China Mieville - The Scar

They stumbled and kicked and clawed their way to the bars, crushing each other against the iron. There were more screams, and louder panic.

Tanner Sack shouted with his fellows.

No one came to them.

The ship reeled as if it had been punched. Bellis was hurled against the window. Passengers were scattering, screaming or shouting, getting to their feet with terror in their eyes, throwing spilled chairs and stools out of the way.

“What in Jabber’s name was that?” Johannes shouted. Someone nearby was praying.

Bellis stumbled with the others out onto the deck. The little armored boats were still plowing toward the Terpsichoria on the port side, but looming from nowhere on the starboard side, where no one had been looking, tight and flush against the ship, was a massive black submersible.

It was more than a hundred feet long, striated with pipes, studded with segmented metal fins. Seawater still streamed from it, from the seams between its rivets and the ridges below its portholes.

Bellis gaped at the baleful-looking thing. Sailors and officers were shouting in confusion, running from rail to rail, trying to regroup.

Two hatches on the top of the submersible began to rise.

“You!” From the deck, Cumbershum pointed at the passengers. “Inside, now!”

Bellis retreated into the corridor.

Jabber help me oh dear gods oh spit and shit, she thought in a confused stream. She stared wildly about and heard passengers running pointlessly from place to place.

Then suddenly she remembered the little cupboard, from where she could see the deck.

Outside, beyond the thin wall, she could hear shouts and gunshots. Frantically, she cleared the shelf in front of the window and put her eyes to the dirty pane.

Bursts of smoke discolored the air. Men ran past the glass in panicked rout. Beyond them and below, across the deck, little groups of men fought in confused and ugly battle.

The invaders were mostly men and cactus-people, a few tough-looking women, and Remade. They were dressed in ostentatious and outlandish gear: long colorful coats and pantaloons, high boots, and studded belts. What distinguished them from the pirates of pantomime or cheap prints was the grime and age of their clothes, the fixed determination in their faces and the organized efficiency of their attacks.

Bellis saw everything with impossible detail. She perceived it as a series of tableaux, like heliotypes flashed up one after the other in the dark. The sound seemed disassociated from what she saw, a wiry buzz of noise at the back of her skull.

She saw the captain and Cumbershum screaming orders from the forecastle, firing their pistols and frantically reloading. Blue-clad sailors fought with inexpert desperation. A cactacae midshipman threw down his broken blade and felled one of the buccaneers with a massive punch, roared with pain as the man’s comrade hacked deep into his forearm in a spray of sap. A group of terrified men attacked the pirates with muskets and bayonets, hesitated, and were caught between two Remade with massive blunderbusses. The young sailors went down screaming in a rain of ragged flesh and shrapnel.

Buzzing sedately between the masts, Bellis saw suspended figures, three or four of them, harnessed to balloons like the first scout, flying low over the fighting, firing flintlocks into the crowd.

Gore stained the deck.

There was more and more screaming. Bellis was trembling. She bit her lip. There was something unreal about the scene. The violence was grotesque and hideous, but in the wide eyes of the sailors Bellis saw bewilderment, a doubt that this could possibly be happening.

The pirates fought with heavy scimitars and squat pistols. In their multicolored clothes they looked like rabble, but they were quick and disciplined, and they fought like an army.

“Dammit!” shouted Captain Myzovic, then looked up and fired. One of the dangling balloonists jerked, and his head snapped back in an arc of blood. His hands clutched spastically at his belt, releasing ballast like heavy droppings. The corpse began to rise, swiftly, spiraling into the clouds.

The captain gesticulated frantically. “Regroup, for fuck ’s sake,” he shouted. “Take that bastard on the poop deck!”

Bellis twisted her head, but she could not quite see the captain’s target. She heard him, though, close to her, giving terse orders. The invaders responded, breaking off skirmishes to form tight units, targeting officers, trying to break the line of sailors blocking their way to the bridge.

“Surrender!” shouted the voice beside her window. “Surrender and this finishes now!”

“Dispatch that bastard!” the captain shouted to his crew.

Five or six sailors ran past Bellis’ window, swords and pistols drawn. There was a moment of silence, then a thud and a faint crackling.

“Oh Jabber …” The cry was hysterical, but it broke off suddenly in a retching exhalation. There was a blossoming of screams.

Two of the men stumbled back into Bellis’ view, and she cried out aghast. They collapsed to the deck in great gouts of blood, and died quickly. Their clothes and bodies were savaged with an incredible number of wounds, as if they had been outnumbered by hundreds of enemies. There was not a six-inch space on any of them that was not scored with some deep gash. Their heads were shredded flesh and bone.

Bellis was transfixed. She trembled, her hands at her mouth. There was something deeply unnatural about those wounds. They seemed to shiver between states, deep rends that were suddenly insubstantial and dreamlike. But the blood that pooled below them was quite real, and the men were really dead.

The captain was staring in shock. Bellis heard a thousand overlapping whispers of air. There were two blubbering screams, and wet drumbeats as bodies fell.

The last of the sailors ran past Bellis, back the way he had come, howling in terror. A hurled flintlock smacked solidly into the back of his head. He fell to his knees.

“You godsforsaken swine!” Captain Myzovic was screaming. His voice sounded outraged and deeply afraid. “You demon-loving bastard!”

Paying him no attention, a grey-clad man walked slowly into Bellis’ field of vision. He was not tall. He moved with studied poise, carrying his heavily muscled body as if he were a much more slender man. He wore leather armor, a dark charcoal outfit studded with pockets, belts, and holsters. It was streaked and streaked with blood. Bellis could not see his face.

He walked toward the fallen man, holding a straight sword stained completely red and dribbling thickly.

“Surrender,” he said quietly to the man before him, who looked up in terror and sobbed, fumbled idiotically for his knife.

The grey-clad man spun instantly in the air, his arms and legs bent. He twirled as if he were dancing and stamped out quickly, the bottom of his foot slamming into the fallen man’s face and smashing him back. The sailor sprawled, bleeding, unconscious or dead. As the man in grey landed he was instantly still. It was as if he had not moved.

“Surrender,” he shouted, very loud, and the men of the Terpsichoria faltered.

They were losing the fight.

Bodies lay like litter, and dying men screamed for help. Most of the dead wore the blue of the New Crobuzon Merchant Navy. Every second more pirates emerged from the submersible and the armored tugs. They surrounded the Terpsichoria ’s men, corralled them on the main deck.

“Surrender,” shouted the man again, his accent unfamiliar. “Throw down your weapons and we’ll end this. Raise your hands against us and we’ll cull you until you hear sense.”