Free The Sea Hates a Coward by Nate Crowley Page B

above the surface, fanned planes as wide as city streets, and it dived. A few of the harpoon-zombies broke free of their mounts and were sucked into the abyss, and the whole prow of the Akhlut dipped almost to its tip in the surging water.
    Then the rockets came on. Without warning, the squat cylinders along the Akhlut ’s hull roared into life, two dozen tongues of plasma jetting straight into cold sea with a force intended to fight hundreds of tons of surging muscle. Instantly the world filled with steam, intensely thick and scalding hot even at a hundred yards’ distance. No wonder the weapon-zombies arrayed on Akhlut ’s flanks had looked as though they’d been cooked: they had been.
    With the world obscured by the boiling ocean, it was impossible to tell how the battle was progressing. The rocket burst came to a halt, and all that could be heard was the breaking of steel cable under tension, the revving of motors and the popping of gunfire, all muffled by the blanket of steam.
    In the boat around Wrack, bobbing motionless now its purpose was done, the spent dead leaned against each other, faces even emptier than they had been. Beside him, the broken-jawed woman had slumped to a half-crouch, head still craned to the sky as if waiting for her shout to fall back into her mouth. The commander was invisible through the mist.
    After a few minutes of unseen chaos, a weapons pinnace swung past them, its pilot leaning from his seat to gesture at theirs. The engine started up again. Seconds later, the Akhlut ’s horn sounded from the fog; long, triumphant and tired like a wounded animal over a fallen rival. The radio chatter was clear, even from the back of the boat: “ It’s dead! It’s dead! It’s dead! ”
    The Akhlut swam into view as a dark shape, resolving into predatory angles as they drew alongside. Beside it, a great armoured carcass bobbed peacefully in the water, strung to the killship by a forest of cables. The leviathan had been hooked. Atop the ship’s forecastle an overseer stood, leaning on a radio mast, and raised his fist in salute to the pilots of the circling boats, as steam swirled around his pillar-like legs.
    He was unaware of the ghost-white shape, almost invisible against the rolling mist, looming behind him with mantis claws raised as if in greeting. With a singular, final crunch, the hooked limbs of the second ET 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
     
     
    W RACK HAD ALREADY sunk thirty feet before he really thought to do anything about it. The dark wave 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 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