Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘Not the drawings, but their subject – sigils – symbols. Graphic geometry, Walter called it.’

His junior officer coughed, one communication that wasn’t terribly subtle.

But Eric hesitated for one more second, and I held his gaze. ‘All right. Barker, take the crew to the Boadicea. God knows Hetherington will be able to take you through the start-up; it’s his bloody design. I’ll be with you shortly.’

‘Sir.’ The man hurried away.

Eric beckoned us into his office. ‘You’ve got five minutes and counting, Julie.’

‘Then shut up and let me talk.’

I summarised in seconds Walter’s theories of interplanetary signalling. Eden had not been interested in thinking this through before, other than as a cover for his own scheme, but now I made him listen.

‘It’s an old idea, after all,’ I said. ‘You know there was a mania for signalling to other worlds decades before the Martians showed up and proved that there are civilisations elsewhere. People proposed digging Pythagorean triangles in the desert and setting them alight with oil to make them visible to Martian observers – that sort of thing. In the end, they were right!’

Eric, to give him credit – and with the huge distraction of the forthcoming battle no doubt foremost in his mind – seemed to be thinking it through. ‘It all seemed a lot of silly nonsense, I suppose,’ he said slowly. ‘But then, after the ’07 war, there were those luminous markings the astronomers spotted in the clouds of Venus. “Sigils”, you say – the word Jenkins used in his book, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes! This was in 1913. And at the same time, similar markings were seen on Mars . Now we interpret that as a marker of the Martians’ successful invasion of Venus. These are communications between worlds, Eric. And communications we can manipulate. ’

He nodded slowly. ‘Very well. But even if I buy all that what’s it got to do with the Martians in Buckinghamshire?’

‘Everything. Do you have a map of the ’07 landings? And maps, or aerial photographs, of the ’20 landings…’

It took a minute of my five for him to retrieve relevant maps and photos from the clutter in his room, and another minute to find a thick wax pencil with which I defaced said sigils. Without needing to refer to the documents I carried, I remembered what Walter had shown me; with the pencil I connected the Martians’ landing pits, in Surrey in ’07, and in Buckinghamshire more recently – connected them with looping, sinuous swirls. I made these marks without comment, and let Eric make the last leap of induction.

He held up the ’07 map, disfigured as it was. ‘But this symbol – it is the same as the astronomers saw on Venus.’

‘Exactly. You see it. It is the Martians’ brand of ownership , like a stock handler’s, burned now into the flesh of England herself. Over and over again. That was what they were building here even in ’07. And they’re doing it again, in Bucks – Marriott for one has maps that show exactly that, if you know how to look.’ I tapped my battered leather case. ‘These are Walter’s drawings of those sigils. He wanted me to show them to the Martians as proof of our intelligence.’

‘It was only to be a cover story; I didn’t pay much attention to the detail. But this set of symbols is what you wish to manipulate – is that the idea?’

‘Yes! But it’s not the Martian sigil that’s important here… And it’s more than a handful of drawings.’ And in a few words I sketched my idea, the what and the how and the why.

Eric mused. Then he grinned. ‘It’s outrageous. It’s insane.’

‘I know. Even Walter Jenkins didn’t think this big, and that’s saying something., It might work, though. Look, I know you’ve been feeding explosives and weapons to the resistance units inside the Cordon. I met one contact– “Marriott”.’ He looked uncomfortable at that.

‘And you have hundreds of soldiers, trapped in there since the day of the invasion. I know you’re in touch with these people. What we need to do is to get to those groups, to tell them how to use those resources in a once-and-only exercise – to set their charges, to make some precise modifications on the ground—’

He eyed me. ‘You realise you’ll have to do this yourself. I can control the Army element, but you’ll have to convince them – Marriott and his kind – as you’ve convinced me. Well, halfconvinced – and then see it through. I couldn’t do it. It’s your vision.’

I’d been expecting this, if not dreading it. ‘If I have to go back into that hell on earth—’

Verity grabbed my hand. ‘I’ll be with you.’

Eric considered. ‘What a war this is – what dilemmas you pose for me!’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘I’m not saying I buy all this – and at some point we’ll have to have a discussion about why you didn’t carry through your orders about the contaminated blood. But it’s worth a shot, and won’t cost much. Your five minutes is more than used up. And I’ll tell you this – if you’re to go back into the Cordon today, the only way you’re travelling is with me, in the Boadicea. I’ll take you to her via stores; you’ll need to be kitted out. I hope you’re adept at lacing up your boots on the run…’

Accounts of what has become known as the ‘Second War’ are multitudinous, but variable in quality and authenticity – most penned, if I am a judge, by ‘observers’ who were far behind the lines, and based on eye-witness accounts, if at all, only at second and third hand. What one needs for the truth is an account set down by a witness close enough to have seen the action, yet lucky enough to have survived the carnage of those May days – and , of course, a witness honest enough to tell it as she or he saw it, without spicing up the truth for the sake of sales or selfaggrandisement.

Luckily for me and for future historians, such witnesses do exist.

One such was Cherie Gilbert, then aged 24, who, at the time of the Martian landings near Los Angeles, had been employed in Hollywood Paramount as a personal assistant for a director of the movie company. Cherie’s skills extended well beyond the clerical, and such was the chaotic nature of the industry in those days that Cherie soon found herself used in a variety of roles, some of them quite technical. She had even served as a camera operator in the shooting of Griffith’s The Kaiser’s Lover in 1921, when influenza had laid waste to the workforce.

‘And that’s why you got to come with me,’ said Homer Girdner, as, panting, he led Cherie up Mount Lee, the greenclad hill that stands above Hollywood itself, and then higher into the San Gabriel Mountains.

In L.A. it was only just after six in the morning of the Friday (it was already afternoon in England, and I was stuck in the carcass of a crawling landship, as I will describe). But the breeze, blowing off the land and towards the sea, already bore a faint tinge of burning, Cherie thought. They hadn’t climbed high enough yet to get a good view to the east. But everybody knew that was where the Martians had come down: inland, in the direction of San Bernardino. And the evidence of war was already apparent.

It was just as in New York, it turned out. At local midnight the cylinders had landed in two waves, the first fifty-odd being dummies that had smashed a lifeless cordon into the ground to prepare the landing sites of the second wave, which carried crew and their war machines. But whereas in England two years before there had been a full day between these waves, the Martians had evolved their strategy again; now in America, in New York and here in LA, the two waves had come down just an hour apart, leaving the human forces even less time to respond. This would be the pattern repeated around the planet, in the next few hours.