Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Mary grabbed his hand. ‘No, Bert! Not without you.’

‘I’ll survive,’ he said with that grin of his. ‘You know me. But this—’ He gestured at me. ‘What a gift, to drop into our laps! And if we can get our little girl safe…’

Verity and I talked it over in private, briefly.

‘That’s Bert Cook for you,’ I said. ‘Likes to make everyone dance to his tune. But there’s a certain truth to his speculations, don’t you think? A brutal rationalism. There always was; Walter saw it in him.’

‘But I wonder how the military and the politicians will regard him. The traitor who seems to have exposed hundreds to the Martians… What charges could be brought if they got their hands on him? They’d probably have to invent a whole new category of law. Crimes against the species.’

‘Verity, do you think we should do this? Deal with Cook, I mean.’

‘If it will get you into the Redoubt.’ She smiled. ‘And it’s in the little girl’s interests to get her out of here.’

‘Agreed.’

We went back to Cook and Mary. Verity asked bluntly, ‘Bert, do you have access to a telephone?…’

Of course he did.

It took twenty-four hours to set up.

The scheme involved a Zeppelin flight over the Cordon area, close to where we were, while Bert set up a diversion in the north, hopefully to distract the attention of the Martians. A squad of marines would drop from the Zepp, retrieve Mary and Belle from the caves, and lift them away. That was the arrangement. It took most of those twenty-four hours before Cook was happy with the promises he’d received, including a personal assurance from Churchill himself.

Of course neither Cook, nor Mary, nor even Verity knew the true purpose of it all – knew of the weapon I carried in my veins. No doubt Mr Churchill was aware, but he didn’t drop it into the conversation.

For our second night in the caves, as he had the first night, Cook offered us heaps of blankets, and suggested we tried to nap. I for one did not sleep.

We left the caves at midnight. It was, I would learn later, May 19, a Friday. Cook assured us it was safer for us to come upon the Redoubt in the small hours, for the Martians were calmer at the dawn than at other times of the day. We carried weapons in the countryside, but would stash them in a ditch before we reached the Martian base. I had with me, however, Walter’s pictures, in their battered leather case, carried all the way from Berlin.

So we walked through the silent dark towards the pit of the Martians. With every step closer I felt a gathering dread, as I had been travelling for twelve, thirteen days already. And in the silence and the dark I thought I could feel the agent in my blood, the poison. If the Martians were a canker in the earth, there was a canker in my own blood, as if my body were a mirror of the whole infected planet.

We arrived at the Redoubt a little before four a.m. Albert Cook grinned at us in the grey light, and it was as if he had read my thoughts. ‘You’ve ’eard of Darkest Africa. Welcome to Darkest England, ladies.’

The Martian city at Amersham was in essence a tremendous earthwork perhaps a mile across. Its beginning had been the infall of three cylinders close together, whose overlapping impact craters had since been greatly extended and deepened by the patient work of the Martians’ excavating-machines. Now it was one vast bowl surrounded by an earthen rampart, which we climbed, Verity and I, with Bert Cook at our side. And at the crest, we stood on a frozen wave of broken tarmac and brick and shards of glass, and we looked into the Redoubt.

It was the space cylinders that first drew my eye. They were like great tilted pillars stuck in the ground: three Pisas of heatscarred metal, in the grey dawn light. And even from here I could see, at the very centre of the earthwork, a shadow in the earth, enigmatic, dark. I knew this was a deep shaft, visible to spotter planes, that the Martians were cutting straight down into the ground. Similar efforts had been started in the pits they had excavated during the First War, especially at Horsell Common, site of their first landing, and on Primrose Hill.

That was the essential layout – the three great cylinders, each perhaps a hundred yards long and stuck in the ground at the corners of a rough equilateral triangle, and the vast pit at the centroid of that triangle. Fighting-machines stood tall and inert, at rest looking a little like the water towers you see in some American states – dozens of them, in loose groups. And, all around these tremendous monuments, the Martians and their machines worked, glistening and rustling in the gathering light, emitting soft hoots, and hisses where the green smoke escaped from limbs and apertures.

Even from here I could see people – what looked like a crowd of them – sitting passively on English soil, or in the foundations of ruined houses. Perhaps they were recent captives, yet to be processed.

‘Don’t move,’ Cook said softly.

My attention snapped back to my own situation. Now I saw that a handling-machine had, all but silently, clambered up the inner face of the rampart on which we stood.

The machine stopped dead before us. It had five articulated legs, as they all do, and long manipulative tentacles composed of the usual metal rings, and a set of fine specialised tools fixed to its front. I wondered what delicate task it had been pursuing. The Martian riding it was the usual leathery sack, from a distance rather like a bear curled up to hibernate – but there was no fur on that glistening hide, and those gruesomely long, bony fingers were folded beneath the carcase. Evidently we were being inspected.

And so I faced the Martian. I had seen pictures; I had read accounts, including my brother-in-law’s. I had not been so close to any Martian before, save for the pickled specimen they had put on display in the Natural History Museum – and save for the beast that had attacked us in the perimeter tunnel, and even then there had been no time for cold contemplation. It gazed back at me with those huge, oddly bright eyes, from that enormous smooth head with the huge eyes, the disturbing, beakless mouth – a head fully four feet across. I knew there was a logic in this strange morphology. From ape to Neanderthal to human you can see a progression, a growth of the forebrain, a regression of the protective brow that shelters the eyes, a shrinking of the jaw and the great muscles used to chew coarse food. In this Martian those trends had been progressed to their limit. But it was not evolutionary logic that struck me in those moments of encounter. That strange round head with its small features, that pinched mouth, the eyes widened as if in perpetual surprise, oddly gave it the look of a monstrous infant, which shard of familiarity made it all the more repulsive.

I have always regarded myself as rational, but a wave of intense antipathy broke over me at that moment. I longed to destroy this thing, to expel it; it was a thing that did not belong on our earth, and I wanted it gone, down to the very cells of my being. More than disgust, it was a deep visceral revulsion – and a stab of savage despair too.

Verity’s good hand grasped mine. ‘Welcome to hell,’ she murmured.

Cook grunted, ‘And call me Virgil. Ha! Two snobs like you don’t expect a bloke like me to start quoting classic literature, do you? Just keep still. ’E wants to check you over, that’s all. Oi, pretty boy. It’s me!’ He held up the mayoral chain around his neck. ‘Good old Bert! You know me. Go on, you tell your bosses… They do it all by thought, you know. Reading minds.’

I said softly, hardly daring to move, ‘You believe that, do you?’

He snorted. ‘Not a question of believe . It’s obvious if you watch ’em for a bit, as I’ve done.’