Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Then Verity gasped, pointing back to the pit. ‘Here comes another fighting-machine. And another. How can they come so fast?’

‘Down, you fools!’

A firm hand in the back forced Frank to the ground, with Verity sprawled alongside him. Frank twisted to see the sootsmeared face of Bert Cook, grinning, his teeth white in the light of Frank’s torch. ‘Sorry about the rough handlin’, Miss.’ Frank protested, ‘Bert –’

‘Lie still, I say!’

And Cook kept them pressed down even as a fighting-machine swept over them.

Frank, twisting, saw one immense leg, the best part of a hundred feet tall, swing through the air over him, as the cowl far above twisted this way and that. And Frank saw the metallic net on the thing’s ‘back’, a detail with grisly associations. Though the Heat-Ray stabbed this way and that, it never came close to the three of them. He survived – they survived – and the Martian passed.

‘Can you see the pattern?’ Cook yelled in Frank’s ear. ‘They’re going for equipment, guns and ammo – and men who fight back, they’ll get a lick of the Ray too. But if you submit – well, you might get stomped on accidental—’

‘They’re leaving us alive,’ Verity said.

‘’Course they are. That’s why they’re not using the Black Smoke, I imagine. And we all know for why, don’t we?’ He smacked his lips, as if hungry. ‘They’re harvesting. And you know why? Because we’re defeated already. Already . Oops – here comes the second machine – down!’

Again he pressed their heads into the dirt, as hundreds of tons of articulated metal waved in the air above them.

And then came a third fighting-machine, and a fourth.

‘This is the life!’ yelled Bert Cook, through the din. ‘This is the life!’

On the Monday night I had slept badly.

Before midnight, when the next batch of Martians were due – so the rumours had it, and by now they were well informed – I had returned to the West End. I had been out on the Strand, in fact, in the night air. With the restrictions on traffic the city was free of engine noise, and I could clearly hear the voices of people out and about as I was, and somewhere the clank of a train leaving Charing Cross, perhaps a troop-carrier. And to the north, I thought by Covent Garden, I heard voices raised in revelry, even the shrill sounds of a ragtime band, and then a thin police whistle. Marvin’s regime had not quite sucked all the gaiety out of the city, then; not even the Martians had managed that.

It is an odd thing, looking back, how bright London had been made in the night, in those years between the Martian Wars. It was not quite Times Square, but the West End would ever be ablaze with electric lighting, and even the meaner districts to the east and south of the river would shine with electric, and with old-fashioned gas where the supply was kept up. All of it bright enough that the sky above was masked from sight – as if the British who had been threatened from the sky now wanted to shut out the night altogether, to pretend it did not exist.

But in spite of the customary glare that night, at midnight, as Tuesday began, I saw green flashes, off to the north-west: the Martians coming down for the second night in a row, really not so far away from London, and right on top of my ex-husband. I heard a brief barrage, like a flash storm, far beyond the horizon, and thought I saw a few flickers of white light, like immense explosions. But it was over quickly – within a minute or so. Could the battle be concluded so soon? I refused to be drawn into the speculation of the anxious strangers around me, as ignorant as I was myself. But I stood, and waited, and listened.

After perhaps half an hour of silence from the front, it might have been more, I went back indoors. Again the hotel had kept the bars open, though there were markedly fewer guests there than the previous night – and fewer staff too, and many of those still working wore armbands proclaiming their volunteer dedication to one service or another, and might not be around much longer. I took more sandwiches for my pockets, and a glass of hot toddy, and retired to my room. Of course there was no news to be had on the Marvin’s Megaphone, nothing but patriotic music, sad or uplifting. I turned it off and tried to nap.

I was out again at dawn.

That Tuesday was a fine, clear day, with a nip in the air although March was nearly done with us, and the sky was deep blue and streaked with low cloud to the west. I had my rucksack on my back, with all my worldly goods, for I did not know what the day might bring. None of us did. But I did not check out of my room at my hotel on the Strand – I had the key in my pocket; perhaps I would yet return. (I never did; I have the key still, before me as I write.) I walked to the river, the heart of the city.

Though I do not count myself a Londoner I suppose it was an instinct to go there, at such a moment. The river could be a strange sight in the dawn light, even on days when Martians weren’t attacking, for you would see folk picking their way through the exposed mud of the banks, seeking treasures that might have been washed down the drains to this great natural sewer: coins, lighters, pens, cigarette and card cases, even bits of jewellery. These ‘mudlarks’ were a symptom of the return of extreme poverty under Marvin, a condition Dickens would have recognised.

But that morning the water itself was crowded and noisy from engines, hooters, bells, and raised voices. There were some of the Navy boats I had seen the day before, gun platforms and torpedo rams among them. And I saw too a scattered host of civilian ships, ferries and yachts and quite grand river-boats, all making their cautious way downstream – towards the sea, and away from the fighting. Some of those on the yachts and cruisers stared curiously back at the mudlarks, and at me, and at the city’s great buildings. Some of them raised Kodaks to take photographs. I imagined great houses further upstream, at Marlow and Maidenhead and Henley, being abandoned for the season now that the noisy new neighbours from Mars had moved in.

I remember distinctly that none of the mudlarks looked up to watch this grand procession of well-heeled refugees drift by.

And nor did the mudlarks see the flying-machine.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye at first, a shift in the light, off to the west. When I looked that way I saw a disc, flat and wide, a smooth profile – and very large, and evidently moving very rapidly, for it was greyed with distance, and rose up beyond the clouds. It was a Martian machine, of the kind which I had seen once before, in the sky over Essex, from the bobbing deck of the paddle-steamer on which I, Frank and Alice escaped to France during the First War. The great flyer moved smoothly and silently, with a grace that made it seem to belong to the realm of the air, like a cloud, like a rainbow, rather than to the dullness of the ground. But then it has long been remarked that all Martian machines have a sense of living grace about them, as if, sparked with electricity, they were alive themselves, in contrast to our own clanking, steam-driven, spatchcocked gadgets. I strained my eyes, trying to make out any details – any differences of form or operation from that glimpse thirteen years ago.

It is a remarkable truth that of all the gadgets humans retrieved after the First Martian War, it was the flying-machine that was the first to be made operational. It flies, in fact, not by dragging its way through the air with propeller blades as our aeroplanes do, but rather it gathers in the air, raises it to a super-hot temperature, and then lets it expand explosively from an array of vents which may be swivelled and turned. It is as if the machine is fitted with a series of rockets, but rockets which can be directed and varied in their thrust, and which will not run out of propellant, since it is the air itself that replenishes them. As for the heating agent, this seems to be a development of the Heat-Ray technology; the energy generators used by a flying-machine seem to be closely related to those used in that weapon.