Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

When the Martians drove into the tangle of streets just south of the green spaces of the Scrubs itself, a bugle sounded, calling a general retreat. Eden waved to his men. ‘Fall back! Fall back!’

But even as the retreat began, glancing to his right, Eden saw the looming walls of the prison – a gaol hastily commandeered by the order of Churchill as the King’s Line was established in the last hours and days – and he saw great doors opening. A group of lorries towing flat-bed trailers burst from the gates. On the back of each truck were devices covered in tarpaulins, and men and women in protective suits. Careless of the men who scrambled to get out of the way, these vehicles lined up, taking positions that roughly blocked the road before the Martian advance. As soon as the lorries were stopped, their drivers dived out of their cabins and ran back to the protection of the prison.

The tarpaulins were whisked away – and Eden saw the men around him goggle. For, arrayed on the back of each truck, were Heat-Ray cameras. Old now, battered, some visibly patched, these weapons had been retrieved and stored from the wreckage of the earlier Martian expedition. At great risk, and considerable loss of life, as Eden, drafted in as a relative expert on Martian technology, had witnessed for himself, human engineers had discovered how to work them. Now brave souls standing on the trailers swivelled the generators on the big mounts to which they had been attached. They looked like searchlights, Eden thought. And one by one they were turned towards the advancing Martians.

At the last moment Eden threw himself over a low wall and out of the way, peeking to see what happened.

The Martians slowed. It seemed to Eden that the lead machines, or their occupants, looked down at the humans, their crude vehicles, and the purloined Heat-Ray cameras, as if curious.

And then – Nothing! Eden could see the operators frantically working controls rigged up to enable them to operate the Heat-Ray projectors, controls that no longer did their bidding.

After that brief hesitation, the Martians resumed their advance in complete safety.

In a flash Eden thought he saw why this ploy – Churchill’s secret weapon – had not worked, and it occurred to him that he should have anticipated it before. But if he had warned his superiors, would he have been believed?

For all Walter Jenkins’s boasting, he, Eden, was probably the man who had seen the Martians closer than anybody else, for he had spent long days cooped up in the Horsell cylinder. And he had seen the Martians work together, and with their technologies. Like Jenkins he had come to believe that the Martians communicated through a semblance of telepathy, though in his view this was more likely to have been achieved through some subtle technology with equivalent function. As I learned later, the dissections of retrieved specimens from ’07 had turned up oddities whose functions have yet to be explained. For example, each Martian has, embedded deep in his hind brain, a peculiar mass of crystal, egg-shaped… One would think it mechanical if not for its location. But we know that the Martians have achieved a union of the biological and the mechanical, externally at least: their great machines are like suits they don for specific purposes. If that’s so outside their bodies, why not within too? At the very least, such evidence is suggestive.

In any event, if a Martian mind could talk direct to another Martian mind, why not to a Martian machine?

The Heat-Ray generators would not fire, it seemed, not if there was a Martian in their sights. It seemed an obvious precaution for the Martians to adopt.

‘Undone by a safety catch!’ Eden muttered to himself, behind his wall.

But the day was not yet lost, he thought. For in his visits to the laboratories where the Heat-Ray engines had been studied, he had seen other ways in which the generators could be destructive. There was still time; the Martians had not yet reached the line of the lorries with their projectors. Gathering his courage, Eden dumped his rifle and scrambled over the wall. As the position broke down people were already fleeing before the feet of the advancing Martians. But Eric Eden did not flee. He ran straight for the nearest abandoned trailer, and scrambled aboard.

The Heat-Ray generators were heavy, and it took him precious seconds to turn one, then the second – but at last he had one generator barrel pointing into the mouth of another, both of them turned away from the Martians. The human-built control box was simple – and, he saw with relief, it had a timer mechanism. He says he would have stood his ground and followed through his plan even without that stroke of luck, and I believe him, but he much preferred to inflict some damage and save his own life in the process. With the Martians closing on his position, he set the timer for thirty seconds. Then he scrambled off the trailer and, ducking, running, rolling, made for the cover of another wall, low but stout.

He saw what came next.

Ignoring Eden, if they saw him at all, the Martians made for the two Heat-Ray generators he had pushed together. As always in such cases, the Martians were more interested in retrieving their own technology than in the antics of humanity. Two machines leaned over the assemblage, as Eden watched, and he counted down the second hand on his wristwatch: ‘Four – three – two – one—’

Whatever disabling mechanism protected the Martians themselves from the Ray might not save the Heat-Ray cameras themselves: that was his hasty theory. A camera would not fire on a Martian, but, perhaps, it would fire on another camera. So Eden hoped.

And so it proved. When one Heat-Ray was triggered, it fired at point blank range into the carcass of the other, injecting lethal energies, sublimating the hull, liquefying the many mysterious parts of the camera, perhaps shattering the arrays of crystals and mirrors within – and, at last, destroying the casing of the mysterious power generator of the Heat-Ray, that featureless sphere no larger than a cricket ball which, experts like Einstein and Soddy had argued, must somehow harness the energies of the atom.

Energies suddenly released, in a London street. Even amid the ongoing battles in the west, the detonation was heard all over London.

Two fighting-machines were smashed, broken to smithereens which wheeled through the air. Three others were damaged, two enough to disable them.

Much of what occurred during the early days of the Second War was to remain classified as secret; it was many years before I learned from Eric himself (in an airship sailing over the Arctic wastes, as I shall relate in its proper place) what he had done that day. It was the act of a franc-tireur , people would say, but in that act Eric Eden inflicted more damage on the Martians than in any other single incident that day. He himself was badly burned, but survived.

But he did not stop the Martian advance.

Once the wreckage of their fallen had been cleared away and sent back to the Middlesex pits, the surviving fighting-machines, still more than forty of them, resumed their march into London. Now, with the King’s Line breached and the Army’s last attempt at a surprise attack survived, there was nothing and nobody to stand in their way.

My sister-in-law and I had continued to flee.

From Marble Arch we pushed our way down Oxford Street and Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus and the Strand, and then to the Embankment, myself urging my sister-in-law along – or sometimes vice versa, for it had already been a long day of flight and terror for both of us. Of detail I can remember little. The streets seemed full of people, rushing hither and thither, but all heading away from the Martian advance. It was like a tide receding across a stony shore, perhaps, the detail chaotic and unpredictable, the general drift evident. And there were so many people – for even if London had been drained in those few days of millions, millions more remained.