War of the Worlds

by Adam J. Whitlatch

  “This is our new Achilles Class Battle Tripod,” Kushnirov said, gesturing to the machine. “Sixty-five feet tall. A heavy machine gun and six light rockets. Heat ray with an effective range of one thousand meters, and an eighty-eight millimeter cannon on full turret.”

  As if to illustrate his point, the turret on top of the tripod swiveled.

  “Gentlemen, this is the most advanced killing machine in the history of mankind. It is more heavily armored than any previous generation of battle tripod. The new Achilles Class Battle Tripods will be the tip of the A.R.E.S. spear in the coming conflict with the Martians and will replace the current generation of Achilles. I am pleased to inform you that fifty of these new machines are ready for service. Crews have been selected to begin immediate training.”

  Kushnirov’s gaze fell on Wells. “Because of their outstanding performance in recent battle simulations, the honor of command of the first of these will go to Captain Eric Wells and his crew.”

  A soldier at the back of the room whistled loudly. “Good on ya, Captain!”

  “Don’t be shy, Captain,” Roosevelt said. At his urging, Wells and his unit rose as the secretary called their names. “I give you Captain Eric Wells from England, Lieutenant Jennifer Carter from the United States, Corporal Patrick O’Brien from Ireland, Sergeant Abraham Douglas from Canada, and Lieutenant Raja Iskandar Shah from Malaya.”

  After allowing the soldiers a moment of applause, Roosevelt addressed Wells. “Have you thought of a name for her?”

  Wells looked up at his new tripod, and his chest swelled with pride. He couldn’t help but smile. “The Goliath, sir,” he said.

  “Ah!” Roosevelt beamed and clutched his lapels. “An excellent choice.”

  “Tomorrow, you all will be divided into two equal forces,” Kushnirov said. “To further our preparations for the coming conflict, we will stage a war game. Each team will be equipped with five of the new Achilles Class Battle Tripods. Blue team will be under the command of Captain Wells. Your force will consist of British, French, Italian, American, and Indian tripods. The red team of Japanese, Korean, German, Russian, and Austrian tripods will be under the command of Captain Sakai.”

  Wells glanced at Sakai, who sat next to Richthofen. With his shaved head, black uniform, stiff posture, and stony expression, Sakai looked every bit like a modern samurai. His hands rested on the pommel of his katana, which was propped between his legs. Sakai was arrogant and dangerous, but—most importantly—he was a formidable warrior, both on the ground with a blade and at the command of a tripod.

  Tomorrow’s games would be interesting to say the least.

  “My apologies, Captain Richthofen,” Roosevelt said. “There’s a serious front moving in from the north. I’m afraid you and your flyboys will have to sit this one out.”

  Richthofen grinned. “No problem, Herr Secretary. I can assure you we’ll spend the time productively. Drinking.”

  The flyboys erupted into raucous laughter. Sakai’s brow furrowed in disapproval.

  Kushnirov’s thunderous voice cut the laughter short. “Do you think this a joke, Captain Richthofen?”

  Richthofen’s levity faded. He looked as if the general had just taken him over his knee.

  “Nothing can prepare you for war itself,” Kushnirov said. “The sound… the smell… the fear. Death is ugly. All you can do is make sure it is your enemy that dies.”

  Wells knew the truth of the general’s words all too well. Even now, fifteen years later, he could still smell his parents’ burning flesh, hear their screams, and worst of all, he could still see the hideous, diseased face of the Martian slug that had destroyed everything he ever loved. He squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to block out the haunting visions.

  Lieutenant Carter noticed his anxiety. “Captain?”

  “I’m fine,” Wells whispered.

  “So prepare yourselves,” Kushnirov said. “Know what you fight for… who you fight for. This time we will be ready.”

  The soldiers stood and cheered. Wells hoped the general was right.

  Chapter Two

  Sarajevo

  “So this is how you welcome your guests? With bombs?”

  The archduke was furious. His face was flushed, and his handlebar mustache bristled. If not for the terrible circumstances, the sight might have appeared comical to the onlookers.

  The mayor stared from the podium, his mouth agape and the sheets of paper bearing his welcome speech hung limp in his hand.

  “Well?” Franz Ferdinand shouted. “What have you to say for this… this… outrage?”

  The mayor swallowed, and struggled to find his voice. “Your Highness, I—”

  Ferdinand felt a gentle hand on his shoulder, and looked into the eyes of his beloved wife, Sophie. She leaned in and whispered in his ear, “Calm yourself, dear. You’re making a spectacle.”

  The Archduke suddenly felt every eye upon him. A nervous cough came from the back of the room. Ferdinand returned his gaze to Sophie, and nodded. He took a deep breath, sat, and gestured toward the mayor.

  “You may proceed,” he said.

  Sophie patted his hand, and Ferdinand nodded again. The mayor cleared his throat and resumed speaking, but Ferdinand did not hear it. His mind was racing. Details of the morning’s events overlapped in his mind, an impossible scramble he couldn’t hope to untangle.

  One moment, the archduke’s motorcade had been traveling along the Appel Quay. The next, a boy in the crowd had thrown a bomb into Ferdinand’s car. The explosive had bounced off the folded top, mere inches from his head, and rolled beneath the following car before it exploded. Before another attempt on the archduke’s life could be made, the motorcade sped away, leaving the police to apprehend the assassin.

  They dragged the would-be assassin out of the riverbed, where he had attempted to take his own life by cyanide capsule, but instead only managed to spill his guts into the shallow water. Luckily the boy was as inept at suicide as he was at assassination. There was no escaping justice.

  Why had there been no soldiers patrolling the motorcade route? There would be an investigation. Oh, yes. Heads would certainly roll for this inexcusable breach in security.

  The mayor finished his half-hearted welcome, and the applause stirred Ferdinand from his thoughts. The grinning fool was holding his hand out toward the archduke; it was his turn to speak. Ferdinand rose and stepped up to the podium.

  He patted his pocket and realized the speech he had prepared was missing. To his horror, Ferdinand remembered he had left it in his aide’s charge, and the man had been wounded in the other car. A policeman entered from the back of the room and walked briskly to the podium. The officer whispered something to the mayor and handed him a stack of wrinkled papers.

  Worry lines creased the mayor’s forehead as he held out the papers. “My apologies, Your Highness.”

  Ferdinand accepted the papers and immediately recognized his own flowing script, that which wasn’t covered in dark red blood, that is. The archduke felt a throbbing in his skull and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

  *****

  Ferdinand sighed. “What a mess.”

  Sophie patted his thigh and looked out as the car bounced over the cobblestones of the Appel Quay. Most of the crowd had dissipated, but a few curiosity seekers still lingered.

  Ferdinand’s hat, a garish accouterment adorned with a green plume, fluttered in the breeze. He brushed one of the feathers from his face with the back of his gloved hand.

  “We knew the risks of coming to Sarajevo,” Sophie reminded him.

  Ferdinand nodded.

  Governor Potiorek, who was riding in the front seat, turned and smiled. “There is nothing to worry about, Duchess. The assassin has been apprehended. The threat is over.”

  The archduke glared at Potiorek, and the governor’s smile faded. He faced forward.

  Ferdinand leaned to whisper in his wife’s ear. “Are you well, my dear?”

  S
ophie smiled. “I am.”

  Ferdinand touched her abdomen. “And the baby?”

  Sophie laid her hand over his. “I felt him kick this morning.”

  The archduke grinned. This bit of news was the only joy he’d felt all day.

  As soon as he returned to the hotel, he planned to dictate a stern memorandum to both his military staff and uncle. All Austrian forces were to be recalled from that ridiculous A.R.E.S. organization. Roosevelt’s insane pipedream of a Martian return was utterly preposterous. Earth didn’t need an army to protect humanity from the Martians; the germ had taken care of that.

  Martians were too weak of constitution to exist on Earth. It would be folly for them to make another attempt. No, better to ignore them. Let them wither and die on their red ball of rock.

  All around him, Ferdinand saw the Martians’ legacy. Heavy conduits snaked along the outer surfaces of nearly every structure. Occasionally, the motorcade passed an empty building that still bore the scars of the Martian invasion. Sputtering, steam-powered automobiles traversed the streets, their smokestacks leaving billowing trails behind them.

  No, he thought. The Martians and their death machines were a distant memory—a footnote in a long history of war. Roosevelt could pound desks to his heart’s content, but the motherland needed all of its troops and weapons here in Europe. They would be needed for the coming conflict with Austria’s enemies. And there would be war, sooner rather than later, the archduke surmised.

  Order needed to be restored if the empire was to endure.

  He looked to his right, where Count Harrach rode on the car’s running board. The Count had insisted on riding with the royal couple, unconvinced that the threat was over, despite Potiorek’s repeated assurances.

  “Are you comfortable, Count?” Ferdinand said, loud enough to be heard over the chugging steam engine.

  Harrach nodded. “Quite comfortable, Your Highness.”

  Ferdinand smirked. The car turned right onto Franz Josef Street.

  “No, no! What are you doing?” Governor Potiorek shouted. “You’re going the wrong way!”

  The car lurched to a halt, and the driver looked at the governor, confused. “My apologies, Governor. Are we not going to the National Museum?”

  “No,” the archduke huffed. “My wife and I wish to visit the wounded before we retire to our room. Were you not informed?”

  “No, Your Highness,” the driver said. “Apologies. I will turn back.”

  Ferdinand sat back in his seat and sighed. “Incompetence,” he said. “All around me… incompetence.”

  Sophie offered a reassuring smile.

  The car pitched into reverse, and Ferdinand saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked up and saw a young, dark-complected man striding toward the car from the doorway of a corner delicatessen.

  “What do you want?” Count Harrach demanded.

  The young man did not reply, but drew a gun from his waistband. He fired two shots. The people on the corner screamed, and one of them tackled the gunman, wrestling the pistol from his hand. The assassin reached into his pocket and raised a small capsule to his lips, but a policeman struck him on the back of the head with the pommel of his sword, and he dropped the pill.

  Potiorek leaned over the seat. “Your Highness! Are you all ri— Dear God!”

  Sophie reached for her husband. “In Heaven’s name, what has happened to you?” she cried.

  Ferdinand tried to speak, but blood sputtered from between his lips. His hand was clamped over his neck, applying pressure to a small, round wound that spurted when he lifted his stained glove.

  “Drive!” the governor shouted. “To the hotel! Quickly!”

  The driver stepped on the accelerator, but the car was still in reverse and crashed into the vehicle behind it. The sudden movement threw Sophie forward across her husband’s lap. Gears ground as the shifter found its rightful place, and finally the car surged forward, weaving between startled pedestrians. Sophie lay still, clutching her abdomen. The archduke shook her.

  “Sopherl,” he sobbed. “Sopherl, you must stay alive. You must stay alive for our children.”

  Harrach wiped the blood from Ferdinand’s mouth with his handkerchief. “Your Highness, are you in much pain?”

  Ferdinand shook his head, and fresh blood poured down his chin. “It is nothing. It is nothing. It is… noth….”

  The archduke closed his eyes and said nothing more.

  Chapter Three

  A.R.E.S.

  The mid-afternoon sun beat down upon Goliath Squad’s shoulders as they trained in the A.R.E.S. base’s central courtyard. The soldiers were divided into two groups: artillery and close-quarters combat training.

  Sergeant Douglas cradled a portable heat ray emitter in his arms. He made handling the massive weapon’s weight look easy, which the recruits under his instruction soon learned was definitely not the case. A heavy cable connected the emitter—known informally as “the Torch” among the troops—to a large backpack laden with gas cylinders and pressure valves.

  While the Torch was an effective and devastating weapon, agonizingly slow recharge times meant it had to be used sparingly and wisely; there was no room for error. In inexperienced hands, the beams had a tendency to stray, so these training sessions were crucial to instill proper respect for the weapon. For training purposes, the weapons’ intensity was lowered enough to only lightly scorch their targets, but at full power the rays could easily melt holes in the walls encircling the courtyard.

  Douglas watched the dial on his Torch crawl into the green. When the needle stopped, he pulled back the safety lever, locked it into the firing position, and leveled the weapon. Orange arcs of energy sparked along the Torch’s nozzle, and a hum filled the air.

  “Firing,” he shouted. The declaration was a regulatory formality. Nobody was foolish enough to wander anywhere near the firing range.

  Douglas squeezed the trigger, and a red-orange beam shot from the weapon’s nozzle. The heat ray sizzled through the air like lightning and struck a round target twenty-five yards away. Douglas released the trigger, slid the safety forward, and pointed the barrel skyward, letting the hot vapor drift harmlessly above him. He shielded his eyes from the sun with his left hand and smirked at the almost perfectly round scorch mark on the target.

  “Nice shot, Sarge!” one of the men commented.

  Douglas turned to the man and gestured toward the targets. “Let’s see if you can do it better, Private.”

  “You got it!” The soldier hoisted his heat ray emitter to hip level, his feet side by side, shoulder-width apart. He disengaged the safety more forcefully than necessary.

  “Hold it, Private,” Douglas said. “Finger off the trigger.”

  “What’s wrong, Sarge?”

  “Look at your feet, son,” Douglas explained. “You try to fire that weapon like that and it’ll knock you on your ass faster than you can blink.”

  Douglas lightly kicked the private’s legs until the right one was forward and his knees bent slightly.

  “A strong stance is key,” he explained. “You should be stable but loose to absorb the shock. Now give it a try.”

  The private nodded and squeezed the trigger. The beam sliced through the air and immediately strayed up and to the right. Douglas grabbed the emitter’s barrel and guided it toward the ground, leaving a charred trail in the grass before the soldier released the trigger.

  “Sorry, Sarge,” the private said.

  Douglas clapped a mammoth hand on the man’s shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, son. We’ll work on it once your weapon recharges. All right, who’s next?”

  *****

  Across the courtyard, the rest of Goliath Squad paired off, practicing with wooden practice swords called bokken. Captain Wells squared off with Lieutenant Carter while Lieutenant Shah worked with Corporal O’Brien a short distance away. Their button-downs were gone, leaving them in their sweat-soaked, red undershirts.

  Carter’s technique wa
s aggressive; she drove Wells back with long strides and hard blows. It was all Wells could do to stave off her attacks, his bokken deflecting blow after blow without seeking an opening of its own.

  “Fight back, damn you,” Carter snarled. Her sword came down in a diagonal arc.

  Wells blocked the attack, and their bokken connected with a resounding crack. “I am!”

  “Don’t lie to me!” Carter went low and swept her sword in a horizontal arc aimed for Wells’ waist.

  Wells blocked the strike awkwardly, but quickly brought his sword up and around. The bokken came down from his right shoulder, and the blade stopped an inch from Carter’s neck. Their eyes met. For a moment, Wells found himself lost in those sapphires.

  It was all Carter needed.

  Suddenly the fire returned to her eyes, and she kicked, sweeping his back leg out from under him. Wells landed hard on his backside and the sword fell from his grip. When he looked up, Carter stood over him, her blade at his throat.

  She grinned and offered a hand. “Again?”

  *****

  “Stand still, you wanker,” O’Brien shouted. He swung his bokken in a downward, overhead arc, but his smaller, more agile opponent sidestepped the attack and smiled.

  “Think, my overly aggressive Irishman,” Shah said. “Wouldn’t that be foolish of me?”

  O’Brien’s swings became increasingly erratic as he lumbered about trying to swat the nimble Malay like a bug. Shah stepped into O’Brien’s range, deflected a strike aimed for his head, and drove the pommel of his bokken into the Irishman’s gut.