The Scar - China Mieville [250]
Tanner spasmed with shock and reached out, and saw that something followed the racing bubbles from Shekel’s mouth, billowing up darkly. For a moment Tanner thought it was vomit, but it was blood.
Still staring with an expression of confusion, Shekel began to sink. Tanner grappled with him, hauling him up with his tentacles, kicking out for the surface, his mind filled up with a shattering sound. And blood smoked up ferociously not only from Shekel’s mouth but from the massive wound on his back.
It seemed so far to the surface.
There was only one word in Tanner’s mind. No no no no no no no no no no no no.
He shrieked it without sound, his suckered polyp arms gripping Shekel’s skin, pulling him fitfully toward the air, and indistinct shapes gusted around Tanner, in and out of shadows, baleful and predatory as barracuda, jackknifing and twisting away, there and gone, moving with an effortless piscine ease that made him feel clumsy and heavy, fumbling with his boy, fleeing the sea. He was an intruder, disturbed and making an escape, cowed by real sea-things. His reconfigured body was suddenly a terrible joke, and he cried and floundered with his burden, struggling in water suddenly quite alien to him.
When he broke the surface he was screaming. Shekel’s face came up in front of him, twitching, leaking brine and gore from his mouth, emitting little sounds.
“Help me!” screamed Tanner Sack, “Help me!” But no one could hear, and he clamped his ridiculous suckered limbs to the side of the Hoddling and tried to drag himself from the water.
“Help me!”
“Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong!”
For hours, the laborers on the Hoddling’s deck had tended the great steam pumps that sent air to the Ctenophore, and prepared themselves to haul it back. One by one they had slipped into a kind of torpor. They had noticed nothing at all until the cactus-woman greasing the safety wire began to bellow.
“Something’s fucking wrong!” she yelled, and they came running, panicked by her voice.
They watched the wire, their hearts slamming. The great wheel—almost empty now, its harness almost all played out—was shaking violently, juddering against the deck, trembling the screws that held it down. The cable began to shriek, tearing its way past the guard-piece.
“Bring them up,” someone shouted, and the crews ran to the massive winch. There was a snap and the noise of slipping gears. The pistons punched into each other like boxers. The engine’s cogs bit down and tried to turn, but the cable fought them. It was taut as a treble string.
“Get them out get them out,” someone screamed uselessly, and then with a hideous cracking sound the huge winch rocked backward violently on its stand. The engine smoked and steamed and whined childishly as its guts began to spin freely. Its complex of ratchets and flywheels blurred, revolving so fast they were as dim as apparitions.
“It’s free!” the cactus-woman reported to a hysterical cheer. “It’s coming up.”
But the bathyscaphos was never designed to rise that fast.
The wheel accelerated in ridiculous haste, hauling up the cable at dizzying speed. The gears gave off the dry stink of burning metal and grew red-hot as they whirred.
It had taken three hours to send the Ctenophore to the bottom. The disk of rewound cable increased so quickly they could watch it grow, and they knew it would be no more than minutes before it was all pulled back.
“It’s coming up too fast! Get away!”
A mist of brine boiled where the thigh-thick cable was torn from the sea. It scored through the water. Where it met the Hoddling’s side, it wore a deep groove in the metal, howling in a monsoon of sparks.
Engineers and stevedores scrambled to get away from the machinery, which struggled with its remaining bolts like a terrified