Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

So they marched through downtown, heading straight for the Monroe Tower, or so it seemed.

Harry grunted. ‘So much for our theory that they wouldn’t come this way.’

Marigold said, ‘They have the machines to spare, I guess. At least we’ll get a good view.’

She sounded remarkably unafraid, Harry thought. And yet he himself felt little fear; perhaps it was simply exhaustion after a night without sleep and the slog of the evacuation, or perhaps his capacity for fear was overwhelmed by the remarkable spectacle he saw unfolding before him.

Now one pack of machines veered off to the Martians’ left, some making for the navy yards on the East River, others pushing into the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. There were no tall buildings there. The Martians towered, the Heat-Ray played easily, and whole blocks were blown apart by the fire.

Meanwhile a central group had reached the financial district. Harry himself saw the destruction of City Hall, and with the smashing of the seat of the city’s government, he supposed, organised resistance, what there was of it, would begin to crumble. The Woolworth Building, still the world’s tallest building nearly a decade after it was completed – nearly seven times as tall even as a fighting-machine – seemed to attract particular attention. Marigold loaned Harry her binoculars so he could see handling-machines swarming up the sides of the building, rapidly reaching its upper levels, where they began the demolition of the building floor by floor, working their way downwards, so that rubble cascaded down into the streets below.

‘It almost looks beautiful as it falls,’ Harry said. ‘Like an opening flower.’

‘They seem to have targeted it. Maybe they could see the Woolworth from Mars. They might think it has some military function.’

‘I’ve drunk coffee in there,’ Harry mourned.

‘We’ll build it again – bigger and better.’

But, after all he had seen that day, Harry wasn’t so sure.

Now the lead Martians were already approaching the southern shore, and the big military forts at the mouth of the harbour, Fort Tompkins on the New Jersey shore and Fort Hamilton on the Brooklyn firepower to the fight. But side, were adding their own Harry saw that yet another detachment of fighting-machines had walked down the Brooklyn shore and were already lashing at Hamilton with their Heat-Rays – and the weapons had the range to take on Fort Tompkins too. One fighting-machine, Harry saw, had waded out to Liberty Island, and climbed up onto the dry land. For a moment, perhaps a third the height of the statue, it rested there, and it appeared to look around at the battles underway on land and sea. Harry heard its eerie cry: ‘ Ulla! ’ Then, evidently having decided the statue was not worth the trouble of demolishing, it waded away.

Marigold touched Harry’s arm. ‘We must go. They’ll be here soon.’

‘ Ulla! Ulla!… ’

Harry imagined that same cry echoing all around the world, that terrible evening. Dazed, he allowed Marigold to take his hand and lead him to the stairs to ground level.

Eighteen hours after the Martians had first fallen on Long Island, Walter Jenkins was still at his self-constructed monitoring station in Dahlem – by his clock it was after eleven p.m. He had been sleepless for more than twenty-four hours already. He assuaged hunger and thirst with flasks of coffee and packs of biscuits, assembled before the vigil had started. And yet, he hoped, his concentration and powers of analysis had not faltered.

Walter thought he was seeing the strategy. As the cylinders had continued to fall, a rain of aluminium and fire around the world, his attention had turned from the astronomical to the geographic, from the reaches of interplanetary space to the ground. He referred frequently now to a big Mercatorprojection world map on which he had marked, in vivid red ink, the fall of each cluster as it was reported in. It was clear by now, of course, that the Martians were making landfall at local midnight, wherever they fell. He pictured those cylinders still out in space, hanging over the earth as it turned beneath them, like a stream of bullets from some tremendous machine-gun.

But those volleys had clearly been planned to land, not simply according to a geographical pattern, but at key human targets. The Martians seemed to be making for all the world’s major inhabited landmasses, from Asia to Australia. And in each assault they came down close to a key city. The first wave of dummy cylinders would smash down to sterilise the terrain, and within six hours their battle groups were out, mounting large-scale, coordinated, lightning-strike assaults on the cities and their supporting facilities, fuel stores, transport links. And, by means of this brutal decapitation of human society – wrecking capital accumulated by an industrial civilisation across centuries – it seemed the Martians might be striving to win their war quickly.

Yet it was a war Walter knew that mankind could not afford to lose. For, with the whole world smashed as England had been over the last two years – with stores depleted, manufacturing capacity gone, governments dissolving – we would not get another chance. The massacre of mankind as an independent species would be completed in this generation. And for the children of the future – like the wretches in the Martians’ cylinders – only a million years of slavery.

Walter concentrated on the immediate situation. The first landings had been scattered, at New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Peking, Bombay – one per midnight band. Now, though, in the last hour – and even as he had listened to wireless reports of the devastation of Peking – the pattern had changed, with no less than three targets at the same longitudinal meridian being selected: St Petersburg in Russia, the Ottoman capital Constantinople, and Durban in South Africa – the latter the first Martian footfall in that continent. And given the operational pattern so far, Walter could predict to the hour when the major assaults on those centres would begin: at six in the morning, local time.

Then, through his window, Walter saw a flash of green light, in the darkened sky. He glanced at a clock. In Berlin, it was midnight.

‘ Ulla! Ulla!… ’

In a strange, lonely dawn, Emre heard that eerie cry echo over Constantinople, even drowning out the muezzin calls.

Emre Sahin was, by inclination and training, a soldier, but a decade before, in the wars against the Balkan League, a Greek cannonball had neatly detached his left leg and the lower part of his right. He had been just twenty years old at the time. Now Emre had become an accidental journalist, and he would leave one of the more compelling accounts of the Martians’ action in Constantinople, for the benefit of myself and other historians.

But as it happened, in the days before the Martians came, Emre, anticipating the ending of Ramadan a few days hence, had been preparing a shadow-puppet play.

Emre had always enjoyed the end of Ramadan: the threeday celebration that followed a month of fasting, when family would visit to exchange gifts of sweets and tobacco and perfume and porcelain, and there would be happy gatherings in the coffee houses, and in the open spaces there would be a bayram, a fair with amusements for the children. And Emre, after his injury, had got in the habit of mounting shadow plays: his own adaptations of traditional stories for his nephews and nieces and their neighbourhood friends, and bawdy shows for the adults. His art was simple but his storytelling good, and the work gave him and his family a good deal of pleasure. And it had been a key part of how he had rebuilt his life.