Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘Chalk country, Doc,’ came a familiar voice. ‘Sappers know the landscape. ’Ave to. Nat’ral geologists, you could call ’em.’

Frank turned, startled. ‘Bert Cook!’

Cook was wearing a reservist’s uniform, as muddied as the rest. Under his steel hat, Frank saw, he had blackened his face with burnt cork. The officers had suggested it, but most of the troops hadn’t bothered; Martians brought no snipers. ‘Hello, Doc,’ Cook said. ‘Heard you were ’ere – with this unit. Made my way along the perimeter to find a friendly face.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Just in time for the late sitting of the show, eh?’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised you’re here, Bert. I suppose you would always come back.’

‘“As a sparrow goes for man”, as your brother quoted me.’ He sounded charged, excited – yet calculating, Frank thought. ‘And here I am, right underneath ’em. This is what I’ve been waiting for, ever since the beggars died off in ’07 – waiting for them to come finish the job they started.’

‘You say it with such relish, Bert. You are a riddle.’

‘I’ll give you a riddle. What’s green and flashing and flies like a bird in the sky?’

Frank stared at him.

Cook grinned, and pointed upwards.

It took Frank some time, with the help of other survivors, to put together a coherent account of what followed. But then, as it turned out, he would have the time – plenty of it.

It was at the stroke of midnight that Fairfield’s Cylinder No. 12 made its entrance, with a vivid flash of green overhead, and then a concussion, a slam on the ground. Frank, huddled down in his trench, felt it as a shuddering in the earth, and a gust of air that knocked the breath out of his chest. In the trench the duckboards creaked and cracked, some of the loosely constructed parapet of sand bags collapsed, and here and there people whimpered and huddled. It was a great blow, as if the earth had suffered a mighty punch – not as great as the calamitous infall of twenty-four hours earlier, Frank realised immediately, but nearer .

Then, just seconds after the cylinder’s fall, Frank heard shouting. ‘Advance! Advance!’

‘Bring those bloody guns up!’

‘A light here, throw a light!’

Frank stood on a firing step and looked ahead, out of his trench. He saw a greenish glow coming from a hole dug new into the churned-up ground, with earth scattered around, and small fires in the nearer distance where there were trees and grass and buildings left to burn. Men and field guns were silhouetted against the eerie green glow, and picked out by wavering torchlight, already advancing towards the new pit.

And, from somewhere far behind, Frank heard the cough of artillery: the big guns firing from behind the lines, the giant eighteen- and sixty-pounders. The plan was that those great shells would smash up the cylinders before the ground troops even closed.

Frank’s new friend Feldwebelleutnant Schwesig and his gun crew, mobile, fast, and well-trained like all German troops, were among the first to reach the perimeter of the new pit. Later Schwesig told Frank what he saw. There was the cylinder embedded in the earth, standing vertical, a great pillar of steel some thirty yards across – and, no doubt, a hundred yards long, as it had proved when the inert craft were finally dug out of the ground after the First War. Schwesig and his crew prepared their G8 gun for what seemed to them the remote possibility that anything from within that cylinder should survive the blast of the field artillery already being trained on the target. There was no rush; they had nineteen hours’ grace before the Martians could move out in force, so they believed.

But the rules of the game changed again. There was a crack, a flash of greenish light. Schwesig saw it as a band of light around the top seam of the cylinder, under its flat lid.

Then that disc of metal, itself weighing perhaps five thousand tons, was suddenly detached and cast aside like a straw boater, to fly across the pit. No hours of patient unscrewing this time! The cylinder had not waited inertly for the human attack, not for nineteen hours, not even for nineteen minutes.

Then, in another instant, a kind of tentacular, metallic arm lifted out of the craft bearing a compact device not unlike a moving-picture camera: a device that Schwesig remembered well from his briefings. It was a Heat-Ray generator. Schwesig hurled himself flat into the dirt. He saw a ghost-pale beam of light pass not feet over his prone body, and thought he felt the air itself blasted to a tremendous temperature. Around him men who had not been so fast to react flashed into white flame, as the Ray swept like a hose around the perimeter of the pit. All this in mere seconds after the opening of the cylinder.

Nineteen hours!

Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield was a little further back, on a slight rise, observing. He could not see the heat beam itself, or indeed the projector being wielded from the suddenly open cylinder, but he saw men, machines, vehicles and horses incinerated in a glare of light, all around the pit. Then he saw more beams, coming presumably from projectors within the cylinders themselves, reaching up into the sky, pale, barely visible in air that was already filling with smoke. He looked up, wondering – and saw detonations, high in the air, almost like fireworks, he would say later. These were the artillery shells, incoming from the remote big guns, on their way to smash the Martian cylinder before it ever opened – that had been the theory. None of them reached the ground, never mind its target. A few spotter planes too were caught like moths in an invisible flame, brief flares against the midnight sky.

And then, rising out of the pit, above the smoke, he saw a great cowl, like a bronze helmet, lifting smoothly three unfolding legs. It was a fighting-machine – a great tripedal engine of war, returned to the earth after thirteen years, rising out of the smoke, above the disintegrated corpses of hundreds of men. All this and not yet a minute since the cylinder had landed.

Fairfield saw it in an instant. If we had deduced that the Martians were at their most vulnerable on first landing, so had they themselves, and they had done something about it.

Verity Bliss, in the medics’ ditch with my brother, was too far back to see any of the first moments of the conflict in detail, but she quickly got the general picture – so she would tell me later. The Martians, who were supposed to be dormant in their pit, were fighting back; the soldiers were dying. And that great cowl of the first fighting-machine was already advancing, looming out of the pit. Verity grabbed my brother’s collar, and hauled him by main force out of the trench. ‘We must run! It is the only chance!’

Frank had heard the cries of freshly wounded; in his head he had been frantically preparing to go over the top, to help who he could, he and his staff. Back into the horror. But he could see he had no choice but to agree; the whole position would soon be overwhelmed. Out of the trench he came, and he and Verity rounded up the rest of their staff, yelling and pushing: ‘A doctor’s no use to anyone fried! Run, scatter!’

But even as Frank ran away from the pit – heading deeper into the Martian Cordon – Frank saw that others were running forward: gunners scrambling to man their weapons, even individual troopers hurling themselves into trenches and taking pot-shots at the Martian with their rifles. And Frank saw, looking back over his shoulder, that the Martian was advancing remorselessly into the fire. He saw again that peculiar threelegged motion of the thing, this mobile war-machine without wheels. It was a tripod, like a milking stool tipped over and bowling along at a tremendous speed – a traumatic memory of thirteen years before, he told me. But even as it advanced the fighting-machine kept its upper body steady, that great cowled ‘head’ a superb platform for targeted fire. And it was already picking its targets precisely, Frank saw: weapon emplacements, ammunition dumps, vehicles. A stray pass caused Frank’s field hospitals, a row of muddy tents, to flash into flame. A bit of him mourned, but at least they had been empty. Individual soldiers fled in terror, but they were generally spared – though any who shot back got a dose of that ghostly, lethal beam as it raked the trenches and dugouts.