The New Crobuzon crews watch as their chance to return home disappears. The Armadans scream their approval again, as the huge shape rolls over in the sea, ponderous and regretful, resenting every movement, and burps up fire as it is dragged below.

The Crobuzoner flagship has gone.

Frantic, its fellow dreadnoughts begin to level volleys too soon at Armada itself, churning the sea and making the city pitch as if it were in a storm. But some of the smaller ironclads are now in range, and their heavy shells shatter masts and tear through the fabric of the city.

A bomb swamps Winterstraw Market, tearing apart a circle of stallholder’s boats. Two shells arc chillingly overhead and break a hole in the side of the Pinchermarn, sending hundreds of library books flaming into the water. Ships are sunk, the bridges that tether them on all sides splintering.

Angevine and Shekel comfort each other, hiding from the remnants of the invading Crobuzoners. Shekel is bleeding profusely from his face.

But terrible though these attacks are, only the dreadnoughts could destroy the city, and they are not in range. They are being harried, contained, broken by the onslaught of gunpowder-stuffed tugs. The Armadan vessels keep coming. After a fifth explosion rocks its bows, the Bane of Suroch begins to buckle, to crack, to list, to collapse into the water.

Ironclads and scouts mill solicitous and useless around it, drones around a dying queen. Under renewed onslaught from the remnants of the Armadan fleet, but most of all under the unexpected and suicidal attacks of all those refitted steamers, the New Crobuzon dreadnoughts are, one by one, being destroyed.

From the raised deck above theGrand Easterly , the man screams in unheard horror.

The man tenses and kisses his statue with a fervent frenzy, then prepares to leap out and down, folding space a little, and land on that frigate below, which is rumbling and gearing up to leave. But he stops as a terrible realization shakes him.

He watches the last two dreadnoughts quiver under the attacks and fire their vicious guns at their tormentors. And even though those retaliations cost several Armadan vessels, the ugly explosions that rock the dreadnoughts’ flanks continue until the Crobuzoner vessels go down.

The invaders’ coal has been sunk. The man watches, quite numb. There is no point now in him jumping ship or swimming out for his home vessels. Even if the Armadans do not destroy every single ship, even if one or two fast-running ironclads escape, this is the middle of the Swollen Ocean, uncharted waters, almost two thousand miles from the nearest land and twice that far to home. Within a few hundred miles their boilers will grow cold, and the Crobuzoner vessels will be calmed.

They have no sails. They will rot and die.

There is no hope for them.

This rescue has failed. The man is still trapped.