Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Needless to say all three of the men looked inordinately pleased as we looked upon these toys.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Marriott said, almost bashfully. ‘What a way to treat these lovely cars! Especially the Ghost. We had to cut up a lot of old boilers to get the plate for all this.’

Verity snorted. ‘Why bother? The Heat-Ray would cut through this lot in a second.’

‘Ah, but that’s a second more than you’d have otherwise. We go whizzing by the fighting-machines, at their very feet.’ He mimed driving, wrenching at the wheel. ‘The Martians fire the beam – sizzle! We take a lick, but live to fight another day, or another minute anyhow, and the armour has done its job. Whiz!

Sizzle!’

He was a bank manager, standing in the morning sunshine, playing at soldiers like a small boy. But I was not one to mock him for it, for, even if he wasn’t riding with us, he was showing more pluck than anybody I had met inside the Cordon, aside from Verity.

He said now, ‘You’d be better to ride with Jeff in the Rolls.’

By ‘Jeff’ he meant the bottom-pincher. ‘You’ll see the Merc has a lot of clutter in the back. We hope to make a gun turret that will rotate, for the Maxim, you see—’

‘We’ll ride in the Merc,’ Verity said firmly.

‘Are you sure? But—’

‘The Mercedes.’

Marriott shrugged, and instructed his men.

We shook hands one last time, and with some feeling. Then we clambered into our respective vehicles, Toby driving the Merc in the lead, with myself and Verity riding in the car with him, and Jeff in the Rolls following behind with its cargo of dynamite. It was this accidental disposition which would save my life and Verity’s – that and her foresight.

So we set off.

It was a surreal journey, the first half-mile or so, that drive along an empty road through a deceptively peaceful scrap of English countryside. The roofs had been left open, so that any passing Martian could make out we innocent holiday-makers, and at least we got the sunlight. But the very smell of the car’s interior was unusual, the customary fragrance of an expensive, well-valeted car, of polished leather and carpet cleaner, replaced by a more industrial stench of welded steel, and the tang of cordite. I fretted a little that we had had to leave behind most of our few belongings in the inn – though Verity had her small first-aid pack at her waist, and her revolver tucked into the back of her trousers. And I had Walter’s messages tucked safe in a pocket of my jacket.

We hadn’t even reached the flood water before it all began to unravel.

Toby saw it first. ‘Martian!’ he hissed.

We could all see the fighting-machine, striding boldly over the open country ahead of us, off to the north-west. It was the sheerest bad luck; he must have been coming back from a patrol, and happened upon us. But there was no doubt he saw us; he immediately increased his speed, using that strange loose-limbed gait to bowl along across the green towards us.

Toby immediately slammed his pedal to the floor, and the car lurched forward. ‘Only chance is to get there before him,’ he shouted. ‘If we get those charges laid – even if we just throw the crate out of the Rolls –’

Verity and I shared a glance of horror; this sounded like foolhardy madness to us. Better to abandon the car and take cover in a ditch than this flight towards our enemy! But we had no choice in the matter; we were not behind the wheel. And, glancing back, I saw that Jeff in the Rolls was following us, indeed more than matching our pace.

So we tore down the hill, and now I could see ahead of us the rough earthwork of the Martians’ accidental dam, a mound two years old and thick with the bulbous growths of the red weed. The water behind, stretching off to our left up the valley, deceptively placid, was itself Martian and earth life mixed choked with red and green, together. I saw no Martians moving there, and had lost sight of the fighting-machine that had spotted us.

But he had not lost sight of us.

I thought I heard a crack like an electric spark, smelled an electric tang – perhaps I smelled the plasma that the Heat-Ray makes of the air as it passes through. That was how close it came, but it missed us, by a fraction. The Heat-Ray’s range is measured in miles, but its targeting is a matter of machinery, not miracles; even the Martians could miss.

That errant bolt of energy had, however, slammed into the road surface behind us. I glanced back and saw a crater, bits of tarmac and bedrock still cart-wheeling in the air – and the Rolls following, with Jeff inside his box of steel, about to tumble into that new pit, with the dynamite crate in the back.

Verity yelled, ‘Hold on!’ And she ducked down, her arms over her head.

We pieced it together later. Verity had always known the danger, but had despaired of getting through to Marriott when we spoke to him in his cellar. Later guilt racked her, but that’s all hindsight; he would not have listened.

Dynamite is not stable. It is three parts in four nitroglycerine, which is itself a strong explosive. Over time the dynamite will ‘sweat’; it leaks its nitroglycerine, which will gather in the bottom of a containing box. That was why Verity had asked Marriott if he turned his boxes; an old hand will turn such a store repeatedly. Worse, the nitroglycerine can crystallise on the outside of the dynamite sticks, leaving the whole assemblage still more sensitive to shock or friction. Most manufacturers will tell you that dynamite has a shelf life of no more than a year, under good storage conditions. In that cellar Verity had found boxes at least two years old and probably more; and the storage conditions were anything but proper.

She told me later that even before the operation at the dam, if Marriott and his lumpen assistants had ever dropped a crate in that cellar – I watched the Rolls tip into the crater – My memory of what followed is not clear.

The blast swept along the road and lifted up our car like a toy. I remember even in that instant a flash of concern about our driver Toby, but we worked out later that he, crumpled in the wreck of the car, must have been dead in an instant.

And Verity and I were both thrown through the roof and out into the air, and bumped and banged as we flew helplessly in that cloud of debris. We both came down in the flood water lucky!

I hit the water with a hard slap, and my fall was cushioned by the bed of vegetation which lay beneath the murky surface, some of it green and yellow, the colours of earth, much of it that ugly crimson that is the palette of Mars. At first I did not struggle. Bewildered, I suppose shocked, I almost welcomed the softness of the swollen vesicles and thick leaves under me, as if I was being cupped in some vast hand. I could see the surface above me, the sun’s distorted figure – and even then I thought I saw the slim form of the fighting-machine, looking down on me through the air with a dispassionate calm, as a biologist might look at a tadpole wriggling in a pond. I took a breath, or tried to – I suppose the air had been knocked out of me by the detonation – and the water was like a cold soup pushing into my throat, dense, suffocating, and now fear sparked, and at last I fought.

My chest convulsed, but I could not empty myself of the water, and only dragged in more. I struggled against the grip of the red weed, but as in a nightmare the harder I fought the tighter it gripped me.

I stopped fighting. I was going to die there – I knew it for a certainty. I tried to relax, to submit. I remember that I did not pray, and nor did memories and regrets flood me, as I have been told is common in such situations – instead I hoped only that the pain would be brief.