Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Frank the doctor asked, ‘And what of our bacteria and viruses? That was new to them too, evidently.’

‘A lacuna in their knowledge when they came, yes. I speculate they must have eliminated whole microscopic continents of such creatures deep in their past, perhaps while they were in the process of remaking their own bodies. So long ago they simply forgot such perils – as a Roman, say, would have been surprised to be savaged by a wolf at the heart of a city in Italy. But they learned, the hard way, and next time will come prepared.’

Cook leaned forward. ‘But there’s a question of intelligence, you see. Of signalling and communications. Every soldier knows that. All those Martians who came ’ere are dead . How could they have got the message back, then, about gun boats and germs, back across space to Mars?’

Walter said tensely, ‘I explored this issue in my memoir. I observed the Martians in life as closely as anyone – yes, I still maintain it is so, Major Eden! And I still argue that what I saw with my own eyes, of their ability to carry through complex communal tasks all without a word being spoken , is evidence of some kind of telepathy. A direct link, mind to mind. Why, isn’t it logical? The Martians have stripped away their bodies until they are nothing but mind. And if a Martian mind may speak to another across a pit in England—’

Cook rubbed his chin. ‘Then why not between worlds?’

Philip, the voice of common sense, guffawed. ‘Oh, this is all fanciful.’

‘So would the idea of warriors from Mars have been once, cousin,’ Walter said regretfully.

Eden objected now, ‘But if that’s so why the sigils, the markings on the faces of the worlds?’

Cook said, ‘Nothing wrong with that. Just as a Navy tub will fly the White Ensign, even though those boys talk to each other with the wireless telegraph these days, instead of with flags like ol’ Nelson in ’is day.’

‘Or perhaps,’ Eden said with an uncertain grin, ‘it’s a marker. Telling the men from Jupiter to keep off.’

‘Or vice versa,’ Walter whispered. ‘Which is the point I’ve been trying to make…’

As this conversation unfolded, of the mind-reading of the Martians and other exotica, I glanced at Carolyne, Walter’s former wife, who had not been addressed since the beginning of the conversation. She sat rather slumped, her face an expressionless mask – not bitter, somehow accepting.

At last Philip, sensible as ever, cut across the talk. ‘Very well, Frank, you’ve done scaring us. Tell us your news, man!’

‘We’ve seen the shots,’ Walter said, almost gently. ‘The shots on Mars.’

‘Ah,’ said Eric Eden softly, sounding oddly disappointed.

And there it was – at last!

The tension broke within me, as if I had received a grim but not unexpected diagnosis of illness. I remembered again how I thought I had seen that solitary fighting-machine on Primrose Hill move its head-like cowl – as if in anticipation. It had distressed me – I thought I had been seeing things… Perhaps it knew, through some machine telepathy of its own…

This was the way of it with Walter, of course. If you’ve read his Narrative you’ll know he wasn’t a man to walk in a straight line. He set off from the ruins of Woking in search of his wife, at Leatherhead, and ended up on Primrose Hill, at the greatest concentration of Martians in England. Of course! If you want to find Walter Jenkins, go where the Martians are. And as then, so it was now, with this rambling affair of second-party messages and transatlantic crossings: in the end here we all were facing the Martians once again.

Philip was angry, reasonably enough. ‘You have such news, Walter, and you yattered on about Jupiter—’

‘But it’s as Bert said,’ Walter replied, his voice faint. ‘You have to see the bigger picture.’

‘Oh, to Hades with your bigger picture, you pompous ass,’ Frank protested. ‘ When ? When did the firing start? On February 27? Because if they kept to the same timetable as last time that’s when they’d had to have fired, with an opposition on April 21—’

Cook snarled. ‘And if it’s so, the governments have kept it quiet after all—’

‘No,’ Walter said softly. ‘Earlier than that. The strategy’s evidently different this time, although it’s not yet obvious how. The guns started firing earlier – nine days – on February 18.’

Frank was as furious as his cousin by now. ‘You’re saying now that they started to fire in February! Why, that means the landings must be close – what, days away, no more? And it is only now you warn us, with this farce of messages across the Atlantic?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Walter said, still more quietly. ‘You must understand that the information I have is partial, gathered in shards and scraps – the security is heavy here, and it was difficult for me to get in touch with you at all – then it took time for you to come together. I suppose I might have planned it better. I did my best, Frank, to give you this warning. I did my best.’

Oddly enough, I believed him.

And Cook, the military man, picked up on the key detail. ‘You said guns , Jenkins. The guns started firing. Not gun. ’

‘That’s it. More than one this time, Bert. More than one gun, on Mars.’

We looked at each other in horror, we veterans of the First War.

Walter continued to speak, his voice frail and faint, dogged. ‘We think we saw the casting of the new weapons – just as, in retrospect, we glimpsed the casting of the first at the opposition of 1894, when the workers at Nice and Lick saw an anomalous glaring on the surface. They had one cannon last time. Now it’s ten . Ten we’ve seen to fire, anyhow. A belt of them in low latitudes, spread around the planet.

‘We’ve been able to map it against Schiaparelli’s scheme of the canals. Perhaps you know that the canals are tremendous affairs, some thousands of miles long – and they meet, in groups of three or four or five, with geometric precision, in junction places, “nodes” as Lowell called them, or “oases”. The greatest of them all is a node called Solis Lacus, the Lake of the Sun – a sort of nerve centre for the whole planet, I suspect, from which any point can be reached. But there are others, at Trivium Charontis, Ceraunius, the Cyane Fons. These junctions of transport network may be like our cities.’

Philip the industrialist said, ‘And so centres of population, of manufacture. And if you’re seeking to build an interplanetary cannon—’

Cook nodded. ‘All right. Ten cannon instead of one. Last time it was ten shots—’

‘This time there were a hundred, Bert. Ten from each gun. Last time a flotilla; this time a veritable fleet.’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘But what about the oppositions? Why come now, four years before the next minimum approach?’ I could hear a complaining whine in my voice, I admit. Like everybody else in those days, I would watch the skies at every opposition with Mars, even the most unfavourable. But I knew that the next most likely date for an attack was two years hence. Not now! It’s not fair! That was how I, quite unreasonably, reacted.

But Walter was reason itself, in his fashion. ‘But last time they came in ’07, two years before that minimum. Perhaps they planned, and abandoned, a follow-up shot for the perihelic optimum at ’09. We’ll never know, of course. There’s no reason to suppose they haven’t expanded their capabilities to exploit less and less favourable oppositions – why not?’

Cook nodded grimly. ‘Well, at least we’ll be prepared this time, if we can get the guns up before they open their shells – and if we can predict where they’ll fall.’