Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘I’m sorry about the lads,’ Marriott said when Verity briefly recounted our welcome. ‘All part of the cover, of course.’ He waved a hand. ‘You can see why an inn is so useful. Even the Martians know that people come to such places at all hours. And an inn has a cellar, like this one, where we can get up to all sorts of mischief out of the Martians’ sight. But it’s all fakery upstairs, as – what did they give their names as?’

‘Jeff and Toby.’ Verity seemed restless; she got up from her stool and roamed around, peering to see the maps in the dim light, to read labelling on the boxes and crates.

‘That’ll do,’ Marriott said. ‘But we ran out of beer on the second or third night. Ha! Didn’t take us long to drink the place dry. And of course we don’t have power or even running water. But we get by.’ He grinned, self-satisfied in his little underground kingdom.

I was quickly deciding that I did not like this man, no matter how brave he proved to be, how noble his motives. With the aim of puncturing him a little, I ignored this speech and turned to Verity. ‘How did you get in contact with these characters?’

‘They approached me,’ she murmured. ‘Wish I could read these labels better… Since the first days, when Abbotsdale and its folk settled down to a routine, I have always felt – restless.’

‘It’s a foul business,’ Marriott said, pushing his way back into the conversation. ‘Living as we do with the Martians, and accepting – sacrifices. Better than the alternative, I suppose, when the Martians just swoop down like something out of Bram Stoker and take a fellow. But still it’s all a brutal affair, and a daily demonstration of our humiliation. Yes, humiliation.’

‘Hence this operation,’ I said.

He beamed his pride. ‘It’s not much for now, although as it happens we have something of a spectacular planned for tomorrow. But one does what one can. And, yes, we’re always on the look-out for new recruits. One gets a sense – a certain look – if a person isn’t content to be one of the cattle.’

‘Which is how you spotted Verity.’

‘That’s it.’

Verity was inspecting a revolver. ‘I imagine much of this is a relic of the first days of the invasion.’

‘Mostly from what the Army units trapped inside the Cordon had with them – there’s a lot more out there, you can imagine, in one cache or another. That’s where the ammo comes from too, most of it. They’ve tried air drops from the outside—’

‘The Martians shoot them down,’ Verity told me. ‘They seem to be able to tell when there’s weapons or ammunition and such.

They let through drops of medicines and clothes and food – most of the time, anyhow; they seem to err on the side of caution. These crates – it is dynamite, isn’t it?’

‘Not military – there was a store here before for quarrying and demolition and such-like. Even the farmers used the odd stick to clear deep tree roots, I’m told.’ He grinned. ‘We’ve been quietly spiriting the stuff here since the invasion.’

Verity frowned. ‘Which was over two years ago.’ She looked at the crates, again trying to read the labels.

‘Think this stack is a lot? We’ve got more of it stashed all over, right up against the walls of the pits in some cases. We had a quarryman on the team, and he showed us how to lay the charges so you get the result you want. Like sculpture, he described it, like sculpting the landscape, the very earth, and we all listened to him.’

‘Hmm,’ Verity said. ‘And did he train you on how to keep dynamite?’

He ignored her. ‘All we need is the word.’

‘You seem to have got organised quickly,’ I said, at the risk of flattering Marriott.

‘That we did. And that was all thanks to Captain Tolchard – an Army man, among those who got stuck here. Older chap he was, in his fifties; but he’d had some training in franc-tireur methods, back when they were still organising in case of an invasion by the Germans. Hard to think how it used to be, ain’t it? All the things we were scared of that never came to pass, save for the biggest thing of all. Anyhow he got things organised sharpish so we could resist the Martians instead. He made sure we got the weapons and so on squirreled away fast. And he found a lot of willing followers; many of us had been in the Fyrd or had served before.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Who, Tolchard? Taken by the Martians, would you believe.

Just bad luck, that’s all. I saw him myself, a man like Tolchard he fought the Boers, you know – running like a rat before the catcher, just like a rat, before he got scooped up by one of those tentacle things—’

‘So now you’re in charge.’

‘For my sins. I was in the Fyrd myself, a second lieutenant.’

‘What did you do for a living?’

‘Bank manager, in Cheapside. Branch of the London & Country.’ He stroked his desk. ‘Was out this way for a drive in the country, just a few days out was the plan, never been here before, this part of the world. Since my wife died, well, I hadn’t been out much, but it was set to be a fine few days. And then the Martians came, and that was that – I was stuck. Just luck, really.’

‘A bank manager, though.’

‘Not much need for those skills in here! But I got this desk from a branch in Great Missenden – well, it was going to waste.

Got to have a good environment to work in, you know.’ He tapped his head. ‘Lots of planning to be done, and somebody’s got to do it.’

Verity said, ‘Those boxes of dynamite… These came from Somerset West, I can see that much, which is a factory in South Africa. I’m no expert, Marriott, but I’ve been around soldiers for the last two years – I can’t find a date, but the boxes look weathered– they must be a good deal older than two years – do you turn these boxes?’

He waved a hand and said sternly, ‘I have professional soldiers in this cadre and I leave all that to them, and I’d recommend you do the same.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Perhaps you should come over here and sit down with your friend, and tell me what it was you wanted of me.’

She was clearly infuriated to be so patronised, and seemed reluctant to give up her pressing about the dynamite, but she nodded. ‘Tell him, Julie.’

‘I need to find Albert Cook.’

He scowled. ‘That traitor.’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter why. The Abbotsdale folk have got their heads down. But you must know where Cook is. It’s evident you have a wider knowledge of the country.’ I got up and walked around the desk to the big maps stuck to the wall behind him. The light was dim, but I could make out the names and places on the big, highly detailed ordnance maps. ‘We got these maps parachuted in special,’ he said with some pride.

I pointed. ‘Here’s Amersham – here’s Abbotsdale – here we

are.’ The Cordon itself, the Martians’ devastated perimeter, was a thick circular band shaded with pencil. ‘And these red spots—’

‘The subsidiary pits, as we think of them. Where the cylinders came down away from the Cordon at the edge, and away from the Redoubt, the big central group at Amersham.’ I had not seen maps of the occupied zone as detailed as this, but it was reminiscent of patterns I had seen before, in Berlin.

Just as Walter had in Berlin with his old map of Surrey and London, now with the forefinger of my right hand, following the inner pit markers, I traced one loop, two, in a scrawled clockwise spiral, an integrated pattern that must have been twenty miles across, all contained within the dark band of the Cordon. It was, I saw, the same pattern Walter had discerned in the Surrey landings of ’07, and on much the same scale. I asked Marriot, ‘And these lines you’ve marked that connect the pits—’