Free The Sea Hates a Coward by Nate Crowley

concatenations of moaning. Trying to shoulder his way through the crowded deck, he found their faces turning towards him, mute confusion etched on their brows as they shouted wordlessly and shoved back. For every foot he managed to squeeze through the press, he seemed to be pushed back eighteen inches by their flailing.
    Wrack was on the brink of laying in with his fists, when the mortars began firing.
    Dull thuds rang out from the Akhlut , and were echoed after a moment by popping detonations from a nearby weapons pinnace. Heavy projectiles tumbled through the leaden sky in low arcs, before smacking into the water ahead in plopping plumes of brine. A second volley fired, and then the detonations began. They were felt rather than heard, battering concussions that felt as if the boat was being smacked against from beneath, made Wrack think at first they were being swatted at by the ET. Depth charges. The hunt had begun.
    At once, every boat in the flotilla increased speed. A third volley of charges went tumbling into the water, and the weaponised dead on the Akhlut ’s flanks raised their enormous arms, as if prompted by an unheard signal. The overseer at the helm leaned forwards in his saddle and twisted his huge wrists, opening the throttle to full.
    They pulled out ahead of the fleet, engine screaming, and the other corpse-carriers pulled out beside them. Smoke blasted from the backs of the black barges, and they advanced in a loose knot, smashing through the tips of waves and raising curtains of spray.
    Beneath them the water turned pale as the speeding body of the ET ascended like a rising beach. It could only have been fifty feet from the surface, its plates, tubercules and jointed limbs visible as patches of shifting colour. They matched its speed, and jockeyed on the surface to surround its mass with a loose ring of boats.
    The Akhlut ’s horn sounded once again, a call for blood, and was answered from below by a subsonic scream that rattled the teeth in Wrack’s jaw.
    Joining the cacophony, the machinery at the heart of the pinnace began to thrum, building to an aggravated whine. All around the circle, the other boats’ machines were coming to life, a swelling chorus that crackled with electric menace. Wrack began to feel lightheaded.
    The overseer’s radio burst into life with an urgent string of exclamations, and he reached hastily for an iron helmet, sliding it over his head with obvious urgency. A warning klaxon began blaring from the Akhlut , and the sound of the generators ascended to a barely-audible shriek.
    Then the blackness came. Wrack felt it an instant before it hit, like a flash of lightning seen in the heartbeat before its passing tore the air apart. It came from beyond the horizon, a shockwave of invisible dread with only one possible source. That spiteful tower on the Tavuto , squat and glowing with baleful green light, the source of the awful sleep that he had slipped from back in the flensing yards.
    Back on the ship it had been a conquerable presence, like tar tugging on his heels; this was something violently physical, a wall of angst that advanced across the windswept distance at impossible speed and knocked his mind aside like a flower before a tsunami.
    The world went away.
    His lips touched hers, an instant before they thought they would, and began moving softly, making strange, tiny wet crackles. His thumb rubbed a slow circle in the soft hair at her temple, and he was surprised at how her mouth didn’t really taste of anything. His eyes flickered open, saw her eyelids tremble above heavy lashes, and closed again. What had they even been saying, before their eyes had gone out of focus and their mouths had dipped in together?
    The firelight danced through the bottle’s green glass as he swirled the whisky in its bottom. Cool air, the last breath of a summer sunset, ruffled the hair on his brow as he leaned back into the coarse grass. Laughter blossomed in the shadows, twigs crackled in