Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

At ten past six Marigold Rafferty was at the door.

The three of them ran to Woodward’s car, and with Harry behind the wheel fled the residence, heading west, soon joining a slow river of cars and people funnelling down the length of the island. Glancing back, Harry saw that even now, in the gathering daylight, the Bigelow place was glowing with light. Somewhere in there, he suspected, the band was still playing.

It had been at five a.m. (in Britain, midnight on Long Island) that Verity and I, in the Martian Cordon, had demanded of Albert Cook that we be taken to Eric Eden.

Cook responded immediately, and quite impressively. He got us out of the Redoubt, made a phone call from a concealed station to the Army contact he’d been using to negotiate his terms, and then took us to a heavily camouflaged car of his own and raced us across the Cordon. He assured us the Martians wouldn’t touch him, but I was never confident about that.

At the perimeter we were met by a couple of taciturn soldiers in unmarked camouflage gear and with dirt-blackened faces, and led to another bolt-hole. This time the Martians did not detect our passing under the Trench, or interfere with it.

On the far side, out of the Cordon, we were met by a junior Army officer – a Lieutenant Hopson waiting with a car, armoured and camouflaged, with a woman driver, a heap of blankets and flasks of coffee. Not for the first time I was impressed by the efficiency of all this, of the management of operations that spanned the Cordon from the huddling countryside outside to the zone of suppression within.

Through Cook we had asked only to be reunited with Eric Eden, who I thought of as my principal conduit to the Army’s chain of command. It was Verity, in fact, who, as we drove away, first asked where we were being taken. It was only then that we heard we were heading for Thornborough and the ‘landship base’. I don’t believe I had heard that word before: landship . When Verity asked what it meant, the officer would not reply – or could not.

So we were off again. I was content to huddle with Verity in the back, and clutch clean-smelling blankets around me, sip strong but rather stale coffee, and listen to the competent murmurings of the officer and his driver as they called ahead by wireless to their command stations.

And I tried not to look up at the sky.

Thornborough turned out to host an Army base, a couple of miles east of Buckingham – and so perhaps thirty miles northwest of Amersham, and the Martians’ Redoubt. The morning light was gathering as we were passed through the base’s fence.

It was hard to see much, for of course the Army wished to stay out of sight of the Martians. There were no electric lights, and every building, every vehicle was painted or draped with camouflage green and brown. But still the landships, pointed out by Hopson, were unmistakeable, as we drove past them and into the base itself – unmistakeable, if unclassifiable. They were rows of mounds of different sizes, the smallest perhaps twenty feet long and ten tall – I guessed immediately that these were bulky vehicles of some sort – but the largest was immense, more than a hundred feet long and with turrets at front and back perhaps three times my height. It looked like a ship, in fact, though we could not have been further from the sea. All this glimpsed in shadows and silhouettes against a brightening dawn sky, the profiles obscured by camouflage blankets and netting.

Verity’s hand crept into mine. ‘What frightful things.’

I squeezed her hand. ‘At least these monsters are on our side.’

We were escorted into the base by our tame lieutenant. The place was busy, bewilderingly so. It appeared to be disguised as a series of rambling farm buildings, all connected by tunnels of canvas and wood ply so as, I imagined, to be invisible from the air. Outdoors, in the ‘farmyard’, we saw soldiers in heavy combat gear forming up into groups of four or six or twelve, talking softly. They carried the customary tin helmets and gas masks and small arms, but, unusually, they also brought tools: bags of spanners and wrenches and the like. We were hustled inside through a doorway. Inside crudely partitioned rooms, we saw huddles of officers in discussion, and walls covered with maps, and plates of stale-looking sandwiches and cold cups of tea standing around. Meanwhile, uniformed staff literally ran between farmhouse and outhouse and stables and barns.

‘As if we’ve stepped into a wasps’ nest,’ Verity murmured to me as we were hurried through all this. ‘But the Martians aren’t coming down in England again, are they?’

‘No, they’re not, according to the astronomers and the spotters,’ Eric Eden said, approaching us – at last we had found him. Like the soldiers we’d already seen, he was in heavy combat gear, evidently preparing to take part in some mission. ‘But we’ve already heard of landings elsewhere… Come, we don’t have much time.’

He hurried us into his office – everything was in a hurry that morning – and I, exhausted already and sleepless, found it difficult to cope. I glanced around at the maps on the walls. One of them was a world map, Mercator style, with two ugly Marsorange markers pushed into the sites of New York and Los Angeles. It was now after 8 a.m. The meaning was clear.

‘That’s the point of our own operations this morning,’ Eric was saying now. ‘The fact that we’re in the middle of another wave of landings, I mean. Tonight, as a new wave of cylinders come down – and the analysts are saying they expect landings all around the planet through the next twenty hours or so – surely the British complex is the nearest the Martians have to a command and control centre. And we intend to do something about it.’

Verity nodded. ‘With those – cockroach things outside.’ He grinned. ‘The landships, yes. We’ve been saving them for a special occasion. When, if not now? And I, for my sins, am in command of the HMLS Boadicea , the nastiest cockroach of them all. So: while I’m very pleased to see you two safe and well, I’m far from impressed that you failed to fulfil your mission of the contaminated blood, Miss Elphinstone. But I’m sure the intelligence people will want to pump you dry of all you learned inside the Martian Cordon. Now if you’ll excuse me, I really must find my crew and get on—’

I grabbed his arm. ‘Eric – we came here to find you, remember – you need to listen to me.’ I can imagine how I looked to him, still in the clothes I had worn in the Cordon, grimy, perhaps blood-splashed, smelling of mud and dirt and sweat and sheer fatigue, wild-eyed – but, I like to think, determined.

‘I really don’t—’

‘Sigils,’ I said.

A junior officer called him. ‘Major Eden, we’re ready to load up…’

He made to pull himself away. ‘Julie, I have a battle to fight.’

‘And I can tell you how to win the war – or at least, to end it.’

He hesitated, clearly torn. ‘This is the Walter Jenkins stuff, isn’t it? The “messages” we were using as cover for the blood scheme. Are we back to that? All rather eccentric—’

‘Not eccentric, Eric. Look, I’m probably more sceptical than you are. But the things I saw in the Cordon… This isn’t like another war against some portion of humanity, the Germans or the Russians—’

‘Actually it’s generally been the French,’ he murmured with an irritating smile.

‘ This war is interplanetary. It’s just as Walter has been saying all along – ever since the Narrative , even. And if we’re to prevail we have to think on that scale.’

‘And we do that with drawings, do we?’