The Massacre of Mankind

by Stephen Baxter

  But now, too, he saw explosions of a different kind in the water along the flanks of the ships in the line – detonations, spouts. Of course it was the Heat-Ray, all but invisible except where it struck. When it hit the ocean it caused the very water to flash to steam, explosively, in great volumes.

  ‘Closer than we thought,’ the rating muttered. ‘They can see us.’

  And then the Martians, standing on Dogger Bank, found their range.

  A beam hit a vessel only a couple ahead of the Invincible in the line, licking it almost lovingly. Everything the beam touched flashed to flame or melted or exploded - the ship’s hull, the superstructure. Soon the ship was wrapped in smoke and steam, its armoured hull plate cracked and crumpled, its funnels gashed and falling and spewing smoke and steam. As the ship began to list - less than a minute after the first strike - Eden saw men throwing themselves desperately into the water, some only to be boiled alive if they entered the cauldron stirred by the Heat-Ray. The deck of the next ship in the line already swarmed with men trying to reach those in the water with ropes and belts, even as the battle continued.

  The doomed ship’s heavy armour had given it barely any protection. And the Invincible was a battle cruiser, Eden remembered, with thickness of armour deliberately sacrificed for speed and manoeuvrability. Before the Martians, the human vessels looked horribly primitive, slow and lumbering, the smoke billowing from their stacks a symbol of their wretched crudeness. Yet each of those wallowing tubs carried over a thousand crew. Eden felt naked and exposed.

  But the battle, once joined, continued. Still the shells poured down onto the Martian position. The rating had hold of a pair of binoculars now, and claimed he could see the brazen cowls of the Martians – ‘A whole flock of ’em,’ he claimed. ‘And one down! And another!’

  But even as the Martians defended themselves against the incoming hail of shells, those bronze cowls twisting this way and that, one ship after another in the line was maimed by the HeatRay. One ship simply disappeared in a huge detonation, out of which tremendous components came wheeling, cast by the residual spin of smashed turbines. There could be no survivors of such an end, Eden realised.

  The rating said grimly, ‘That’s bad, if the Martians are working it out. Hit the magazine and a ship like this will go up like a Guy Fawkes firework . . .’

  And the Heat-Ray touched the Invincible.

  Looking down, Eden saw thick armour below his position crumpling like paper in an invisible fist – as if by magic, as if from no tangible cause – and fragments, white-hot, dripped into water that boiled. Eden heard screams now, and men tumbled like toys into the water. He braced for the detonation that would kill him – but the ship, shuddering, limped on.

  The Minotaur rating slapped his shoulder. ‘You any kind of doctor, sir?’

  ‘A nurse, maybe.’

  ‘Come with me, then.’

  Eden found himself hurrying down a gangway to an enclosed chamber that, he quickly learned, was used as a ‘distributing station’ during battle. Here the wounded were brought as fast as they could be gathered, sorted by a kind of rough triage, and then treated by medical officers in their white coats before being carted off to rest areas deeper in the ship.

  Eden was needed here. He helped as best he could, lugging the wounded, carrying supplies, even wrapping bandages tight around a splinted broken arm. The flow of the injured was relentless, bewildering. He would tell me, much later, that the experience had taught him a greater respect for battlefield medics – for Frank, for instance. Even to continue to function in such conditions, to think – to make one life-or-death decision after another, over and over – seemed heroic to him.

  But it was hellish not to be able to follow the battle. There were no portholes, no way to see what was going on, but Eden could hear the explosions all around, the guns still firing, a rougher roar that was the effect of the Heat-Ray hitting the water, and bangs and shudders all around the ship, which was starting to list, ominously.

  Afterwards he would have found it hard to say how long he served in that station, racked throughout by a sense of imminent doom; it might only have been minutes, or perhaps half an hour. Compared to the muddy chaos of a land battle, he had always thought of naval warfare as a rather remote, abstract affair – not like this.

  Then, though the noise of the battle did not cease, he heard cheering from above decks. Eden was between patients, and curiosity burned – more than curiosity, a desire to know if he was likely to live or die. With a stab of guilt he broke away, promising himself his absence would be brief, and scrambled up a gangway to the deck.

  Up there, still the air was alive with the whistle of shells, and the sea churned with the wreckage of ships. He managed to find his Northumbrian rating. ‘There!’ The man pointed across a stretch of ocean where still the shells rained. ‘There!’ he cried, over the continuing roar of the Invincible’s own guns.

  And Eden saw it, a line of low shadows on the northern horizon, grey in the mist, the smoke stacks high, the guns sparking. Fire, all along the horizon; it was an astonishing sight.

  ‘That’s the Grand Fleet out of Scapa! The dreadnoughts! Now those Martians will be sorry, you see!’

  But then the Heat-Ray found another of the battle-cruisers of the Invincible’s line. There was a vast explosion, and the ship seemed to burst, and then implode, and she was gone.

  From my yacht, we heard thunder in the north, and saw flashes – they must have been dying ships. But we saw no ships, or Martians.

  I learned that some thirty per cent of our convoy’s Navy escort was lost in the action, but only five per cent of the passenger ships. The loss to the Martians was unknown. This kind of loss was typical. But still the passage of people and goods across the oceans continued. I myself sailed far south of the battle zone and towards England, without incident.

  7

  A LANDING AT THE WASH

  Once safe from the perils of the high seas our convoy broke up, with the larger cargo vessels making for the great ports of the south and east coasts, while the military vessels made for their own home ports. As for my party, we came into the Wash at last, where, close to the shore, a fleet of fishing smacks and the like was waiting to greet us, a mirror of the arrangement at the Frisian coast. With Lieutenant Gray, Sergeant Lane and a small mob of other victims, I and my rucksack were loaded once more into the foul bilge of a fishing vessel, and we had to endure another tortuous journey through the shallow sandbanks that all but choke that tremendous bay. It was evening by now, and how our skipper - a crusty old salt with a beard like Martian snow - navigated us through it all to the lights of the shore I don’t know; we heard curses and the ringing of bells coming from the dark as others of our scattered fleet ran aground. But make it we did, and I was relieved to have my feet back on solid ground once more.

  We were, I discovered, in the estuary of the Great Ouse and not far from King’s Lynn. Motor-cars painted a dull military green waited here, and Gray quickly went to commandeer one to transport me onwards. Sergeant Lane had his own unit to find, but he waited with me politely while Gray tried to sort things out.

  The driver, however, insisted on checking over my own papers and identification. I quickly discovered that a passport was no longer sufficient documentation to allow a subject of His Majesty to set foot on English soil, and there was something of a stand-off as Gray debated with the driver. ‘Damn it!’ he said. ‘I never thought of that.’

  The driver was a woman, perhaps forty, smartly uniformed, competent, apologetic. She looked me over and grinned. ‘Well, you don’t look terribly dangerous, ma’am. I’m allowed to transport one prisoner under guard. I’ll have to check that rucksack, though. And I’ll need another warm body in the back with her – in addition to yourself, Lieutenant.’

  Gray sighed. ‘Very well. Sergeant Lane?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You’re volunteered. Now let’s get aboard this jalopy and make for the bright lights of King’s Lynn
. . .’

  Lane complied with a grin. ‘Better than the barracks. First round’s on me, Miss,’ he muttered to me as he clambered into the car.

  We spent a night in the town, of which I saw very little.

  Gray and Lane, I learned, spent some of the evening at the cinema, where they saw The Kaiser’s Lover, a Hollywood drama of the early days of the Schlieffen War, with screen stars mugging between footage of the actual events. And from the look of my companions the next morning, they appeared to have stayed up long after the show was over. As we boarded the train I teased them. ‘Gave the film a thorough critique, did we, gentlemen?’

  Gray grunted. ‘Film – balderdash – I don’t remember any bally Americans saving Paris single-handed.’ The train lurched into motion and he blanched.

  Lane laughed. ‘Looks like it’s not just wartime memories coming back to you, sir.’

  ‘Oh, hold your peace, man, and enjoy your day off.’

  ‘Right you are, sir.’

  We headed south-west through Peterborough and Northampton towards Oxford, where we would change. Our route passed well to the north and west of the Martians’ Cordon. Though Martian forays outside the Cordon were rare, they did occur, and no part of mainland Britain was entirely immune from attack. You could see the response, the camouflage colours roughly splashed over buildings, rail tracks, even telephone lines clumsily concealed – and few vehicles moving anywhere, for the Martians targeted mechanical transport. Of course a skimpy layer of camouflage would not deter a determined Martian – they could detect the heat of a concealed engine, for instance – but their machines were few, Britain a comparatively large island, and they did not check everything, and such precautions were worthwhile.

  There were stops too at places I did not recognise. One striking location was a sprawl of what appeared to be hastily thrown-up barrack blocks, hutments of wood or concrete panels or even corrugated iron, which must have been hideously uncomfortable in the summer. These blocks were set out in grid systems. The Union Jacks flying everywhere, and a perimeter of dug-in artillery pieces, made me think of a military camp; on the other hand a handful of children playing in a desultory way in a meadow close to the small rail station reminded me of a holiday village – like Caister Camp in Norfolk, where George, Alice and I had spent a brief holiday in the year before the First War.

  The rail stop had no name.

  ‘What is this place?’

  Gray was half-dozing. ‘Umm? What time is it?’ He glanced at a pocket timetable. ‘Camp A-One-43, I should think, if we’re on schedule.’

  ‘Camp? I see children playing.’

  Lane said, ‘You have been away a while, haven’t you, Miss? This is a Winstonville – that’s what the Cockneys call ’em.’

  ‘Oh. A refugee camp.’

  ‘Rather more than that,’ Gray said. ‘It’s a functioning township, with shops and doctors’ surgeries and schools and chapels, all thrown up in the blink of an eye. One of dozens, if not more - they label them by the road-numbering system, you see . . .’

  I was familiar with the general idea. All of this was a consequence of the unending Martian threat to London. There were still millions trapped in the capital, and a significant percentage of our national resource was spent on provisioning the Londoners, trying to enable their escape, and catering for refugees.

  London had always been more than a sink of people, however. It had been at the centre of Britain’s economic activity, as a financial centre, a port, even as a manufacturing centre – the Woolwich Arsenal alone, now smashed and burned out, had been our most significant munitions factory. After the Martians struck we needed a national reorganisation, and for better or worse that was what we got. So the other ports of Britain, from Hull to Harwich, Southampton to Liverpool, were now taking cargo that had once unloaded in London, and vast new transport networks, camouflaged against Martian attack, were being thrown down. And new manufactories of all kinds were being set up across the country, with the aid of loans from the Germans and Americans and others. Huge areas of the north of England had been torn up and transformed into giant open-cast mines for the ores, readily available, that now yielded aluminium with the Martian process. But there were the usual mutterings of profiteering; even with the Martians for company, the rich got richer and the poor poorer.

  The government system had been shaken up too. Much power had been devolved to regional governors under Lloyd George, now the Prime Minister. (Marvin was long gone, dead at the hands of the Martians, after a foolish advance that he, shamed by Churchill’s example, had insisted on leading in person against a Martian foray in 1921.) The royal family was still ensconced in Delhi, and from the beginning I had heard nothing but pleasure from the people that the King, at least, was safe.

  ‘Winstonvilles, though?’

  Gray eyed me. ‘I take it you know that Churchill is Governor of London – of that region of the country, as it’s been carved up by the government in exile in Bamburgh. Not that those field guns would be much protection if a Martian were to take a dislike to one of them. He thinks in big, bold strokes, and these refugee communities are one of his ideas.’

  ‘A bit of a lad,’ Lane said, grinning. ‘Good old Winston.’

  At Oxford we changed trains at a brand new station, in an industrial belt that now appeared to encircle the historic core of that university city. It was early afternoon, but I thought the air was odd, with a kind of electrical tang to it – like sniffing ozone at the sea side – and a peculiarly greenish tint to the air brought back unwelcome memories. I wondered what was being manufactured in these great new factories, with their Marstainted technologies.

  I was relieved to board the connecting train, which would take us directly south through Southampton to Portsmouth. When we passed through Abingdon, Gray said we were about as close to the Chilterns, and the Martian Cordon, as we would get. All along the train, I saw as it followed a wide bend in the track, faces were pressed to the glass, staring out to the east in awe and trepidation. But of the Martians I saw nothing – not that day.

  8

  IN PORTSMOUTH

  In Portsmouth at last, we were met off the train by a despatch rider with revised orders. I was to first report, not to HMNB Portsmouth, the Navy base, as I had expected, but to a military hospital outside the city. Gray accepted this change of circumstance with a kind of cheerful resignation; indeed he seemed pleased to have a grain of fresh evidence of the caprice of command.

  As a car was found for me, I made my clumsy goodbyes to Sergeant Lane – his given name was Ted, he vouchsafed to me now.

  ‘It’s been a pleasure, Miss. But I’ll have to call my unit and find out if I’m still to make my way to Harwich. Probably another train ride, and paid for out of my own pocket. And me a veteran of the eastern front.’

  ‘Criminal,’ I said.

  ‘Ain’t it, though?’

  Gray was eyeing him speculatively. ‘Well now, look, Sergeant. You know that my mission is to escort Miss Elphinstone here across London and all the way into the Martian Cordon. And you know about as much about that as I do. Why don’t you hang around for the evening? I could make a couple of phone calls, get you transferred pro tem. Unless there are duties for which you are absolutely essential elsewhere.’

  Lane rubbed his chin and glanced north, the direction the Martians lay. ‘Hmm. A veteran of the eastern front, and now into the Martian pit. Not many men can say that, can they, sir?’

  ‘I wouldn’t imagine so.’

  ‘And it is your round.’

  ‘Let’s get Miss Elphinstone settled first . . .’

  The Queen Alexandra hospital, a sprawl of red-brick buildings that dated to before the First Martian War, was outside the city, a short tram-ride if you hadn’t got a military chauffeur as I had. They were expecting me at reception – and I was surprised to be met there by Marina Ogilvy, wife of the astronomer at Ottershaw. It was an awkward encounter; in my surprise I struggled for a moment to recognise her.r />
  A brisk matron took charge, and led me to a private room. Marina came with me. En route I got a glance into a ward; I saw men evidently badly burned, cocooned in bandages, or with obvious respiratory problems. This was the kind of injury you came to expect from contact with the Martians, if you survived at all. We were a long way from the front line of the Second Martian War here; this was the first set of casualties I had seen since leaving England two years before, but it would not be the last.

  At my room the matron told me I faced a series of injections - ‘Your friend can stay with you.’ The area within the Martian Cordon was quarantined, I was told. Though attempts were made to maintain supplies and otherwise support those trapped, there had been reports of such war-zone horrors as cholera and the typhoid, and I was to be inoculated as best as possible. ‘And you will be given other vaccines of a more experimental nature,’ the nurse told me vaguely. ‘It’s all quite routine.’

  That last was, as it turned out, my first encounter with the Lie. But I felt no alarm at the time. One trusts nurses!

  After the injections were done I lay on a bed, sleeves rolled up, and while we were alone briefly, I spoke with Marina. ‘I do apologise for not recognising you back there.’

  She smiled tiredly; she was a woman who had always seemed tired, in my recollection of her. ‘Oh, don’t be. It was my husband who had the famous face after all.’

  ‘I suppose I understand why they called on you. In the First War your husband was among the first to try to communicate peacefully with the Martians -’

  ‘The first in the war to lose his life, along with Professor Stent and the rest, silly fools all.’

  ‘Perhaps. But their motive was a good one, wasn't it? And now here we are attempting contact again.’

  ‘You’re right, of course. I think I’m here to attach a kind of legitimacy to the enterprise. I’m a symbol of my husband. Silly fool,’ she said again, savagely. ‘I heard that Lady Stent, the Astronomer Royal’s widow, refused to have anything to do with it. But that may be just rumour. Few people refuse their duty these days.’