The Scar - China Mieville [206]
Metal and metal meet, and black powder ignites, and oil combusts and flesh bursts and burns.
Below the water Tanner rocks violently, stunned by ripples of pressure. He hemorrhages, blood gouting from his gills.
Above him, Armadan ships are shadows on illuminated water. Their formations are breaking down into chaos. Some of them are eddying in confusion, and (Jabber) breaking apart (Jabber help us), breaking in two or three, slipping closer, growing bigger as they descend toward him slow as nightfall, so slow he’s imagining it, but then around him the menfish scatter and (Godspitshitno) broken slabs of metal are plummeting like comets with trails of grease oil dirt shrapnel blood.
The fall of broken ships howls past him spewing bubbles and bodies and disappears into the dark.
From the airships, the carnage is distant and muted: little puffs and booms, and the black-crusted glow of oil fires, and ships that are there and then are not. The Armadan fleet continues like a pack of stupid blind dogs through that merciless onslaught, diminishing as it goes, until at last its guns can reach the Crobuzoner fleet.
Seen through hundreds of feet of air, the war is like a diorama. It seems a reconstruction. It does not look real.
The screaming cannot be heard over the explosions.
Blood sluices over the sides of Armadan ships. Metal bursts and tears, and the ships are suddenly serrated, murderous to their own sailors. The Armadan gunners fire, and their shells arc in fiery parabolas into their enemies. But those thousand yards have been merciless, and the Armadan fleet is already half broken.
The sea has become charnel. The water is littered with bodies. They move with the swells and currents, in a macabre dance. They emit clouds of blood like squid ink. They are transformed by the sea: entrails fan like coral; torn swathes of skin become fins. They are broken by jags of bone.
Tanner is very slow and cold. As he rises he passes a woman who still moves, too weak to swim up but not quite dead. He turns to her with soundless horror and hauls her skyward, but her movements become the juddering of dead nerves before they reach the air. And as Tanner lets her go he sees that there is more movement all around him, that there are men and women drowning as far as he can see, that he cannot help them, that they are too weak to live. He sees their ghastly desperate motions everywhere he looks, and he feels suddenly removed, conscious not of men and women, khepri and cactacae and scabmettler and hotchi, but only of countless, mindlessly repetitive motions, winding slowly down, as if he stares into a vat of rainwater at slowly dying insects.
He reaches the surface in a moment of calm, a chance stillness in the carnage, in the middle of what was the Armadan fleet. Around him vessels are breaking up with ugly noises. They are floundering, retching smoke and fire, hissing as they slip into the cool water, sucking their dying crews with them.
Tanner struggles. He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.
The air sparks. Elyctro-thaumaturgic quarrels burst from the Crobuzoner vessels; arbalests hurl vats of strong acid. But now, even broken as they are, the remnants of the Armadan fleet fight back.
They fire shells the size of men, which smack into the Crobuzoner dreadnoughts and open in ragged metal flowers. Wooden warships sail into range, weaving between enemies, and their cannons sound, denting slabs of armor, breaking through smokestacks, and snapping the moorings of guns.
The Trident and its airborne flotilla have reached the sky over the Crobuzoner fleet. They begin