Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

The three of them stood in hot, murky air; smoke had swirled all night from the burning countryside around them, and some had tried to sleep in their gas-masks. Even now the westerly breeze was only slowly dispersing the smoke, and Frank had to blink to keep the grit out of his eyes. Overhead, aeroplanes buzzed like gnats. Frank had had a chance to shower, at least, and to change his clothes – he hadn’t slept – and yet he had an odd sense of unreality, as if the daylight was a sham, as if his hands and arms were still steeped in the blood and ordure of dying men. He had to concentrate hard to follow what Fairfield was saying.

Fairfield showed them aerial photos of a ring of craters, fifty-two in all – wounds executed with surgical precision, Frank the doctor thought.

‘It looks,’ said Verity Bliss, studying the photographs, ‘as if someone pressed a string of pearls into wet clay, and carefully lifted it away again.’

‘I suppose it does rather,’ Fairfield said. ‘But it’s difficult to get the scale of the thing. This is a composite photo, you know. The chaps worked through the night to assemble such images, and maps of the new terrain – and that’s not to mention the peril to the flyers who took the shots. Each of these craters is all but a mile wide, and it butts up against its neighbour, neat as a geometry exercise. Not that I was much use with the compass and straight-edge in my days at school. This smudge,’ and he pointed to a blur at the very centre of the circle, ‘is Amersham, a fair-sized little town. All but lost within the perimeter – see the scale of it?’

Frank recalled that Walter had spoken of a hundred cylinders on the way; only fifty or so had landed yet. ‘The second wave,’ he said. ‘That’s what comes next. All this is just a stage-setting. The next will be the war craft, like the cylinders of the last invasion. That’s the thinking. But where will these next cylinders come down? Can we say, yet?’

‘With some degree of certainty; they’re only eighteen or so hours out now. Some will hit the interior of the Cordon, landing a little later than the first lot, and the locations there aren’t secure yet. But others, the first to fall, will hit—’ He jabbed at the photograph with a forefinger, following the curve of the arc of craters. ‘Here, here, here… In the existing pits of the perimeter, you see. Not every crater will be targeted, as you can see, but a respectable number will get a new visitor.’

Verity seemed baffled. ‘Why would they land on terrain they already churned up?’

‘Because they smashed up any resistance there first, before they began to unscrew a single cylinder,’ Frank said. ‘Now they think they can land in peace.’

‘That’s the idea,’ Fairfield said. ‘But there’s still a flaw in their thinking – a loophole. They didn’t get us all, and we’ve time to respond – to bring up more troops and guns from the rear and from the reserve divisions. Surround them even before they land.’

‘“Surround them”,’ Verity repeated. ‘Which is why we’re going inwards.’

‘That’s the idea. The thing is, one of the cylinders appears to be coming down right on top of us . So we’re taking a fighting force inside the Cordon, you see, through the craters and to the relatively unharmed land within, so that there will be a welcoming party ready on all sides of the cylinder when it comes down. And meanwhile fresh troops will be brought up to plug the gaps we leave and wall them in from the far side.

‘And you’ll be coming with us. So I’m afraid it’s to be a day of walking for you, walking and digging in – it’s not far, but tricky countryside, as you can imagine. The scouts and sappers have gone on ahead.’ He eyed Verity. ‘I’m not ordering you to do this, Miss. You VADs are volunteers. If you wish to be released—’

Verity said boldly, ‘When the fun’s only just started? Not on your life, Lieutenant-Colonel.’

Fairfield grinned. ‘Carry on, then.’ He snapped out a smart salute and walked on down the line.

‘Brave of you,’ murmured Frank.

She snorted. ‘You should see the alternative – if I skulk away from here I’ll have to go back and face my mother, who says she once met Florence Nightingale. Sooner the Martian horde than that . Come on, Doctor Frank, let’s get our things packed up.’

Frank had always kept himself reasonably fit. After that confrontation at High Barnet he had taken up his school-days boxing again, since the skill had proven so useful in a crisis, and later he had responded with reasonable enthusiasm to the demands of the Fyrd trainers for their recruits to achieve physical readiness.

Even so, he would write, he was already exhausted by the time they had got the field hospitals and their ancillary stations emptied out and torn down and stowed away in motor-wagons and horse-drawn carts. At that, the equipment he and his medical staff had to handle was a good deal easier than the heavy weaponry, ammunition and other gear that the regulars had to manage. ‘I never saw a bunch of men look less fit than a random selection of British privates,’ he told me. ‘But give them a task of any dimension and they get it done, grumbling as they go – smoking, swearing, complaining, every one a miniature Hercules.’

In fact, at the time, he found the demands of the physical work a relief. Better to be engaged in the outside world than in the contents of one’s own head.

There was a brief respite for lunch at midday, of cold meat and bread supplied by the field kitchens. And then, in early afternoon, the column formed up to make its way north-west, and through the devastated area of the Cordon. Frank imagined the scene as viewed from above, like Fairfield’s photograph mosaic – perhaps as seen from one of the Martian cylinders that was falling to the earth even at that moment – the great circular scar in the landscape, and all around men and their machines and horses, creeping towards the barrier of smashed earth from both sides, and crawling gingerly through it. Fairfield and other officers walked or rode alongside the marchers and the vehicles, and scouts zipped up and down the line on motorcycles, fairly bouncing over the broken ground.

As Frank understood it, they passed through the Cordon at a point where two of the Martians’ craters, side by side, abutted each other. Here was to be found a ridge of relatively undisturbed ground – relatively, but Frank soon learned it was littered with smashed buildings and tumbled trees, or simply churned up to expose the chalky bedrock of the country, rock the colour of bone. In the worst of it the sappers had laid tracks of canvas and planking, but that was meant more for the benefit of the vehicles than the walkers, and Frank and his team, each laden with a pack, had to plod carefully. Smoke drifted everywhere.

And, every so often, they came upon horror. At the centre of each of the Martians’ craters, any building, any human being – any living thing – had been smashed to atoms, leaving no residue. But at the periphery of the craters it was different, the damage partial. They came to houses like shells, with one wall left standing and the interior floors, unsupported, hanging limp; broken water pipes leaked slow floods into the heart of the ruins. And here the destruction of the bodies had not been total. Frank imagined he could smell putrefaction in the air, the stink of rot under the lingering smoke. In one place he saw a splash of blood, a slumped form, where a child had been hurled against a wall, perhaps by the air shock, and, it seemed, had simply burst open, like a balloon full of water.

‘Eyes forward,’ Fairfield said sternly, as they passed such scenes. ‘The scouts and the sappers have been through this place. Nobody left alive, or they’d have brought them out. Eyes forward now, concentrate on your own destiny, not theirs, for there’s nothing we can do here…’