Read Online The Sea Hates a Coward by Nate Crowley - Free Book Online

as a claw the colour of green milk rose from the measureless sea beyond the bay, studded with wicked barbs, and hooked itself roughly over the closing sea-gate. For a moment, he could have sworn the entire vessel dipped inches as the ghastly thing tugged on its edge, before the metal sagged like tissue and tore away. Even as the gate collapsed, a second limb unfolded from the roiling sea, its tip groping over the edge of the bay and catching in the trailing guts of the Bahamut.
    Over the crashing hiss of pouring water, whip-cracks popped from the lagoon as the cables anchoring the gigafauna in place stretched and snapped. The middle of the Bahamut was drawn out towards open water by the claw, as an armoured head rose at the edge of the abyss in sheets of rushing green water.
    It was part mantis shrimp, part dragonfly nymph, part mountainside, part god; an edifice of compound eye and scissoring mouthparts. Something too weird to exist beyond rambling footnotes, even in the books of his youth. One of the ET clade.
    The ETs were some of the least understood, the most feared, and the most profitable of Ocean’s fauna. Some held they had been the original inhabitants of this endless sea; others, that their ancestors had been carried here as larvae in ballast tanks, long years ago when the sky had been a way in and out of the world. Nobody even knew if they could breed here.
    Either way, they were rare, and huge, and worth ten times their weight in meat. Despite being inedible, their strange aromatics, weird compounds, their cellular metabolism based on radioactive decay, made them prizes beyond measure. And they were bastard hard to kill.
    As soon as the knotted immensity of the ET’s head broke water, the guns opened fire. From the corners of the steel lagoon clustered turrets blazed into life, dozens of muzzle flashes drowning the weak morning light in their actinic rage. An instant later the air filled with the hyperkinetic stutter of miniguns, the arrhythmic crump of AP shells, and the staccato thud of munitions raining into yard-thick chitin-analogue.
    With a titanic screech that seemed to shiver the deep steel of the deck, the ET reared a full fifty yards into the air, twisting its segmented tower of a body even as its surface was drilled into clouds of splinters, before hurling itself sideways into the sea. Gouts of water leapt up from its vanishing, a swell of oil-souped brine washing over the walls of the lagoon, and then all was silent but for the slapping of the bullied water.
    Then, pandemonium.
    A new siren, deep and aggressive, blasted from horns all around Dakuvanga’s base. Boats were being hauled from their brackets by a swaying forest of cranes, while trucks carrying munitions, fuel and endless piles of the flailing dead swarmed to the muster points beside the lagoon.
    “ Code Three! Code Three! ” screamed a static-blasted voice from the cab of the truck. “ It’s holed and surface-bound; fleet C, all boats to pursuit, all boats! ”
    The predator’s howl came again, and Wrack saw the sea beyond the Tavuto break in the roll of a mountainous carapace.
    “ There she blows! ” came the shout from the radio, a distorted cry of ecstasy, and Wrack found himself tumbling from the truck in a mound of disgorged bodies.

 
    CHAPTER NINE
     
     
    H E WAS HERDED down a steel ramp and into darkness, one of a numberless press of zombies being funneled below decks and into thundering industry of the Tavuto ’s underworld. Down they went through channels and conduits, merging with other streams of zombies and sorted at junctions by hard-handed overseers. Chains rattled on pulleys, hammers clinked in the depths, and radio chatter echoed along the low ceilings like the rustle of bat wings.
    There was no way to turn around in the press, nor to see more than a few feet past the jostling heads of other cadavers. For all he knew, Mouana and the others could be an arm’s reach away, or gone entirely. They had become a sort