands or lying motionless in the water. And while it was hardly a refuge, Wrack was so eager to have something between him and the depths that he flopped over its edge with profound relief.
There was no time to rest, however; the boat was so low in the water that every large wave threatened to swamp it entirely. Worse yet, with the monster’s avenging companion now leaving the area, scavengers were finally beginning to move in to investigate the kill. Here and there, sleek fins were sliding out of the milky water around them, and things were beginning to bump against the underside of the hull. They would find nothing palatable in the weird biology of the dead ET, but human meat in the water was a different matter. He could not let the boat sink.
Wading clumsily to the front of the boat, he saw what he had hoped was there: the overseer’s iron bucket helmet, still mercifully lying next to the pilot’s saddle. Grabbing it, he began to bail water from the hull, scooping and heaving with a vigour he would have been proud to have managed while alive. If only the overseers could see him now, Wrack thought, smirking grimly, he would surely make Tavuto’semployee of the month.
After fifteen minutes or so, it became apparent there was no way he could empty the boat by himself. His arms were beginning to shake, clearly working at the limits of whatever necrological chemistry let them move in the first place, and there was no appreciable difference in the water level within the boat. He was going to need assistance.
When he turned from the bow, he found to his utter astonishment that he already had it. Wordlessly, and unnoticed by him above his own frantic splashing, a small group of the other zombies, the broken-jawed woman leading them, had begun aimlessly scooping water with their hands and hurling it out of the boat.
Whether this was a conscious attempt to help, or just mindless familiarity with copying the work going on around them, he had no idea. He decid
ed to assume the former, for the sake of thin optimism, and splashed over to the small group with the helmet in his hands.
“Use this,” said Wrack, as he thrust the makeshift bucket at Broken-Jaw, and felt something giddily like hope as she nodded calmly and took it from him. He began searching the boat for more containers for bailing. He spotted the emergency locker—wide open, a two-man hand pump half dragged from it—and let out a shout of triumph that collapsed into raw, waterlogged coughing.
The boat did not sink. It seemed to take hours to empty it, but by the end, almost every zombie on the boat had been raised from its stupor and cajoled into helping. There were twenty-eight of them in all; Wrack had counted. Some were beginning to clumsily attempt speech, while others were still struggling to manage eye contact.
Only two were beyond waking: one tiny man who could not have been past his mid-teens when he died, and who emitted a constant, low moaning, and another whose immense girth in life had shrunk to layers of sore-pocked skin folds hanging from his hips. They had been placed in a corner at the back of the boat for the time being, leaning against each other while the rest of the crew worked their way to sapience.
Even the one-armed zombie had come round. They had taken their turn at the pump, grinning darkly all the while, and repeating the phrase, “we’ll find out, we’ll find out, won’t we,” like someone trying absently to remember a string of numbers. Every attempt to discover their name had only been answered by a wet, lunatic chuckle.
Wrack was just wondering what in blazes they were going to do once the boat was safe, when he heard the engine.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
THROUGH SHREDS OF mist pulled apart by the breeze came one of the weapons skiffs, billowing filthy smoke from its stack. Mouana was standing at the bow, wearing a grin that was definitely more than the resting expression of her papered-over skull. She called to a hunched zombie at the back of the craft, and the skiff pulled alongside them, its side clanging softly against theirs on the swell.
“Hungry?” she shouted, loud as her punctured chest would allow, and hefted a bulky net bag before hurling it into the bilge of Wrack’s pinnace. As it hit the floor it burst open, and several large tins rolled out. The labels were unmistakable: five-pound cans of Hedstrom & Sons boiled beef, labels scuffed but otherwise gleaming.
Wrack did not think it would be possible for two dozen zombies to moan in delight, but as every head in the boat turned towards the cornucopia of tinned flesh, an eerie chorus rose from their throats.
Even as Mouana clambered into their vessel, still slowed by her shark-bitten hip, Wrack’s improvised crew had abandoned the last of the baling and were falling upon the cans. While some had the presence of mind to work the ringpulls, others were battering the tins against the vertices of the burnt-out generator, or—wince-inducingly—attempting to bite them open.
Soon, the entire boat was full of wet, chomping, snuffling sounds, as sea-pruned hands shovelled wobbling meat into famished jaws. Even some of Mouana’s crew, who Wrack assumed had already eaten, were flopping over into the wider boat for seconds. It was all he could do to wait and clasp arms with Mouana before falling guiltily on a can, which he had already slid beside him with a surreptitious foot.
“Strange party,” said Mouana, and was gracious enough not to expect an answer, as Wrack was thoroughly consumed by the effort to wolf down half his head’s weight in cow detritus. “Overseer’s rations,” she added. “This lot was for four of them. You believe that?”
Wrack didn’t answer; he was too busy forcing beef into his mouth. He didn’t even have to stop to breathe. He was fairly certain he’d swallowed a tooth, but what did he care? He still had thirty or so to play with. He only noticed Mouana was speaking to him again when she punched him in the shoulder and pointed over to the body of the dead ET.
“Mealtime there, too,” she said, as a crash of saltwater eclipsed the sound of the munching dead.
Exotic scavengers had found the leaking carcass. Something segmented, with a collar of red glass eyes around its maw, had thrown its front half onto the bobbing flank and was chewing away with rotary jaws, sending pale scraps flying up with marine spray. Wrack had no idea what it was, but he felt he wanted to get away from it. Forcing his hands to stay clamped around the tin, he gulped down a packed mouthful and nodded at the skiff.
“How did you get that working?” he asked, slightly muffled by meat sounds.
“We were engineering corps,” answered Mouana. “Worked the generators for the railguns. Good with petrol. Might get us halfway back. Or further. Let’s not push our luck, though.”
Wrack had no idea how far past Tavuto’s horizon they had travelled, but it seemed a horrible long way. He only hoped Mouana had made a note of where the sun had been on the way out, as he wasn’t sure—especially after his trip into the depths—which edge of the world the slaveship sat past. Somehow, the journey had to be made. After the chaos and the disaster of the ET hunt, there could surely be no better time to sneak aboard unremarked and cause havoc. And in any case, there was nowhere else to go.
He really, really hoped she knew where Tavuto was.
“That way,” she offered, turning his shoulder so he was facing a completely different part of the horizon from the portion he had been sure was home. “We’ll see the smoke before long, or the lights. If it takes that long. Let’s go.”
They went. Convincing the other zombies to help them lash the boats together was less an exercise in persuasion than in leading by example. The conversations involved were halting and not entirely rational, but the two craft ended up linked bow to stern, the weapons skiff leading, with some interesting knotwork. It was good enough.
Some time later, as the sun was setting, the skiff’s engine gave out. Tavuto was still nowhere in sight. Mouana spent a long while under the back plating of the craft, asking Wrack in the shortest sentences possible to search in the pinnace’s own workings for spares, but it soon became apparent the boats shared completely different engine designs, and no diesel grumble was forthcoming. The saltwater slap of wave on wave continued patiently around them all the while.
Though the onset of night in Ocean was forgivingly slow, in time the sun crept below the horizon and twilight was upon them. Twilight with nothing visible but dancing wavelets for miles in every direction. Wrack decided it was time to face facts, and mention the stack of oars he had seen in the emergency locker.
By the time night fell; they were rowing. Forty dead people, half of them still stuck in the gulf beyond speech, fewer yet able to muster the coordination to row, dragging two broken boats across endless sea.
“Did you feel the black pulse?” asked Wrack, as he hauled back clumsily on the oar with arms glowing with fresh food. Mouana did not answer.
“You know,” he continued, miming an explosion, “the wave, from Tavuto, The one with the memories. We were in the middle. It took what we felt, then used it against the ET. Did you feel it too?”
Mouana kept rowing, did not look over at him, even when he repeated the question. He repeated it again.
“Keep rowing,” said Mouana, her face hard and her words barely audible over the slapping of oarblades on water.
They did. More zombies joined them at the oars. The pub bruiser, who had managed nomore than the words “fack off” off since the demise of the Akhlut, had piled in at sunset and would not be moved, and the amputee, who had latched onto the side of a decayed, silent specimen, worked tirelessly with one arm.
A while into the night, his forearms shivering, Wrack took to the bow and looked forward for a while, hoping to spot the lights of the Tavuto. After a while staring into the black where water supposedly met sky, he found Mouana beside him.
“It feels odd to talk,” said Wrack, his mouth still dry from the astringent meal.
“It’s not fun,” she replied, the quiet sucking of her wound punctuating her words, “but it’s worth it.”
“It’s good,” he answered,
as the hull slid across boundless water. “I mean, we’re not meant to even be conscious, are we?”
Once again, Mouana didn’t answer. Wrack wondered whether it was because he had split the infinitive, before realising his companion’s silence was probably more to do with distaste for big questions than with grammatical propriety. They were a librarian and a military engineer, he reminded himself, before trying a different—and perhaps more honest—tack.
“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.
“So… 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.”
