Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Woodward had purloined an Army field-wireless kit from the corpse of a signals officer, and had been trying to follow the progress of the war. ‘Well, they are still moving. As Patton predicted, they broke out of Manhattan to the north and are already in Connecticut. Reports say they got as far as Peekskill on the Hudson, and Danbury on the Housatonic. They may not go much further north; the land is bad up there. The intelligence guys think the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts must be a target – biggest in the country, and we know they did their scouting before the landings. One group looks as if it’s considering an advance to Hartford, maybe even to Boston. There’s another group heading south-west, maybe making for Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC. The Army set a trap at a place called Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and they’ve been held up there. But—’

‘But wherever else they are, the Martians they withdrew from Manhattan.’

‘Thanks to Edison’s bombs,’ Marigold said with a grin.

Woodward nodded. ‘For sure Edison’s flux bomb is the first really effective weapon we have developed against them. And if you think about it, they reacted just as they did before, in England. I read the history. In Surrey in ’07, the first time an artillery shell knocked one of them over – I bet they weren’t expecting us even to be capable of that – they rescued their wounded, and their machine, and withdrew to their pits for a while. Just as here. We bloodied their non-existent noses and they pulled back.’

Looking into the east, Harry thought he saw something in the sky, over Brooklyn and Long Island, like a cloud perhaps, in an otherwise cloudless heaven. No, it was too dark to be a cloud, and moving too quickly. If not a cloud, then what? A Zepp?

Marigold said now, ‘Fighting-machines or not, I haven’t seen much in the way of rescue work and such.’

‘You will,’ Woodward said. ‘It takes time to move resources on this kind of scale; you got a whole city down here…’

Not one cloud but three. Black as night, solid. And they seemed to be scattering some kind of dark rain below.

Approaching fast. Not clouds at all.

‘Oh, damn.’

Marigold raised her eyes comically. ‘Harry! Not in front of the US Army.’

But Harry wasn’t about to smile. He pointed. ‘They’re coming back.’

Marigold shaded her eyes from the sun.

Bill Woodward got to his feet, fumbling for his own binoculars. ‘Flying-machines. Spotters always say they’re bigger than they look, and further away, and faster than you think.’

Marigold said, ‘They’ll be here soon enough. And that black stuff they’re scattering – it looks as if it’s pooling on the ground, like the smoke from dry ice. Swirling around the buildings.’

Harry nodded. ‘The British call it the Black Smoke. A new variant, resistant to water. You can slaughter whole populations with the stuff, easier than the Heat-Ray. But it’s only been used on a limited scale over there, this time anyhow. They want to knock us out of the fight, but not to kill us all, it seems. But, the British found out, if you resist, you get whacked.’

Marigold said grimly, ‘New York resisted. And here’s our reward.’

And Harry Kane felt true fear, for the first time in the war – perhaps in his life, he would say. All he had experienced so far, in the midst of the fury, had left him oddly untouched within. Somehow he had always believed he would come through this intact, no matter what happened to those around him. As if he were invulnerable and immortal. The coming of the flyingmachines changed all that. Perhaps all young people have to shed such illusions. For Harry, the Black Smoke, an approaching wall, was like the advance of death itself, implacable, unavoidable.

Harry thought he was doomed, the earth itself lost. He was wrong about that.

For I had fulfilled my own mission.

On the Friday afternoon, after debarking inside the Martian Cordon from the landship Boadicea with Lieutenant Hopson, I had quickly got in touch with Marriott once more, and through him his network of resistance fighters. Meanwhile, following Eric, the surviving underground telephone lines into the Cordon had been fizzing with new instructions to the troops stranded there.

I had never been sure if Marriott believed my account as to why I wished him to use his stock of explosives in one great earth-shaping exercise. He may have had his pompous side but he was a hard-headed, practical man, and determined to take the fight to the Martians as best he could, and good for him; now he cavilled at the fact that this operation would not be hitting the Martians directly. But I think, paradoxically, he liked to be given an assignment from authorities to which he still believed himself accountable, and loyal. He relished the thought of such a technically complex set-up, part of an operation that included many of the regular troops trapped inside the Cordon with him. And, more than that, he liked the sheer symbolism of it. After all – what a gesture!

A communication to be seen from space!

Whatever he was feeling, after I persuaded him to my cause, Marriott and his scattered army immediately got to work. It took them much of the rest of the Friday to plan it – I had found him late – and much of the Saturday to move the explosive caches into place, all across the Cordon, all beneath the gaze of the Martians. Still, all was ready by the morning of the Sunday. After some final checks, and with a last coordination with the military authorities, Marriott, by phone, sent the messages to his franc-tireurs to detonate at noon.

So it came to pass. All across the Cordon – and even within the Amersham Redoubt itself – the Martian earthworks were disrupted by a series of blasts, carefully placed. It could never be complete, never perfect – there was not the time, and the explosives were placed under conditions of extreme peril, whether by regulars or the franc-tireurs . Nevertheless, the stratagem was effective. Aerial photos taken before and after the blasts show it clearly.

That morning the Martians’ earthworks, as imaged at eight thirty a.m. by spotter planes, had undeniably sketched a set of sigils, some miles long, incomplete but near-perfect copies of that sinuous marking humans had first perceived on the faces of Venus and of Mars, after the Martians’ invasion of the younger planet – and, later, through the scholarship of Walter Jenkins, had been made out in the unfinished pattern of pits the Martians had dug into the ground of Surrey in the year 1907. This was the Martians’ brand of conquest. But in the afternoon, by the time the dust and smoke had cleared, the sigils had been disrupted, blasted apart – and they had been replaced by circles, on all scales, far from perfect but the intent clear. At noon on Sunday, then, we humans replaced that Martian brand upon the earth, not with a symbol of our own – but with a Jovian sigil , that figure of infinite symmetry which the astronomers had seen burn in the clouds of Jupiter itself.

And a couple of hours later the Martians began to respond. In Battery Park, meanwhile, in those last moments, as the flying-machines loomed, the three companions stood in a line and held hands, Bill and Harry to either side of Marigold.

Marigold said, ‘Old Bigelow will never know what he started when he invited the three of us to that party – was it only on Thursday night? It seems a different world.’

‘Do you regret it?’ Woodward asked. ‘Resisting, I mean. The flux bombs. We probably could have got out of here…’

‘Hell, no,’ Harry said.

Marigold smiled. ‘Ditto,’ she said firmly. ‘And, you know…’