Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

That was when the Martian fighting-machine appeared, looming over the Library, there at the heart of Melbourne.

Luke would later be surprised how little fear he experienced. But then for a boy from the outback, everything about the city was astonishing: the great buildings of the business district, so tall they looked as if they might topple over at any moment. Even the Ferris wheel at Luna Park, as tall as a Martian and even more massive, was more alarming than a fighting-machine at first glance.

For a moment the Martian simply stood there, as if gazing down at the boy, as he gazed up at it. But then glittering tentacles writhed about its cowled superstructure, and it wielded a device like a heavy cannon. Luke had seen guns before. He turned and ran, fast and hard. But he was curious enough to glance over his shoulder.

The Heat-Ray made the library’s dome explode in a hail of concrete shrapnel, and the incineration of the precious books began with a tremendous flare of flame.

Luke had overheard white folk talking of their justification for taking his ancestors’ land and driving them towards extinction. When the Europeans had landed in Australia it had been a terra nullius , they said, a land belonging to no one, a land as empty in law as if the native people did not exist at all. And the victory of the Europeans had been the result of a war of steel against stone. Now, thought Luke, even as he ran, whatever that tremendous machine was – he wondered if it might be Japanese, for he had heard the gentlefolk of Melbourne expressing fears at the territorial ambitions of those foreigners – now this country was seeing the waging of a new war: not steel against stone, but heat against steel.

He ran and ran, laughing.

If Luke Smith slept through the invasion of Australia, when the Martians came to Peking – they landed a couple of hours after Australia – at first Tom Aylott didn’t believe that there was an extraterrestrial threat at all. ‘That was China for you in the Twenties,’ he told me years later in Sydney, when I met him after the launch of his own book on those times. ‘You wouldn’t have thought it could get any madder. But then …’

He had been shaken awake at around six a.m. by a friend, a Chinese student called Li Qichao. ‘You come! War! You see!’

Li, an ardent disciple of Sun Yat-Sen and a visionary of a future Chinese democracy, was barely twenty-one. A bright, ambitious boy from the country, his education disrupted, he had come to the city to learn as much as he could of the realities of power and diplomacy. While waiting for destiny to call he survived by means of various part-time clerical posts – and he had fallen in with Tom Aylott.

But he was prone to be excitable, and Tom tried to turn over. ‘Yeah, yeah. Wake me when the house is on fire, Qichao…’

Tom himself was only twenty-two, but he was making a name for himself as an energetic correspondent for The Times of London. That morning Tom was having trouble surfacing from another riotous night with other young westerners in the bars of the Legation Quarter, as it was known, an area within the walls of the Inner City itself that had long been claimed as a protectorate by western governments and companies.

And after all, in those days war was no novelty in China. The Boxer Rebellion against foreign meddling, had been only twenty years in the past; the last Qing Emperor, a boy called Puyi, had abdicated just ten years before; there had been a breakdown of order in the country since the death of the first strong-man President, Yuan Shikai, in 1916. Peking was still the residence of the internationally recognised Beiyang government, but in practical terms much of the country was in the hands of one warlord faction or another, or else prostrate under foreign control.

But here was Li shaking Tom vigorously, with his English disintegrating as it often did under stress. ‘War coming, Tom!’ he insisted. ‘War coming!’

And now Tom thought he could hear it: a distant crump of explosions, the sound of running feet, women and men shouting – and the wail of frightened children, a sound that was all too familiar in Peking.

Tom’s first thought was: story .

He forced himself fully awake. He was already in his shirt, underwear and socks; he grabbed his pants, jacket and shoes. Despite Li’s protestations he used the small bathroom – his bladder was too full to allow any other course.

‘You come! Fighting close!’

‘Sure, Qichao, sure,’ he called over his shoulder while buttoning up. ‘Who is it this time? The Zhili, the Fengtian – where the hell is my Kodak? The Kuomintang, even?’

Li grinned, wildly excited – as, Tom was already mature enough to reflect, only the very young can be stirred by the coming of war. ‘Come see!’

So they dashed out of the apartment, into a daylight already so bright it made Tom wince. And they ran directly south, towards the walls of the Inner City.

The heart of Peking, Tom told me, was a place of nested rectangles, each with its walls. You had the Inner City, a domain of aristocrats, officials, soldiers – with, in recent decades, the grudgingly admitted foreigners in the Legation Quarter – and within that the Imperial City with its extensive water gardens, and within that in turn the Forbidden City itself, protected by a moat and three sets of walls. There was also an Outer City appended to the south wall of the Inner, a tremendous annex stuffed with enormous temples. Of course since the fall of the Qing even the Forbidden City was forbidden no more, but every foreign visitor knew that the best view of Peking, and the countryside beyond, was from the city walls.

And it was onto those walls that Tom and Li climbed now. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of cordite, and a coarser stink of burning, and as he breathed deep from the climb Tom found himself coughing.

They soon made the top of the wall. The city from up here was always an odd sight, almost a sylvan scene rather than urban in the western sense, with the green of trees punctuated here and there by the egg-yolk yellow of the domes of palaces and temples.

Peking itself seemed at peace, but the countryside was not.

When Tom and Li looked east, into the rising sun, they saw the fighting-machines, silhouetted, their slim shadows long before them. It was a sight Tom immediately recognised from images of the British landings. Tom says he was struck by the sheer animal-like grace of the great machines, as are many observers on their first encounters with Martian technology. It was remarkable to see them suddenly superimposed onto this Chinese landscape, a world away from England.

And there were many of them, the machines marching in what looked like a grand crescent, heading for the city. Li tried to count them: ‘One, two, three, four… eight, nine, ten, eleven… many. ’

There were attempts being made to resist the Martians’ advance, Tom saw. Weapons fire sparked around their footfalls, and shells burst close to their hooded carapaces. That was no surprise; Tom imagined that aside from the Germans’ front in Russia, this must be one of the most militarised places on the planet. And he wondered if the warlords were cooperating, for once, against this common enemy.

Even if so, they were doing no good. Just as was seen around the world that day, the Martians applied the lessons they had learned in England about the danger of our artillery, and simply shot the shells out of the air. Tom could see military vehicles, cavalry units on stocky horses from north China – even men riding camels from the Gobi – all scattering at the feet of the advancing Martians. And here and there men and animals and vehicles were incinerated in silent bursts of flame: moths before welding-torches, Tom thought, appalled.