Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

The government system had been shaken up too. Much power had been devolved to regional governors under Lloyd George, now the Prime Minister. (Marvin was long gone, dead at the hands of the Martians, after a foolish advance that he, shamed by Churchill’s example, had insisted on leading in person against a Martian foray in 1921.) The royal family was still ensconced in Delhi, and from the beginning I had heard nothing but pleasure from the people that the King, at least, was safe.

‘Winstonvilles, though?’

Gray eyed me. ‘I take it you know that Churchill is Governor of London – of that region of the country, as it’s been carved up by the government in exile in Bamburgh. Not that those field guns would be much protection if a Martian were to take a dislike to one of them. He thinks in big, bold strokes, and these refugee communities are one of his ideas.’

‘A bit of a lad,’ Lane said, grinning. ‘Good old Winston.’

At Oxford we changed trains at a brand new station, in an industrial belt that now appeared to encircle the historic core of that university city. It was early afternoon, but I thought the air was odd, with a kind of electrical tang to it – like sniffing ozone at the sea side – and a peculiarly greenish tint to the air brought back unwelcome memories. I wondered what was being manufactured in these great new factories, with their Marstainted technologies.

I was relieved to board the connecting train, which would take us directly south through Southampton to Portsmouth. When we passed through Abingdon, Gray said we were about as close to the Chilterns, and the Martian Cordon, as we would get. All along the train, I saw as it followed a wide bend in the track, faces were pressed to the glass, staring out to the east in awe and trepidation. But of the Martians I saw nothing – not that day.

In Portsmouth at last, we were met off the train by a despatch rider with revised orders. I was to first report, not to HMNB Portsmouth, the Navy base, as I had expected, but to a military hospital outside the city. Gray accepted this change of circumstance with a kind of cheerful resignation; indeed he seemed pleased to have a grain of fresh evidence of the caprice of command.

As a car was found for me, I made my clumsy goodbyes to Sergeant Lane – his given name was Ted, he vouchsafed to me now.

‘It’s been a pleasure, Miss. But I’ll have to call my unit and find out if I’m still to make my way to Harwich. Probably another train ride, and paid for out of my own pocket. And me a veteran of the eastern front.’

‘Criminal,’ I said.

‘Ain’t it, though?’

Gray was eyeing him speculatively. ‘Well now, look, Sergeant. You know that my mission is to escort Miss Elphinstone here across London and all the way into the Martian Cordon. And you know about as much about that as I do. Why don’t you hang around for the evening? I could make a couple of phone calls, get you transferred pro tem . Unless there are duties for which you are absolutely essential elsewhere.’

Lane rubbed his chin and glanced north, the direction the Martians lay. ‘Hmm. A veteran of the eastern front, and now into the Martian pit. Not many men can say that, can they, sir?’

‘I wouldn’t imagine so.’

‘And it is your round.’

‘Let’s get Miss Elphinstone settled first…’

The Queen Alexandra hospital, a sprawl of red-brick buildings that dated to before the First Martian War, was outside the city, a short tram-ride if you hadn’t got a military chauffeur as I had. They were expecting me at reception – and I was surprised to be met there by Marina Ogilvy, wife of the astronomer at Ottershaw. It was an awkward encounter; in my surprise I struggled for a moment to recognise her.

A brisk matron took charge, and led me to a private room. Marina came with me. En route I got a glance into a ward; I saw men evidently badly burned, cocooned in bandages, or with obvious respiratory problems. This was the kind of injury you came to expect from contact with the Martians, if you survived at all. We were a long way from the front line of the Second Martian War here; this was the first set of casualties I had seen since leaving England two years before, but it would not be the last.

At my room the matron told me I faced a series of injections – ‘Your friend can stay with you.’ The area within the Martian Cordon was quarantined, I was told. Though attempts were made to maintain supplies and otherwise support those trapped, there had been reports of such war-zone horrors as cholera and the typhoid, and I was to be inoculated as best as possible. ‘And you will be given other vaccines of a more experimental nature,’ the nurse told me vaguely. ‘It’s all quite routine.’

That last was, as it turned out, my first encounter with the Lie. But I felt no alarm at the time. One trusts nurses!

After the injections were done I lay on a bed, sleeves rolled up, and while we were alone briefly, I spoke with Marina. ‘I do apologise for not recognising you back there.’

She smiled tiredly; she was a woman who had always seemed tired, in my recollection of her. ‘Oh, don’t be. It was my husband who had the famous face after all.’

‘I suppose I understand why they called on you. In the First War your husband was among the first to try to communicate peacefully with the Martians—’

‘The first in the war to lose his life, along with Professor Stent and the rest, silly fools all.’

‘Perhaps. But their motive was a good one, wasn’t it? And now here we are attempting contact again.’

‘You’re right, of course. I think I’m here to attach a kind of legitimacy to the enterprise. I’m a symbol of my husband. Silly fool,’ she said again, savagely. ‘I heard that Lady Stent, the Astronomer Royal’s widow, refused to have anything to do with it. But that may be just rumour. Few people refuse their duty these days.’

The matron returned and briskly told me I was free to go, though I might experience symptoms such as mild nausea for a while and I should ‘go easy’. There would be no more long distance travel that day.

Otherwise I was free to wander. After so many days in company that was mostly male and exclusively military, I could think of nothing better than to escape. It was a pleasant May evening, even if it was a Monday, and I itched to walk. Marina agreed to accompany me. But my night off took some negotiating by telephone with Lieutenant Gray – I still did not have the right papers. We worked out a kind of deal. Shortly afterwards a taxi-cab pulled up outside the hospital, with a single passenger: Ted Lane. The sergeant’s brief, from Gray, was to keep a discreet watch on us for the evening: ‘That man will do anything to get out of buying a round,’ Lane grumbled. But he was cheerful enough, and I trusted his competence as much as Gray evidently did.

Since the cab was paid for, we used it to take a tour of the city, seeing the dockyard and the harbour, which, as when I had seen it before with Philip Parris, bristled with fighting ships. Then we were dropped in the Commercial Road, and took a stroll, with Gray tailing us at a discreet distance. At that it was easy to lose him in the crowd, for there was plenty of khaki about, as well as Navy blue. The other predominant colour seemed to be black. Marina told me that black was something of a fashion now. ‘As if we’re all back in Victoria’s day,’ she said gloomily.

Another striking difference from Paris or Berlin was the lack of motor traffic on the streets: a few omnibuses and ambulances, police cars and military vehicles, only a handful of taxi-cabs and private motor-cars. On the other hand there was a flood of horse-drawn traffic, which brought with it the straw and manure and an earthy reek that had been lost from the streets of Britain since before the First Martian War. It was all down to a shortage of petrol, Marina said – that and a general discouragement to use motorised vehicles, which attracted Martians.