Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [137]
As the panic began, some nearby clock struck the hour and several things happened at once.
Throughout the gathered crowd, in the anti-strike demonstration and even here and there among the striking dockworkers themselves, clumps of men—and some women—suddenly reached over their heads and in violent, quick motions tugged on dark hoods. They were fashioned without visible eye- or mouth-holes; dark crumpled blanks.
From the underbelly of each of the airships—looming absurdly close now—spilt clutches of ropes that jounced and whiplashed as they fell. They fell through the yards and yards of air, their ends coiling slightly on the pavement. They contained the gathering, the pickets and demonstrations and surrounding crowds within four pillars of suspended rope, two on either side of the river. Dark figures slid expertly, at breakneck speed, the length of the cords. They came in a constant quick drip. They looked like glutinous clots dribbling down the entrails of the disembowelled airships.
There were wails from the crowd, which fractured in terror. Its organic cohesion broke. The people fled in all directions, trampling the fallen, grabbing children and lovers and stumbling on cobbles and broken flagstones. They tried to disperse down the side streets that spread like a network of cracks out from the riverbanks. But they ran into the paths of the men-o’-war that bobbed sedately along the alleys’ routes.
Uniformed militia were suddenly converging on the picket from every side street. There were shrieks of terror as mounted officers appeared on monstrous bipedal shunn, their hooks reaching out, their blunt eyeless heads swaying as they felt their way with echoes.
The air brimmed with sudden short screams of pain. People blundered in stumbling gangs around corners into men-o’-war tentacles and shrieked as the nerve-agent which riddled the dangling fronds oozed through their clothes and over their bare skin. There were a few breaths of juddering agony, then a cold numbness and paralysis.
The man-o’-war pilots tugged at the nodules and subcutaneous synapses that controlled the creatures’ movements, coursing deceptively fast over the roofs of the hovels and the dockside warehouses, trailing their steeds’ venomous appendages into the channels between architecture. Behind them were trails of spasming bodies, eyes glazed and mouths frothing in dumb pain. Here and there, a few in the crowd—the old, the frail, the allergic and the unlucky—reacted to the stings with massive biological violence. Their hearts stopped.
The militia’s dark suits were interwoven with fibres from man-o’-war hide. The tendrils could not penetrate them.
Ranks of militia charged the open spaces where the pickets were congregated. Men and vodyanoi wielded placards like badly designed clubs. Within the disorderly mass were brutal skirmishes, as militia agents swung spiked truncheons and whips coated with man-o’-war stings. Twenty feet from the front line of the confused and angry demonstrators, the first wave of uniformed militia dropped to their knees and raised their mirrored shields. From behind them came the gibbering of a shunn, then quick arcs of billowing smoke as their fellows hurled gas grenades over into the demonstration. The militia moved inexorably into the clouds, breathing through their filter-masks.
A splinter group of officers peeled off from the main wedge formation and bore down on the river. They threw tube after hissing tube of billowing gas into the vodyanoi’s watercræft ditch. The croaks and screeches of burning lungs and skin filled the hole. The carefully maintained walls began to split and dribble as more and more strikers hurled themselves through into the river to escape the vicious fumes.
Three militiamen knelt at the very edge of the river. They were surrounded by a thicket of their colleagues, a protective skin. Quickly, the three at the centre pulled target-rifles from their backs. Each man had two, loaded and primed with powder, one of which they set beside them. Moving very