Free The Sea Hates a Coward by Nate Crowley Page A

the flames. He leaned over to answer Tom’s question with a joke, but he had forgotten the question.
    Oof, but it was cold. Groggily, he pulled the thick duvet over his shoulder and up to his chin, wriggling down into the body-hot cavity beneath. Warm hips cupped his arse, and he slid his shin in between sleeping legs, a shiver passing through him at the pleasure of the snug contact. Who were they, again?
    He couldn’t believe he still had half the book left to read. Better yet, there were three more to go in the series once it was done. As he turned the page the torch slipped from its crook between his head and shoulder, and he rummaged on the mattress to retrieve it, eager to get back to the story. As he grabbed the light, he looked for a while at the way the light shone through the webs at the base of his fingers, translucent and pink with warm blood. The book had closed on itself. What page had he been on?
    His father showed him again, defining the horse’s jaw with a swoop of his pencil and then blocking in the curve of its neck. He scribbled out his own effort, which looked like a sort of ill crocodile, and reached for a new sheet of paper. Frowning in concentration, he put his pencil to paper and drew a wobbly line to define the horse’s nose, but he was pressing too hard and the tip broke off, leaving a black starburst on the page. He turned to his father to ask whether he should start a new drawing, but his dad didn’t really have a face.
    Sunlight fell in an orange stripe across the stuffed toy rabbit, motes pirouetting in front of its worn smile. Its woollen ears flopped across his shoulder as he picked it up and hugged it. Then it was gone, and his hands were white, cold claws, branded with the mark of a violent rebellion. He was a wretched thing, on a monster-haunted ocean, clutching the fading memories of a dead man.
    Schneider Wrack howled at the sky, the sound tearing from his throat as if it could take him with it, and the world howled along. All around him the dead screamed as their former selves were snatched away from them forever, and their horror shook the miserable boat, drawn to the generator like lightning grounding through a rod. The generator whined and overloaded with a deafening crack, blasting everything it had gathered downwards in a single black pulse. All around the ring the other boats did likewise, their machinery cooking off and sending shockwaves of grief into the fathomless sea.
    It was despair, weaponised.
    The ET reacted immediately, and violently. With a bellow of confused rage that seemed to come from the whole of Ocean, its great pale back began surging up through the water like an onrushing storm. The overseer turned hard, nearly capsizing them as the boat banked to avoid the breaching monstrosity, and only just made it in time: it erupted from the sea like a fist through paper, a tower of ragged wounds with claws spread like vengeful wings.
    Empty, broken, standing only because of the pressure of other bodies, Wrack looked up with a strange serenity at the leviathan’s jaws, hanging high above in a halo of crashing water.
    The Akhlut opened fire. Harpoons as thick as treetrunks slammed into the ET’s neck from ports in the killship’s grinning mouth, while a fusillade of smaller projectiles whistled across from its hull, each trailing a thick steel line. Half bounced off the otherworldly armour, but enough lodged between the plates and spines. The beast writhed as spearheads detonated beneath its skin, twisting in a mass of cables like some fiendish marionette, then began to shudder as the gun-limbs of the turret zombies sounded at close range.
    It crashed back into the sea, obliterating a weapon-pinnace that had made too close a pass under its bulk, and put on a terrible burst of speed. Its twin tails thrashed beneath the surface, kicking up titanic waves in its bid to evade its pursuers, and the immensity of the Akhlut was dragged behind it like a sledge.
    Its tails rose