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

by Edited by Ian Edginton

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  abaddon@rebellion.co.uk

  First published in 2019 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Publishing Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith

  Editors: David Thomas Moore,

  Michael Rowley and Kate Coe

  Design: Sam Gretton, Oz Osborne and Gemma Sheldrake

  Marketing and PR: Remy Njambi

  Cover Art by Gemma Sheldrake.

  All stories copyright © 2019 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Publishing Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-230-2

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  SCARLET TRACES

  AN ANTHOLOGY BASED ON H. G. WELLS'

  WAR OF THE WORLDS

  EDITED BY IAN EDGINTON

  INTRODUCING STORIES BY

  STEPHEN BAXTER & ADAM ROBERTS

  EMMA BEEBY • I. N. J. CULBARD • MAURA MCHUGH

  JAMES LOVEGROVE • JONATHAN GREEN • MARK MORRIS

  NATHAN DUCK • DAN WHITEHEAD • CHRIS ROBERSON

  & ANDREW LANE

  Introduction, Ian Edginton

  Going Up the Blue, Stephen Baxter

  Something Sweet in the Superstitions, I. N. J. Culbard

  The Martian Waste Land, Adam Roberts

  The Menagerie, Emma Beeby

  The Adventure of the Wheezing Man, James Lovegrove

  Voice for a Generation, Nathan Duck

  Spitting Blood, Mark Morris

  The Alarmist, Dan Whitehead

  Last Shot, Chris Roberson

  The Mechanical Marionette Mob, Maura McHugh

  Wonderful Things, Jonathan Green

  Red Frame, White Heat, Andrew Lane

  For Jane, Connie, Seth and Corinthia.

  My own little solar system.

  The Small Matter of Mars

  an introduction, by

  IAN EDGINTON

  LET ME TAKE you back to the mid-nineteen-seventies when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, punk was a four-letter word and the shops shut on Wednesday afternoons. This was also the era when we had only three television channels and social networking meant meeting your mates up the park. I was in my early teens; I contracted glandular fever and was off school for several months. Weeks of boredom beckoned until I was rescued by my local library. My mum would run sorties into the stacks bringing back Sherlock Holmes, Triffids, John Carter, Tarzan, Count Dracula, the occasional Cthulhu. Best of all she bought me Martians—both the Ray Bradbury and the H.G. Wells kind. While I appreciated Mr Bradbury’s take on the Red Planet’s inhabitants, it was the bloodthirsty other sort who really struck a chord; I think it was because I had to go the hospital every two weeks to have blood drawn so they could monitor my condition that gave me an affinity for the exsanguinating aliens.

  There was something else that appealed to me though, in The War of the Worlds: there wasn’t a hero. No brilliant detective or lord of the apes. Wells’ protagonist was an everyman—he had a day job. He wasn’t always at the centre of the action, but we saw the world though his eyes, the chaotic horror and terrible mundanity of war. As I read and re-read the story, I began to peel back the layers, to peer under the bonnet at the story-telling mechanics beneath. It was only when I was older did I realise that it was also a commentary on empire and imperialism; how technologically advanced nations predate on others for their land and resources. Even today, Wells’ story still resonates as his narrator is undeniably a refugee, driven from his home by war as his country burns all around him.

  In all the times I read the story, I had one nagging question: “What happened to all of the Martian technology after the war?” It wasn’t until a decade or so later (and I had embarked on a burgeoning career as a comic book writer) that comic book artist Matt Brooker, aka Disraeli, and I finally got to answer the question. Scarlet Traces was a comic book series set ten years after the abortive Martian invasion. The industrious Victorians had reverse engineered the alien tech, which then enabled the British Empire to consolidate its hold on the world and become the preeminent superpower of the day. Set against this backdrop, the series focused on retired-Government-agent-turned-gentleman-adventurer Robert Autumn and his batman Archie Currie as they investigated the disappearance of Currie’s young niece. They journey from the streets of London to the privations of the Glasgow slums to the corridors of power, uncovering a truth that will change worlds.

  This was followed a few years later by Scarlet Traces: The Great Game, set in the 1940s and focusing on the British Empire’s invasion of Mars. Afterwards came Scarlet Traces: Cold War, set in the 1960s; it was concerned with the Martians’ occupation of Venus (at the end of Wells’ novel, it’s noted that Martian cylinders are seen being fired towards Venus) and the plight of Venusian refugees settling on Earth. In all of these I’ve endeavoured to follow Wells’ theme and depict the broad sweep of events as seen by ordinary people caught up in the various conflicts. There’s a newspaper photographer who lands the scoop of a lifetime, a young soldier on the front line and a Venusian family attempting to make a new home in the UK.

  The history of Scarlet Traces has been on a strange and circuitous one. It has been published on both sides of the Atlantic, both as a mini-series and a weekly saga. It very nearly didn’t see print at all when not one but two publishers went bust and almost took it down with them. Yet, we’re still here! The latest series, Scarlet Traces: Home Front, is running in 2000 AD (The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic!) with another in the works. All of it, including this delightfully weighty tome, can be traced back to those few months when I was laid up at home, passing the time with my head in the book which inspired me to ask that most fundamental of storytelling questions, “what if?”

  From that single question has sprung an elaborate, alternate timeline with many more stories to be told than I had ever envisaged. I therefore decided to throw open the doors and invite other authors in to play in my Martian sandbox. I’d read The Massacre of Mankind, Stephen Baxter’s own sequel to The War of the Worlds, so he seemed to be a natural fit. The problem was, how to get in touch with him? As luck would have it, he was doing a signing at my local Waterstones, so while getting my copy of Massacre signed I tentatively broached the subject. It turns out that he was already a fan of Scarlet Traces and was happy to jump aboard. Stephen put me in touch with Adam Roberts, and gradually the ball started rolling. I put the call out: the remit was simple, set a story anywhere along the Scarlet Traces timeline, but most of all have fun with it.

  I strove for a diverse mix of talent, so there are established fiction authors such as James Lovegrove, Mark Morris, Chris Roberson, Jonathan Green, Maura McHugh and Andy Lane alongside comic book writers and artists Emma Beeby, Dan Whitehead and I.N.J Culbard as well as English teacher and pod-caster extraordinaire, Nathan Du
ck. The result is a diverse and eclectic cornucopia of tales ranging from a wonderful homage to a certain 1960s television puppet show, to ant-headed men-in-black, to sundry clockwork creations, alongside appearances by Sherlock Holmes, T. S. Eliot and the great man himself, H. G. Wells.

  NONE OF THIS would have been possible without the involvement of artist Matt Brooker. We started working on the series when we were both wet behind the ears and we’re still going even though we’re very much grey around the gills. His art hasn’t just interpreted the story; in many cases it’s inspired it. The fantastical visuals that have blossomed from my terse scripts have fed into my imagination to spark even more ideas. Seeing Scarlet Traces in print, in all its incarnations, is an undoubted joy—but most of all I’m grateful for the splendid friendship it has given me with Disraeli the D’emon Draughtsman.

  Going Up the Blue

  a thrilling account, by

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  1938

  I

  “ROYAL ASTRONAUTICAL MARINE Heavy Transport Shackleton to Olympus Dock. Transmitting security codes...”

  We were going up the blue.

  Me and my crew, and the other mevvies, and infantry and Hussars and other assorted lethal riff-raff, thousands of us stacked up in that HT like bullets in an ammo belt. We had flown up into space from our training grounds and muster points to the battlefield: going up the blue, we called it. And we were nearly there—at Mars!

  Not that it was an easy ride.

  In those days, when you flew from Earth to Mars, you went goldfish, as the transport crew called it. Wearing your ‘Easy’—your Extreme Altitude Suit—with the faceplate open, you were popped neatly into a gravity chair, a tube full of translucent blue compressive gel that was supposed to protect you from the various accelerations of the flight. Once you got over the shock of taking the stuff into your lungs and breathing it, it wasn’t so bad. Almost comfortable.

  And time passed quickly. Twenty-eight days inside that tube, to Mars.

  But you were never quite unconscious—or at least, I wasn’t. I had seemed to perceive something of the outside world, of the steel decks and orderly routine of this huge transport ship as it had thundered through its interplanetary journey.

  And even as we closed on Mars I seemed to hear those over-confident tannoy calls:

  “Request permission to approach... Codes cleared and confirmed...”

  I closed my eyes. I was supposed to be spark out until my glass tube was popped open safely on the ground, and I was handed a towel for my hair and a cup of cha.

  But that, as it turned out, wasn’t going to happen.

  “Stand by to—Jesus Christ!”

  And I, a goldfish, felt my tank—the whole ship—shudder around me.

  THAT WAS WHEN Corporal Beatrice Currie, 3rd Royal Martian Expeditionary Vehicle Regiment and Engineer in my own MEV, showed up outside my pod. She was in her own Easy, and she was punching at emergency release buttons with clumsy gloved fingers.

  I knew the drill. I kept my mouth open and as the gel level dropped I puked and retched until the last of it was out of my lungs and belly. I had a brief impression of wailing sirens, yammering tannoy voices and a smell of burning, and I breathed in my suit’s sweet, dry oxygen and coughed some more. Then, as soon as she could get hold of me, Bea shoved me upright and snapped down my helmet faceplate.

  There was another slam and the deck rotated around us, and we grabbed for handholds.

  When we were stable again Currie looked me in the eyes. At thirty-five she was a few years older than me. I saw a hard face, a sardonic smile, startling blue eyes, a lock of red hair gone rogue inside her Easy helmet. “Simms. Diane. Corporal. Are you with me?”

  My voice, when I tried it, sounded like “Bulldog” Marsden, a ferocious RSM I’d had suffered under at Bovington. “Yes. Yes, I’m here. Where are we going?”

  “To the MEV. The others should be there by now.”

  “Is it all going tits up, Bea?”

  “Don’t yap, just follow me.” Currie fair dragged me out of the pod and flew along the corridor from handhold to handhold. I did my best to follow, stiff and dizzy and bewildered as I was.

  Handhold to handhold: we were in weightless conditions, more or less, but this was no serene lunar cruise. Bea kept one eye on me, even as I struggled to keep up with the pace she was setting. Bea was tough, but I knew she wouldn’t leave me behind.

  And we passed gruesome milestones. More grav-chairs, some empty, some still occupied—some containing what were evidently corpses. Dead before we had even attained the battleground we had come so far to reach. Dead without even waking up.

  Then a particularly brilliant flash, the light leaking through a port.

  The whole ship tipped and lurched. We were slammed from side to side, like pebbles rattling down a drainpipe. I imagined the pilots of the Shackleton desperately throwing their huge craft from side to side, trying to evade whatever was being thrown up at them.

  And when I passed that port, for the first time I could see out. I saw the superstructure of Olympus Dock, shadowed in the pale sunlight of Martian orbit. And something of the welcome we were receiving.

  OLYMPUS DOCK WAS at the top of a space lift.

  She was in a Clarke orbit ten thousand miles up, hovering permanently over Olympus Mons, a mighty volcanic mountain which I could see below like a vast blister. Cargo-carrying tethers attached Dock to ground, with road connections to Marineris Base beyond.

  And even as the Shackleton came in, I could see the Dock was under fire.

  Most of it was heat ray tracks, dead straight lines sprouting up from Mars with that eerie silvery shimmer they create in a vacuum: traces of lethality thousands of miles long. I was too high to see the gunners, Martian squabs in their war machines. But their aim, across such vast distances, was pinpoint-precise.

  The rays just lanced through the complex cross-shape of the Dock, and, I saw, they were striking the Shackleton itself. It was the secondary explosions these incisions caused that were throwing the ship around. Everywhere I saw gravity chairs being ejected from ruptured flanks; the little capsules sprouted thistledown wings that, with luck, could deliver the occupants down, down through the thin air to the surface and perhaps sanctuary. Even as I watched I saw the flickering heat rays targeting individual chairs, thousands of miles high. And bodies, floating in space, some still, some wriggling pathetically amid the debris.

  But I saw too that the MEF, the British Empire’s Martian Expeditionary Force, was fighting back. I could see the little darts of Eagle fighters whizzing low above the calderas of Olympus, and heavier craft, Fireball-class interplanetary cruisers, weighing in with higher-altitude runs and trailing explosions of their own.

  The tannoy clamoured again. “Olympus, this is Shackleton. Olympus, come in, we’re venting...”

  “If you’re quite finished lollygagging?” Bea’s cultured voice said at my shoulder. “Come on.” And she grabbed my arm and hauled me away.

  THIRTY SECONDS LATER and down one deck, we were at the access port to our MEV.

  The round hatch was open and the MEV cabin beyond with its heavily instrumented walls looked like a cavern crusted with jewels. Charlie Newman, our gunner, was already in there, throwing switches and bringing the vehicle to life.

  Captain Paul Travers, our MEV Commander, was waiting outside. His dark hair speckled with grey; he was a good few years older and a lot more experienced than any of us. And his expression was hard. “About bloody time.”

  “Sir—Captain—”

  “Commodore Guest has ordered us to abandon ship. Who are we to argue? But we are not riding those thistledown grav-chairs and give the bloody squabs more target practice.”

  Still groggy as I was, I couldn’t work it out. “We’re going down in the MEV, sir?”

  “Damned right.” He shoved me through the hatch. “To your position, Driver.”

  It made no sense at all. But I had no choice. You never do. You follow o
rders.

  I scrambled to my position, at front right of the cabin. Gunner Newman was to my left, readying his weaponry. Engineer Currie took her place on the left side of the hull, and began powering up the radio, life support, radar and other essential systems.

  Commander Travers slammed the hatch and took his own slightly elevated couch at the back. “Status, Driver?”

  I called back, “Turbine engaged. Pedrail tested and functioning. Sir—”

  “Auxiliary thrusters?”

  I pressed another button; an array of small external jets burped in sequence. It sounded like a patter of footsteps on the outer hull. “Operational. Sir—how can we get off the transport in the MEV? It’s a ground vehicle...”

  It was true that the MEVs were designed to be mobilised direct from their HT, released through access hatches and ramps immediately after landing and ready for action in case the craft came down in a firefight.

  The operative word in that sentence being down.

  As in, down on the ground.

  “Sir, the Shackleton—we’re thousands of miles high!”

  “Not for much longer,” Currie said with a certain glee—well, that was Bea Currie for you. Black humour, and sometimes rather soulless. “And getting lower all the time, rather rapidly, actually.”

  Travers said, “It will be an unorthodox egress. But it’s all a question of timing, that’s all. Now then. Engineer, I want a countdown to the thousand-foot mark, when we get that far. Driver, use your auxiliary thrusters to take the sting out of our downward velocity, and then, once those spider-legs hit the ground, take us out of there. Gunner, try to stay awake. We may receive a rather unfriendly welcome.” I glanced back at Travers. He had cracked his faceplate, and was smoking a pipe. “And when we get this done we’ll have an anecdote they’ll never believe in the NAAFI.”