Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Meanwhile, behind the machines a kind of corridor of smoke was rising, as the countryside the Martians had already crossed began to burn.

‘We must get out of here,’ Tom said. But he raised his camera and captured hasty images.

‘Magnificent sight.’

Tom glanced at his friend; Li’s face was shining. ‘You sound as if you are enjoying this.’

‘China flat on her back,’ Li Qichao said. ‘Foreigners everywhere. Russians want Mongolia. British want Tibet. Japanese want Manchuria. Americans – Americans just sell stuff. Government a joke, country full of warlords. And yet, and yet,China still a great country. Even Martians see that!’

‘They’re attacking you, and you see it as an endorsement?’

‘New age starts,’ Li said. ‘I, I will go east and south, find the Kuomintang. Sun Yat-Sen. It is said the Emperor will join us.’

‘What Emperor? Puyi? He’s just a kid.’

‘Let Martians drive out foreigners. Then Chinese drive out Martians. We survived Genghis Khan. Will survive this. And then …’

But already the Heat-Ray, with a range of miles, was licking at Peking, and buildings in the outer suburbs were flashing to flame.

Tom closed up his camera. ‘OK, Qichao. But for now let’s just make sure we live to see some of that future.’

Li grinned. ‘Come!’

They made their way around the wall parapet, away from the Martian advance, as the destruction of the city began in earnest.

The dawn of Saturday in Peking was around midday of Friday in New York. And through that long Friday afternoon Harry Kane and Marigold Rafferty watched the Battle of Manhattan unfold.

From Battery Park the end point of their flight south, it was hard to imagine a better view, Harry thought – if ‘better’ was a word to use on such a day. The Park itself was on a rise, and to get an even more favourable viewing platform they had managed to break into the Park’s Monroe Tower. Dating back to 1910, such towers had been set up all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts at a time when German aggression had appeared to threaten the US itself, as well as to breach the long-held Monroe Doctrine of non-interference by European powers in the Americas. The Towers, intended for spotting warships at sea, had seen no use in anger, and had quickly become obsolete as aeroplane surveillance technology had advanced. But the Battery Park Tower offered an unparalleled viewpoint over south Manhattan, and had become a popular tourist spot. Of course that morning it was locked up; it had been the work of a moment to break in, and it took only a little longer for the two of them to scramble up a spiral stair to the spotting platform, an electric elevator being out of action.

And there was Lower Manhattan laid out before them, a great reef with its excrescence of tremendous buildings – like trees in a forest, Harry thought idly, competing for the light. The complex fretwork of docks and wharves around the island’s shore added still more organic character. It was magnificent, Harry thought, the windows of the buildings sparking in the sun, the elegant, rectilinear simplicity of the street plan – the sheer vigour of it all, the newness – though you could see even from up here the extremes of wealth and poverty, the towering palaces a short walk away from the darker warrens of a deprived polyglot population.

But now an interplanetary war had come to Manhattan. The fighting, in fact, had begun even as the Martians waded across the East River, dozens of them coming across from all along the Brooklyn shore. The Navy tried to hold a line at the river. A handful of destroyers bore down on the wading fighting-machines, but even before they closed the Heat-Rays had wielded their invisible energies; the ships, their hulls melting, their stores of fuel and armaments exploding, were turned to helpless hulks.

One, however, a slim ghost with four funnels spewing smoke, somehow survived to slide under the legs of the great machines. The Martians had been packed so dense that once she was among them the Fox could barely fail to find a target.

It somehow did not surprise Harry that Marigold kept a small set of binoculars, like opera glasses, in her jacket pocket. Now she studied the distant action. ‘I think that’s the Fox. Oh, so brave – she’s firing! Aiming for the machines’ cowls – got one! Two! And another!…’

Even with the naked eye Harry saw fighting-machines stagger and fall, each like a man shot in the eye – and each casualty took others out of the fight, he realised, for, just as had been observed since the Martians’ first incursion into England, when one Martian fell, its fellows would retrieve it. But the Fox had only minutes to make her mark on the war before multiple Heat-Ray projectors were brought to bear, and she exploded in a flash.

Harry had his notebook out now and scribbled notes and impressions. ‘From the Thunder Child to the Fox , a line of brave fighting ships that have stood up to the Martians…’

‘Men and women, not ships,’ Marigold said heavily. ‘Make sure you write that down. More than a hundred souls on that lost vessel alone. At least it will have been quick, I suppose.’

And now, with the brief naval battle won, the remaining Martians had landed on Manhattan’s eastern shore unimpeded.

As they began to make their way into the island’s interior, they were like skeletal figures looming over the buildings – like medieval visions of death, Harry thought. And they deployed their scythe, the Heat-Ray. Buildings simply shattered, collapsing in clouds of glass and brick and smashed concrete, plumes of smoke and dust blossoming. Harry was too far away to see the fate of individual people; surely it was only in his imagination that he heard the screams. Now battle was joined by the military forces on land. Harry saw and heard the big guns in Central Park open up, and the clatter of small-arms fire; he imagined Woodward and his buddy Patton leading brave charges against the advancing machines. On the river, too, the remaining big battleships brought their guns to bear again.

‘But it’s not enough,’ Marigold said, pointing. ‘Look, more Martians are coming over the river, even now… I’ve been trying to count them. There are so many, and they move to and fro, like shadows.’

‘And don’t forget the handling-machines,’ Harry said grimly. ‘We won’t even see them from up here.’

‘Nevertheless you can see there are distinct formations…’

She was right, Harry thought, watching carefully, trying to be analytical. One large battle group was already towering over Central Park, where, it seemed, much of the city’s armed forces were still concentrated. More were moving northwards, just as Woodward had predicted, forming up onto a great crescent, no doubt in search of easy pickings on the mainland, in upstate New York and beyond.

And another large group was splitting off on the south side of the pack. They scattered along the streets below Central Park – the 57 thto 53 rd, perhaps. They quickly formed into a crescent, with the bow leading and trailing flanks. This was the classic fighting-machine formation the Martians had deployed fifteen years earlier, against London – and now, no doubt, this dreadful day and night, a formation they were using in their assaults on human communities all around the world. And even as they walked they deployed the Heat-Ray almost casually. Many of the towers of central Manhattan loomed even over the fighting-machines, but the beams swept the faces of the great buildings, as if mining the walls of a canyon. Concrete and steel buckled and smashed and melted, and glass rained down. Harry could see the people fleeing now, in the streets; he saw them not as individuals but as swarms, like ants before men with flamethrowers.