Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

And meanwhile the Martians were coming. The western sky, livid red since dawn, was stained by smoke and flame, a sullen glow that seemed to be advancing closer. Already, looking that way, you would glimpse a Martian or two, a terrible machine towering above the houses and offices and shops, like a man wading across a coral reef.

As for ourselves, we still had our basic purpose in mind: to head south and east, to get to the coast – to flee to the continent, as we had the last time the Martians came. But as we reached the Embankment, I readily admit my capacity for planning was exhausted. How were we to cross the river? The water was full of shipping, boats and yachts and even barges heading steadily downstream, although a few Navy boats struggled in the other direction. None would stop for us, not if we waved gold bullion as payment. The trains and the underground were all long shut down; no driver would bring his train back towards the Martians. Even the bridges were crammed with people, though I thought that might be our best chance of further progress, even if we had to fight our way through.

But as I retreated into myself, my sister-in-law came into her own. Suddenly she took the lead, hurrying me along the river, heading west through Aldwych and Blackfriars – past the medieval heap of the Tower, which still bore the scars of Heat-Ray licks from the ’07 War – and then through the wharves and warehouses of Wapping.

And there she brought me, bemused, to the mouth of the road tunnel to Rotherhithe.

We found our way blockaded by burly men, dockyard workers, who had piled up scrap in the road entrance, and barriers thrown across the spiral stairs meant for pedestrians. One man, arms folded, stepped in front of us. ‘Tunnel’s closed.’

‘Is it?’ Alice asked, breathing hard, sweating, somewhat dishevelled, somewhat weighed down by her suitcase, but determined.

‘Ain’t choo ’eard? Martians in town.’

‘But our intention is merely to pass through. If you would stand aside—’

‘Local folk on’y. No toffs.’

I closed my eyes, wondering if it would be class war that killed me.

But Alice was unperturbed. ‘Is Fred Sampson here?’

‘’Oo?’

‘I’m sure you know him. The local union organiser. Fred and his wife Poppy, and their children—’

‘’Oo wants ’im?’

‘If you would kindly tell him that Mrs Elphinstone is here – Alice Elphinstone – he might remember me as “the Fabian lady”…’

When the message was transmitted, to my astonishment, Fred Sampson did indeed remember his ‘Fabian lady’.

For some years, I now learned, and since the deprivation under Marvin had begun to bite, Alice and others of her Fabian Women’s Group had been coming to Limehouse, Wapping and other dockyard areas to alleviate the plight of the working poor. Alice herself, with her medical connections through her deceased husband, had brought aid to Fred’s own smallest child, an asthmatic whose lungs did not prosper well in the river-side district’s damp, smoke-laden air.

As we waited at the barrier I frankly stared at Alice, as if at a stranger. ‘The “Fabian lady”? I thought they were banned.’

‘Not banned. Frowned upon, compromised – yes. I joined anyhow. One thing led to another,and here we are.’ She looked at me coldly. ‘I know you think I’m weak and foolish. That is how your brother-in-law portrayed me in his Narrative – a cruel sketch. And with George gone, after the war, that is how people perceived me.’

‘That is the way you behave!’

‘Are human beings only one thing ? Yes, I was terrified that day, scared out of my wits, but that isn’t me. And I don’t care to explain myself to the likes of you – despite your bullying, Julie, for that’s what it is, even if I’ve had cause to come to appreciate your help in the years since. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

So there you had it, an astounding personal revelation on that most astounding of days. I sometimes wonder if there was anybody Walter mentioned in his wretched Narrative who had not come away mortally offended.

Anyhow we were ushered, as polite as you please, into a road tunnel that had become, in the hours and days since the Martian landings, a shelter – a veritable town under the city, with food, latrines, a water supply – even electric lights working off a small generator. We had meant to go on, but discretion proved the better part of valour. Exhausted, bedraggled, there we stayed, safe and snug, at least for a time.

It was only later that I learned how the Martians completed their work of that terrible day.

The Martian vanguard, before which Eric Eden’s unit retreated, had proceeded along Western Avenue, and then through White City and Bayswater, until they came to Regent’s Park. From there they crossed the Park, and then to Primrose Hill.

As everybody knows, it was on the Hill that the Martians of 1907 had begun the building of their largest single excavation, a vast pit that had crawled with their handling-machines and excavators, before the plagues killed them all. And here too had been left a single, inert fighting-machine as a symbol of that defeat – inert, or so we believed. I had thought I saw the thing twitch, in those last days before the Martians returned to earth – and now witnesses saw it move again , turning its cowled head, defanged as it had been by the loss of its Heat-Ray camera, and trying to lift legs that had been set in a concrete plinth. Truly it can be said that Martian machinery has the quality of life, even loyalty to its masters.

And now, on the last day of March 1920, about twenty fighting-machines stood tall on Primrose Hill, from where they were visible from afar across the city – and of course, since the Heat-Ray was a line-of-sight weapon, anywhere the Martians could be seen was vulnerable to the fire. Meanwhile the rest of the machines, another twenty or so, fanned out in twos and threes towards specific targets. Targets, yes: that was to be the game for the rest of that day, and into the night. With human resistance already vanquished, the machines turned on the greatest city in the world.

And this time the damage was not random and haphazard, as it had seemed to be when that first war-party had ventured from Surrey into the city in ‘07. Now they had intelligence from that first expedition; now they had the recent scouting of their flying-machine. This time the destruction was deliberate and purposeful. Beams delivered by the raiding parties stalking across the city, or delivered direct from Primrose Hill – for the Heat-Ray has a range of some miles– destroyed our great transport links, beginning with the rail termini; Euston, King’s Cross, Charing Cross, London Bridge, Waterloo, Victoria, Paddington. Our war-making abilities were smashed, too; Chatham and Woolwich Arsenal were already wrecked from the fighting-machines’ strikes of the day before, and now the explosives factory at Silvertown was targeted, going up with glow like a sunrise – it created a bang that was heard in France. Many of our great buildings and show centres were cut down, Olympia and White City and even the Crystal Palace.

The symbols of our power were wrecked; the headquarters of the British military at Horse Guards, Whitehall, our seat of government in the ugly new block at Westminster which did not withstand the Heat-Ray any better than its elegant predecessor had. At the Bank too, the heart of Britain’s – indeed the world’s financial system was cut up. How much of the purpose of these buildings was understood by the Martians on the day has since been a matter of debate – what would a Martian know of stocks and shares? For myself I believe that save for sites with obvious functions like the Woolwich munitions factory, the Martians judged the significance of a site on the grandeur of the buildings, and the density of human activity they had seen around them; they did not need to understand a specific purpose to judge a target’s importance to us.