The Scar - China Mieville [211]
He has told his government everything—he warned them of the nauscopists, so that the Crobuzoner meteoromancers could hide their fleet’s approach; of the airships, so that golems were prepared; and of how many ships they would have to face. The Crobuzoner forces have been calculated to defeat the Armadan navy, which this man has researched and communicated to them. But he did not think to count those useless, age-pocked tugs and steamers, trawlers and tramps. He did not imagine them reckless and stuffed with explosives. He had not pictured them driving across the sea, into the path of an ironclad or a dreadnought, as they do now, firing their pathetic guns like pugnacious children. He did not imagine their crews abandoning them when they were mere yards away, hurling themselves from the sterns of the smoke-spewing ships and onto rafts and lifeboats and watching as their abandoned vessels ram the flanks of the Crobuzoner ships, breaching their inches of iron and igniting, exploding.
There is a smear of dirty colors to the west, and the sun is very low. The crews of the two dirigibles waiting by Dry Fall’s Uroc are impatient.
The Brucolac and his vampir cadre will soon be awake and ready to fight.
But something is changing in the sea aft of the city. The Crobuzoner sailors who have boarded the city are staring in horrified astonishment, the Armadans watching with fierce hope.
The tugs and steamers continue to plow toward the oncoming Crobuzoner fleet—driving on toward the battleships, their engines overheating, their wheels locked into position, their throttles wedged full ahead—until, in ones and twos, they impact. Several are blown from the water in fountains of metal and flesh before they can reach any quarry. But there are so many.
When they reach the towering sides of a dreadnought, the prows of the empty tugs and trawlers crumple, buckling backward. And as they compress, their red-hot engines burst, and the oil or gunpowder or dynamite wedged beside the engines ignites. And with ugly, oily flames; with great gouts of smoke and dragged-out explosions that dissipate some of the energy into useless sound; with one-two-threes of smaller detonations in place of one solid blast, the ships explode.
Even such imperfect torpedoes as these begin to hole the Crobuzoner dreadnoughts.
Way behind them, the broken Armada force starts to regroup. The New Crobuzon vessels are being slowed, and slowly ruined, by the onslaught of sacrificed vessels. The Armadan battleships rally their fleet and begin to fire on their stalled enemies.
The sea is full of lifeboats: escapees from the abandoned vessels that shudder their way toward the dreadnoughts. The crews row frantically, striving to avoid other oncoming Armadan ships. Some fail: some are crushed and sunk; some are swamped by the enormous bloody waves, or are caught in the heat of depth charges or are broken up by cannonballs. But many escape into the open sea, back toward Armada, watching their ugly little tugs smack into the invaders and explode.
These unexpected attackers—a ridiculous, wasteful line of defense—have stopped the Crobuzoners, ship after ship immolating itself, melting their target’s iron sides.
The dreadnoughts are stopped.
The Morning Walker is sinking.
There is a cheer, a rising yell of astonished triumph, from the aft edge of Armada, where the citizens can see what is happening only a handful of miles out to sea.
The roar is picked up by those who hear the cry of triumph and mimic it; and then by those behind them, and behind them. It sweeps across the city. Within a minute, men and women in the far reaches of Dry Fall and Shaddler and the Clockhouse Spur, on the other side of Armada, are screaming their ecstatic approval, though they are not sure of what.
The Crobuzoner troops stare in total horror. A great crack spreads up the side of the Morning Walker. More of the little ships smash into it and explode, even as it begins to buckle, even as its magisterial outline