The Massacre of Mankind Read online

  Stephen Baxter’s

  THE MASSACRE OF MANKIND

  A sequel to

  The War of the Worlds

  by

  H.G. Wells

  Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2016 All rights reserved

  The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First publication in Great Britain in 2015 by Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Carmelite House,

  50 Victoria Embankment,

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  www.gollancz.co.uk

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  BOOK I THE RETURN OF THE MARTIANS

  1 A CALL TO ARMS

  2 A MEETING OF VETERANS

  3 AN ARTILLERYMAN IN NEW YORK

  4 AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

  5 MY RETURN TO ENGLAND

  6 THE SURREY CORRIDOR

  7 IN LONDON

  8 A MEETING AT OTTERSHAW

  9 A CALL FROM GERMANY

  10 TO STANMORE AND LONDON

  11 IN LONDON

  12 THE MOBILISATION

  13 APPROACHING UXBRIDGE

  14 THE LANDING OF THE FIRST WAVE

  15 MONDAY IN LONDON

  16 INTO THE CORDON

  17 CYLINDER No. 12

  18 THE FLYING-MACHINE OVER LONDON

  19 THE FIRST HOURS WITHIN THE CORDON

  20 AN OCCUPIED COUNTRYSIDE

  21 AT ABBOTSDALE

  22 HOW THE MARTIANS MOVED OUT OF THE CORDON

  23 OUR FLIGHT FROM STANMORE

  24 ON THE KING’S LINE

  25 HOW THE RETREAT BEGAN

  26 THE MARTIANS AT WORMWOOD SCRUBS

  27 A FLIGHT ACROSS CENTRAL LONDON

  28 THE FALL OF LONDON

  BOOK II ENGLAND UNDER THE MARTIANS

  1 I RECEIVE A CALL IN PARIS

  2 A MEETING IN BERLIN

  3 A JOURNEY TO THE COAST

  4 ABOARD THE INVINCIBLE

  5 AT THE GERMAN COAST

  6 THE BATTLE OF THE NORTH SEA

  7 A LANDING AT THE WASH

  8 IN PORTSMOUTH

  9 A SECRET ASSIGNMENT

  10 A NIGHT IN HAMPSHIRE

  11 MY RETURN TO LONDON

  12 FROM ALDWYCH TO STRATFORD

  13 INTO THE SEWER

  14 EMERGENCE

  15 IN THE TRENCH

  16 A TUNNEL UNDER THE TRENCH

  17 INSIDE THE CORDON

  18 THE POTATO FIELDS

  19 A DINNER PARTY

  20 VERITY BLISS

  21 A BICYCLE RIDE

  22 ‘MARRIOTT’

  23 WITH THE FRANC-TIREURS OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

  24 AN AWAKENING

  25 THE VILLA OF THE CYTHEREANS

  26 A HARVESTING

  27 A FIGHTING-MACHINE’S PILOT

  28 IN THE WEST WYCOMBE CAVES

  29 THE ARTILLERYMAN’S TALE

  30 A STRANGE NEGOTIATION

  31 INTO THE REDOUBT

  32 PRISONERS OF THE MARTIANS

  33 A LABORATORY

  34 THE DRIPS

  BOOK III WORLDS AT WAR

  1 THE HOUSE IN DAHLEM

  2 ON LONG ISLAND

  3 IN THE BIGELOW MANSION

  4 AN EXODUS

  5 I ARRIVE AT THORNBOROUGH

  6 AT LOS ANGELES

  7 HMLS BOADICEA

  8 INTO ACTION

  9 ESCAPE FROM LONG ISLAND

  10 THE BRIDGES OF NEW YORK

  11 CENTRAL PARK

  12 HOW THE MARTIANS CAME TO MELBOURNE

  13 IN PEKING

  14 THE MARTIAN INVASION OF MANHATTAN

  15 WALTER JENKINS IN DAHLEM

  16 A SHADOW PLAY

  17 ABOVE DURBAN

  18 OUTSIDE ST PETERSBURG

  19 THE ADVANCE FROM THE ELBE

  20 TO THE CAPITAL

  21 WITH THE MARTIANS IN BERLIN

  22 A NEW YORK EDISONADE

  23 A WORLD UNDER SIEGE

  24 THE REVENGE OF THE MARTIANS

  25 A PLAYER OF THE GAME

  26 SILENCE FALLS

  BOOK IV MARS ON EARTH

  1 A TELEPHONE CALL

  2 AFTERMATH

  3 BY MONORAIL TO ENGLAND

  4 BACK TO THE REDOUBT

  5 THE MARTIANS’ UNDERGROUND LAIR

  6 THE VATERLAND

  7 A JOURNEY ACROSS THE ARCTIC

  8 AT CAPE CHELYUSKIN

  9 AN UNRELIABLE PROPHET

  10 THE EPILOGUE

  Afterword and Acknowledgements

  To

  H.G. WELLS

  This Extending Of His Idea and

  The H.G. Wells Society

  ‘If astronomy teaches anything, it teaches that man is but a detail in the evolution of the universe, and that resemblant though diverse details are inevitably to be expected in the host of orbs around him. He learns that, though he will probably never find his double anywhere, he is destined to find any number of cousins scattered through space.’

  Percival Lowell, Mars, 1895.

  ‘Despite a return to war-mongering and greed, still it seemed to me that humanity was on the verge of a deep apprehension of its place in the cosmos. The intellectual world was alive with speculation and hope. But then the Martians came again.’

  Walter Jenkins, Narratives of the Martian Wars, 1913 & 1928.

  BOOK I

  THE RETURN OF THE MARTIANS

  1

  A CALL TO ARMS

  To those of us who survived it, the First Martian War was a cataclysm. And yet, to minds far greater than our own and older even than the Martians, minds who regard our world from the cold outer reaches of space, that conflict must have seemed a trivial affair indeed, and unworthy.

  Since the First War, and indeed before it, the nebular hypothesis has become familiar enough to the newspaper-reading public, and over time has been amply confirmed by the scientists. The sun is the father and mother of the solar system. From its mass periodically are expelled tremendous blasts of matter, belts of gas and dust and complex elements baked in that hot hearth, which coalesce across millions of years into globes: these are the planets with their retinue of moons, which, cooling, then recede slowly from the central fire. It follows that the further a world is from the sun, the older it must be – that globe and its cargo of life – and cooler. Thus the earth is older than hot, fecund Venus; and Mars, austere and chill, is in turn older than our temperate globe. The outer worlds, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, are ancient indeed and locked in the stasis of time and cold. But Jupiter – king of planets, more massive than the rest combined, and older than Mars as Mars is older than our world - is, must be, host to the gravest intellects of all.

  We know now that these minds have long watched us – humanity, the Martians, even innocent Venus. What can they have thought of our War? The fragile sparks crossing the night, the flares of fire on the green skin of our planet, the splash of ink-black smoke – the swarming and helpless populations . . . They looked on all this as a silent god might regard his flawed creations, perhaps, their reflections disapproval profound.

  And yet, claims Walter Jenkins, provides the context within which we, who once believed we were lords of creation, must live out our petty lives. Our petty lives and - as the Martians inflicted when they made their second crossing to this earth - our small deaths.

  Walter was right. This mighty context was to shape everything about the Second War, and indeed the most important mom
ent of my own life. On the other hand, I myself, like most people, stay sane by generally not thinking about it.

  And speaking of grave scrutiny, as I commence this memoir of my own, I cannot help but acknowledge the long shadow cast by that tombstone of a volume which everyone knows as the Narrative, the history of the First War penned by Walter, my esteemed brother-in-law – if he can still be termed such after I divorced Frank, his brother – a work that, as Walter’s therapist Freud might say, has burned a particular perception of the First Martian War into the public subconscious with the intensity of a Heat-Ray. Let me warn the reader from the off that if it’s the grandeur of the cosmos that you want, all told in the lofty prose of a man who was once paid to scribble such stuff, then it’s another correspondent you should seek out. And indeed if you want the self-portrait of a soul undergoing psychic shock and disintegration, which in the end made Walter’s tome of more value to the bump-feeler than to the historian, go to him. On the other hand if it’s an honest, factual account of my own experience you’re after – a woman who survived the First unimaginable Martian War and had her life pulled to pieces in the Second – then I humbly submit this, history as I saw it.

  Although I admit it is an irony that my experience of the second conflict should begin, long before a Martian again set foot on this earth, with a complicated series of telephone calls from Walter himself, emanating from the hospital in Vienna where he was being treated at the time. I, who was patiently building a fresh life for myself in the New World, wanted nothing to do with it. But I have always had a sense of duty. I answered the summons.

  A dotty-house, to Jupiter! From the beginning it was a tangled tale indeed.

  2

  A MEETING OF VETERANS

  My first inkling of the impending storm came in fact in New York, specifically at the Woolworth Building, when Major Eric Eden (retired) asked to meet me.

  My young colleague Harry Kane insisted on accompanying me. Harry was of that breed of brash American journalists who are always suspicious of all things European – he would have been even before the Schlieffen War, I think. I suppose Harry came as a kind of moral support, but with a morbid curiosity too about a Martian War that to him had been only a distant spectacle of his youth.

  So we made our way. It was a brisk mid-March day in the year 1920. Manhattan had suffered what everybody hoped would prove to be the last snow storms of the year, although the main hazard on that particular morning turned out to be the slush piles alongside every sidewalk, ever ready to soak an unwary ankle. I remember that morning: the swarming, cheerfully ill-tempered traffic, the electric advertising hoardings that glowed in the greyness of the day – the sheer innocent vigour of a young nation - in those last hours and minutes before I was dragged back into the affairs of gloomy, wounded old England.

  At last Harry and I pushed through the doors into the Woolworth. The air in the lobby, heated and scented, hit me like a slap in the face. In those days the Americans liked to be very warm indoors, and that was one transatlantic cultural shift I had yet to get used to. I pulled open my coat and loosened my headscarf, and we walked across a floor of polished Greek marble that was speckled with melted snow and grit from the street. The lobby was busy, every one of its transient, swarming inhabitants intent on his or her own destination. Harry, with his usual air of amused detachment – an attractive trait in a man a few years younger than me, even if it doesn’t sound it - said to me over the noise of the excited, chattering crowd, ‘I take it your Major Eden doesn’t know the city so well.’

  ‘You can say that without ever meeting him?’

  ‘Sure I can. If you don’t know Manhattan, where else do you set up a meeting but here? In London an American would meet you at St Paul’s – that’s the one with the hole in the dome, right? And a British in New York – well, here we are, in the tallest building in the world!’ He pointed. ‘And there he is, by the way.’

  The man he indicated stood alone. He was slim, not tall, and wore a morning suit that looked expensive enough but dowdy compared to the peacock fashions around him. If this was Eden he looked younger than his thirty-eight years – six years older than me.

  ‘And that must be Eden because -’

  ‘He’s the only one looking at the artwork.’

  Indeed, hands in pockets, oblivious to the crowds, the man was staring up at the ceiling, which (had I ever noticed this before?) was coated with mosaics that looked Roman, perhaps Byzantine. That was the Americans for you; in this new monument to a triumphant Mammon, they felt the need to reach back to their detached European past.

  Harry strode across the floor, muttering, ‘Could he look more the Englishman abroad? If this is the best he can do to blend into the background, no wonder the Martians caught him.’

  That made me snort with laughter as I followed. ‘Hush. You’re terrible. The man’s a hero.’

  Hero or not, Eden looked rather nervous as we bore down on him, and he couldn’t help glancing down at the practical trouser suit I was wearing, as was my custom. ‘Mrs Jenkins, I take it -’

  ‘I prefer Miss Elphinstone, actually, since my divorce.’

  ‘My apologies. I imagine you recognised me from the posters in the bookshop windows.’

  Harry grinned. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It has been a well-announced tour. Just Bert Cook and myself for now, but we should be joining up with old Schiaparelli in Boston - discoverer of the canals, you know - in his eighties but going strong . . .’

  I introduced Harry quickly. ‘We both work for the Post.’

  ‘I’ve not read your book, sir,’ Harry admitted. ‘It’s kind of out of my sphere. I spend my time fighting Tammany Hall as opposed to men from Mars.’

  Eden looked baffled, and I felt moved to interpret. ‘Tammany Hall’s the big Democrat political machine in the city. Americans do everything on a heroic scale, including corruption. And they were not men in that cylinder, Harry.’

  ‘However,’ Harry went on, unabashed, ‘I’ve been known to dabble in the book trade myself. Sensational potboilers, that’s my line, not having a heroic past to peddle.’

  ‘Be glad of that,’ Eden said, softly enough.

  A line which seemed to me the embodiment of British understatement! Eric Eden was, after all, the only living human being who had actually been inside a functioning Martian cylinder – he was captured in the first couple of days in ‘07, as the military, in their ignorance, probed at the first landing pit at Horsell. Having been kept alive, perhaps as a specimen for later examination by the Martians, Eden had fought his way out of a space cylinder with nothing much more than his bare hands, and had ultimately made it back to his unit with invaluable information on Martian technology.

  He said now, ‘Miss Elphinstone, Walter Jenkins did warn me of your likely – ah, reluctance to get involved. Nevertheless Mr Jenkins did press on me the importance of the contact, for you, the rest of his family. He seems to have fallen out of touch with you all. Indeed that’s why he had to make such a circuitous attempt to contact you, through myself and Bert.’

  ‘Really?’ Harry grinned. ‘Isn’t this all kind of flaky?’ He twirled a finger beside his temple. ‘So the man wants to contact his ex-wife, and the only way he can do it is by contacting somebody he barely knows, with respect, sir, on the other side of the world, in the hope that he can talk to his brother’s ex-wife-’

  ‘That’s Walter for you,’ I said, feeling oddly motivated to defend the man. ‘He never was very good at coping.’

  Eden said grimly, ‘And that was presumably even before he spent weeks being chased by Martians across the countryside.’

  Harry, young, confident, was not unsympathetic, but I could see he did not understand. ‘I don’t see what favours Jenkins has done you either, Major Eden. I saw the interview you gave to the Post, where you attacked him for claiming to have seen more of the Martians than any other eyewitness, when they were at loose in England. As you said, you certainly saw stuff he nev
er did -’

  Eden held up his hand politely. ‘Actually I didn’t say that, not quite. Your reporter rather gingered it in the telling – well, you have to sell newspapers, I suppose. But I rather feel that we veterans should, ah, stick together. And besides, if you take a longer view, Jenkins did me a favour. One cannot deny that his memoir is the one that has most shaped public perception of the War ever since its publication. And he does mention me, you know.’

  ‘He does?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Book I, Chapter 8. Although he does describe me mistakenly as “reported to be missing”. Only briefly!’

  I snorted. ‘The man’s in the dictionary under “unreliable narrator”.’

  Eden laughed, not very sincerely. ‘But he never related my own adventures, as he did Bert Cook’s, say, and so I got the chance to tell it myself – and my publishers to label it as an “untold story”.’

  Harry laughed. ‘It’s all business in the end? Now that I sympathise with. So what’s the plan, Major Eden? We gonna stand around gawping at frescoes all day?’

  ‘Mosaics, actually. Sorry. Miss Elphinstone, Mr Jenkins wishes to make a telephone call. To you, I mean.’

  Harry whistled. ‘From Vienna? Transatlantic? That will cost a pretty penny. I know we’re all excited by the new submarine cable, and all, but still...’ The cable had been planned as part of a global alert system in the aftermath of the Martian War – although in the event the cable was not laid in place before the Schlieffen War had broken out, that entirely human affair.

  Eden smiled. ‘As I understand it Mr Jenkins is not short of pennies, thanks to the success of his book. Not to mention the rights he has sold for the movie versions.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Anyhow, Jenkins will make the call to our hotel suite – I mean, mine and Bert’s. If you wouldn’t mind accompanying me there -’

  ‘Which hotel?’