Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Gray grabbed my hand and pulled me away, heading for a ladder downward. ‘Miss Elphinstone – Julie – we go now.’

‘Where?’

‘Into the tunnels, of course!’

Our port of call was what looked like a manhole cover, set in the duckboards of the gully. Of course Ted Lane was waiting for me there, with a party of soldiers – only a handful of men, armed with pistols, rifles and shovels.

I inspected the cover. ‘That looks it came off a sewer, like the one we climbed down at Stratford.’

‘It probably did. Let’s get on with it.’

Lane and one of the soldiers hauled the cover aside, to reveal a shaft with iron handles set in the walls, just like Stratford. That was where the similarity ended, though, as I discovered as I followed Lane down, with Gray right behind me. The tunnel we entered was deeper even than the great sewer had been, and faced with sapper-applied concrete, not neat Victorian brick. Electric lights had been fixed to the walls, along with cables and wires and copper pipes. And where the sewer had been half-flooded, this tunnel was all but dry, with only a smear of damp mud at its lowest arc. All this, of course, had been constructed since the landing of the Martians.

At the bottom of the shaft, Lane grabbed a steel combat hat from a stack and crammed it on my head. Without further ado, we ran for it.

The tunnel was straight and true, as far as I could see it, heading dead west. It was awkward work to run in there, for the rough-finished roof was too low for comfort standing up, even for shorter folk than me.

At least we seemed comparatively safe in here, out of reach of the Heat-Ray, and the clamour of the guns was muffled. But we were burrowing underground at the feet of the Martians, like big rats, just as Bert Cook had predicted. Indeed, as we scurried through that tunnel I thought the soldiers ahead of me had a pale, rat-like air. I felt an intensification of the deep dread that had not left me since I began this journey – for I was like a plague rat myself, scurrying off some ship into a crowded medieval port, my blood foul with disease.

Lane called back, ‘We’re passing under the Trench now. This passage goes on, at about this depth, all the way under the broken ground where the Martian cylinders landed—’

The soldier ahead of him called back, ‘And tough work that was. Those blessed cylinders smashed up the very bedrock when they fell. You try digging all that out by hand while them Martians stomp about up top – it was enough to chill the blood.’

Ted Lane said, ‘Pity you didn’t make it big enough for a normal person while you were at it, mate, I keep banging my nut.’

‘Huh. That’s doing no harm, unless it’s to my precious wall.’ Gray called forward, ‘Shall we save our breath, lads?’ At length the NCO who was leading the sappers ahead of us held up his hand, and slowed. ‘Rest area.’

We had come to a place where the concrete walls were wider, if only marginally; there was room to sit, a water tank with a spigot. On the floor I saw crushed cigarette stubs, what looked like empty food tins, and a covered hole for a toilet. The men stopped, dropping their kit with grunts of relief.

I, with Lane, walked through this area and just past it into the tunnel beyond, to make room for the rest. Gray, behind me, hung back, in the middle of the rest place. All of us were ducking our heads. I describe this quite precisely because our disposition at that moment was to determine life and death for all of us.

It had been only minutes since the alarm had roused us, but I for one was shaking and breathless and needed the rest. ‘Just a breather, lads,’ the NCO said. ‘I know we just started, but it was all of a rush, and now’s the time if you’ve got a boot on backwards or your corset’s too tight—’

The tunnel wall imploded.

I saw it come in from my right hand side, the concrete wall shattering into a hail of blocks and rubble and dust that slammed across the tunnel and into the far wall. The noise was tremendous; my ears rang with it, and the grit got in my eyes – I suppose it was a miracle the electric supply kept working, so any of it was visible – but I saw how a couple of men, caught in this lethal wash, splashed like bags of crimson paint against unyielding concrete. Despite my experiences in the First War, I had never witnessed such immediate and violent death before, not close to.

The surviving soldiers reacted immediately, and faster than I did. Ted Lane grabbed me around the waist and pulled me back into the tunnel. Gray and the sappers formed up in rows, across the width of the rest area, with revolvers and rifles drawn. The NCO was yelling orders, and Lane was shouting in my ear as he pulled me backwards, but I could hear nothing but a muffled roar.

And then I saw the Martian. Long tentacles came through first – I say ‘tentacles’; they were metallic limbs, multiply jointed and flexible, with every appearance of life despite their surface artificiality. These limbs pulled at the broken tunnel wall, widening the aperture. Then through came one leg, two, long, insectile, powerful. And then a broad body, like an upended saucer – like a crab but made of some metallic material – it was pulled into the tunnel by those limbs. A third leg through, a fourth, a fifth . And riding that eerie carriage I saw a thing like a sack of leather, glistening wet and pulsing, with a scatter of concrete dust sticking to the moist flesh – very like the targets I had seen used for bayonet practice in the grounds of the house in Hampshire, but alive , visibly so, pulsing and quivering like an organ, like a great lung dug out of a chest. It was a handling-machine, of the kind I had seen innocently manufacturing aluminium in the Surrey Corridor, with, on its back, a Martian. Later I would learn that this was the first time a handling-machine had been seen used in this way, as a weapon in direct conflict. But Walter Jenkins had foreseen it: as he told me in Berlin, the Martians weren’t likely to modify their machines, perfected as they were by a million years of use, but they were certainly capable of inventing new ways to use them.

And cradled in the limbs of this machine, as it clambered free of the hole it had made in the wall – ‘Heat-Ray!’ I tried to yell the warning, but could not hear even my own voice. ‘Heat-Ray!’

The men stood their ground and fired. I could barely hear their shots; I saw the bullets splash off the metallic hide of the machine, but they could not reach the living Martian. Lane pulled me back further, and I did not resist; I had no weapons and could contribute nothing to the fight. And the Martian wielded its Heat-Ray, at last. One man gone! Two! I heard their despairing cries as they died, and I could feel the waves of heat, intense, shocking.

But the soldiers were not done yet. Gray grabbed the NCO by the shoulder, and I saw him show the man something he held in his left hand, a pellet small and dark. It was a grenade, I guessed. The NCO hesitated for a second. Then he moved back, yelling at his men until they followed him away from the rest area.

Gray waited until the beast had clambered fully into the tunnel. It was a big machine which barely passed the walls…

Gray stood his ground and faced the thing from Mars…

He detonated his grenade…

In that confined space the shockwave knocked us like nine pins, back along the tunnel. Whether the explosion damaged the handling-machine fatally I cannot say, but I saw the roof collapse, and a rush of earth and rock like a dark waterfall smashed down on machine, Martian and all. As far as I could tell Ben Gray made no effort to get away. He must have been almost under the handling-machine when the explosion came.

And I saw the roof over my own head cracking.