Scarlet Traces: An Anthology Based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds

by Edited by Ian Edginton

  But there was more than that in the automated logs, and it was stuff that Bea had been looking at, as I could tell from notes she had made. Feeds from deep space. Even sightings of other ships, other transports, that at first baffled me.

  The navigation was my priority, though. And as soon as I thought I had found us a route, I asked Travers to come over to review my solution.

  “You see, sir, I’m thinking of using this wadi here. Dry as a bone according to the maps, but it curls around the Shackleton crash site, missing by about ten miles, and then—”

  “Straight back to the Marineris compound. That’ll do. Pot and kettle stowed away, Newman? Let’s get on with it. Make ready, Driver.”

  “Sir.” I went back to my own station, and the others settled in.

  Off we buggered. It took only minutes to reach the wadi I’d spotted; it was a deep, narrow channel, dry as a bone, that looked just as useful on the ground as from the air.

  But as I drove down the slope, Travers strolled over to my station.

  “Very good,” he murmured. “And now we’re underway, Driver, perhaps we could discuss what else you were looking up at the Engineer’s station.”

  I felt my jaw drop. How could he have seen? That’s officers for you. Mystical powers.

  And I was aware of Bea Currie watching us closely.

  I took a breath. “It’s just this, sir. We picked up a lot of traffic from space, before our antennae got burned off. It’s all in the logs. There are more heavy transports out there. Like the Shackleton.”

  He frowned. “More inbound? Hadn’t heard of that.”

  “Not inbound, sir. Outbound. These ships are leaving Mars. And they have been trying to ping Olympus Dock as they went, which was what the MEV picked up.” I showed him a list I had scribbled. “See, there’s the Bonaventura, the Gloucester, the York... I know that a single Shackleton-class transport can despatch a whole division. Nearly five hundred MEVs, three armoured brigades, a support group, an infantry division, Hussars. But, sir, if three ships, at least, are leaving Mars—why, they must have lifted a couple of days before we even arrived—then most of the MEF must already have been withdrawn.”

  He was stiff for a minute, silent. I could see his curiosity and loyalty to his crew battling with his drive not to admit that he didn’t know what the hell was going on. “And you say all this information was already in the log when you sat down at the station?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He turned to Bea Currie. “So, Engineer. Care to enlighten us why you have been monitoring these departures? And you didn’t think to report this to me? How, indeed, you even knew to look?”

  Currie was silent for a moment. Then she grinned, rueful. Her manner changed too, her posture. As if she was relaxing, subtly.

  “Well, sir. I suppose it had to come out sometime. I’m—well, I’m not all I may seem. And I have sources of information which—”

  “Get to the point.”

  She sighed, and glanced at Charlie Newman. “Frankly, sir, I thought it was kinder if you didn’t know. But now you’ve caught me out by snooping at my station—thanks, Simms!—Captain, have you ever heard of Galahad?”

  V

  UNCHARACTERISTICALLY, PAUL TRAVERS hesitated. He admitted, “I have not.”

  Nor had I, in fact.

  “You will. The whole of Mars will, soon—the whole solar system. It’s the finish, you see, sir. When the last tail-ender is bowled out, as you would probably put it. Which is why, I suppose, they gave this cover operation the code name ‘Stumps’.”

  “The finish. You’re saying they’re going to exterminate the Martians altogether.”

  “If it works, yes. So they’ve taken off the MEF, or most of it—not needed any more, you see? Not here. Not anywhere, actually,” and she said that with a chill.

  I listened with only a fraction of my attention, because I was having to concentrate on the driving. That convenient wadi of mine was turning out to be littered with obstacles. The ground was peculiar for one thing, covered in chunks of slippery, translucent stone: stuff that looked as if it had been heated to very high temperatures.

  And on the wadi floor, and on natural shelves on the walls, there were odd rock formations.

  They looked like coils of twisted rope, but huge. Some of the ‘rope’ might have been four, five feet in diameter. I was no geologist, but I’d seen a fair variety of terrain during my training on Earth, and I’d seen nothing like this. I kept my distance.

  Meanwhile the interrogation of Bea Currie continued.

  Gunner Newman sounded baffled and alarmed. “They evacuated the MEF, did they? So what about us? We only just got here.”

  “A rear-guard, that’s all we are, Charlie. Just here to hold the line until Galahad is unleashed. All to distract the Martians from the real strategy.” She sighed. “I knew all this. I did think it kinder not to tell you, frankly. What good does it do to know? And as for my work at the station, I was just confirming the elements of the operation I could detect: the outgoing transports, the incoming weapons platforms... Call it curiosity. But it’s all true, I’m afraid.” And now that callousness in her came out. “You’re a Judas goat, Charlie. That’s all. Or a night watchman in the cricket, if you like. You’re just supposed to keep your wicket until the final session of play.” She laughed.

  “You cold sod,” Newman said bitterly. “What are you, a splice?”

  “That’s enough of that, trooper,” Travers said sharply.

  That was fair enough. I knew that the officers stamped down hard on morale-killing rumours of ‘splices’, Martian-manufactured, germ-resistant humanoid simulacra supposedly hidden among us.

  But Travers went on, “On the other hand, Currie, by your own admission, you aren’t all you seem. Or even what it said you were on your despatch papers.”

  I had to look up at that. “What, you mean she’s Scottish, sir?”

  Travers looked startled.

  Currie laughed.

  And Newman, looking out through his own sights, cried, “Look out!”

  I SNAPPED MY attention back to my driving.

  We were approaching another of those coiled formations, though with plenty of clearance, but I diverted right even so.

  Travers returned to his station and looked through his periscope. “Damn peculiar. What is that? It looks like toothpaste pushed out of a tube somebody sat on. Some kind of lava feature? We are close to Olympus after all. Perhaps a meteor shower punctured a carapace of rock over some lava bed, which—oozed.”

  I glanced over at Newman. “Why the alarm, Charlie? We’re missing the nearest of them by a long way.”

  He was wide-eyed. “It’s not that. I think it moved. That big bugger straight ahead. It looked like, like an adder I saw once. That was all coiled up too. Until it uncoiled.”

  We looked at each other. Drove on in silence.

  Then, apparently on impulse, Currie snapped a switch, connecting up external microphones. They worked, to my surprise.

  We heard a scrape of rock on rock.

  “Uncoiling,” Newman breathed. “Told you so.”

  I glanced back at Travers. “Your orders, sir?”

  He made a chopping motion with his hand. “Straight on. Driver, keep your speed steady if you can. But stay away from those things.”

  So we drove on, into the valley of the rock snakes.

  “ALL RIGHT, CURRIE,” Travers murmured. “While we’re enjoying this nice drive in the country, and assuming you’re not going to slit our throats with a haggis any time soon—”

  “A haggis is a foodstuff, sir.”

  “Never mind bloody haggis. Tell me more. Tell me how it is I come to have a jock under my command.”

  “Yeah, you don’t sound it,” Newman said bitterly, as if he had been personally duped.

  “One learns to keep it quiet, if one wants to get on. Look, sir—my story is unexceptional, except for the generosity of one man. An Englishman at that.

  “My fa
mily come from Glasgow. We had been doing fine until the changes came.” She glanced at Travers. “The Martian technologies, sir—”

  “I do know my history, Engineer.”

  “Aye, but you didn’t live it.” And again she sounded Scottish to me. Ye didnae live it. “By the time I was born, and then little James, there was no money. So my elder sister Katie responded to an advertisement in the papers, for domestic service down south. A lot of girls like her went down that way. For a few weeks it went well, she wrote home and sent money. But then she fell silent.

  “Look, I was only a kid. Five years old when she disappeared. Katie had always looked after me and Jimmy. I don’t know what happened to her, and probably never will. But, next thing I knew, a man called Robert Autumn—old soldier apparently and friend of my uncle Archie’s—was sending us money, enough to keep food on the table and even to send me and James through decent schools, and to college. For him, Greyfriars and St Cedds, Cambridge. For me, Sterndorf and Lonsdale, Oxford.”

  “Oxford.” Newman snorted. “Where you picked up the plummy accent.”

  “If you like. I learned to hide, I suppose. Wouldn’t you?” She touched her red hair. “I even dyed this mop, for a while. But then I grew to resent it all.”

  “Rock tube,” I said, focussing on my driving. “Another dead ahead. Most of them have been up on the wadi walls. This one is right in front of us.” And I would have sworn it hadn’t been there earlier, but didn’t say so.

  “Find a way round if you can,” Travers said mildly. “I can guess what came next. Lonsdale, eh? Always a nest of deviants. Recruited you there, did they? The PCM, or a similar resentful cabal.”

  I slowed, edging forward. The damn tube looked too wide to bypass. I looked for ways to climb the valley walls a little, could see none.

  “Something like that,” Currie said. “I was—receptive. I don’t deny that. But I chose the military as a career, and it wasn’t just so I could learn how to blow up the BBC. It was partly a lack of options, for a girl from north of the border, despite Oxford and the rest. All right, I fudged my paperwork. Wouldn’t you? And besides—look, sir, you don’t have to believe me, but I thought I had a duty to fulfil. With the Martians, it’s them against humanity, isn’t it? When I was a bit younger I was something of an idealist, I think. I imagined that if the Martian threat was removed, then the world, the human world, could recover. Become a kinder place.” She snorted. “That was before I got to know the English.

  “Well. Next thing you know I was assigned to your MEV team, sir, and the Shackleton expedition, and here I am. That’s what comes of an excess of duty, and being too bloody good at the job.

  “Look—the only useful thing that came out of my dubious background is an information network. And that’s how I know about Galahad, which—”

  “Sir,” I cut in. “I can’t get around that rock tube, ahead. We either go back.”

  “Or?”

  “Or blow it up.”

  Travers shrugged. “Gunner, you heard the lady.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I SLOWED THE MEV to a crawl.

  Newman leaned into his sight.

  We fell silent.

  I felt—we all felt—the recoil as the forward cannon fired.

  Charlie was a fine gunner. He got that curl of rock square, and it burst into fragments that flew up and away, and when the dust had cleared I could see the way through easily.

  “Good work, Newman,” I murmured. “Here we go...” I concentrated on the path ahead, avoiding the chunks of debris that littered the floor. And then—

  “Driver, back,” Travers called urgently from his station. “Back up, back, back.”

  I obeyed reflexively; I reversed the gears and we hurtled backward, and I switched to my own rear-view periscope. “Sir? What’s the problem?”

  “Just drive. Back, back...”

  I hadn’t seen it, you see. Seen them. Before, I’d been focussing on the obstacle ahead, and now I was looking straight backward.

  Hadn’t seen the other rock tubes, arrayed on the wadi walls to either side of us, rise up. Uncoiling, with more of that rasp of rock on rock transmitted through Currie’s microphones. All in response to Charlie’s shot, apparently.

  Uncoiling until they towered, fifty or sixty feet high, perhaps. Swaying a little. Just like snakes rising from a charmer’s basket. As if alive.

  I hadn’t seen the nearest of the rock tubes open a single, huge red eye. Didn’t see a mouth like a cavern gape wide.

  But now I saw it.

  And I saw a tongue of flame erupt from its mouth, a flamethrower directed straight at the MEV. It splashed over us, with a fierce light that flared through the ports.

  I kept reversing as fast as I could without slamming the MEV into the wadi walls, dodging, trying to evade the flames, to present the thickest cahelium shield to the incoming fire.

  Now Travers called, “More of them! All around us. More of these bally flamethrowers. Return fire, Gunner. Driver, get us out of here as quick as you like.”

  He was right. The narrow valley was alive with the rock tubes now, glistening towers writhing against the crimson sky. All of them were firing at us, bathing us in flame, no matter how many of them Newman shot up. And no matter how I dodged I couldn’t turn our thickest shields into the fire for long enough to protect us.

  “We’re actually on fire,” Currie said, wondering. “The outer hull. Even though there’s barely any oxygen in the miserable air out there.”

  “Something else,” Charlie said, his voice tight. “The big one, the first one that fired, dead ahead of us. A different weapon, I think.”

  Still trying to reverse us out, I dared to glimpse. I saw that big monster rise even taller, and something glowing golden pushed out of its mouth. It vomited a coherent, football-sized mass of flame.

  A mass that came straight at us. It made a rushing noise, like a jet.

  “Driver! The shielding!”

  I wrenched at my joystick, pounded the foot pedals, trying to position the MEV.

  It wasn’t enough. I had been slow to react, as Travers had picked up. Which I will always regret.

  Because that big globe of fire got past our thickest shield and smacked directly into the hull, before the Gunner’s position. I saw it burn through the toughened glass of the ports—through cahelium-hardened hull plate—and we were breached. Air howled, escaping into the Martian cold.

  Then transparent partitions slammed down around the Gunner’s position, trapping Charlie like a wasp in a jar. The fire blew itself out, leaving droplets of some golden substance scattered over the deck, burning their way into the fabric. The Gunner’s position had been wrecked—but Charlie was still alive, lying gasping on the floor, inside the pressure partitions, breathing in nothing but thin Martian air, and smoke. Horribly burned.

  Travers came to life. “Keep backing up, Driver. When we’re safe, park us up. Easy suits closed up, please. Engineer, get those partitions removed.

  “Bring our man out.”

  We got on with it.

  VI

  ONCE THE CABIN was more or less operable again, I drove us on in the direction of Marineris Base, avoiding my treacherous wadi, but sticking to cover where it was available.

  Charlie’s wounds were terrible, from what I glimpsed. Nose and both ears gone. One hand burned off, the other crippled.

  Yet Bea tended to him.

  “You’ve got yourself a Blighty one there, lad. Well played.”

  “Yes, Corporal. My mother.”

  “I’ll tell her. I’ll make sure she’ll know all about what you did. They’ll all know. You’ll get the Military Cross for this, Newman.”

  “Don’t want them giving it to the wrong bugger then, Corporal.”

  “No, we don’t. I have your payroll...”

  That was the last I heard them say to each other.

  AFTER THE BODY was wrapped up, Currie returned to her seat.

  In his own station, Traver
s mused a while, pipe in hand. We had learned not to interrupt him when he was in this mood.

  At length he said, “You don’t make close friends in this business, you know. I missed Tharsis Ridge, but I fought at Phaethontis, and Phlegra, and Trivium. And now here. As time goes on, the friends you make during training tend to disappear, one by one. And you don’t cultivate new friendships because they may not last...”

  He fell silent.

  At length Bea said, “But there’s always the team. Isn’t there, sir?”

  “Yes, Corporal. There’s always that.”

  I drove on.

  WHILE THE COUNTRY was quiet, Currie tried to work out what had hit us.

  The residue of that golden football had mostly burned its way out through the MEV, just as it had burned its way in, and it was just as well for us the hull was made of damage-resistant, self-healing materials. But, it seemed, the stuff had left a few fragments behind, or at least traces, enough for Currie to do some analysis.

  “It’s some kind of new substance, as far as I can tell, sir. New to science, I mean. Radioactive, in a way. Half-life of about seventeen days. But it’s enormously energetic. And extremely dense—too dense.”

  I muttered, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, it has densities associated with the core of a planet, rather than surface rocks. Of course here on Mars we aren’t far from the site of Planet V...”

  Travers grunted. “One thing I have learned is that there is a great deal about Mars that we have yet to discover, or understand. But we have done rather more warrin’ than explorin’.” He grinned at that thought, a wolfish expression.