Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

The two of them speculated for a while, about how the Martians could know of the existence of the Bank. It was a parallel of my own overheard conversation on the fishing boat. If the Martians could ‘see’ through mist and fog, and in the dead of night, why not ‘see’ through a hundred feet or so of water? Perhaps those flying-machines of theirs had mapped the sea beds as efficiently as they must map the dry land. And as to how the fighting-machines could have reached the Bank – ‘They have no boats,’ Eden mused. ‘But, as you say, they could simply walk there. Under the water. It must seem quite unnatural to creatures of a world of shallow seas…’

‘Makes sense for the Germans to give us a hand, anyhow. Even the Channel’s not so deep. If the Martians can just walk to Europe…’

‘But what of today? What are the tactics? What are we trying to do, do you think?’

The rating, clearly an intelligent man and experienced, if of low rank, seemed pleased to be lecturing an officer. ‘I’ll tell you what I would do, if Admiral Jellicoe asked.’ He used a forefinger to sketch an invisible map on the palm of his hand. ‘Here’s Dogger, and your Martians. Here’s the passenger fleet that’s going to pass within easy striking range of the Heat-Ray. Well, I’d put a call out to divert the convoy south – while we , instead of steaming north-west to England, are sweeping starboard like so, to head east.’

‘Ah. Passing between the Martians on the Bank and the passenger fleet.’

‘That’s it. Give those Martians something to think about. Meanwhile the Grand Fleet coming from the north will divert east also, passing to the north of the Bank.’

Eden frowned. ‘All in a line? Instead of steaming straight at the Martians?’

‘That’s the tactics. You keep your ships together in a group, so they protect each other, and you show your flank so you can bring your guns to bear. Now, we’ll have been firing our big guns as soon as the Martians were in range, even if they’re over the horizon and too far to spot, for it’s always worth the chance of a lucky strike. After all, we’ve got a longer reach than the Martians; that Heat-Ray of theirs is strictly line of sight, while we can lob a shell miles over the horizon.’

‘Hmm. But they have the ability to strike our shells out of the sky—’

‘That’s why you have to overwhelm them; you can’t shoot down every hailstone in a storm, can you?’

‘That you can’t.’

‘Anyhow, we have to try. Can’t have ’em blockading England.’

Eden could not argue with that sentiment.

Then the Invincible ’s own guns opened up.

For Eden it was as if he had suddenly been dropped into a battle zone. The ship had four twelve-inch guns and sixteen four-inch; when they all started to blaze the ship shuddered, the noise was deafening, and the cordite added to the black coal smoke from the engine stacks to wreath the ship in a choking haze. Yet still Eden clung to his place at the rail, with the rating alongside him. And Eden could see the gunfire erupting from all the ships of the group, strung out in their line to west and east.

Now the rating stood on a rail and yelled, pointing. ‘There! I can see the shells come down! We must be close to the Bank!’

Eden, peering, saw plumes of water rising up, columns that he thought might be two hundred feet high or more, rising and feathering in the air.

But now, too, he saw explosions of a different kind in the water along the flanks of the ships in the line – detonations, spouts. Of course it was the Heat-Ray, all but invisible except where it struck. When it hit the ocean it caused the very water to flash to steam, explosively, in great volumes.

‘Closer than we thought,’ the rating muttered. ‘They can see us.’

And then the Martians, standing on Dogger Bank, found their range.

A beam hit a vessel only a couple ahead of the Invincible in the line, licking it almost lovingly. Everything the beam touched flashed to flame or melted or exploded – the ship’s hull, the superstructure. Soon the ship was wrapped in smoke and steam, its armoured hull plate cracked and crumpled, its funnels gashed and falling and spewing smoke and steam. As the ship began to list – less than a minute after the first strike – Eden saw men throwing themselves desperately into the water, some only to be boiled alive if they entered the cauldron stirred by the Heat-Ray. The deck of the next ship in the line already swarmed with men trying to reach those in the water with ropes and belts, even as the battle continued.

The doomed ship’s heavy armour had given it barely any protection. And the Invincible was a battle cruiser, Eden remembered, with thickness of armour deliberately sacrificed for speed and manoeuvrability. Before the Martians, the human vessels looked horribly primitive, slow and lumbering, the smoke billowing from their stacks a symbol of their wretched crudeness. Yet each of those wallowing tubs carried over a thousand crew. Eden felt naked and exposed.

But the battle, once joined, continued. Still the shells poured down onto the Martian position. The rating had hold of a pair of binoculars now, and claimed he could see the brazen cowls of the Martians – ‘A whole flock of ’em,’ he claimed. ‘And one down! And another!’

But even as the Martians defended themselves against the incoming hail of shells, those bronze cowls twisting this way and that, one ship after another in the line was maimed by the Heat-Ray. One ship simply disappeared in a huge detonation, out of which tremendous components came wheeling, cast by the residual spin of smashed turbines. There could be no survivors of such an end, Eden realised.

The rating said grimly, ‘That’s bad, if the Martians are working it out. Hit the magazine and a ship like this will go up like a Guy Fawkes firework…’

And the Heat-Ray touched the Invincible .

Looking down, Eden saw thick armour below his position crumpling like paper in an invisible fist – as if by magic, as if from no tangible cause – and fragments, white-hot, dripped into water that boiled. Eden heard screams now, and men tumbled like toys into the water. He braced for the detonation that would kill him – but the ship, shuddering, limped on.

The Minotaur rating slapped his shoulder. ‘You any kind of doctor, sir?’

‘A nurse, maybe.’

‘Come with me, then.’

Eden found himself hurrying down a gangway to an enclosed chamber that, he quickly learned, was used as a ‘distributing station’ during battle. Here the wounded were brought as fast as they could be gathered, sorted by a kind of rough triage, and then treated by medical officers in their white coats before being carted off to rest areas deeper in the ship.

Eden was needed here. He helped as best he could, lugging the wounded, carrying supplies, even wrapping bandages tight around a splinted broken arm. The flow of the injured was relentless, bewildering. He would tell me, much later, that the experience had taught him a greater respect for battlefield medics – for Frank, for instance. Even to continue to function in such conditions, to think – to make one life-or-death decision after another, over and over – seemed heroic to him.

But it was hellish not to be able to follow the battle. There were no portholes, no way to see what was going on, but Eden could hear the explosions all around, the guns still firing, a rougher roar that was the effect of the Heat-Ray hitting the water, and bangs and shudders all around the ship, which was starting to list, ominously.

Afterwards he would have found it hard to say how long he served in that station, racked throughout by a sense of imminent doom; it might only have been minutes, or perhaps half an hour. Compared to the muddy chaos of a land battle, he had always thought of naval warfare as a rather remote, abstract affair – not like this.