Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

And I knew that many of the new structures were as extensive underground as above, with cellars, bunkers and dormitories. The governments too were digging huge bunkers under their ministries – around the world it was so, too. Some commentators said that, fearing a Martian return, we were becoming as subterranean as the Martians themselves.

We came into Waterloo, and I was delighted to see the figure who waited for me on the platform. It was Joe Hopson, nearly forty years old now and his hair a rather startling grey, but as dapper as ever in a crisp, clean uniform. We had gone through a few ‘debriefings’ together after the Martian withdrawal, and we had kept in touch since – with Christmas cards, at least. He made to embrace me, but I recoiled, I hope subtly enough. My blood has long since been scrubbed clean, but still I find I recoil from physical contact. Instead, I mockingly gave him my best attempt at a military salute.

‘At ease, soldier,’ he said with a grin. After a brief struggle, with his old-fashioned manners warring with my sense of independence, he took the small rucksack that was as usual my only luggage. ‘Come. We have a car waiting.’

‘So you’re a captain now,’ I said. ‘If I’m reading your stripes correctly, that is.’

‘Afraid so. Didn’t get terribly far, did I? My cadet instructor at school, old One-Ear Crookswell, would be mortified. And also I’m retired – well, semi. I’m a sort of reservist now – most of us veterans are. Even on a salary, if a small one. The Second War was so brief in the end that those of us who had the luck to do the actual fighting were pretty few, and those who survived are even fewer. So it’s worth keeping us old warhorses in the stable and feeding us the odd handful of oats, so we can give the shiny new generation the benefit of our experience. Keeping our forces match fit in case the Martians decide to have another go, you see. I run into Ted Lane sometimes at such bashes, and he says he still hasn’t forgiven you.’

I pulled a face. ‘Well, he’s a right to be aggrieved.’ He was talking of the time I had slipped out of Abbotsdale with Verity Bliss to find the Buckinghamshire franc-tireurs , without so much as a word to Ted who had followed me across the North Sea in the role of protector. ‘I suppose keeping match fit, as you say, makes sense – if you think the Martians are likely to come back.’

He glanced at the sky, apparently involuntarily, which I have observed is a tic among those of us who went through those days – no doubt I share it myself. ‘Well, that’s always possible,’ he murmured. ‘And we’re coming up to another set of favourable oppositions, aren’t we?’ He looked at me. ‘I daresay you know more than I do.’

‘Sorry. I’m just a civilian, not even a foot-soldier any more. But that’s partly why I accepted Walter’s invitation to come back to Amersham – to find out what’s up, even just to see it all again – I’m researching my own account of those days, you see…’

We came to his car, emblazoned with a military flag and parked in a premium spot. I suppressed a pang of alarm that it was one of the modern designs that, like the monorail carriages, was carried on single wheels. Somehow this thing kept its balance even standing still, even as we jumped inside.

So I was whizzed across London.

When we reached the desolation that had been Uxbridge we came to barriers of various kinds, manned by police and military. I was reminded of the old Surrey Corridor.

Hopson guided me through all this with a few calm words. He had seen more of the fighting than me, and he had been a very young man at the time. He was always one of those who hid his real feelings, in his case beneath a layer of publicschool faux innocence, but every so often you would glimpse deeper depths, as if a shaft of sunlight pierced murky water.

Beyond Uxbridge, we drove to the Trench, the huge and complicated fortifications thrown up around the Martian Cordon. A way through the perimeter had been brutally cut, and I peered up at earthworks that now looked like artificial hillsides, covered by sparse grass and by rose-bay willow herb. To see all this again, empty of the soldiers and their equipment which had swarmed everywhere all those years ago, was very strange for me. Then we passed into the Cordon itself – through that cratered annulus smashed up in a few seconds when the Martians’ dummy cylinders had fallen, and still a lunar plain all these years later.

Stranger yet was to drive into the countryside beyond, through towns and villages and the undulating green of the chalk country of the Chilterns, even now comparatively unscathed. This was the region that the Martians had ‘farmed’, in the jargon of the military analysts, with trapped humanity as their stock. So you would see a village with a couple of inns open for business beside a church whose steeple was melted to slag. And I saw cattle in the fields and sheep, with that season’s healthily grown calves and lambs.

But I knew that this area, all of it within the Martian Cordon, was still under the direct military rule that had once been imposed on the whole country. For here continued a very secret process of weighing guilt: of determining who among the residents could be charged with active collaboration with the Martians. Of course it was fourteen years in the past now, and I knew that many of those guilty, or at least fearful of being found guilty, had quickly fled. The last I had heard of Albert Cook was that he was living under an assumed name in Argentina, with his partner and the daughter I had once met – Mary and Belle – and I found it hard to begrudge that brutal but clear thinker a retirement of peace. I was glad that Frank had been cleared of collaboration charges, but had since disappeared from my view – he was pursuing front line medical work in communities still recovering from the War, as far as I knew. ‘Marriott’, by the way, got an O.B.E., much to his smug satisfaction.

Thus, at last, we came to Amersham, and the Martians’ central Redoubt.

Once again I entered that mile-wide fortress.

Now the Redoubt was surrounded by wire fences and watch towers, and a circular connecting road. Within, amid the old Martian pits and earthworks, was a clutter of human structures, barracks, prefabricated buildings that looked like factories, or perhaps laboratories, some of them with hefty power plants of their own. There was a hospital, a pub, even a few shops. It was like a military camp, or even a small town, all built to the most modern of standards, and it almost looked cheerful in the sunlight. Yet the whole was penned in by barriers of steel and barbed wire, soldiers patrolled everywhere – and, I saw as we got out of the car, a Navy airship swam overhead, the lenses of huge cameras glinting.

I had last seen this place with Albert Cook, while the Martians were still in residence. Now there was a kind of patina of humanity over the whole thing, with metal walkways and steps and ladders, and small huts set up on the dirt, and heaps of equipment here and there. People walked around in coveralls and helmets of various hues. It all reminded me a little of some tremendous archaeological dig – Schliemann at Troy, perhaps. I tried to ignore all this, to remove the people in my mind’s eye, and to replace them with Martians and their machines.

Yes, I thought, that peculiar terracing might have been created by an excavating-machine. That mound of chalky earth, glistening with flints, might have been raw material for a handling-machine as it industriously produced its ingots of aluminium. And that flat place, cut like a cave into the wall, might have been where the Martians themselves would gather, emitting their eerie hoots, where they might have fed. Over it all would have been standing, not bored sentries, but fighting-machines.