Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

When the second bomber came over, it seemed to fly straight into the path of the heat beam. One wing was sliced away, and fuel tanks began to detonate inside its structure, even as the great craft’s momentum carried it on, lumbering over the heads of the crowd. And it began to fall, twisting as its one remaining wing grabbed at the air. The gathered Martians trained their Heat-Rays, and the craft burst apart, raining hot shrapnel on the crowd.

Before the last remnants of the bomber reached the ground, Walter was gone and running, past the Gate, away from the triumphant Martian machines and the scattering crowd, and into the shadows of the Tiergarten.

In Manhattan, as night had fallen on that very long Friday, though they descended from the Monroe Tower, in the end Harry and Marigold had not dared venture far from Battery Park. The two of them found what appeared to be an abandoned gun emplacement, a grassy pit. Here they huddled under their coats; they drank water and ate the biscuits they had brought. At least the night was not cold, and Harry thought he slept a little, though the drifting smoke made him cough.

Once he got up and clambered out of the pit to see the progress of the war. The night was almost pitch dark, and he wondered if smoke obscured the sky, rather than cloud. Much of Lower Manhattan was blacked out, though here and there a building still shone brightly, an isolated jewel – a hospital, perhaps, with its own electrical generator. A hulk was burning on the river, perhaps one of the great, brave battleships slowly dying, casting gaudy reflections from the water.

And on the Brooklyn shore, illuminated by the light of fires which burned unchallenged, he saw fighting-machines at work. They moved cautiously through the ruins now, as if more circumspect. Every so often he could see a slim silhouette bend down, almost gracefully, and those metallic limbs reach out to pluck something from the ground – something wriggling, something screaming perhaps. Just as it had been in England before, here were the Martians harvesting Americans for their grisly repast.

He wondered what the hell else was going on around the world, this terrible night.

He returned with heavy heart to the gun emplacement, huddled against Marigold’s warmth, and tried to sleep.

He was shaken awake. Suddenly it was daylight. A blackened face loomed over him, grinning.

Harry struggled, but a hand was clamped over his mouth. Beyond, Harry saw Marigold, sitting up, pulling at her tousled hair.

Cautiously, the hand was removed from his mouth. ‘Bill Woodward?’

‘The very same.’

‘I – what time is it?’

‘About six in the morning, Harry; you were sleeping pretty deep.’

‘Six. On Saturday?’

‘Yeah, it’s Saturday. I guess we’re all exhausted.’

‘You went off to Central Park, the Army units…’

‘I spent the day killing Martians. Or trying to. We took a pasting,’ he said grimly. ‘They outnumbered us, two hundred to twenty thousand. But we made damn sure they knew we’re here. And the evacuation’s proceeding, maybe we saved a few lives. The radio says Babe Ruth got out safely.’

‘Well, that’s something!’

‘And then, towards the end of the day, we had a delivery.

Parachute drop. Very brave, very risky.’

‘A delivery? Of what?’

Marigold leaned over. ‘From Menlo Park, Harry.’ Harry saw now that Bill had dragged a kind of cart with him, covered by a green Army blanket. Bill pulled back the blanket to reveal three metal cylinders. He reached over and hefted one of these; perhaps a foot wide, four feet long, wrapped in leather. It looked as if it might be an engine component, or some heavy gun.

‘Think you can manage this? It’s the latest fruit of Mr Edison’s ingenuity.’

‘Edison? What are we going to do, throw light bulbs at them?’

Marigold said, ‘Oh, rather more than that. Menlo managed to produce fifty of these, and ship them over. Mostly untested, probably half won’t go off at all. But if even a fraction of them work we’ll have struck a mighty blow. After all we think there are only around two hundred and fifty fighting-machines in the area, so taking out even one—’

Harry sat up and reached for a cylinder. ‘Show me.’ Marigold slapped his hand, ‘Whoa! Hold your horses, Hopalong, there’s high explosive in there.’

Bill grinned again. ‘We’ve got work to do. Get up, empty your bladder, eat something – I have a flask of coffee—’

‘You have coffee. In the middle of the end of the world?’

‘Not that yet.’

By 7 a.m., led by Bill Woodward, the three of them had infiltrated the Lower East Side. It wasn’t difficult. There was no power, no traffic moved in the rubble-choked streets, and in some blocks fires burned unchallenged. Martian fighting-machines stood around the precinct like prison watchtowers, but just as in the Cordon in England, it seemed that individual humans were allowed to move to and fro without hindrance, so long as they offered no threat to the Martians.

No visible threat.

Bill led them to a site – Harry believed it was on Allen Street, but it was hard to be sure so extensive was the damage – where the Martians had already begun the construction, in the light of that first morning of occupation, of one of their characteristic redoubts. The excavating-machines had dug a great crater in layers of shattered masonry, cutting through broken-open cellars and stores, even gouging into the granite keel of Manhattan itself. Fighting-machines stood over the pit, some of them empty of their drivers, and busy handling-machines had already begun their efficient processing of American dirt and rock into fine aluminium ingots. In the shadows individual Martians lurked, shuffling in their heavy, leathery way, and hooting to each other as they avoided the morning sunlight – they were creatures of a colder world than ours. Ruins looked down on this scene, gaunt and eyeless.

And at the centre of the pit were people: men, women and children, perhaps thirty of them, sitting in a huddle. They seemed unconfined, but Harry had no doubt that had they tried to escape they would have been struck down quickly. Instinctively he began to pen character sketches in his head. Most of them looked as if they had been inhabitants of the wretched tenements that had stood here, tired-looking women, grimy men, wide-eyed, shoeless children. But there was one soldier, apparently wounded, as helpless as the rest, and a woman in the uniform of a nurse. One mother was trying to speak to the nurse, as if asking for help for the child sleeping on her lap. But the nurse covered her ears and turned her head away.

The rebels peered at this scene from behind a broken wall.

Woodward growled, ‘Livestock to be consumed. Americans! Well, not today. Here’s the plan…’

The tactics were simple. Woodward and Harry would take the three bombs to a hole in the ground Woodward had spotted, close to a cluster of machines, probably a blown-open cellar. The bombs themselves would be ignited simultaneously by a wireless signal, sent by Woodward. And while the Martians were hopefully paralysed and confused, Marigold, on the opposite side of the great pit, would call to the prisoners and lead them to freedom.

That was the plan. They quickly got everything into position.

Then, with a feral grin, Woodward counted down. ‘Three, two, one—’

It almost worked.

What Edison and his whiz-kids in Menlo Park had come up with was a new kind of bomb. It came out of research into Martian technology, at least of a secondary kind. I suspect Harry never understood it fully, but then, neither do I.

It was, and is, believed that the Martians’ energy cells – used to power the Heat-Ray, for example – are based on the extraction of energy from the nuclei of atoms. Einstein and others have shown that in principle the compression of matter to sufficiently high densities will cause it to fuse to a secondary state of greater density, a different elemental combination, with tremendous energy being liberated in the process. It is as if, says Einstein, some of the very mass of the fuel has been transformed to energy. This process itself was not well understood before the Second War, and indeed is still not under our control; investigations into the phenomena dating back to the aftermath of the First Martian War caused terrible accidents, in Ealing, South Kensington and elsewhere.