Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Cherie saw puffs of smoke along the flanks of those low grey silhouettes on the ocean. She couldn’t make out the shells in flight, but soon she saw splashes of dirt on the hills held by the Martians. And again the great guns shouted, and again. The war had started.

Homer clenched his fist. ‘Yes! Smash those devils! See, the first volley fell short, and now the second is going long – they are bracketing the foe – and with the next shots—’

‘If they have time,’ Cherie muttered. She hastily got her camera cranking again. The Martians were adjusting their positions, And Cherie saw them wield those terrible projectors that looked so like movie cameras, but were not. Some seemed to be firing on the incoming Navy shells, which popped harmlessly in the air. And the other Martians advanced down the hillsides, apparently oblivious to the danger of the longrange naval shots which continued to crater the ground, sparsely, all around them. She said, ‘I think—’

Homer gasped. ‘Pan, for God’s sake. Pan. Look at the city. Look at the city!’

She turned, still cranking. And she saw that the Martians were firing on Los Angeles. The Heat-Ray beam, as it cut in a dead straight line through the air, was all but invisible – certainly it wasn’t caught through her crude lens, and probably not on film – but its effects were all too dramatic. The city had lain still in the morning light, but now, at scattered points, buildings simply exploded into flame, and palls of smoke threaded up into the air. After a couple of minutes Cherie thought she could hear the clang of fire bells, and, perhaps, a distant screaming. But soon individual blazes were joining up – she zoomed out instinctively to capture the panorama – whole districts were already ablaze.

‘Jesus,’ Homer said. ‘It’s like ’Frisco after the quake. And where’s the damn Army?’

‘Going the way of the damn Navy, maybe.’ She pointed out to sea. One of those grey warships was burning, listing in the water.

‘Jesus, Jesus… What’s the range of that Heat-Ray?’

‘The English thought miles, at least. And it’s accurate. Homer, were you thinking we’d get shots of the Martians marching into downtown, the National Guard bravely holding out? They don’t need to do any of that. They can just stand on the high ground and pick us off—’

Now there was another immense thunder this time than a tremendous detonation, less like footfall, and Cherie wondered if she felt the ground itself shake.

Homer pointed north, excited. Huge plumes of black smoke rose up. ‘Look at that! They’re going for the oil, the refineries!’

Again Cherie panned and zoomed.

‘Those aeroplanes they flew out of England,’ Homer said. ‘They went all around the world. Did their spotting pretty smart.’

‘Yeah,’ Cherie said. ‘They know what to hit. The city will die of thirst because they cut the aqueduct, and pretty soon we won’t be able to fight back at all because there’ll be no oil.’ She looked around. ‘And they’re moving again.’

The great machines strode through the clearing mist, heading purposefully down the slope, and now their invisible rays struck at suburbs closer by, in the lapping hills. When the Heat-Ray swept over Pasadena, Cherie turned the crank steadily as green lawns crisped and fried, and fine houses exploded like cheap props.

Homer said, ‘We need to get out of here.’

‘I’m doing what we came to do, filming until we run out of stock.’

He plucked at her sleeve. ‘Cherie—’

‘Load me up or leave me alone.’

He hesitated. Then he bent to open a fresh can.

And meanwhile, in England, I was going into battle myself.

Closeto, His Majesty’s Landship Boadicea was magnificent. But her designers must have been insane.

That had been my overwhelming impression when I first saw her in the full morning light, as we hurried towards her with Eric Eden, commander of the craft, and the last to come on board thanks to my distraction of interplanetary communications. She was stripped of her camouflage blankets now, though her hull was painted with splashes of white, black, and light and dark green, and her form was clearly visible. She was a ship of the land indeed. Imagine a broad, low-slung body, and a command tower rising up from the heart, and heavily armoured gun turrets, two in the bow, one in the stern. The guns were Navy issue, in fact, each turret having a pair of fourinch guns on steerable platforms. And now imagine all of this lifted from the ocean and planted on the land, on a great wheeled framework – a tricycle, with two immense wheels in front and one behind. Immense, yes; each of the wheels was no less than forty feet in diameter, the height of six adult human beings standing on each others’ shoulders; the wheels alone were big enough to look like elements of a circus ride, and wrapped around by a kind of tread with thick ridges. This was the greatest of the landships, though Boadicea was in the van of a whole fleet of lesser vessels that looked like mutated variants of the basic design, all bristling with armour and guns and caterpillar tracks. The technology was still experimental, the design not fixed, and the different vehicles, as they had emerged from the proving grounds in remote, well-concealed areas of Scotland (as I would learn), were more or less hand-crafted.

As we ran up, many of the machines had already started their engines, and we were surrounded by a growl of mechanical noise, and plumes of exhaust, and engineers ran everywhere, servicing these behemoths even as they made ready to move off. It was as if we were waiting for the off at a race at Brooklands, and from the laughter and backslapping I saw among some of the crew and engineers, perhaps there was some of the competitive camaraderie of men who engage in such events.

A cold part of me wondered if the Martians would be impressed.

Eric, being Eric, observed our reactions even as we approached our ironclad. ‘Quite something, isn’t she? She’s faster on the road, of course, though she chews up the tarmac. But she makes good speed across country too, and given her size she’ll tolerate few obstacles.’

Verity, who had a practical eye, grunted sceptically. ‘Why a tricycle? I had a trike when I was a little girl. I never imagined seeing it scaled up to this monster size!’

Eric grinned. ‘The one rear wheel makes her easy to steer. Simple as that.’

‘She looks impressive,’ I gasped as we hurried to the monster. ‘But what’s to save her when the Martians offer a dose of the Heat-Ray?’

‘Ah.’ We had reached the machine now. With a gloved fist he rapped hard on the painted metal. ‘Under a shell of aluminium, we’ve got one of our most precious resources of all: Martian cylinder hull-metal. We’ve never managed to manufacture the stuff, so this is all stripped from the Martians’ own cylinders, as landed in Surrey fifteen years ago. Designed to protect a cylinder’s occupants as it comes hurtling into an atmosphere at interplanetary speeds, you see – not even the Heat-Ray can cut it, and teams in the universities and on the military ranges have spent years establishing that. Indeed the armour has already been tested in battle.’

I noted he did not say where; even now Britain’s involvement in the Russian front was a secret. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.

We came to an open port, round-cornered like a watertight door on a ship, with a short stepladder reaching to the ground. It seemed to be the only breach in the hull, save for slit windows and weapons platforms contained in sponsons, great bulges on the flank of the hull large enough to host a gunner or two. But I saw periscopes jutting out of the hull – the ‘ship’ was like a submarine in some ways, then. Eric hastily waved us aboard.