Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Then, though the noise of the battle did not cease, he heard cheering from above decks. Eden was between patients, and curiosity burned – more than curiosity, a desire to know if he was likely to live or die. With a stab of guilt he broke away, promising himself his absence would be brief, and scrambled up a gangway to the deck.

Up there, still the air was alive with the whistle of shells, and the sea churned with the wreckage of ships. He managed to find his Northumbrian rating. ‘There!’ The man pointed across a stretch of ocean where still the shells rained. ‘There!’ he cried, over the continuing roar of the Invincible ’s own guns.

And Eden saw it, a line of low shadows on the northern horizon, grey in the mist, the smoke stacks high, the guns sparking. Fire, all along the horizon; it was an astonishing sight.

‘That’s the Grand Fleet out of Scapa! The dreadnoughts! Now those Martians will be sorry, you see!’

But then the Heat-Ray found another of the battle-cruisers of the Invincible ’s line. There was a vast explosion, and the ship seemed to burst, and then implode, and she was gone.

From my yacht, we heard thunder in the north, and saw flashes – they must have been dying ships. But we saw no ships, or Martians.

I learned that some thirty per cent of our convoy’s Navy escort was lost in the action, but only five per cent of the passenger ships. The loss to the Martians was unknown. This kind of loss was typical. But still the passage of people and goods across the oceans continued. I myself sailed far south of the battle zone and towards England, without incident.

Once safe from the perils of the high seas our convoy broke up, with the larger cargo vessels making for the great ports of the south and east coasts, while the military vessels made for their own home ports. As for my party, we came into the Wash at last, where, close to the shore, a fleet of fishing smacks and the like was waiting to greet us, a mirror of the arrangement at the Frisian coast. With Lieutenant Gray, Sergeant Lane and a small mob of other victims, I and my rucksack were loaded once more into the foul bilge of a fishing vessel, and we had to endure another tortuous journey through the shallow sandbanks that all but choke that tremendous bay. It was evening by now, and how our skipper – a crusty old salt with a beard like Martian snow – navigated us through it all to the lights of the shore I don’t know; we heard curses and the ringing of bells coming from the dark as others of our scattered fleet ran aground. But make it we did, and I was relieved to have my feet back on solid ground once more.

We were, I discovered, in the estuary of the Great Ouse and not far from King’s Lynn. Motor-cars painted a dull military green waited here, and Gray quickly went to commandeer one to transport me onwards. Sergeant Lane had his own unit to find, but he waited with me politely while Gray tried to sort things out.

The driver, however, insisted on checking over my own papers and identification. I quickly discovered that a passport was no longer sufficient documentation to allow a subject of His Majesty to set foot on English soil, and there was something of a stand-off as Gray debated with the driver. ‘Damn it!’ he said. ‘I never thought of that.’

The driver was a woman, perhaps forty, smartly uniformed, competent, apologetic. She looked me over and grinned. ‘Well, you don’t look terribly dangerous, ma’am. I’m allowed to transport one prisoner under guard. I’ll have to check that rucksack, though. And I’ll need another warm body in the back with her – in addition to yourself, Lieutenant.’

Gray sighed. ‘Very well. Sergeant Lane?’

‘Sir?’

‘You’re volunteered. Now let’s get aboard this jalopy and make for the bright lights of King’s Lynn…’

Lane complied with a grin. ‘Better than the barracks. First round’s on me, Miss,’ he muttered to me as he clambered into the car.

We spent a night in the town, of which I saw very little.

Gray and Lane, I learned, spent some of the evening at the cinema, where they saw The Kaiser’s Lover , a Hollywood drama of the early days of the Schlieffen War, with screen stars mugging between footage of the actual events. And from the look of my companions the next morning, they appeared to have stayed up long after the show was over. As we boarded the train I teased them. ‘Gave the film a thorough critique, did we, gentlemen?’

Gray grunted. ‘Film – balderdash – I don’t remember any bally Americans saving Paris single-handed.’ The train lurched into motion and he blanched.

Lane laughed. ‘Looks like it’s not just wartime memories coming back to you, sir.’

‘Oh, hold your peace, man, and enjoy your day off.’

‘Right you are, sir.’

We headed south-west through Peterborough and Northampton towards Oxford, where we would change. Our route passed well to the north and west of the Martians’ Cordon. Though Martian forays outside the Cordon were rare, they did occur, and no part of mainland Britain was entirely immune from attack. You could see the response, the camouflage colours roughly splashed over buildings, rail tracks, even telephone lines clumsily concealed – and few vehicles moving anywhere, for the Martians targeted mechanical transport. Of course a skimpy layer of camouflage would not deter a determined Martian – they could detect the heat of a concealed engine, for instance – but their machines were few, Britain a comparatively large island, and they did not check everything, and such precautions were worthwhile.

There were stops too at places I did not recognise. One striking location was a sprawl of what appeared to be hastily thrown-up barrack blocks, hutments of wood or concrete panels or even corrugated iron, which must have been hideously uncomfortable in the summer. These blocks were set out in grid systems. The Union Jacks flying everywhere, and a perimeter of dug-in artillery pieces, made me think of a military camp; on the other hand a handful of children playing in a desultory way in a meadow close to the small rail station reminded me of a holiday village – like Caister Camp in Norfolk, where George, Alice and I had spent a brief holiday in the year before the First War.

The rail stop had no name.

‘What is this place?’

Gray was half-dozing. ‘Umm? What time is it?’ He glanced at a pocket timetable. ‘Camp A-One-43, I should think, if we’re on schedule.’

‘Camp? I see children playing.’

Lane said, ‘You have been away a while, haven’t you, Miss? This is a Winstonville – that’s what the Cockneys call ’em.’

‘Oh. A refugee camp.’

‘Rather more than that,’ Gray said. ‘It’s a functioning township, with shops and doctors’ surgeries and schools and chapels, all thrown up in the blink of an eye. One of dozens, if not more – they label them by the road-numbering system, you see…’

I was familiar with the general idea. All of this was a consequence of the unending Martian threat to London. There were still millions trapped in the capital, and a significant percentage of our national resource was spent on provisioning the Londoners, trying to enable their escape, and catering for refugees.

London had always been more than a sink of people, however. It had been at the centre of Britain’s economic activity, as a financial centre, a port, even as a manufacturing centre – the Woolwich Arsenal alone, now smashed and burned out, had been our most significant munitions factory. After the Martians struck we needed a national reorganisation, and for better or worse that was what we got. So the other ports of Britain, from Hull to Harwich, Southampton to Liverpool, were now taking cargo that had once unloaded in London, and vast new transport networks, camouflaged against Martian attack, were being thrown down. And new manufactories of all kinds were being set up across the country, with the aid of loans from the Germans and Americans and others. Huge areas of the north of England had been torn up and transformed into giant open-cast mines for the ores, readily available, that now yielded aluminium with the Martian process. But there were the usual mutterings of profiteering; even with the Martians for company, the rich got richer and the poor poorer.