Iron Council - China Mieville [179]
Decisions were still made, but the overarching strategy that had made the Collective operate like a power, an alternative city-state, was breaking down. Some squads were commanded with strategic intelligence, but each action now was more or less its own end, part of nothing larger.
The Flyside Militia Tower had long been stripped of weapons, its thaumaturgic compounds deployed, its secret maps taken. Skyrails, thick and thrumming wires, extended south and north from its top, each stretched taut to its terminus. In the south the last militia tower in the city, in the suburbs of Barrackham; to the north the rail angled up, hundreds of feet above the tangle of slate and iron roofs, over the ghetto of the Glasshouse and the intricately twisted River Tar, up to the centre of New Crobuzon. It went to the Spike, stabbed into the sky by Perdido Street Station.
In these savage last days, the Collectivists of the Flyside tower filled two pods with explosives, chymical and blackpowder. A little before noon, they released one in each direction, throttles jammed. The little vehicles of brass tubing and glass and wood accelerated very fast, screamed over the city.
Wyrmen scattered in surprise as the wires bowed under the pods’ weight. They rose, shouted obscenities.
Perdido Street Station was the centre of the city, even more than Parliament, the atramentous keep now empty of functionaries (it was an irony of the time that the “Parliamentarian” government had suspended Parliament). The Mayor was making decisions from the Spike.
As the north-travelling pod careered over Riverskin the militia fired grenades. They landed short, with cruel billows, on Sheck or the riverside streets near Petty Coil. But the guards could not miss for long. The pod made the metal skyrail scream, and one two missiles sailed out, burst its windows and detonated.
The pod blew, its payload conflagrating in an apocalypse instant, and it plummetted in a smoke-described arc. It shattered across the shopkeepers’ houses and terraces of Sheck, crumbling into melting metal and fire.
To the south, though, the explosive-crammed pod rushed over spivvy streets, directly above a barricade at the borders of Aspic and Barrackham. Militia and Collectivist looked up from either side of the wedge of rubble and brick.
The pod overshot open scrubland, sinking as the skyrail angled down, as the estate towers rose toward it. It rushed into the Barrackham Tower.
A one-two-three of explosions as dirty fire blared from the top of the militia spire. Its concrete bulged and split; it was eaten from inside by an unfolding plume; it went up, blew out and began to fall, and the stories below it subsided. In burning slabs like pyroclastic flow the top of the tower slewed off, militia pods falling out and tumbling.
The skyrail went murderously slack, whiplashed down across two miles of city. It coiled through slates, gouging a threadline fault and killing as it came. It dangled from the Flyside Tower and curved toward Aspic, where its hot weight tore buildings.
A spectacular kind of triumph, but one the Collectivists knew would not change the tide.
Most of the workshops by Rust Bridge were quiet, their staff and owners keeping out of sight or protecting the Collective’s borders. But there were still some small factories doing what work they could, for what payment they could get, and it was to one of these that Cutter went on the day the militia tower fell.
The fires of the ancient street of glassworkers were cold, but with a scraped-together purse and political exhortations, he persuaded the seditionist workforce