Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Then the shock hit them.

I learned later that the astronomical spotters had got some of it right – at least the number of projectiles, and the rough location of their fall. None had anticipated the manner of that fall.

A total of fifty-two cylinders landed on central England that night. Tsiolkovsky and co-workers later calculated, given comparisons with the 1907 assault, that they must have come in five flotillas, each of ten or so shots: launched on the 18 thFebruary, and then on the 20 th, 22 nd, 24 thand 26 th.

(The cylinders to fall the next night, at that moment still en route to the earth, had been fired off on the interleaving nights, from the 19 ththrough to the 27 thFebruary…)

As Tsiolkovsky had suggested, the Martians used engines during their interplanetary flight to tweak their trajectories, the lead volleys slowing to allow latecomers to catch up, so that in the end all the cylinders of the first wave fell simultaneously – at least within the limits of accuracy of the timepieces of the military observers who saw them fall – at midnight of Monday, March 29. And the last cylinder to be fired, accompanied by its tardier brothers, landed on the earth four weeks and four days after its launch – the precise same timing as the cylinders launched in ’07.

(And meanwhile the second wave cylinders were still coordinating their own fall, out in space…)

That first fifty-two fell together in a great ring of sixteen miles diameter, roughly centred on the town of Amersham in Buckinghamshire. The circle of impacts reached out as far as High Wycombe to the south-west, Uxbridge to the south-east where Frank was stationed, and Berkhamstead to the northeast. The cylinders came down in a chain, each roughly a mile from its neighbours on either side. There were no green flashes this time, no attempts to slow the craft – if true craft they were, rather than inert missiles fitted with steering engines. Their purpose with that first wave was evidently not to deliver Martians and their equipment intact to the earth, as had been the case with the Horsell cylinder and its siblings of the First War.

The sole objective was destruction.

In their analysis of the 1907 event, Denning and others with expertise in the kinematics of meteorites had pointed out that by landing their cylinders relatively softly, the Martians had actually thrown away a kind of advantage of position – the advantage of the sky over the earth. Barringer, meanwhile, has studied the Canyon Diablo crater in Arizona, and has suggested that it may have been formed, not by volcanic action or by such events as a steam explosion, but by the uncontrolled fall from space of an iron-rich meteorite a few tens of yards across – that is, of a similar size to a Martian cylinder. A hole in the earth some half-mile across and two hundred yards deep: there you have a measure of the harm such a fall can inflict. Indeed, Walter’s account of his experience of close proximity to a cylinder-fall on the houses in Sheen gives a vivid impression of the damage done even by these relatively gentle landings.

(Incidentally one speculative writer – the man-of-the-year-million essayist whom Walter met in Berlin – has irresponsibly suggested that the Barringer crater was created by such a cylinder, an early Martian visitor of the remote past.)

This was the simple but cruder tactic adopted by the Martians to begin their second assault on the earth: to use the brute kinetic energy of these dummy projectiles to smash any resistance before it had a chance to escape, let alone respond.

Thus the event that befell England that March night. Consider the impact of a single cylinder. In its last seconds of its existence the Uxbridge cylinder angled in from the west, across the Atlantic Ocean. It punched its way through the earth’s atmosphere in fractions of a second, blasting away the air around it, blowing it into space, leaving a tunnel of vacuum where it had passed. And when it hit the ground, it delivered all its energy of motion as heat in a fraction of a second. The cylinder itself must have been utterly destroyed, says Denning, and a great wave pulsed outward through the bedrock. A narrow cone of incandescent rock mist fired back along the cylinder’s incoming trajectory, back through the tunnel in the air dug out in those last moments – some more distant observers thought they had seen a vast searchlight beam. Around this central glowing shaft, a much broader spray of pulverised and shattered rock, amounting to hundreds of times the cylinder’s own mass, was blown out of the widening crater. Then the shock waves came, a battering wind, a searing heat. Even the ground flexed and groaned, as a crater a mile wide was dug into the flesh of the earth.

And in that same moment the event was repeated in that grand ring, all around the target circle: seen from the air (as photographs taken the next day proved) it was a circle of glowing pits, every one still more impressive than the Arizona crater, neatly punched into the English ground. And any military units which had been within a mile of the infall were lost.

Many had believed that England would not be subject to a second Martian attack, but enough had believed it possible, and more had feared it, that the authorities had been compelled to prepare. The result had been a reconfiguring of our military and economy, a recasting, perhaps for the worse, of our international relationships, and a coarsening of the fabric of our society. All this had however delivered a much more effective home army, and when the attack had finally come the mobilisation, after years of planning and preparation, had been fast and effective.

But as a result of that promptness a little less than half the new British Army, as measured in numbers of regular troops and front-line materiel, was destroyed in the first minutes of the assault – most of the lost troops leaving no trace. And even those on the periphery of the landfalls, like Frank, endured great trials.

The violence was astonishing, overwhelming. To Frank, lying in the dirt, it felt as if the world itself were coming apart, the very bedrock shuddering, dirt thrown high into the air, his own body hurled and wrenched. Waves of heat washed over the trench above him, and then a kind of hail – fragments of hot rock, he thought, that stung where they hit him. The contrast with a moment before was astounding – the orderly processes that had led him to this point smashed and shattered in a moment – as if he had suddenly been born into some new, primordial realm, a helpless mote.

He lay flat on his belly, face pressed into the dirt, hands over his head. He stayed down behind the sandbags until the ground had stopped shaking, the waves of heat and noise had roared past them, and the thin hail of hot rock fragments had ceased to fall.

Then he dared to look up, over the parapet. There was only billowing dust, as if the world had been erased.

Verity’s face was a coin in the gloom, as blank and bewildered as he felt. When she spoke it sounded as if she had had the breath knocked out of her. ‘What was that ? The Heat-Ray?’

‘Not that… I don’t know.’ Frank stood up. ‘A terrible disaster.’ He glanced around. He saw the camp in disarray, tents blown over, even a great field gun toppled on its side. Officers stood over communications specialists with their telegraphs and field telephones, striving to no avail to contact lost units. And Frank saw now that his field hospitals were blown down, the beds and other supplies scattered. ‘This will take some clearing up.’ His very words seemed foolish as he spoke. How could any human agency cope with this?

There was the sound of a motorcycle revving. Verity pointed. ‘Look.’