The Massacre of Mankind

by Stephen Baxter

  The roads out of the city seemed crowded too, though she was so far away that the grandest of automobiles looked like glittering ants. She thought she heard the screech of a train whistle, almost as eerie as those unearthly cries coming from the east. Overnight, as the precise location of the Martians’ midnight landing had at last become clear, most people she knew had announced their intentions to pack up and get away. If so, where would they go? Down into the city for sure, and then out of town – mostly north, probably, towards San Francisco using the better roads and the coastal rail tracks. She wondered if the newsreel companies would have cameras out in the train stations and along the roads to catch that great American exodus, a parallel of Long Island, indeed of London twice before.

  Well, Cherie had a picture to shoot. She got her camera set up and loaded, and cranked a few frames, an establishing pan shot. And she turned to focus on Homer, squatting on the dirt ground, headphones on his ears, tinkering with his radio.

  ‘Shit,’ Homer said now.

  She frowned. He wasn’t one to swear. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘The Martians . . . I’m listening to KDZF.’ He was a radio buff. She knew that was one of his favourite stations, and, run by the Automobile Club of Southern California, one of the more authoritative. ‘Also I got a couple of the police bands.’

  ‘What about the Martians?’

  ‘They cut the aqueduct. The Owens River . . . Once they broke out of their pit, they sent a party straight over.’

  She knew about the aqueduct, a mighty canal that brought LA its water across a distance equivalent to the span between Washington, DC, and New York. A civic monument, gone, just like that. ‘They know what they’re doing, then,’ she mused. ‘They’ve cut our throats. So where are the Martians now?’

  He listened again, and his eyes grew wide. He took off the ’phones, stood, looked around, and pointed east. ‘There.’

  The fighting-machines casually walked over the crest of the hills, and paused, looking down on Los Angeles.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Homer.

  ‘Help me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Help me get the camera turned around. Feed me film. Come on, Homer, damn it! This is why we’re up here . . .’

  As she cranked the handle she watched the Martians through the camera’s small viewfinder. She saw five, six, seven of them, spreading out along the crest of the hills. She panned and zoomed, trying to catch the essence of their motion. She knew that the British soldiers who had faced the Martians back in ’07 had compared them to ‘boilers on stilts’. To an American eye they had more the look of water towers - and in fact when making his movie ten years later Griffith had draped rough mock-ups of cowls and tentacles over genuine water towers, for cheap establishing shots. But now, as the Martians moved, she saw how inappropriate those comparisons were. Huge as they were, the fighting-machines bowled gracefully along the ground, tilting, and those marvellous legs and their nests of tentacles twisted and flexed. Seen in the grey of distance they were less like machines than lithe animals, she thought now: tall, leggy animals like giraffes, passing each other as they sought good positions.

  There was a crack of thunder, coming from the bay, that made her jump. She lost the shot, the camera wavering.

  Homer grabbed her shoulder and pointed. ‘Look! The ships are firing their big guns!’

  Cherie saw puffs of smoke along the flanks of those low grey silhouettes on the ocean. She couldn’t make out the shells in flight, but soon she saw splashes of dirt on the hills held by the Martians. And again the great guns shouted, and again. The war had started.

  Homer clenched his fist. ‘Yes! Smash those devils! See, the first volley fell short, and now the second is going long – they are bracketing the foe – and with the next shots -’

  ‘If they have time,’ Cherie muttered. She hastily got her camera cranking again. The Martians were adjusting their positions, And Cherie saw them wield those terrible projectors that looked so like movie cameras, but were not. Some seemed to be firing on the incoming Navy shells, which popped harmlessly in the air. And the other Martians advanced down the hillsides, apparently oblivious to the danger of the longrange naval shots which continued to crater the ground, sparsely, all around them. She said, ‘I think -’

  Homer gasped. ‘Pan, for God’s sake. Pan. Look at the city. Look at the city!’

  She turned, still cranking. And she saw that the Martians were firing on Los Angeles. The Heat-Ray beam, as it cut in a dead straight line through the air, was all but invisible – certainly it wasn’t caught through her crude lens, and probably not on film – but its effects were all too dramatic. The city had lain still in the morning light, but now, at scattered points, buildings simply exploded into flame, and palls of smoke threaded up into the air. After a couple of minutes Cherie thought she could hear the clang of fire bells, and, perhaps, a distant screaming. But soon individual blazes were joining up – she zoomed out instinctively to capture the panorama – whole districts were already ablaze.

  ‘Jesus,’ Homer said. ‘It’s like ’Frisco after the quake. And where’s the damn Army?’

  ‘Going the way of the damn Navy, maybe.’ She pointed out to sea. One of those grey warships was burning, listing in the water.

  ‘Jesus, Jesus . . . What’s the range of that Heat-Ray?’

  ‘The English thought miles, at least. And it’s accurate. Homer, were you thinking we’d get shots of the Martians marching into downtown, the National Guard bravely holding out? They don’t need to do any of that. They can just stand on the high ground and pick us off -’

  Now there was another immense thunder this time than a tremendous detonation, less like footfall, and Cherie wondered if she felt the ground itself shake.

  Homer pointed north, excited. Huge plumes of black smoke rose up. ‘Look at that! They’re going for the oil, the refineries!’

  Again Cherie panned and zoomed.

  ‘Those aeroplanes they flew out of England,’ Homer said. ‘They went all around the world. Did their spotting pretty smart.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cherie said. ‘They know what to hit. The city will die of thirst because they cut the aqueduct, and pretty soon we won’t be able to fight back at all because there’ll be no oil.’ She looked around. ‘And they’re moving again.’

  The great machines strode through the clearing mist, heading purposefully down the slope, and now their invisible rays struck at suburbs closer by, in the lapping hills. When the Heat-Ray swept over Pasadena, Cherie turned the crank steadily as green lawns crisped and fried, and fine houses exploded like cheap props.

  Homer said, ‘We need to get out of here.’

  ‘I’m doing what we came to do, filming until we run out of stock.’

  He plucked at her sleeve. ‘Cherie -’

  ‘Load me up or leave me alone.’

  He hesitated. Then he bent to open a fresh can.

  And meanwhile, in England, I was going into battle myself.

  7

  HMLS BOADICEA

  Closeto, His Majesty’s Landship Boadicea was magnificent. But her designers must have been insane.

  That had been my overwhelming impression when I first saw her in the full morning light, as we hurried towards her with Eric Eden, commander of the craft, and the last to come on board thanks to my distraction of interplanetary communications. She was stripped of her camouflage blankets now, though her hull was painted with splashes of white, black, and light and dark green, and her form was clearly visible. She was a ship of the land indeed. Imagine a broad, low-slung body, and a command tower rising up from the heart, and heavily armoured gun turrets, two in the bow, one in the stern. The guns were Navy issue, in fact, each turret having a pair of fourinch guns on steerable platforms. And now imagine all of this lifted from the ocean and planted on the land, on a great wheeled framework – a tricycle, with two immense wheels in front and one behind. Immense, yes; each of the wheels was no less than forty feet in diameter, the height
of six adult human beings standing on each others’ shoulders; the wheels alone were big enough to look like elements of a circus ride, and wrapped around by a kind of tread with thick ridges. This was the greatest of the landships, though Boadicea was in the van of a whole fleet of lesser vessels that looked like mutated variants of the basic design, all bristling with armour and guns and caterpillar tracks. The technology was still experimental, the design not fixed, and the different vehicles, as they had emerged from the proving grounds in remote, well-concealed areas of Scotland (as I would learn), were more or less hand-crafted.

  As we ran up, many of the machines had already started their engines, and we were surrounded by a growl of mechanical noise, and plumes of exhaust, and engineers ran everywhere, servicing these behemoths even as they made ready to move off. It was as if we were waiting for the off at a race at Brooklands, and from the laughter and backslapping I saw among some of the crew and engineers, perhaps there was some of the competitive camaraderie of men who engage in such events.

  A cold part of me wondered if the Martians would be impressed.

  Eric, being Eric, observed our reactions even as we approached our ironclad. ‘Quite something, isn’t she? She’s faster on the road, of course, though she chews up the tarmac. But she makes good speed across country too, and given her size she’ll tolerate few obstacles.’

  Verity, who had a practical eye, grunted sceptically. ‘Why a tricycle? I had a trike when I was a little girl. I never imagined seeing it scaled up to this monster size!’

  Eric grinned. ‘The one rear wheel makes her easy to steer. Simple as that.’

  ‘She looks impressive,’ I gasped as we hurried to the monster. ‘But what’s to save her when the Martians offer a dose of the Heat-Ray?’

  ‘Ah.’ We had reached the machine now. With a gloved fist he rapped hard on the painted metal. ‘Under a shell of aluminium, we’ve got one of our most precious resources of all: Martian cylinder hull-metal. We’ve never managed to manufacture the stuff, so this is all stripped from the Martians’ own cylinders, as landed in Surrey fifteen years ago. Designed to protect a cylinder’s occupants as it comes hurtling into an atmosphere at interplanetary speeds, you see – not even the Heat-Ray can cut it, and teams in the universities and on the military ranges have spent years establishing that. Indeed the armour has already been tested in battle.’

  I noted he did not say where; even now Britain’s involvement in the Russian front was a secret. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.

  We came to an open port, round-cornered like a watertight door on a ship, with a short stepladder reaching to the ground. It seemed to be the only breach in the hull, save for slit windows and weapons platforms contained in sponsons, great bulges on the flank of the hull large enough to host a gunner or two. But I saw periscopes jutting out of the hull – the ‘ship’ was like a submarine in some ways, then. Eric hastily waved us aboard.

  We clambered up the ladder, each of us with undone shoelaces and leather helmets not yet on our heads. Clambered up and into the belly of the machine. It was a space we were to share with the engines, I immediately discovered, which dominated that compartment, two huge, gleaming monsters that I would learn were Sunbeams, diesel engines designed for submarines. Gigantic differentials and cross-shafts spanned the rest of the interior, delivering the motive force to the tremendous wheels we had seen. Every wall and floor surface had been painted white, and the whole was brilliantly lit with electrics – I could not see a scrap of daylight. It was a complex interior of compartments and bulkheads, and gangways and ladders to the gun turrets and the bridge tower – a cramped and cluttered space, but geometric and orderly: even the rivets were white-painted. I felt like a mouse under the bonnet of a car.

  And it was extraordinarily cluttered too, like a mobile ammunition store, with every wall fixed with racks that held shells for the big guns and bullets for the small arms. In underfloor lockers there were lodes of various specialised tools, as well as access to the vehicle’s mechanisms. In the few spaces remaining were heaps of other useful items, such as towing cables, water flasks, grease guns, protective clothing, hard hats, gas masks and goggles.

  Then the engines started up, the noise a howl in that confined space, and the whole shook and shuddered.

  ‘No room for the crew!’ Verity protested, yelling over the noise.

  ‘We find a way,’ Eric shouted back. ‘Look, don’t worry, you’re in the best possible hands; our drivers are Stern and Hetherington themselves, and it’s all their fault!’

  I could barely hear either of them. Later I would observe the crew communicating in a kind of improvised sign language, and even by slamming spanners into the pipes.

  Eden yelled, ‘Now, look, you two, make yourself useful. Julie, we’re one crew member light, so get up into this sponson – there’s a door in the hull just there, see? You can be a spotter even if you can’t work the gun; we have telephone links throughout. I’ll be up on the bridge. And, Verity –’ He moved a heap of spare clothing to reveal a first aid box, painted with a red cross on white; it was alarmingly small, I thought. ‘You’re a nurse, aren’t you?’

  ‘Just a VAD.’

  ‘Better than what we had before, which was nobody. But when the action starts, just keep out of the way! Oh, and stay away from the engine. Every surface in there gets hot enough to fry bacon . . .’

  So I clambered up into my sponson, which was a blister barely big enough for a kind of reclining chair into which I wedged myself, with the controls of a tremendous gun in front of me. With my legs up, my head bent forward on my neck, and barely able to move around the weapon, I was soon stiff and sore and increasingly uncomfortable.

  Then the landship moved forward, with a crude jerk that I imagined was something to do with the gigantic gearing, and a ferocious rattling thanks to the lack of any kind of suspension.

  We were underway! The crew cheered, and I clung on for dear life.

  8

  INTO ACTION

  Our pilots, Stern and Hetherington, were, I learned later, significant figures in the short history of landship development – I suppose we were lucky to have them aboard.

  Captain Albert Stern was a civilian given a volunteer commission, and Commander Tommy Hetherington of the 18th Hussars a dashing cavalryman with a vivid imagination. The vessel we rode, it seemed, had started life as a sketch on a napkin made by Hetherington, at a dinner with Churchill at a London club. Only Churchill, one might think, could push such mad visions to actuality. But at the time our greatest war machines had still been ocean-bound, and little use against the Martians. Churchill could see, as few others did, that this was a way of bringing that great technology to land combat.

  The great engineering concerns of the north of Britain had been involved, under the emergency government’s orders, in the development and construction of these beasts, from Metropolitan Cammell of Birmingham to Mirrless Watson of Glasgow. Churchill had taken a key interest in the project throughout, and had inspected training exercises on a military range in the Highlands, although many trials had taken place on the continent, I learned - and some of the smaller models had even been tried out in battle, in the bloody secrecy of the Germans’ Russian front.

  As we got underway I explored ways to see out of my lumbering metal prison. The simplest were my sighting slits, gaps in the hull from which I could draw back rather stiff metal covers. These gave a view out to the sides, and a limited view ahead. I had a small periscope, too, through which I got a narrow view, front and back and to the sides.

  Through these means I could see the countryside across which we rolled, and the vehicles that followed us, a fleet with ourselves at the crest: landships small and large, though none so large as us, proceeding in billows of exhaust smoke and with the soil of English fields being thrown up around their tracks, so that we left an ugly brown scar that stretched back the way we had come. The clumsy vessels reminded me of lungfish, creatures of the water crawling painfully o
ver the land. Smaller vehicles, cars and motorcycles, darted around us, and aircraft flew overhead, bright little toys in the morning sunlight, whose noise was quite drowned out by the engine roar of the advancing land armada.

  But we made progress slowly. Our own top speed off the road was only four or five miles an hour, and there were a lot of breakdowns and other delays. The cars and ’cycles could make much greater speed.

  As the journey wore on I took breaks from my small prison. Every so often I needed to bend my spine back into something resembling a natural posture. And, so that she need not leave her station, I brought Verity cups of water from a spigot that ran increasingly hot as the journey wore on.

  Hot – the whole of our living space was hot, noisy, oily, cramped and crowded, and we were jarred with every rabbit hole we crossed. The crew, wearing face masks and goggles, laboured at their engines, continually tending the clattering pistons and hissing valves. At least the air we breathed seemed fresh enough; I imagined there must be some circulation system to stop the build-up of exhaust gases. But I thought we might all melt in the rising temperatures, as that long morning wore on.

  The crew of the landship, however, despite the heat and clamour, worked steadily. They were technical, highly trained, competent, efficient young men. Despite their khaki fatigues they had the air more of Naval officers than soldiers – indeed, they called their commander ‘Captain’. They might have been tending some tremendous power generator, perhaps, as opposed to a weapon of war. I wondered if this was a vision of the war of the future, of calm young people working their precise controls and dispensing remote death. Perhaps we were becoming like the Martians after all, I thought, who made war with a similar lack of passion.

  The lavatory was a hole in the floor covered by a metal hatch. I used it once; there was no partition, but in the circumstances modesty was hardly an issue. We were dehydrated, I think, and I could not remember when we had last eaten a decent meal.