The MEV, and the Shackleton itself, shuddered.
Currie called, “Hitting the atmosphere. The transport is slowing rather drastically in the air, thin as it is. Still difficult to estimate our closing velocity.”
“We’ll take what we’re given,” Travers murmured.
It seemed no time at all before Bea called her countdown.
“One thousand feet in ten—nine—eight...”
“Driver, advance flat out.”
I shoved at my joystick and grasped the driving wheel for dear life.
And our MEV shot out of the side of the crashing Shackleton,like a gob of tobacco from the mouth of a drunken squaddie on a Saturday night in Aldershot.
Bea Currie laughed. “And they pay us to do this?”
II
MY NAME IS Diane Simms.
I am one of the few survivors of the Galahad strike on Mars, as it has become known to historians, and which at the time was called Operation Stumps. (Really! Sometimes I think the whole thing was nothing but a public-school cricket match in the heads of our glorious leaders.)
I was born in Chelsea in 1913. My background was lower middle-class, I suppose, though we thought ourselves lucky. My father was a bank manager, as had his father been before him. At the turn of the century Papa had been wily enough to retrain to service the automated teller machines and totalisers when the Martian-based technology began to replace so many human staff in the branches. And so he survived.
Nevertheless I was aware, even as I worked my way through school, that jobs would always be scarce. The military, in fact, was a sensible option in those days. Especially after the first Commonwealth invasion of Mars in ’08, Britain and its closest allies had more or less gone over to a war economy, and a career in one of the forces at any level was likely to be relatively secure—so long, that is, as you didn’t get blown to atoms by the heat ray or decompressed in space.
It was always faintly disturbing to me, though—long before the terrible conclusion of the war, and the Galahad scandal finally broke—that you would see so few veterans of the Martian Expeditionary Force back home in Blighty, smiling bravely from their wheelchairs before monuments to their fallen pals. I wondered if the others were under some kind of order to hide away. For morale purposes, no doubt. Perhaps that would be my own duty some day, I thought. How wrong I was!
Anyway, the space forces especially were accommodating to women, a situation that benefited both myself and Bea Currie, whom I met when we were assigned to our MEV crews during training, with Travers and Newman. Women on average are physically smaller and more compact than men, and somewhat more phlegmatic too, which makes us more effective operators in the cramped, resource-constrained conditions of spacecraft and bases on the Moon and Mars.
And it helped my own application that I was southern English born and bred: a Londoner, without a taint of the Celtic or even of the north. Such was the poverty in those areas in those days that the sons and daughters of the unemployed and unemployable flooded the lower ranks of the forces—I could hardly complain, having taken the same route—and yet they were treated with suspicion, for such groups as the PCM, the People’s Caledonian Militia, looked on the armed forces as a free training ground in the use of weapons and explosives, with an eye on nefarious purposes to follow.
As for me, my progress was smooth enough. I had an early love of driving—I had grown up in an age of new mobility, enabled by Martian arachnid electromechanical technology—and after basic training, that got me selected sharpish to the 3rd Royal Martian Expeditionary Vehicle Regiment. We were sent for specialist training at Bovington and later in the Sudan, whose desert areas are a not wholly unrealistic proxy for the sands of Mars.
And then, in the thirtieth year after our counter-invasion of Mars, our crew, under MEV Commander Paul Travers, got assigned to Operation Stumps. It was to be my own first taste of authentic military action.
The muster at RAM Rendlesham, where we gathered to board the Shackleton, was rather fun, to be honest. The showiest outfits aside from our own were probably units of the Royal Articulated Hussars. Their horses had long been replaced by arachnid-limbed automata, and they still had an irritating flash and dash of the cavalry, but to us they would always be donkey-wallopers. I longed to see how all this armour and manpower would look when delivered to Mars: I imagined a mighty torrent of humanity and machinery, firepower and vengeance, pouring from the open ports of the landed transport.
And none finer than the massed MEVs.
In my training I had grown to love the vehicles I drove. The A-15 Crusader-class Martian Expeditionary Vehicle in particular was a superb vessel, refined through several design generations, and I had become a devoted and loyal mevvie.
But a MEV is not meant to fly.
Not even on Mars.
III
BUT WE WERE flying even so.
We came hurtling out of the hull of the Shackleton at a little more than a thousand feet, and plummeted towards the ground at spaceship-crash velocity.
(Even as we came down, by the way, I could see we were heading into the teeth of an advancing Martian army. But for now the Martians could wait.)
And I, a novice to Martian conditions, was at the wheel.
Look, a MEV is essentially a ground vehicle. It is like a mobile blockhouse; under a moulded upper shield that Bea Currie once called ‘turtlish’, the hull bristles with ports for viewing, weaponry, and sensors such as radar. All of this was painted rust-red for Martian-surface camouflage.
And the hull rides on twin Diplock pedrails, rows of ‘feet’ built of Martian arachnid technology, that whip around on high-speed belts. As I can testify, the pedrails drive the bus at a fair lick over a variety of the terrains that Mars offers. Well, it’s mostly dust, to be fair, though even on level ground there are generally plenty of boulders and pebbles and other litter.
But for such a small world, an awful lot of Mars is not level at all. There are craters like huge bomb scars, and canyons whose side branches alone would dwarf anything you would see on Earth.
What Mars does have, however, is low gravity, only one part in three compared to the Earth. And by the time I got to Mars myself, the clever designers of our late-generation MEV had learned to exploit that gravity, and had supplied the ship with auxiliary thrusters. These are jets that suck in Martian air and turn it to high-speed plasma with heat-ray engines. You drive gung-ho at your wadi or your crater wall, and you have to time the cut-in of the thrusters just right, you see, to leap like a box-shaped gazelle through the Martian sky, and just sail over the obstacle.
In theory. Naturally this is somewhat difficult to practise in the Earth-heavy heat of the Sudan, so I had never tried it before. My instructors had assured me it worked, some of the time.
Anyhow a MEV can’t fly, but it can hop. And that was what gave me my chance now, slim as it was.
Even as we plummeted out of the battle-scarred sky, my small brain fair fizzed with speed and distance calculations, and almost independently my hands danced over the controls. All that training in the Sudan, I suppose, paid off in those few seconds. I blipped the thrusters as we came down, trying to gain the maximum deceleration given the severely limited propellant supply.
I think I did a pretty good job. Even so, the MEV had about as much manoeuvrability as a roast turkey.
For all I could do, we came down hard.
HARD, BUT IN one piece.
A quick check revealed that the hull hadn’t cracked, and the pedrails still rolled.
But I had no time to bask in my triumph, and neither Captain Travers nor any of the crew said a word of congratulations.
We were down, and we were already rolling, and we were in a pickle.
Behind us, a crashing heavy-transport spacecraft separated us from what was left of the MEF, and their ground base at Marineris. And before us, an assault force of annoyed-looking Martians.
I could see the squabs, straight ahead. War machines standing thick as blad
es of grass on an overgrown lawn, so many that their details blurred: those strangely supple metal limbs, the waving tentacles, the snapping heat rays. Tens of thousands of them, I estimated at a glance. And above this field of lethal alien weaponry I saw cylinders streak across the sky, white-hot projectiles launched from the Martians’ gravity cannon behind the advance, and flying over our heads towards the British lines around Marineris Base.
That was when Travers called, “Driver, straight ahead, lickety-split. Gunner, fire at will.”
“Yes, sir.” Charlie Newman’s voice was small, but he got on with it. Immediately the MEV shuddered with the recoil from our shells, and in the Martian lines I saw the welcome fire-blossom of disrupted war machines.
But as to my own orders I wasn’t sure I had heard right.
I called, “Commander, we’re facing towards the Martian lines. Do you want me to turn—”
“Driver, stick to your course. Behind us is a crashing heavy transport that will leave a hole full of fire a mile wide between us and Marineris, and I don’t much fancy taking a sideways detour and presenting a flank for the squabs to use for target practice, do you? And besides—Engineer, the disposition of the Martians? A thin band, I imagine.”
I knew that Bea Currie, while with one eye looking over the systems of our battered MEV after its fall from space, would have the other eye on the Martians. And I knew that the sky was full of monitors, electronic and human, peering down on the battlefield, feeding information down to any surviving forces.
“It’s a crust, sir,” Bea called now. “A ring of war machines closing on the MEF base, and behind them a wider ring of gravity cannon. A front hundreds of miles wide, mind you, but thin, just as you say.”
That was the usual Martian tactical disposition. The heat ray is a line-of-sight weapon, and the Martian horizon is short, so on the ground the squabs’ war machines serve essentially as short-range armour. But their assaults are generally backed up by batteries of gravity cannon, which can lob cylinders—dummies, or missiles packed with explosives or other nasties—over much further distances. It is a kind of long-range artillery, made up of little brothers of the giant guns that shot their invasion task force to Earth in ’98.
“I thought as much,” Travers said, satisfied. “A thin crust. And they won’t expect us to be doing something so boneheaded as driving straight at them pell-mell, will they, Engineer?”
“I’d imagine not, sir,” she said dryly. “Given as they are superior intelligences and all.”
“Let’s do it, then. And once we do break through the line we will lick our wounds, regroup, and work out how we can best use the advantage of our position to attack these bally Martians in the rear. All clear?”
“Crystal, sir,” said Bea.
“So, Driver—forward, prompt as you like.”
This time I obeyed without letting myself think about it.
The MEV shot forward, shuddering as Newman fired his cannon again and again.
I glanced at my crewmates.
Bea Currie was grinning. But then, Bea could be a cold fish. And it was when she was at her most soulless and dry that I sometimes thought I detected something else under the cool boarding-school poshness. A kind of brogue. Crys-tol, s-orr. And she had that startling red mane, I reminded myself, hidden as it was by the Easy hood for now. There had always been rumours, all the way back to Bovington, that maybe the superior Miss Currie had a bit of Celt blood tainting her veins.
Charlie Newman, meanwhile, was working hard, firing and finding plenty of targets.
But already we were closing on the Martian line.
Travers, peering through his periscope at the advancing Martian horde, was unmoved. “Close quarters coming up. You all know the drill. Take the lead, Engineer...”
Another routine we had had drummed into us in the heat of the Sudan. For effective firing in close quarters the whole crew needed to work together.
It began with Bea spotting a target. “Stop.”
That was an order for me; I slammed on the brake, swivelling the MEV to face the likely direction of fire.
Bea said calmly, “Gunner, twenty degrees left.”
Newman responded immediately, seeking the target Bea had spotted. “Firing. Gotcha. Move, Driver.”
And I drove us forward, hard.
Thus the routine we followed, over and over. Target, stop, fire, move, my directions coming from Engineer and Gunner. From a standing position, you see, our kill accuracy quickly improved to something close to a hundred per cent, but we were at comparatively low risk ourselves as we were only a stationary target for seconds at a time.
Travers wisely kept his mouth shut as we went through the routine, over and over again, and war machines fell like toppled trees, all around us.
My job, meanwhile, as well as finding a path through a maze of hundred-feet-tall enemy machines, was to try to keep our nose and carapace facing the most obvious threats, for those parts of the hull were hardened with cahelium extract. Even so we took some blows, and I felt the shudder as we soaked up heat-ray energies, and heard alerts ping as we lost this system or that—probably those pesky thruster packs in the external hull, impossible to protect. But the essentials kept working, the hull integrity, the pedrails, the weapons.
And by the way, if a Martian was spilled naked out of its war machine, you’d give it a second shot to finish it off. Back on Earth, in war, you would probably spare the crew of a crippled land ironclad, as the terrestrial equivalents of the MEVs are known. Sporting, you see. Not the done thing here, though; nothing sporting about your Martian.
So we just kept going. Target. Wrench the wheel, stop. Fire. Move. Over and over. We were like a red hot needle poking into Martian flesh, poking and prying and burning ever deeper. It got harder to see, with the outside atmosphere thick with dust and the green smoke that always spills from smashed Martian gear. And inside, as our trusty MEV took blow after blow, there was a stink of burning, and smoke in the air that turned out eyes red-rimmed.
A few seconds of hell. That was all. It felt like years.
Until we broke out of the other side of the Martian crust, just as Travers had promised.
We raced away.
“Jolly good,” the Commander said now, and I heard him suck on his pipe. “Now then, if our expert driver can find us a nice wadi in which to lie up for a bit, time for a brew, don’t you think?”
IV
OLD HANDS SAY the love of the British squaddie for cha is a relic of Indian campaigns that predate even the Martian invasion of ’98. We mevvies, like the sappers, are a cut above your common yomper, of course, but we never turn down a brew either.
And I admit there is something satisfying about using a Martian heat ray engine to boil a kettle.
Not that we had time to relish the moment. We were a pretty battered crew inside an even more battered craft, deep in enemy terrain, and we took stock pretty quickly.
Bea Currie was our designated medic, and she passed among us checking on cuts and bumps and so forth. We all had ‘Mars sores’, as the veterans call them, scrapes and burns from the MEV’s metal surfaces, and blisters on the backside from the rock-hard leather that for some reason they issue for crew couches. Not much more than white spirit and aspirin was administered. I always thought that Bea, as an amateur sawbones, had the air of a brisk but competent vet.
Meanwhile Gunner Newman and Engineer Currie gave our MEV’s systems the once-over, including the weapons, the hull, the drive. The pedrail, with all its moving parts, is a particular weak spot and we had plenty of spares, but none of us fancied climbing out to work on it.
Then the life support. This was mucky stuff, all carbon dioxide scrubbers and piss-recyclers like a plumber’s nightmare, and you had to take up the deck plates to get at it. You must remember we were as sealed off from our environment as if we were in deep space—Martian air is as thin as charity, and as cold. And even without a breakdown, our onboard supplies were meant only to sustain us fo
r brief forays in the field. We didn’t have a lot of time, one way or another, before we had to get home to Marineris.
Meanwhile, yours truly temporarily took over Currie’s station.
Part of the Engineer’s job is to run the radio, the radar, and various other information-gathering systems. Now I needed to use that information to find out about the terrain we were stranded in, both from stored maps and a few patchy images from space. For my next job was to figure out a way to get us to the MEF base at Marineris.
That was harder than it might sound. Mars has got more land area than Earth, you see, and a lot of it is empty, or else littered with incomprehensible monuments, and if you go driving it can be a big blank. If you are the designated map-reader you quickly learn to be very watchful, very careful, and above all, if you aren’t sure where you are or which way you are headed, you don’t bluff. We drivers trained in fact in the featureless Egyptian deserts, with the Nile serving as a surrogate canal.
But you can’t simulate the detailed conditions of Mars, I was finding now. I have already complained about the dodgy terrain. The weather too is tricky and not like Earth’s. The temperate days, the freezing nights, that’s like the desert. But there are dust storms that can span the planet. Cloudbursts, which bring up flowers that last twenty-four hours. Not to mention hordes of ferocious squabs in their war machines. What I was looking for now was a simple route back to base that would keep us mostly under cover...
But even as I worked, I was aware of other stuff cluttering up the automated logs: other feeds which Currie had been monitoring. Our radio was thoroughly dead now. Currie’s log showed there had been only patchy contact anyhow from the Shackleton, Olympus Dock and Marineris Base after the landing, but even that had ceased when as we had crossed the Martian line. Our antennae and other external systems looked to have been burned off sharpish in our engagement with the squabs. So the message log was old, the terrain and threat updates whiskery.
Scarlet Traces: An Anthology Based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds Page 2
