Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Gray eyed him curiously.

Eden went on, ‘When the Martians returned we set Porton on the germs, with a crash programme to determine which precisely was the pathogen that killed the Martians. The whole thing was another bright idea of Churchill’s, actually, if arrived at belatedly; the man does have a certain ruthless genius.’

Lane leaned forward. ‘How could you test it, though? All them Martians from ’07 were dead.’

‘Ah, but they left their corpses behind – plenty of tissue to experiment with. Did you know that one Martian was born during the ’07 invasion? Found partly budded off its parent – dead as the rest, of course. That provided particularly sweet materials for the sample labs, I’m told. And you needn’t look at me that way, Miss Elphinstone; I doubt that the Martians are showing much pity for human infants within the Cordon right now.’

As he spoke, I could feel my injection sites itch and crawl, and I realised what had been done to me. ‘ They found it , didn’t they? The boffins at Porton Down – they found the pathogen that killed the Martians.’

‘Indeed they did – with a little help from equally advanced laboratories in Germany, which, if you want to know, was the true purpose of my own recent jaunt to the continent. Don’t ask me for the Latin names, that was never my bag. But it’s a very old bug, and it’s been with us a long time – you find it in every population – must have come with us out of Africa, you see, that’s if Darwin and the rest are right about our origin there, having no doubt scythed down our man-ape ancestors before they developed immunity. Well, we can be sure that by now the Martians have fixed themselves to resist that one. So we found another. An even nastier cousin, to which the Martians had no exposure last time, but distant enough related that any protection they cooked up after the last lot will do them no good. And it works; we have enough samples of fresh Martian tissue to have proved that.’

‘And those “tests” I went through last night—’

‘It happily reproduces in the human bloodstream, but does no harm to the carrier.’

‘ It’s in me. This archaic killer. You put it in me. And you want me to carry it to the Martians, under this pretence of communication.’ There was the Lie, revealed and spoken aloud. I immediately felt foolish not to have suspected it before.

And I saw that my companions, Ted Lane, Lieutenant Gray, even the down-to-earth Marina Ogilvy, shrank away from me.

My mission, in the end, was simple. I was to enter the Cordon, and get as close to the Martians as I could – with or without Cook’s help, though the artilleryman seemed the best chance.

‘We’ll only get one shot,’ Eden said. ‘And so we’ve got to target it – to make it count. Bring them all down at once. Remember, another opposition is approaching. If more cylinders are meant to come our way, we believe our chances agin them will be that much greater if the Martians in England, spotters for the fleet, are knocked out before the reinforcements – or perhaps the main forces – even get here.

‘Now, one benefit we’ve extracted from Martian technology is a blood storage system – for much of the supply on which they subsisted in their interplanetary flights in the cylinders was externally stored, you know. We use the technology ourselves, on the battlefield. We’ve every reason to believe that they’re using a similar system in their big central pit at Amersham. And that’s what you’ve got to spoil, Julie. Should take most of them down in one fell swoop, and the open sores the infection creates ought to pass it on to the rest. So you see, you need the Martians to trust you, to get all the way in to the heart of the nest. Which is where Cook is going to provide vital cover.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me all this? I mean, before squirting your venom into my veins.’

‘Because, frankly, it was judged there’d have been a high chance of you turning down the job.’

‘Am I to commit mass murder, Major Eden?’

‘Are you to save the nation, Miss Elphinstone?’

And it was as if I saw my own epitaph.

As the next stage of my journey to the Cordon in Buckinghamshire, I learned, I was to be taken through London. Though millions remained trapped there, the capital was a great hive which the military infiltrated with relative ease, beneath the attention of the Martians – mostly. And I was to join a regular expedition.

That night I was escorted out of Portsmouth, by Ben Gray and Ted Lane, to stay in a rather fine house in the country – I never learned its name, and did not ask – out in the meadows beyond Eastleigh.

The owners had either abandoned the place when the Martians returned to England, or had had their property requisitioned, and now it was used to house officers, while the grounds had been given over to respite accommodation for active troops on leave. In the years since the owners had left the property had lost a lot of its glamour, as evidenced by the muddy boot prints in the hallways, the khaki greatcoats hanging in the cloakroom, and the lack of staff save for a few injured troops, evidently given light behind-the-line duties. One poor chap who served us dinner had half his face a mask of scars.

For, yes, despite the fall from grace, we went down to dinner, of soup and rather stringy beef, served in the oldfashioned formal way, in a dining room lined with paintings of weak-chinned generations of owners. And there was wine from the cellar and port served in fine glasses, and at the end the cigars came out, a very expensive treat shipped from Cuba. Much of the conversation was light, touching on the scandalous behaviour of various film stars, perhaps for my benefit as the only civilian present and one of only three women. Gray put in anecdotes about the eccentric behaviour of Churchill in his bunker at Dollis Hill, where – so it was said – the Governor of London would host meetings of his inner cabinet in his pyjamas and dressing gown, with a goblet of brandy at his side and a budgerigar perched on top of his balding head.

Most Army officers were, after all, drawn from the privileged classes, and all this seemed normal to them. To me it was a strange evening, a poignant reminder of an England that was all but lost. And an England, I thought as I watched poor Ted Lane try to decide which bit of cutlery he was supposed to use next, from which most of the English had always been excluded.

I slept restlessly that night in a room that felt stuffy, on a mattress that felt too deep, a bed piled too high with blankets. Perhaps I was simply disturbed, as I had been since my injections in Portsmouth, by the thought of the lethal pathogens I carried in my body – as if my body itself had become a battleground. Or perhaps I had simply become too used to my relatively austere but comfortable life in Paris.

I was woken very early by sounds outside: voices barking commands or raised in laughter, a hiss of water, even a smell of what might have been cooking bacon. I pulled on a dressing gown and went to my open window.

As I have said, the grounds of the house had been given over as a rest and recuperation area for men brought back from the front. I saw them now, queuing in the low sunlight of an early May morning, at tables for an open-air breakfast of sardine and potatoes and bread and a mug of tea; they were fed from a ‘company cooker’, as they called it, like a big kitchen range on wheels. Or they gathered around communal shower centres to wash – I caught cheeky glimpses of pale flesh – and there were wagons laden with disinfectant and delousing powder through which those just back from the front had to be processed.