The Hound of the Baskervilles (Illustrated Classics): A Sherlock Holmes Graphic Novel
Author: Ian Edginton
Date: 2009-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Graphic Novels; Mystery; Classics; Fiction; Comics; Crime; Detective; Graphic Novels Comics; Comic Book; Novels
Description: After the success of their Illustrated Classics version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ian Edginton and I.N.J. Culbard have teamed up again to create a visually compelling graphic novel adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterpiece. The superb writing and beautiful art takes Conan Doyle’s supernatural tale to new heights. All the elements are here for a thrilling tale: A gnarled walking stick, missing boot, neglected family portrait, convicted killer on the loose, and the ancestral curse of a phantom hound. The great detective himself, Sherlock Holmes—with the help of Dr. Watson—has his work
Publisher: Sterling
Rights: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

An Abaddon Books™ Publication
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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 Duck. 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 orders.

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.”

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 blades 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 for 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.

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 family 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, Travers 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.

“I’m thinking of calling it carolinum,” Bea said. “After Charlie Newman, you see. Why not? We did discover it, in a way.”

“And what does this have to do with those living flame-throwers?”

“Well, it seems to be their power source, sir. What they live on. I don’t believe there is any evidence of such creatures elsewhere on the planet. Maybe we stumbled across the only lode of, of carolinum. If it did fall from space, like a huge asteroid, that would make sense. And these creatures have mutated, adapted to feed on it. On its compact energies.

“But if the Martians know about carolinum, that could resolve a few puzzles about them.”

Travers growled, “Puzzles? What puzzles?”

“Well, sir, I recall the briefings we got in basic. We know the Martians live underground, in vast hives. But we’ve never seen any evidence of the heavy machinery we would need to dig out such caverns. Oh, you could do it with a heat ray, but it would take forever... This stuff, though, this carolinum.”

“Yes?”

“Sir, you could just dig a shaft, drop down a lump of it, and let it melt the cavern out for you. A couple of weeks later, Bob’s your uncle.” She seemed to grow excited. “Why, imagine what could be done with this, if we took it to Earth. Huge engineering feats.”

“Digging canals?” I suggested.

She snorted. “More than that. You could quicken the deserts. Thaw out the poles. We could rebuild the world with this stuff.”

Travers thought that over. “Or,” he said slowly, “you could drop it on a city. Paris, say. Or Berlin.”

Currie sighed. “You have a point, sir. Or drop a pellet into the drains of the Houses of Parliament. Not that I’d dream of it.”

Outside, I could see as I drove on, the landscape was changing. We were entering the fringe of a battlefield. A very old battlefield. There were blackened and twisted wrecks everywhere, both Martian and human. Smashed weapons. I spotted plenty of the glassy scars the heat ray will make if it touches the sandy Martian ground. And bodies, blackened, twisted. In places piled up as if on funeral pyres. Human and squabs. I couldn’t tell how recent all this was.

I reported this to Travers, who looked through his periscope. “Hm. The hinterland of Marineris Base. Charming spot. Well, this is what you get after forty years of siege warfare. And we’re still outside the Martian cordon we broke through, are we, Engineer?”

“Yes, sir. And I can see energy releases up ahead,” Currie murmured. “They’re still fighting. We’ll have to break back through that crust of war machines again, fight our way to the base while trying to avoid getting shot up by our own lads...”

“And then home in time for tea. One for the memoirs, eh?”

I was curious. Or perhaps alarmed, as my small brain chugged through the possibilities. “Sir.”

“Hm?”

“This carolinum stuff. Maybe we should talk about it before we reach the Martians. I mean—what should we do about it? It’s sitting out there in the desert. I marked the location on the MEV’s maps, but—”

“But right now,” Currie said, “since we had our antennae burned off, nobody but us knows it even exists.”

I said hesitantly, “Sir, we could always leave it that way. I mean, what you said about bombing Paris—”

“Indeed. We’d be in danger of waging a war we wouldn’t stop.” Travers looked at Currie. “And of course if even a scrap of such material got into the hands of the People’s Caledonian Militia, it could certainly change the balance of power in Britain, couldn’t it?”

Currie faced him defiantly. “That it could, sir, That it could. But none of it matters now.” She laughed, bitter. “Don’t you see, sir? Because Galahad is coming. We have this lever in our hands that could change all of human history—or wreck it. But it makes no difference. Because none of us is going to live to tell the tale.”

She was wrong about that, of course. But that’s another story.

Travers frowned. “No matter what your source of information about this Galahad, Engineer, I don’t see how you can be so sure—”

“Because it’s the bloody English doing it.” Tha bluidy Anglish. “They’ll wipe out the Martians, even if they have to kill their own troops into the bargain. That’s the English for you. Vicious, thorough bastards.”

“Good point, well made,” Travers mused. “But, Engineer, there’s still something I can’t work out. This Galahad business. When did you first hear about it? On the Shackleton? At RAM Rendlesham, where we mustered? Or—”

She shook her head. “Before that, sir. At Bovington, actually. A week or so before the launch.”

Travers nodded gravely. “When we were going through our final briefings.” He seemed to see the implication of that immediately.

But he was an officer. It took a little longer for it to work through my thick skull.

“Bea,” I said, “that meant you got on the Shackleton knowing you weren’t coming back.”

She shrugged.

“Why, Bea? Why would you do that?”

“Because we’re mevvies. We’d trained as a team for months.” She grinned. “I couldn’t abandon you lot, could I? Face it, Simms, you couldn’t have got out of that bloody goldfish tube without me.”

I choked up. Almost. You don’t choke up in the MEV corps.

Travers said briskly, “Well, then, it’s up to the three of us to make it worthwhile. Whatever the future holds—whether the secret of carolinum dies with us or not—this is our day. The three of us, here together in this fine vessel of ours. And there’s still a battle to be fought. You said it, Engineer; our differences with the Martians overwhelm any squabbles between us. So what do you say? Shall we go up the blue one last time?”

I had to grin. “Yes, sir.”

Bea shook her head. “Bluidy Anglish.”

“Driver, advance flat out.”

I pressed the stick.

The battered MEV roared as it raced across the bloodstained ground, heading straight for the Martian line.

Travers refilled his pipe.

Something Sweet in the Superstitions
a curious matter, by

I. N. J. CULBARD

SOMETHING SWEET.

Simon Sweet? No, not Simon. Where the hell did he get Simon from? Not Peter. Not Paul. Not Mathew, Mark, Luke, or John. Damn it. How the hell could he have forgotten his own first name?

It had to be at least 119˚ in the shade—the desert heat had started to fry his noodle. He wished to god he hadn’t lost his hat—he had left it somewhere, he couldn’t remember where—but people lost things like hats all the time. They didn’t lose their first name.

He’d always been bad with names, but this was ridiculous.

Something Sweet.

He was sitting on a rock in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains—just outside Phoenix, Arizona—when a bright flash caught his eye; sunlight winking off the metal surface of an approaching vehicle. It was a Belvedere Blue Jenson Interceptor and it had long stopped travelling on any road: it scuttled over the rocks on eight, mechanical, spidery legs, kicking up dust in its wake. The staccato sound of these motorised limbs, spearing the dirt and sediment like pneumatic jack hammers, echoed around him. Sweet watched as the Interceptor stopped on the top of a ridge, the engine cut out, and the driver opened the door. Out stepped the figure of a heavyset man wearing a black, single breasted suit, a black tie, and the unmistakable head of an ant. For a brief moment it looked like the man was wearing an oversized Halloween mask, but Sweet noticed that the elbowed antennae twitched. The ant-headed man had a cigarillo clenched between his mandibles and what Sweet took to be a genuine look of malice in his compound eyes, a look that made Sweet’s heart thrash like a fly trapped in a web. Then the ant-headed man casually unbuttoned his jacket, holding out his pinky as he did so, and reached inside.

Was he reaching for a gun?

Sweet jumped up and scurried along the crumbling outcrop. He didn’t care for this madness and he certainly didn’t much care for getting shot neither. Shale and dust shifted underfoot as he desperately tried to keep his balance, fighting the fatigue that pulled at his aching limbs. His calf muscles felt like rocks, the tendons pulling like piano wire. He hunched his shoulders in readiness as he ran, expecting to hear a shot being fired, but the only report was that of the car door slamming shut, and a second later the engine started again.

“You’ll never make it,” said an all too familiar voice in his head. “You might as well give up now.” It was the same voice he’d been hearing for years. The same voice that would ask, “why bother” whenever he tried, and the same voice that would say, “I told you so,” whenever he failed.

Up ahead was a steeper incline and the rock face was smooth. Would the ant-headed man be able to make it up there? Sweet glanced over his shoulder and saw that the Interceptor, with its spidery legs making shorter work of the terrain than he could on foot, was rapidly gaining on him. He reached the incline and managed to get purchase with his dirt-caked fingers, but the leather soles of his shoes slipped. He kicked them off, peeled off his eight-diamond socks, tucked them into his shoes and pushed them into the pockets of his sport coat. The pockets tore away at the seams. Without even thinking about how much he had paid for the ensemble, he threw the shoes to one side and started climbing.

At the top of the incline, the heat of the sun on the rocks made him hop from bare foot to bare foot as he looked down to see the car approaching. It stopped at the base of the incline. The ant-headed man leaned out of the window and pointed up at Sweet— not with a gun, but with stubby little fingers, shouting something that Sweet couldn’t quite make out because his heart was beating so loud in his ears. Sweet turned and ran along the elevation.

There were several stacked boulders ahead and, beyond that, a break where he could work his way back down the other side. He could see the wilderness stretching into a heat haze. But every step from here on out was a painful reminder that in a panicked moment of self preservation, he’d thrown away his shoes—like an idiot. His penance was now a long, painful walk.

Sweet was burning up and nausea was beginning to set in as he navigated his way along the rocks.

In the distance he could see a shape in the haze, something that looked out of place with the rest of its surroundings, looked like it might be a building—the ghost of a house. After a few hundred yards hopping and skipping whenever his feet caught something sharp, he could see that it was in fact a single storey cottage with a steeply pitched catslide roof. It had whitewashed clapboard sidings and a red panelled front door. To the side of it was a garage.

The heat was bearing on him. He slipped off his jacket and placed it over his head, but that just made him warmer and it felt heavy. He dropped the jacket as he staggered towards the house, energy draining from his body with every step. A sharp pain in one toe reminded him to pay closer attention to where he was going, but everything was becoming a blur. His throat was so dry it hurt to swallow, and it hurt to blink. What had set him on this path? What had brought him to this place? Had he done something wrong? Had he hurt somebody? Robbed somebody? Killed somebody? What dumb stupid selfish thing had he done, and why? Money? Love? Nothing really mattered right now except the distance he could put between him and that ant-headed thing, and all he wished for now was a cool glass of water…

When he eventually reached the garage door, he found it slightly ajar. He looked inside. There were pegboards displaying a variety of power tools on each of the walls, and in the far corner was a door—closed—which presumably led into the house. Elevated on a jack ramp in the centre of the garage was a cricket-green Oldsmobile ’98 with the hood open. There was a beat-up old red toolbox on the floor. Next to this was a wooden chair, freckled with white paint, and beside that a workbench laden with various tools and tins of oil and, most important of all, what looked to be a glass of water. All told, the coast appeared to be clear—and Sweet stepped into the welcoming shade, pulling the rickety garage door closed behind him. For now, at least, the sun was off his back.

The concrete floor, with its blossomed oil stains, was cool underfoot. He looked to the house door and then at the glass of water. Someone could come out of that door at any moment and then what? How would he explain himself? What was he doing here? He made a beeline for the water, picked up the glass in trembling hands and drank. It felt like every part of him could breathe again. The coolness radiated within him and the tension flooded out of him. In his mind’s eye, chill ocean waves lapped along a dry sandy shore and he fell hard into the water’s embrace, dizzy with rapturous relief, floating out into the blissful swell. Away, away—

“Pass me the wrench.”

The sound of the voice almost made Sweet choke. He looked around, but he couldn’t see anybody. Was he hearing voices now?

“On the worktop,” the voice said, “can you see it?”

Sweet looked over at the workbench where he saw a large yellow handled adjustable wrench with BusyBee written on the side in black letters. He put the glass down and picked up the wrench.

“Over here,” said the voice, and Sweet looked down. A pair of legs wearing dark brown pleat-fronted trousers and black shoes were sticking out from under the car. An arm, with sleeves of a dark blue shirt rolled up to the elbow, was reaching up. The fingers were like knotted wooden twigs covered in grease and oil. “I would come out an’ say hello, only Mrs Gibson is expectin’ her car ship-shape and I said it would be ready by three. An’ besides, my hands are—you wouldn’t wanna shake ’em.”

Sweet placed the wrench in the grasp of the reaching hand.

“You have a name?” the voice asked.

“I’m… Sweet.”

“Just Sweet?” the voice asked.

“I can’t remember.”

“Well, Sweet, my name’s William T. Hunnicut. But you can call me Bill. All my friends call me Bill. My guess would be you’ve been having a very bad day, am I right?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Take a load off, son,” said Hunnicut, and without hesitation, Sweet sat down in the wooden chair and sank back against the garage wall. There was something comforting about Mister Hunnicut, or Bill as he’d insisted Sweet call him; something reassuring in the tone of his voice.

“If you want more water, there’s a pail by the back door,” said Hunnicut’s voice from under the car, but Sweet was too exhausted to get back up again. “You a long way from home, young man?”

“Truth be told, I’m a little lost and a lot confused.”

“The heat’ll do that to ya’.”

“I think someone is chasing me.”

“The heat’ll do that to ya’ too,” Hunnicut laughed.

“No,” Sweet said earnestly, “I mean, I know they are.”

“What’d they look like?” Hunnicut asked.

“Like something you wouldn’t believe. Like if I described… it, you’d think I was crazy.”

“Try me,” Hunnicut said.

“I’m not crazy,” Sweet said, “even if I have lost my mind.”

“You haven’t lost your mind, son,” Hunnicut laughed, “you just misplaced it on account o’ the heat.”

“Like a hat?”

“Like a hat. Now… think back, where did you last leave it?”

SOMETHING SWEET.

Something beginning with L.

The printer had done a lousy job and the first name on Sweet’s business card was blurred. He’d only had a hundred printed and managed to get a seventy percent discount for the error. “You’ve gotta take what you can get,” as a wiseass once said.

It was a hot day in May, and the ants had come out to play.

Sweet knocked on the front door of a ranch-style house in the cookie-cutter suburban Phoenix neighbourhood of Sun City. Identical houses with identical immaculate lawns and identical white picket fences lined a street that curved out of view. Sun City was laid out in concentric circles—golf courses lining the outer perimeter, then houses, and various amenities at the centre. It had been built as a retirement community for ‘snowbirds’, retirees who’d migrated from the cold north to the Valley of the Sun because, as the locals liked to say, “you don’t have to shovel sunshine.” Sweet’s father was one such bird, but he died just before he could sign the paperwork and roost. Sweet, however could see other opportunities in Sun City. There was money to be made here, people with disposable incomes. He liked to think of himself as the spider and Sun City as his web, full of potential customers, or ‘prospects’ as was the parlance of his trade.

The home owner was a recent widow, Gloria Mann. Her husband, Leonard Mann, who was at least forty years her senior, had died just one day shy of a hundred years old—close but no cigar—and left his grieving widow a considerable sum of money. As a wiseass once told Sweet, “Always read the obituaries.” The wiseass had also been quick to point out that there wasn’t all that much difference between a conman and a salesman. The conman had their Mark; salesman had their Prospect—and it wasn’t stealing if you could convince a person to give you their money of their own free will. Hadn’t Gloria Mann done just that? Hadn’t she convinced old “Lenny, darling” to leave her all his money? They were husband and wife, sure, but she couldn’t possibly have married an old fart like that for love, could she? It wasn’t difficult for Sweet to see it that way and it was thinking like that that helped him sleep at night because although he saw himself as a consummate and honest salesman, in his heart of hearts he knew. He knew.

There stood an ermine white Corvette Stingray in the driveway of this particular home, the sun shining off its hardtop like the glare off a bald man’s pate. The owner, Sweet thought to himself, probably only bought American. This was going to be a tough sell, and it wouldn’t help his case that he parked his Tahoe Green Studebaker out front neither. He usually would park at least a block away. Sweet was in the business of selling British domestic vacuum cleaners, door to door, and if people saw he had an American car… well, something about geese and gander sprang to mind and on top of that, if truth be told, he wasn’t that good at his job. But “you’ve gotta take what you can get.”

Britain had managed to reverse engineer much of the Martian technology left behind following the invasion of 1898, and that technology fueled a good deal of Britain’s exports. Martians, as advanced as they were, hadn’t invented the wheel. Nor did they invent the vacuum cleaner, but that didn’t stop British industry exploiting the technology every which way they could.

Under his right arm, Sweet carried a Mainwaring Model 550 All-British; chrome finish. It wasn’t shaped like a regular vacuum cleaner; the cleaning head looked more like the circular tray of a carousel slide projector. From its undercarriage protruded an array of spidery mechanical legs and numerous motorised brushes, all powered by a spherical electric motor activated at the push of a button. An empty bag was attached to the top of the unit—no handle like most modern uprights. This particular vacuum cleaner could scuttle about the house autonomously; its obstruction sensors operated on a gyroscopic principle so that if the cleaner encountered an obstruction such as skirting or a door, it would simply realign and navigate elsewhere. And all the while it would gather dust and debris through the intake port into the porous bag, like an enormous soft-bodied tick feeding on a host. Not a mental image Sweet cared to share with his customers, but that was exactly what they reminded him of.

Still no reply.

He knocked again.

The wide gable of the house afforded him shade but little relief from the enveloping heat of the afternoon sun. He wore a light, pale blue sport coat, pink shirt, dark blue necktie and matching pants, and a narrow brim straw hat with a blue and grey silk band. It was an expensive suit, but he kept telling himself it would be worth it, because it afforded him the air of confidence and authority he needed to close a sale.

He looked down at his black and white saddle Oxford shoes. Around his feet there had gathered a cluster of ants, and without giving it a second thought, he scraped them with the leather underside of his shoe, smearing their dark guts across concrete. He admired their work ethic, but he had to draw a line somewhere. They had crawled out from under the pristine lawn, in the middle of which there was ant hill.

The door opened.

Standing in the doorway in the half light was the Widow Mann—dressed in subdued tones of bottle green and black, with the blonde voluminous curls of Victory Rolls that framed high cheekbones, ice cold eyes and thin, red lips that didn’t ask “can I help you?” or “what do you want?”

Sweet tipped his hat, saying, “Afternoon, m’am” and “I’m terribly sorry to bother you,” and “I promise not to take up too much of your time.”

The Widow Mann breathed in sharply.

Sweet spoke softly and slowly. Not too slow, but fast talk was for liars. “I’m with the Mainwaring All-British Electrical Vacuum Cleaner Company, and I’d like to talk to you about—”

“I already have a vacuum cleaner,” she said with a voice that was deep, smokey and carried the hint of an Appalachian accent. “Hoover. Very reliable. I only buy American.”

Sweet congratulated himself with a smile, and said how he understood and that he had seen the car in the drive and figured on this being the case, and she complimented him on his observation skills at which point he realised he was losing, not closing the sale, and she began to push the door to, so Sweet said he understood, but wondered if he could trouble her for a glass of water. “Only it’s hot out here, and—”

The Widow Mann breathed in sharply, rolling her eyes this time and stepped back and said, “come in,” and, “wipe your feet,” and with no hesitation at all he picked up the vacuum cleaner and stepped into the house.

SOMETHING SWEET.

Six letters long.

The name was written on a schoolbook in his best handwriting, but he’d made a mistake and run his pencil through his first name more than enough times that the letters were completely obscured, and over the top he’d written the word “Mister”. Not because he’d been too full of his own self-importance at the age of five, but because someone needed to be the grownup, and at five years old he knew this all too well.

It was the night before Halloween, 1938. It was a Sunday. It was somewhere between eight thirty and nine o’clock in the evening. Sweet should have been in bed already, but instead he was standing in the stairwell of an apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, arguing with a girl twice his age. She had curly red hair, freckles and a name he would soon forget, about how he’d messed up his schoolbook and was very likely going to get into trouble for it.

“Betcha can’t even spell it,” she said.

“I can too,” he said, trying not to raise his voice.

“You can’t spell your own name,” she sneered.

“Yes I can,” he said.

“Yeah, well, Mister Sweet’s got smelly feet. How do you like that, huh?”

Sweet liked to play out on the stairwell but he preferred his own company. The door to his apartment was open. That way, if his father ever needed a beer from the cool box, Sweet would hear him calling. Just as the girl with the red hair and the unwelcome opinions was starting to round on Sweet, he heard his father call out, but it wasn’t for a beer this time. The tone of his father’s voice wasn’t of anger neither. The tone was of excitement, like the promise of something magical. “Hey, kid, come quick!”

His father was sitting at the kitchen table and listening to the radio, hunched over it like a betting man praying for his horse to win. News had been coming in for sometime that the British Stellar Expeditionary Forces were getting their asses handed back to them on a plate, having taken the fight to the enemy in ’35. Scotland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand wanted to pull their troops out now that things were going south. But this wasn’t that, although it wasn’t entirely unrelated. “You’re never gonna believe this, kid,” his father said. According to the voices on the radio, Martians had invaded New Jersey. A cylindrical object had reportedly fallen from the sky and landed on a farm in Grover’s Mill. Martians had emerged from the cylinder and attacked the gathered crowd of onlookers with a heat-ray.

And whilst all young Sweet could think about was the end of the world, his father was excited, like some religious fervour had taken hold, all wide-eyed and teeth. He hadn’t seen a smile on his father’s face before. “The Martians are here,” his father rejoiced, “they’ve come to America, kid, they’ve come to America!” And then he rushed over to the window, looking up at the night sky, looking for more cylindrical objects, praying, “Please, sweet Jesus, please!”

“SOMETHING… SWEET,” THE Widow Mann said, regarding Sweet’s business card with a raised eyebrow, “something ending with D.” She’d managed to get a drop of water on it from when she’d turned the faucet too quickly, and so now the ink from the illegible first name had bloomed into a completely indecipherable mess.

Sweet was sitting at the kitchen table of the Widow Mann’s home. A Westinghouse Air Conditioner, or “American made,” as the Widow Mann was quick to point out, kept the room nice and cool. The floor was a patterned linoleum—easy enough to clean, and decorations and furnishings were of a minimalist style.

“Thank you ma’am,” he said as the Widow Mann handed him the glass of water, “very gracious of you.”

“So, Mr… something… Sweet, this is Martian technology is it?” The Widow Mann sneered, looking down at the machine at Sweet’s feet.

“Why, yes it is, ma’am,” Sweet said, “would you care for a demonstration?”

“No, I would not,” she said, and for Sweet it was like coming back a move too late to a chess game.

“Only, I can—”

“It’s not made in Britain, is it?”

Sweet smiled, awkwardly, “Ma’am, it’s—”

“Save it,” she said, “they’re not made in Britain. They’re not even endorsed by the Mainwairing Company, are they? They’re just cheap knock-offs made in a factory in Tucson someplace for a tenth of the price.”

Checkmate.

“Now look here,” he said, even though that was the truth of it.

“No, you look here,” she said, and there was a fire and fury behind her glare, hotter than the sun, melting all the ice he’d seen in those eyes before, “my husband retired from the patent office twenty years ago,” she stabbed at the table with her finger, “and copies of blueprints of Martian technology from Britain were quite a racket, back then. I think the Feds will probably be very interested in you, Mister Something Sweet. They’ll went to know just how you managed to get your hands on those blueprints.”

He sat back in his seat, defeated and deflated.

“They’re made in an American factory, Mrs Mann,” he said hopelessly, holding the glass up to his lips and peering over the rim, “so, technically speaking, American made.”

The Widow Mann snatched the glass of water out of his hand.

“You’ve had your fill of my generosity, Mister Whatever-the-hell-your-name-is. This is why I buy American. Now, get the hell out of my house before I call the god damn cops.”

SOMETHING SWEET.

Two syllables.

When his father was drunk and mad as hell, he’d yell out Sweet’s full name, but he was so drunk it often came out in a slur and the ‘something’ beginning with the letter L, was possibly the worst word his father could attempt to say after an entire bottle of whisky for breakfast, but the Sweet part he’d sneer out with such venom, his lips curled back and teeth bared like a vicious dog.

“Sweet.”

The Martians hadn’t come to America in 1938 and it might as well have been entirely young Sweet’s fault. There had been nationwide hysteria—thousands of New Yorkers had fled from their homes in panic, there had been riots on the streets, there had been suicides, but the whole damn thing had been a hoax, and by the next morning, some 23-year-old man had his name all over the front pages of the newspapers. His name was Orson Welles.

And that rare excitement Sweet had seen in his father’s eyes went out like a light, and Sweet’s father drifted back into the catatonic state he had been in since Sweet’s mother had left them both, since Sweet’s father had stopped calling him ‘son’ and started calling him ‘kid’. From that day forth he would often find his father by the window looking up at the sky, day or night, listening to the radio, waiting.

Hoping.

Eventually the radio broke. It was a miracle it hadn’t set fire to the apartment.

“Did you touch it?”

“No, Pa. I didn’t touch it. It’s never been switched off.”

“Then why’s it broke?” he said, raising his hand. And Sweet flinched. He was used to his father raising his voice all right, but raising his hand was another matter altogether. Sweet’s father glared at the boy, must have seen the fear in his eyes as he said, “I ain’t lyin’ to you, Papa” and that must have been enough to stay his hand.

Sweet’s father wasn’t much good at anything, least of all radio repairs. With the radio broken, his father’s attention shifted to Sweet, and not in a good way. They didn’t have the money to replace the radio, so Sweet decided to fix it himself despite his father telling him, “don’t even bother” and “you’ll never make it work.” He borrowed a book on electronics from the building super, Mister Lewendowski, and used rubber cement to repair the speakers, thread for the tuning dial cord, and just about anything and everything he could get his hands on to keep that thing running.

The first time Sweet tried to switch the radio back on, the dial cord broke.

“Told you so,” his father said. “I don’t know why you bother.”

So Sweet used heavy duty string instead of thread and a dab of wax to stop the ends from fraying.

And it worked.

“Sometimes you just need something big to shake things up a little,” his father said the day the radio came back on. But there was no news of any Stateside invasion. The Martians still hadn’t come to America, and Sweet’s father slipped back into a coma of self pity, like it was up to the rest of the world to pull him back out. “Might as well roll over and die.”

Sweet loved his father, but he grew to hate the man his father had become. Sweet wanted to make something of himself, not wait and waste away. It was a cruel world, but you had to make your own luck in it.

Over the years, Sweet would hear all about ‘the war to end all wars’ being fought on another planet, about how the British had tried using dirty bombs, but the Martians had become immune to anything the British could throw at them. They even managed to turn the moon into a giant cannon, firing rocks at Britain; the impact sending waves across the Atlantic, turned the tide on the Hudson, but it didn’t send Martians. Eventually a Commonwealth space fleet, sent to evacuate troops, arrived and managed to bring the war to an end.

After over a decade of stalemated conflict, not just in space but at home in the tiny Brooklyn apartment, Sweet bought a bus ticket and headed ‘any-place-but-here’, ignoring his father’s warnings of “you’ll never make anything of yourself.”

He wound up in Boulder, Colorado, by chance not by choice, bussing tables, working car pools—you name it. This was Sweet, busy trying to make his own luck, but he never seemed to be able to catch a break. He would see the newsreels and the headlines and learn all about how the Martians weren’t really Martians. They originally came from a planet between Mars and Jupiter that had been destroyed and became the asteroid belt. They had left the ruins of their world and invaded and conquered Mars, just as Sweet had left the ruins of his and headed West. Sweet was working as a fry cook at a diner outside Boulder when the news broke about a flotilla of Venusians arriving on Earth, having managed to escape their conquered home world, but again, not even Venusians seemed to want to come to America.

“SOMETHING SWEET,” HE hissed in indignation through gritted teeth as he slammed the door to his Studebaker shut and threw the vacuum cleaner into the backseat alongside a dozen other tick-like brothers and sisters. If it don’t look professional, they won’t take you for a professional, he thought, rueing the day he’d accepted the discount over quality.

As he turned to start the car, there was a sharp shock in his right calf. He slammed his foot forward, yelling, “son of a bitch!”, trying to straighten up in his seat but there wasn’t room. He kicked the door open and spilled out onto the pavement in a frantic panic, landing on his shoulder. Hundreds of ants had clustered around him. Sweet got up and stamped his foot repeatedly till the ant fell from his trouser leg and onto the sidewalk. He brought his shoe down on it, but when he lifted his foot he could see it still crawling around. He stamped again, and again, and again, until finally he managed to squish the little thing beneath his heel.

Looking up at the house, Sweet could see the Widow Mann looking out of the window at him. The fire was out, and the cool blue eyes had frozen over once more.

Sweet got back in his car and slammed the door.

Damn it.

He looked back at the house, at the Widow Mann standing in the window, watching him. He thought she would have delighted in his discomfort, but there was nothing. Just the ice cold eyes of an ice cold heart. “American made,” he thought, now looking at the Corvette. It had a split window rear design which offered limited visibility. Okay, so the Corvette wasn’t a heap of junk manufactured in a factory in Tucson, but it sure as hell wasn’t perfect. And neither was the ant infested lawn. Everything around him was covered in a thick enough lick of paint to cover the cracks. Nothing was perfect.

He snatched a notebook out from his inside jacket pocket, grabbed a pencil off the dash, flipped to a page of names and gouged a line through ‘Mann’ with such force it almost broke the pencil and tore the page.

Sweet looked over at the pristine lawn and the ant hill and the writhing mass of little black bodies. The word would spread, that much he knew: he was done in this town. He ran a line through all the names in his little black book, and when he was done, he threw it into the backseat.

Sweet started the car and drove away.

“SOMETHING SWEET,” THE trucker driver had said. “I don’t remember. He had the same name as you, anyways. Said it had been happening to him since he was a kid.”

The ‘it’ that had been happening had been a series of alien abductions, and the ‘something Sweet’ could have been a distant relative.

“There’s probably hundreds of Sweets living in America,” said Sweet, “if not thousands.”

“Probably, I guess,” said the truck driver, “but you kinda look like him.”

Sweet was still working in a diner outside Boulder a year before his turn as a vacuum cleaner salesman. The truck driver had come in with the breakfast crowd early one Wednesday morning in May, 1965.

“I kinda look like him?” said Sweet.

“Yeah, sure. Only not like you could be brothers. He’s a lot older. More like a father/son resemblance, you know?” With those words Sweet felt a shudder. “Only he has real long hair and a big beard.” The relief almost overwhelmed him, and Sweet put the name and the resemblance down to simple coincidence. There were thousands of Sweets living in America after all.

“Says he was stolen from his bed in the dead of night.”

“He was kidnapped?”

“Something like that,” said the truck driver, and “he’s from Brooklyn,” and “raised a son, so I figured you might be him,” all of which was beginning to sound like a good deal more than coincidence.

When the news broke that the solar system had once been inhabited by numerous different species, before so-called ‘Martians’, it fired up the public’s imagination with speculation about what other life could have been out there and whether any of it could have survived. It shouldn’t have really come as any surprise to Sweet that his father’s imagination would be no exception. His father. The man who’d stood by the window and prayed for the sky to open up and rain down Martians.

The day his father walked through the door of the diner, Sweet barely recognised the man. He had the long hair and the beard as the trucker had described, and not only that, his father had a smile.

“Something Sweet,” his father said, sitting at the counter, and this man, this stranger who Sweet knew to be his father, told him how he’d met a truck driver who had said he’d met a fellow by the same name who bore a striking resemblance. “Only not like you could be brothers,” his father said, recounting the trucker’s words, “he’s a ‘good deal younger’. How do you like that? ‘A good deal younger’! So I just had to see this ‘good deal younger’ fella for myself.” His father might as well have just said his own son was nothing more than a curiosity, like he’d taken a road trip to Kansas to see the world’s largest ball of twine.

Sweet’s father then went on to tell him how, little over a year ago, he’d managed to get on to the radio and tell everybody that ever since he was a little boy he’d been snatched from his bed by tall men who wore diving suits and took him to what he thought to be some kind of submarine in the sky, with rectangle portholes and that, though his experiences were only minutes long, he’d be gone for hours at a time. Soon enough his father found himself talking to countless other abductees who hadn’t spoken up before but had crawled out of the woodwork now that Sweet’s father come forward. “You should hear some of ’em,” his father said, “wild stories—way more imagination than me. Human zoos on Saturn, crazy stuff like that.” It wasn’t long after that he had a book deal, telling the world about his own ‘experience’ and the experiences of others.

Sweet’s father placed a copy of the aforementioned book on the counter. It was a paperback. On the cover was a depiction of one of the tall men he’d talked about, wearing an otherworldly diving suit, holding a sleeping child, set against a white background with planets in the sky. They Come at Night, read the title, by L. Sweet.

“New York Times bestseller,” his father smiled pushing the book towards him.

Sweet could see an all too familiar gleam in his father’s eyes, as he’d seen many times before; explaining to the landlord why the rent was late, or pretending they’d been robbed right after Sweet’s birthday or Christmas, only for Sweet to find the pawnbroker receipts days later. It was the gleam of a lie. His father spoke like a liar too; fast so the person listening didn’t have a hope of picking up on any of the inconsistencies or remembering any of the details.

“Why?” Sweet asked. “Why did you do this?”

What followed was a moment of silence between them in which it was quite clear Sweet’s father contemplated whether to just come out with it or keep up the charade. Again he smiled, and tapped the counter. Some proverbial coin had been tossed in Sweet’s father’s mind and had landed ‘tails’ and he winced a ‘shot of bourbon’ wince because the truth was hard to swallow.

“I remember you telling me how the world was cruel but you had to make your own luck in it,” his father said softly so as only Sweet could hear him. “I remember thinking how smart you were, how right you were.” His father was buttering him up with flattery—the truth was coming. “Orson Welles made his luck that night when he convinced people the Martians had landed in Grover’s Mill. That stunt alone made him the most talked-about man in America. I didn’t see why I couldn’t do the same and make some of my own.”

Sweet shook his head. “You’re a confidence man, a scam artist.”

“Just making my own luck, son.” And there it was. “Son.”

This man wasn’t his father, he told himself, just some grifter, some wiseass, talking about luck like it was moonshine and how you could get drunk on success.

“I brought you a little something,” his father said, fishing a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket. “You always knew how to fix the radio…”

Sweet took the paper and unfolded it. It was a technical drawing in white lines on a blue background—a contact print on light sensitive paper.

“What is this?” Sweet asked.

“It’s a blueprint,” his father said.

“Yeah, I know it’s blueprint, but for what?” Sweet asked.

“I have a friend at the patent office,” his father said, “a fellow abductee. I’ve made a lot of strange friends in high places, and a lot of high friends in strange places. What you have there is a British vacuum cleaner using Martian technology. I’m sure a smart kid like you can find a way of making these things for a quarter of the price.”

“And then what?” Sweet asked.

“And then you sell ’em,” his father said, like it was as simple as picking apples off a tree.

“I’m not a salesman,” Sweet said.

“Oh believe me, it’s in the blood,” his father said with a wave of his hand.

“Salesmen are honest men,” Sweet said, looking his father dead in the eye.

His father smiled and took a moment.

“There’s zero difference between conmen and salesmen, son,” his father said, tapping the counter again, “conmen have their Mark, salesmen have their Prospect, it’s just a matter of convincing that Mark or that Prospect to part with their money is all. And you can do that. I mean, look at you. You sell lousy coffee all day long, why, you’re practically a pro!”

“Oh, really? And how does someone find a sucker to buy a knock-off?”

“There’s a sucker born every minute, and a sucker dies every minute too, leaving their money to lots of other suckers. Start reading the obituaries. You wanna head to Sun City, Arizona. The place is full of people at death’s door with money to burn, kid.”

“You can’t do something like this. It’s not legal.”

“Was it legal to close down the factories?” his father said, puffing up his chest. “Was it legal to lay off all the workers because one mechanical could do the job of a hundred good honest men? They broke their backs, kid, and what did they get? Nothing. Because all the moneymen do is take, take, take until there’s nothing left and then they take that too. They set the bad example. You’ve gotta follow by their example.” The bluster went out of his voice and he sat forward again, elbows on the counter, and in a much softer tone he said, “You take a little something and you give it back, am I right?”

“Oh, so you’re a regular Robin Hood now?” Sweet said. “Why are you doing this? I mean, why are you really doing this? Why have you come here, and why are you giving this to me?”

And the man he knew to be his father got up from his seat and said, “Because you’re my son.” And with that he turned around and walked out of the diner and Sweet would never set eyes on his father again.

Sweet looked at the blueprint. Damn ugly looking thing. Reminded him of a tick.

They Come at Night remained on the counter. His father had left it there for him. He picked it up. On the inside of the cover his father had written, “Sometimes you just need something big to shake things up a little.”

Sweet threw the paperback in the trash.

But he kept the blueprint.

SOMETHING SWEET.

WANTED FOR FRAUD.

He could see it now. Posted on every wall and in every window in every town. The Widow Mann’s words plagued his thoughts, tugged at his attention. He couldn’t simply tell himself he was over reacting, or that there was nothing to worry about. He knew full well there was everything to worry about now. Oh, how much simpler his life had been before his father walked back into it with that damn blueprint.

He’d stopped at The Fine Dine for supper, down the road from the El Rancho motel where he had a regular room on 66. He pushed the plate of burger and fries to one side; he thought he’d have the stomach for it, but the worry had put a knot in that.

As he walked back to the El Rancho, he noticed the car. A Belvedere Blue Jenson Interceptor, popular with government agencies on account of the fact that it had legs instead of wheels and could cover any terrain.

The Interceptor was empty.

He checked over his shoulder. Were they onto him? As he rounded into the carpark at the El Rancho, he could see there was a broad figure in a dark suit, knocking on his motel room door.

Then something seemed to take over Sweet; an impulse that suggested he should start running. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his car keys, and made a sprint for his car.

He jumped into the Studebaker and slammed the door shut. Less than subtle. Glancing at the rear view mirror, he could see that this had alerted the figure at the door, who wheeled around. The guy’s face was obscured by a pillar. He could just see him turn at the shoulders, and that was all the information Sweet needed. He fired up the car, watching as the figure dashed in his direction. In that moment, all Sweet knew was that they,whoever the hell they were, were onto him.

He slammed his foot down on the accelerator. The engine roared and the car shot forward and screeched out of the car park, pulling out into the evening traffic and a chorus of squealing breaks, barking tires and blaring horns. As he weaved through the traffic, Sweet could see through the rearview mirror that the man rushed to the Interceptor. Sweet cut in line at the intersection and ran the stop light, taking a hard right and forcing oncoming vehicles to brake. Foot down, eyes front, shoulders tight, knuckles white, he leaned on the gas and pressed on.

It wasn’t until he had lost sight of the Interceptor in his rear view for a good hour that he slowed down. For the rest of that evening, he drove aimlessly; trying figure out what to do, whether to double back and collect his things or just keep driving till sunrise. Having lost him, the Interceptor probably returned to the motel thinking he’d be back for his belongings. Sweet kept driving.

Soon enough he found himself drifting north-east on 88. It was night and he was tired; the adrenaline rush had left him beat. He slowed the car down, nosed into a space off the road, cut the engine and killed the lights. The traffic on this stretch was minimal; a car every two minutes, maybe five. He placed his wallet in the glove box, set his seat back and closed his eyes.

There was an abrupt knock at the window. He opened his eyes to bright light, but it wasn’t a flashlight. It was daylight. He’d slept. The car was oven-hot. He had kept the windows closed and now he could barely breathe. His brow and the back of his neck were soaked with sweat and as his eyes adjusted, he saw, parked in front of his car: the Interceptor. As he turned his head he could see that the dark-suited man was now stood beside his car, and somewhere deep inside him a starter pistol fired and he was gone, the Studebaker’s tires kicking up a huge cloud of dust as he tore off down 88.

Quick check in the rearview and he could see the Interceptor was on him. Quick check of the dash and he could see his time spent idling around Phoenix the night before had cost him plenty of gas and he was almost out. Coming up fast on his right he could see a dirt road leading to the Superstition Mountains. He cranked the steering wheel and turned onto the dirt road without slowing down and almost lost control, the rear of the car skidding out behind him. The Interceptor was close.

He kept on the dirt road ’til he was out of road altogether, and that was when he abandoned the car.

He came out running, fast as he could, and that was when he lost his hat.

He ran through a forest of saguaro cacti and found a rock to hide behind, and that was when he lost his mind.

“SOMETHING SWEET,” SAID Hunnicut, puzzling over the name, “beginning with L.”

“That’s right.”

“Two syllables?”

“Just the two.”

“Six letters?”

“Six.”

“That’s a tough one, son,” said Hunnicut, “a real tough one. And you’re all relaxed now and you still can’t remember?”

Hunnicut was right. Sweet was a good deal more relaxed now. Even though the muscles in his calves were still cramping, the pain in his feet was gone and he was just about all talked out.

“Maybe it’s something unusual, like… Lennox,” said Hunnicut, “from Macbeth.”

Sweet had never read any Macbeth, and he was pretty certain his father hadn’t neither. So, no not Lennox.

“Or Lennie, from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men?”

No Steinbeck neither.

“What about Lamont? Like Lamont Cranston, aka The Shadow.”

Yeah, he knew about The Shadow, that was another of Orson Welles’ shows, but no, not a chance.

“Logan? Lucas? Lazlo?”

“No,” said Sweet, “it was Lee… Lee-something Sweet.”

Sitting with Bill Hunnicut, telling him about the whole damn mess and putting the pieces together, had been almost like how he imagined a confessional to work, except he didn’t imagine Hunnicut would tell him he could fix the whole thing with a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Also, he rather liked how Hunnicut called him “son”.

“What was that book your father wrote?” Hunnicut asked.

“They Come At Night,” Sweet said. “New York Times Bestseller apparently.”

“Hmmm,” Hunnicut puzzled. “Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of it, but then it’s not the type of thing I’d read.”

A silence followed.

“We all make mistakes, son,” Hunnicut said, “and the mistake ain’t nearly as important as what we do to put things right.”

Sweet let out a sigh. If he could find a way to put it right, then he would. There were at least a couple of dozen old ladies in Sun City he’d sold his stupid vacuum cleaners to. If he could just show he was sorry in some way.

There was a knock at the door.

“Right on time,” Hunnicut said, “that’ll be Mrs Gibson and her son. I need to get cleaned up here. Would you mind answering the door for me, let her know I’ll be there in a minute. She’ll have a book with her, by way of payment.”

“A book?” Sweet said.

“Knowledge, son, is a valuable thing.”

Sweet took a deep breath, leaned forward—placing his hands on his knees—and got up. He felt light-headed and heavy-footed but was able to coordinate his way into the house and along a corridor with dark varnished boards, at the end of which was the front door. On his right was an opened archway into a lounge full of bookcases, a grandfather clock, and a long topaz Chesterfield couch. Knowledge, it appeared, was indeed a very valuable thing to Bill Hunnicut.

Sweet opened the front door.

The desert air hit his face like a warm breath. Standing before him in a pair white flats was a woman in a canary-yellow cheesecloth dress, and in one white gloved hand she was holding a matching yellow clutch purse. In her other white gloved hand she was holding a copy of Swan’s Way by Marcel Proust. Beside her was a young boy dressed in a blue and green striped t-shirt and grey shorts, but all of that seemed hardly relevant because on both their shoulders sat large, bulbous eyed ant-heads with twitching antennae.

Sweet reeled, his head swimming, and he stepped back from the door. His legs felt like they might buckle at any moment.

“Oh, my,” the ant-headed woman said, as if her appearance had been nothing out of the ordinary, but this man covered in dirt and torn suit and no shoes was out of the ordinary. “Er, is Mr Hunnicut home? Only, he said three o’clock, and—”

But it was no use. Fear had washed over Sweet, and he could barely stand.

“Are you all right?” the ant-headed woman asked, with inquisitive compound eyes—her mandibles chewing every word.

Sweet backed away from the door. His knees were about to give out. Propping himself against the wall, he slid down the corridor. He could barely breathe.

“Hunni…cut,” he mouthed, “Bill?” and his words came out in a slur, like… like his drunken father.

A framed picture fell from its hook as he slipped past it. The noise as it hit the floor was like a muffled gunshot to Sweet’s ears and he fell to his knees.

“Hunnn…”

He felt his muscles grow rigid, his jaw clench.

“Hhhhhuuu…”

He was now on all fours, trying desperately to get back to the garage, when he saw Hunnicut’s black shoes. He could just about make out Hunnicut’s voice but he couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. He reached out and grabbed at the bottom of Hunnicut’s trouser leg. Sweet sat back on his heels and looked up and saw the pleat-fronted trousers, the dark blue shirt tucked in at the waist and rolled up at the sleeves as he wiped his hands on an old rag, and finally, on Hunnicut’s shoulders—the head of an ant.

“LELAND SWEET,” SAID a voice in the darkness. “His name is Leland Sweet,” and then a moment later, “Leland Sweet Jr.”

That was it! The ‘something’.

It was Leland.

Beginning with L.

Ending with D.

Six letters.

Two syllables.

Leland.

Of course it was.

“Can you hear me, Leland?” asked the voice. It wasn’t Hunnicut’s voice and it certainly wasn’t Mrs Gibson’s. It was a British accent.

Leland Sweet opened his eyes.

He was laying on the couch in Bill Hunnicut’s lounge. He had a bag of ice on his head. The man leaning over him, looking into his eyes, was wearing the same suit the ant-headed man had been wearing, only this man had an ordinary head. He looked about the same age as Sweet’s father. Bald. Emerald eyes. Behind him was a much older looking man with a cockatoo plume of white hair on the top of his head, dressed in a baggy brown sack suit. There was a third man, dressed in the same clothes Hunnicut had been wearing. His head was also quite ordinary too. The years had made his cheeks shallow, and gaunt. A pair of spectacles rested on his nose. He was stood with his shoulders hunched and smiled a kind smile.

“My name is Montgomery Brown,” said the man with the emerald eyes, “but you can call me Monty.”

“And this is Doctor Caldecott,” said the man who had been dressed like Hunnicut, in a voice that was unmistakably Hunnicut’s voice, and he pointed to the cockatoo plumed gentleman.

“You need plenty of rest,” said Dr Caldecott, wagging a finger at Sweet, “and plenty of water. You’ve been out in the sun a little too long, young man. I understand your mind’s been playing tricks on you.”

Sweet nodded.

“I’m sorry this has been quite the palaver,” Monty said softly, “but it is a matter of utmost importance.”

Monty unbuttoned his jacket, holding out his pinky as he did so—just as the ant-headed man had done out in the foothills—and reached inside. He pulled out an envelope, not a gun, but all Sweet could think was that it was a court order. The law had finally caught up.

“Now, look, I’m sorry,” Sweet said hitching himself up on his elbows. He wasn’t prepared for how sore his throat would be and almost choked on his words. “I’m real sorry,” he said with his hand on his throat. “If I could change a damn thing I would in an instant.”

“Oh, it’s really no bother,” Monty smiled, “it was just a matter of time.”

“I did some stupid things,” Sweet said, “probably hurt a lot of people, and I wish that I could take it all back.”

Monty frowned. He handed Sweet the envelope. “I’m not really here about any of that,” he said, “it just would make my life a good deal easier if we could avoid probate altogether.”

The envelope contained a copy of Leland Sweet Snr’s last will and testament. Since the publication of his book, he had amassed quite a sizeable fortune in royalties. It seemed that his stories of abduction had captured the attention of a lot readers who could only dream of the Martians coming to America. Montgomery Brown was L. Sweet’s lawyer.

“It’s all yours,” he smiled.

Leland Sweet Jr was sitting up now, looking at the contents of the letter in astonishment.

“He left it all to me?” Sweet said.

“Yes,” Monty said, “by survivorship it’s all yours… every penny.”

“He left it to me?”

“Yes, he left it to you.”

“What I mean is, he bequeathed it, or whatever the word is. He said, ‘I leave all my ill gotten gains to my dearest ‘Kid’… Leland Sweet Jr’… something like that?”

“Technically speaking,” Monty was looking for the right words, “something like that.”

“What do you mean, technically?”

“He didn’t stipulate, but the law stipulates. Your father’s estate is automatically devised to a surviving next of kin.”

“So, by default?”

“Yes.”

And there it was. His father hadn’t left him the money out of some consideration, some act of love for his only son, it was by default. Sweet’s father had never given him a damn thing except trouble. He hadn’t even bothered to give him his own first name. He could have been Mathew, Mark, Luke or John—something biblical, but no, he was Leland Sweet Jr, and Leland Sweet Jr did not want the goddamn money.

But he took the money anyway.

“You’ve gotta take what you can get,” he said.

But what Leland Sweet Jr didn’t do was spend a single dime of it on himself. Instead he mailed a number of cheques to the residents of Sun City, not only reimbursing them for the money he’d conned them out of but enough for each household to buy three or four vacuum cleaners if they felt the need—American or British. And for William T. Hunnicut he provided a large collection of books because knowledge is a valuable thing.

The rest he gave to the worker’s unions protesting the mechanicals.

As for what became of Leland Sweet Jr, nobody knows, but the last I heard was there was a guy bussing tables in a diner outside Boulder, Colorado, and his name was something Sweet.

The Martian Waste Land
an epic verse, by

ADAM ROBERTS

April is the cruellest month, bringing

Martians out of a dead world, mixing

Aliens and humans, feeding

Red weed with spring rain.

We tried our best to keep warm, hiding

There among the late snow, feeding

Our little life with dried tubers.

Tripods surprised us, coming over the Chilterns

With their gullshriek ulla! uulllaa!

My cousin, he took me out through the ruins,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

“MR THOMAS ELIOT?” said the official.

And Eliot was caught. He almost closed the door its grudged open-inch then and there, but, somehow, couldn’t bring himself to. Instead he opened the door slightly wider, almost to the full one-quarter, and peered through. Skin so pale it had a faintly greenish quality. Hair ruthlessly combed and oiled close and neat against the scalp. He wore a waistcoat, an old-fashioned pinned collar and a calmly coloured silk cravat. Respectable enough. The official glanced past him at the one-room apartment: its bed unmade, bottles and tins stacked against the wall. A single electrical light bulb descended, naked and unashamed, from the ceiling. The paint on the wall had seen better days. Uncertain-looking stalagmites of piled-up books on the floor.

“May I come in, sir?”

“If it is concerning,” Eliot began, peeping past the official at the two Security of the Realm constables behind him. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Though it might seem, to the casual reader, as if my support for Doctor Davenport Spry’s work is in some small sense qualified, I can assure you that, if one takes the larger perspective, my support for the government as a whole remains... ah, remains...”

“Mr Eliot?” the officer interrupted. “Please. Our visit has nothing to do with your Criterion articles. May we come in?”

Eliot sighed. “Not,” he said, with soft American precision, “that the authorities will have cause to worry about my little magazine much longer. Finances, having been precarious for a long time, have now tipped into utter desuetude. Come in, gentlemen, come in.”

There were only two chairs, only one of which still had stuffing in its seat. Eliot offered this latter to the official and took the shabbier one himself. “My gas only operates between five and seven,” he explained, “and, given the lateness of the hour, I regret I am unable to offer you or these other gentlemen tea.”

“One of them, Mr Eliot, is a lady.”

Eliot’s lugubrious face did not alter its expression, although his prominent, fleshy ears pinked a little. “I apologise,” he said, his accent skewing more American. “The helmets. And the padded coats. They mean I can’t necessarily discern—but, please, what may I do for you Mr—?”

“Smethwick.”

For a while nobody spoke. Eliot looked up at the helmeted guards. “You are perhaps wondering at the—I cannot avoid the word—squalor in which I live. I am not without means, family means, but nonetheless the money I can claim for my own comfort is insufficient. I have certain medical expenses relating to my estranged wife which I consider it my duty to honour. And the position I used to hold in the bank... well. We all know how hard the reconstruction has been on the banking world. When Lloyd’s closed I was left jobless.”

“They invested in the past,” said Smethwick. “They did not see how completely adapting Martian technology would alter the complexion of our world.”

“Banks are conservative institutions by nature,” agreed Eliot. “And I am a conservative individual. A humble poet, unrich and unambitious. Living a life obscure, dragg’d on, Even as those dead unepitaph’d, who lie In stone coffins at Orchomenus. To quote the,” and Eliot smiled shyly at Smethwick, as if checking to see if his shibboleth had reached the ears of a fellow aficionado, “ah!—famous poet. I wonder why you have come knocking at my humble door.”

Smethwick seemed to ponder this. “Sir,” he said, “I must tell you, I am not much of a reader.”

Eliot waited.

“But,” Smethwick went on, “I understand that you are a poet.”

Eliot nodded very slowly.

“In which case I must ask you to accompany me, sir,” said Smethwick, getting to his feet. “I don’t pretend to know how, but it seems that your poetry may be what stands between us and extinction as a species.”

Eliot did not flinch. “I see,” he said.

“I am not given to exaggerations,” Smethwick added, surprised himself by the other man’s lack of surprise. “But I repeat: your poetry could be what brings peace to the solar system and save all of us.”

Eliot got to his feet, his knees joints snapping like twigs in a fire as he flexed them. “If I’m going out,” he said, in a distracted voice, “then I will need my hat.”

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubble? Sons of Mars,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A thicket of alien herbage, where the sun beats,

There is shadow under this red weed,

(Come in under the shadow of this red weed),

And I will show you something different from either

Your tripod at morning striding forward

Or its shadow at evening rising to meet it;

I will show you fear in an earthly germ.

Laut blies die Waffe

Der Heimat zu

Mein Marsmensch Gaffer,

Wo weilest du?

Ruined cities

And other withered stumps of time

London wrecked and deserted, desperate

Footsteps shuffling down rat’s alley

Under the night’s sky, as the aimed heat-ray

Spreads out into fiery points

Glows into noise, then is savagely still.

Oed’ und leer, der Mars.

ELIOT SAT STIFFLY in the rear of the staff car, only too evidently unused to such luxury. The vehicle’s legs flowed smoothly in their millipede motion. In a few minutes they had crossed the Thames and were heading south. The bulbs and towers of the rebuilt capital shimmered with light; aerial craft hummed and flew. The light turned Eliot’s glasses intermittently into flashing silver coins.

“Incomprehensible to me, really,” said Smethwick. “The changes I’ve seen. I’m guessing, sir, you didn’t witness the ninety-eight with your own eyes?”

“I was in the United States,” said Eliot, distantly. “And still in school. But I remember when I first came to this city. A patchwork of desolation and extraordinary industry.”

“Old-fashioned of me, I know,” said Smethwick. “But I wish we had been able to rebuild on our terms. Not to rely on the Martian technology and so on. Mr Eliot, I have been asked to bring to your attention the terms of the Official Secrets Act of 1889. What you are about to discover must not be disclosed to anybody. You understand, I am sure.”

“Oh, I say,” said Eliot, like a child, his face against the window. “A rocket!” The craft itself was too dark to be seen against the night-sky, but the orange-white flare of its exhaust made a brilliant bulb of light resting on top of a slender stem of gleaming exhaust gas. A moment later the rumble of the lift-off reached the car. The whole vehicle trembled with the reverberation, as if excited.

“Dartford Spaceport,” said Smethwick, matter-of-factly. “Mr Eliot, you follow the news, and are aware of the battles currently being fought between the troops of the empire and the last Martian legionaries?”

Eliot turned his wide face to look at the other man. His glasses flashed Morse-code as the car rushed past a set of irregularly-paced streetlights. “Of course.”

“And that the Martians launched a second invasion—of Venus?”

“There have been rumours of course,” said Eliot. “But it is alarming to hear them officially confirmed.”

“It puts us in a ticklish situation, rather,” said Smethwick. “Potentially facing an enemy on two fronts at once. So anything that gives us an edge—anything that we can use in our fight—could be vital.”

“Poetry,” said Eliot, in a low voice. “As a weapon.”

When Lil’s husband got re-mobilized, I said—

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,

BOWS AND ARROWS AGAINST THE LIGHTNING

There’s no way Albert should be fighting them sky-monsters

You got to know when you’re outclassed, I said

Discretion the better part of valour, and think of poor Albert,

Been in the army four years, he don’t want to face,

Tripods taller than St Pauls and firing all that heat?

Why I can’t even bear to hear their ulla, I said.

Oh can’t you, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who not to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

BOWS AND ARROWS AGAINST THE LIGHTNING

If I don’t like it you can’t make me pick up a rifle, I said.

Let the men fight if they must but leave us out of it.

You ought to be ashamed, she said, to be so lily-livered.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert gets blasted to atoms, there it is, I said,

BOWS AND ARROWS AGAINST THE LIGHTNING

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, minus an arm,

And they asked me up to help ’im change his bandages—

BOWS AND ARROWS AGAINST THE LIGHTNING

BOWS AND ARROWS AGAINST THE LIGHTNING

Take cover Bill! Get down Lou. Gedown May. Gedown! Gedown!

Uulllaa.

Uulllaaaaaa.

THE END OF the journey was a large military compound, in woodland somewhere on the Surrey and Kent border. It was, according to a large illuminated clock hanging over the main building, midnight in London and six in the morning at Mars Olympus Base.

Once out of the car Eliot stretched his legs in front of himself; one, then the other, like a cat.

Inside, Smethwick waved his security clearance at the guard behind a desk, and hurried Eliot through double-doors, down a corridor and into a wide room, busy with activity. A large illuminated screen displayed the entire Mappa Martis, pink and white with darker red for the mountains. Blips and points of different-coloured lights displayed military emplacements and manoeuvres. Women in uniform passed back and forth with bundles of paper, or items of portable electrical equipment. Tobacco smoke thickened the air and lent a hazy softness to the lights.

A stocky man with a large head was standing staring at the display, hands on his ample hips. He was in pinstripe trousers, a pale green shirt and a waistcoat that matched neither cloth, and his tie had been loosened so far it was on the edge of being entirely undone. He turned an ugly visage on Eliot.

“This the poet-wallah?” he said, in a throaty rumble.

Eliot nodded and shook his hand, trying not to stare at the fat chickpea-shaped lump at the end of the man’s nose.

“Morgan is my name,” he said, “but I shan’t bore you with my rank and so on, since you’re not in the Army yourself. Good of you to come, Mr Habbakuk.”

“Eliot.”

“Quite so. My people will take you to your berth in a few minutes, but before you turn in I want to show you something.”

He stumped out of the room and Eliot, glancing at Smethwick, followed him. Morgan did not look behind himself as he stormed down the corridor and did not bother to return the salutes of the various guards and sentries he passed. “Looks like a command centre, that room,” he barked. It took a moment before Eliot realised he was being addressed.

“Somewhat,” he replied.

“Not, though. Mars is too far away for us to be able to command the assault from here. It’s just there to give us a picture of how things are going. In the war. Out of date as soon as it’s posted on the big screen. Here we are.”

They had reached a metal door, heavily studded with carbuncular rivets. “Now,” said Morgan, briskly. “Through here is a Martian—alright? Ugly beggar, so ready yourself.”

“A specimen, you mean?” said Eliot.

“Live one,” barked Morgan loudly. “Best medical science money can buy has kept him free of the Spanish flu, and kept him fed, and so on. We’ve been interrogating him.”

“Gracious me,” said Eliot.

“Quite,” said Morgan, and he nodded his head so vigorously his hefty jowls flapped and wobbled. “You’re not to speak of this. Not to speak of it at all to anyone, understand?”

Morgan inserted a key the size of a pistol into a keyhole, turned it like he was trying to break somebody’s neck. Then he heaved the door open. Inside it was cold—so chilly that feathers of breath became visible at Eliot’s mouth, and he clutched his coat around his neck. Two guards in winter gear stood to attention as Morgan entered.

In the centre of the room was the Martian, floating in a tank of some fluid that glowed pale white-green. Tubes ran into its fat black body. Its skin shiny as liquorish and grotesque, like a cancerous tumour come alive. Dish eyes turned to peer at Eliot as he entered, and the ghastly hooked beak opened and closed menacingly. Eliot gazed, appalled. It was infinitely more monstrous and upsetting to see a live Martian than he could ever have imagined. The three-quarters-preserved specimen in formaldehyde at the Natural History Museum—which he had visited many times—had none of the creeping dread and unheimlich hideousness of the live beast.

“Clever sort of kafir it is, really,” Morgan was saying. “Learned English remarkable quick. But its octopoid beak isn’t suited to pronouncing the words, so we’ve rigged up a sort of—what’s the word the boffins use? Interface. Like a typewriter keyboard, but much larger and more versatile. It operates it with those weedy-looking tentacles. Come on Flobbo,” Morgan shouted. “You’re not usually this reticent when it comes to joining in the conversation!”

The creature in the tank twitched, worked some of its tentacles and turned its eyes on Morgan. “General,” came a blandly uninflected voice through a loudspeaker. “How pleasant to see you again. And this is Eliot?”

“This,” confirmed Morgan, putting a hand on Eliot’s shoulder, “is Eliot.”

“It is a prouder honour than a mere human could ever conceive,” said the dull-toned voice as the Martian pulsed and moved in its tank, “to meet the great writer. The reputation for ugliness is well deserved I think.”

“We Homo sapiens all look ugly to you Martians,” laughed Morgan. “Come now.”

“Even so,” said the Martian. “The ugliness of this sample, by a human standard, is noticeable even to me.”

“I say,” murmured Eliot.

“O Eliot! O thou greatest of writers!” the speaker said. “Hear me, for I am Fs’Bk’lula-bu, warrior of Mars! Ulllaaa!”

“Delighted to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” said Eliot.

“Plenty of time for you two to become acquainted,” said Morgan, sliding his hand down from Eliot’s shoulder to his elbow, and steering him towards the door. “But now I’m conscious of the lateness of the hour. I’m sure you’re about ready to turn-in for the night, my lad.”

Out in the corridor again, with the heavy door shut and locked behind them, Morgan said. “Quite a sight, no?”

“Astounding. Amazing. Really a sight without...’ he reached for the right word. “Analogue in any bestiary.”

“We can talk tomorrow. I’m sure you’re tired.”

“General Morgan,” said Eliot, “I assure you, sleep is the last thing on my mind at the moment. After seeing—that—I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep again.”

“He is a picture, though, ain’t he, our Flobbo? Tell you what: come along to my quarters, have a night-cap. A dram. It’ll settle your nerves, and it’ll give me a chance to explain what’s going on.”

O City city, I can always hear

Beside a barricade in Lower Thames Street,

The stomp-foot coming of the war machines

Passing the angle at which Big Ben leans

Where soldiers lurk at loopholes, where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr lie

In inexplicable fragments on the road nearby.

The river sweats

Oil and tar

Warships founder

With the turning tide

Red weed

Wide

On bankside as

Tripods swing their heavy spars.

The waters wash

Drifting bodies

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.

Ulllaaaaa leia

Ulllaaaaa leialala

HMS Leicester

Firing guns

The stern was targeted

Sharp explosion

Red and gold

The swift sinking

Rippled both shores

Southwest wind

Carried downstream

The screams of men.

White tripods keen

Ulllaaaaa leia

Ulllaaaaa leialala

“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the defeat

He wept. He promised revenge.

I made no comment. What should I pretend?”

“On Margate Sands.

We can regroup

Nothing with nothing.

The scattered infantry of dirty bands.

My soldiers broken soldiers who expect

Nothing.”

ul
la

To Docklands then I came

Burning burning burning burning

MORGAN, CLEARLY AN individual for whom generosity blurred into excess, poured whisky like it was apple-juice. Two cylinders the colour of terracotta tiles rose, solid-looking, one after the other until both glasses were completely filled. Eliot, usually an abstemious man, took the glass with gratitude. “He’s an unnerving beggar, our Flobbo, no?” Morgan chuckled.

“Grotesque,” agreed Eliot. He sipped the whisky, scowled, took another sip.

“Surely, surely. But loves your poetry, sir! Loves it! Which is tantamount to saying that all the Martians love it, because, as of course you know, they operate according to a mode of shared consciousness. Somewhere between a true hive-mind and a group of individuals, like us.”

“My poetry?” boggled Eliot. “My poetry?”

“Gracious!” exclaimed Morgan, apparently in agreement, and swigged a quantity of whisky from his glass.

“I’m honestly not sure, General...” Eliot began. Morgan talked across him.

“They’re alien, see? That’s the thing to hold on to. That’s the Rosetta stone. Now, we humans know what science is—technology, physics, all that—and we know what art is. The two are separate enterprises, what?”

Eliot coughed as the whisky scraped his throat.

“But,” said Morgan, “it seems the Mars-monsters don’t see exactly square with us on this matter. They don’t distinguish between art and science. Their technology is an expression of their artistic impulse, and their culture, back on their homeworld—so far as we can figure it—is developed with a scientific rigour. Take their cry, that infamous cry.”

“Ulla,” muttered Eliot.

“It’s song. It’s how they communicate, by song, and poetry. Now to me it all sounds alike, one ulla exact as to another. But to a Martian’s exquisite ears each call communicates subtle varieties, strategic military communication in the form of aesthetic appreciation of the landscape, or the beauty of a sunset. I can’t say I entirely understand.”

“Indeed not,” said Eliot.

“And it’s a weapon. It’s not a rallying cry, which is what we used to think. It’s a weapon—in itself. There are forms of life, Martian forms, who would literally be struck dead by an ulla screeched at exactly the right pitch. Do you see?”

“Song as weapon.”

“Now, when it comes to human art they’re very picky, rather exactingly so. Their tastes are abstruse, rather sharp to my ears. There’s an asperity to it. They like atonal music, for instance. But when they find something they do like—like your poetry, you know—they adore it. It has a potent effect upon them. And in that we have an opportunity.”

“To reach out to them? To build a bridge to peace?”

Morgan winked one eye. “To hurt them. I’m told by our best boffins that it will be possible to embed artistic combinations in your verse, combinations of sound, tangles if signification, that actually target the Martian mind. Bindweed their thought-process, catch them as a snake is caught by flute-music by a Bombay streetmarket performer. You see? Take Flobbo, our fat friend in the room back there. Some combinations of sound and meaning make him relax and improve his wellbeing. We can easily measure it. Other combinations upset him, degrade his health, and would, if we pressed it hard enough, certainly kill him.”

“You’ve been torturing him,” said Eliot, in an amazed tone, “by reading him poetry?”

“Testing his limits. And they aren’t robust, as a matter of fact. We’ve been using an invention of a Scottish scientist called Fleming to keep the beast from dying of infection, but he’s been ill for a long time. Entre nous, my lad, I don’t think he’ll last much longer. So I say: let’s work it. Take that poem for which you’re so famous—the Martians Make a Wasteland of London one.”

“A Martian Waste Land,” said Eliot.

“Quite so. Oh, they love it, though.”

“It’s unfinished,” said Eliot. “I only managed to write three sections—it’s supposed to have five. Like a Jacobean tragedy.”

“Unfinished, eh? You can tell I think,” confided Morgan, as though he were an expert in literary criticism. “All a bit chippy-choppy, what? But vivid! Most vivid. I was there. I remember it. And you only imagined it, with your mind’s eye! But you capture something of the ruin and the chaos. Very clever.”

“And the Martians like it? I find that rather hard to believe.”

“So it goes, my boy. They want you to go to Mars and recite it!”

Eliot positively coughed with startlement at this. “Me go to Mars?”

“A peace envoy. You would stand before some manner of Martian council and declaim your whatnot, and they in turn would sing a song, and that would help bind a peace treaty. But we’ve a different sort of plan I don’t mind telling you. We’ve a sly plan. Mix your words, the music of which pleases the Martians, with some words we know—from our researches—have the opposite effect. Do you know a chappie called Pound?”

“Pound?”

“That’s the Johnny.”

“John Pound?”

“No, no, some Biblical name. Uzziah, I think. American, like you, though rather more flamboyant. He’s made a name for himself with our present administration, I don’t mind telling you. We tried some of his poems on our Flobbo and the old brute nearly expired on the spot! So what we’re thinking is: mix some of this Pound wallah’s words in with your ones, and when you recite the resulting combination to the Martian, at the great, crumbling amphitheatre of Arcadia Planitia, they will quail and fall back, and we can push forward and finish them off.”

Eliot kept blinking. He couldn’t take it all in. “Adulterate my,” he said, “my poem? Mix it with this—with these other words, this other music?”

“Don’t take this personally, Mr Habbakuk, but from what I’ve read of it it’s pretty adulterated already. All a soup of quotations and snatches of speech, what? What? And we’re talking about making significant advances in this war! Pushing the beasts back, perhaps destroying them entirely there. Who knows what new technology we’ll uncover once Mars is fully ours! Then we can concentrate on their Venus base, and make the solar system as a whole safe for democracy! You can’t say no, my friend. There will be a medal in it—and of course fame, money, preferment. A title I daresay.”

If Eliot was trying to think of a way of saying no, he wasn’t doing a very good job. “I’m not sure I see what good it would do to have me travel all the way to Mars...” he tried.

“They’ve asked for you! They’ve asked for you by name! Don’t you see? It means we’ll be able to get close. To lull them into a false sense of security.”

It sounded dangerous to Eliot. Likely to prove specifically dangerous to his person: to find himself reciting his own poetry to an audience of unearthly monsters as a firefight broke out all around him. But the whisky was warming his stomach and giddying his head, and beyond the danger was the prospect of something else. A glory, perhaps. A recognition. Or maybe a simpler truth, the one that all poets nurse in their hidden hearts—the desire that one day he would truly be able to write a poem so potent it would literally wound and kill those who heard it.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“Good cove,” said Morgan, leaning forward and patting Eliot on the back. “You’ll be a hero, my friend. A hero!” And Eliot, quite uncharacteristically, let out a little laugh. It was as if he could see, in an access of that hierophantic futurity Shelley claims as the special genius of poets, what the future would bring—two weeks’ intensive training at the base, readying him for space-flight. Sessions in the armoured room with the Martian warrior they called Flobbo, reading him poetry—although Flobbo would, in the event, prove too weak to survive the programme designed for him. The hideous being expired, the victim of Earthly infections that Earthly doctors had only ever been able to keep at bay, and never quite cure. His corpse was sunk in a vat of formaldehyde. Not that Eliot grieved for him. He had too much on his plate: being fitted for a space suit, being flown by helijet to Dartmouth and then being squeezed through the hideous winepress of rocket launch high-g up into orbit, before being slotted into a hibernation pod for the long flight to the red planet—to Mars—to Ares himself. The poet as weapon of war.

Flobbo the Martian, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the winds of home, and the deep sand swell

And the profit and loss.

A microbe from the Earth

Consumed his flesh in whispers. As his breathing fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Monster or Man

O you who aim a gun and look to win war,

Consider Flobbo, who was once handsome and tall as you.

ELIOT KEPT OVERBREATHING. He’d been trained, and he knew better, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. It fogged up the interior of his helmet. He was on Mars! On Mars! And behind him was the delegation of the twelve Earthly nations, in spacesuits all bearing the designs of the flags of their countries. Behind them were the various honour guards, and polished-and-waxed vehicles of war. And in front of him was a phalanx of Martians, in their fighting tripods—but with the hoods open, in this, their native air, and the hideous bulbous presences clearly visible.

It smote Eliot abruptly that Morgan’s plan was crazed. Recite a poem and kill an alien being? How could one even begin to think such a thing was possible? Yet here he was, and there was no backing out now. He had memorised the piece—the new finale to his Martian Waste Land—and in mere minutes would say the words. And watch the aliens quail and die before his very eyes. The German specialists who had helped him prep for this mission had wanted to call this new weapon of war the Blitzgedich: the Lightning Poem. But, ever the pedant, Eliot had insisted that lightning was a visual, and his poem an aural, experience. Not lightning, then, but thunder. Not a Blitzgedich, but what the Thunder said.

And what it said was die.

DIE. DIEANDBURN. DAMNYOUTO—

To Hell, of course. But here was hell already: as cold as Dante’s final circle, as red as hellfire. They were on the Arcadia Planitia, inside a huge saucer-shaped indentation, perhaps an adapted impact crater, at least a half a mile in diameter. An outdoors theatre on an epic scale. Pillars, some tall as ship’s masts, others mere broken stumps, circled the rim. And inside: the honour guard and the twelve ambassadors, with various armoured cars and half-a-dozen tanks. Union flags hanging limp in the thin air. And facing them, a dozen varieties of Martian machine, tentacles waving like seaweed in the stream, those unnerving broad pale eyes all focussed on him—Thomas Stearns Eliot. “The King himself will present you your medal,” Morgan had told him, “when you return victorious. He even suggested changing your middle name to Thomas Starkiller Eliot, in honour of your inevitable victory.”

“I don’t know about that,” Eliot had murmured.

Inevitable, Eliot repeated to himself. It was inevitable. His breathing was shallow. Inevitable. Beyond the scrum of alien monsters, the landscape of this alien world was photographically vivid in the thin air. Amber and buff ridges. Pink sky over ancient rocks. To the west pillars of smoke rose from the sites of an earlier battle, like dirt-track roads into the sky. The sun weirdly tiny, like a silver nailhead. A frosty silence filled the arena.

Turning his head to the right and Eliot could see the solar system’s tallest mountain, Olympus Mons—so wide and shallow in its gradient, and from here so far away, that its true scale was difficult to gauge. The summit rose a touch more sharply from the base, a single carious tooth rising from a bank of inflamed-looking gum. Here, in the Arcadia Planitia. Eliot thought to himself, is no water but only rock. Rock and no water and the dusty arena.

A fizz of sound in his ear: his communicator. “You’re wired-in, Eliot,” Command told him. “Let’s do this.”

“Roger that,” said Eliot, and stepped forward.

The military had placed a bank of speakers, to carry his words to the Martians. The aliens, on their side, had assembled a heap of odd pustule-shaped objects that served the same purpose for their words.

“My friends,” said Eliot, and his words boomed and reverberated. His head, sealed inside his helmet, heard the words only as his earpiece broadcast them back to him, but he found he was able to feel the vibration his words made through the soles of his boots. The volume must be immense! Maybe, he found himself thinking: just maybe these Thunder-words will indeed smite and slay.

DIE.

“Martian friends, and future allies,” he said, and the ground under his feel trembled with the soundwaves.

DIEANDBURN.

“I am the poet, Eliot, and have come at your request. I shall read you a new poem that I have especially composed for this occasion, to solemnize the new treaty of peace between our two worlds.”

DAMNYOUTO—

“Eliot,” came a voice: mechanical, uninflected. Eliot stopped. The Martians speaking through their own loudspeakers, their words being translated into English by their own strange technology.

“Most humans are dust beneath the heels of our war machines,” the Martian voice said. “You are different. Your art has touched us. You shall bear children inside your body, and pass your genius on to a hundred new Eliots. And so the key shall be spread through the cosmos!”

The key? What key?

Fzz went Eliot’s communicator. “What the devil...?” said Command, and was interrupted by another voice, a woman’s. “They reproduce by budding. They’re hazy on how humans do it, I suppose.”

“I’d best put them right,” said Eliot. “I wouldn’t want them to think they could... you know, insert—” and he switched his feed to the loudspeakers. “A small misunderstanding, my Martian friends,” he said. “I cannot bear children.”

“You are,” boomed the Martian voice, “too old.”

“No—no—only, it is not the way with human beings,” Eliot said, wondering to himself how much detail he would have to supply, “for the male of the species to carry the child to term. That is the role of the female.”

“Precisely,” blared the Martian voice.

Eliot felt a ticklish sense that he was losing control of this situation. He dismissed it. He needed only to speak the words he had memorised, and the Martians would flail and die.

“I have, as I say, a new work to recite, which I trust you will find...”

“Does it contain the key? We wish to be given the work that contains the key.”

“It,” said Eliot, a little uncertainly. “It does have a bit about a key.”

“The key!” the Martian voice droned. “The Key to all Mythologies! To unlock the belief system of myth and religion that underpins all human society!”

Fzz, in Eliot’s ear. “What in blue blazes are they blathering about?”

“I’m going ahead with the recitation,” Eliot told Command. “It’s now or never.” He cleared his throat and opened the channel again. “My friends, this piece is called What The Thunder Said. After the...”

The Martian voice interrupted immediately. “No! No! We do not want this piece. We want your earlier piece, Middlemarch.”

Fzz. “Oh,” said Control. “Bloody hell.”

With a discombobulating internal vertigo, as if part of his mind were falling down the mineshaft of an inevitability he had foreseen but not understood, Eliot understood what was happening. “My friends,” he said, “there has been a misunderstanding.” He realised he hadn’t routed his words through the loudspeakers, so he switched channels, and said again: “Martian friends, allies. There has been a misunderstanding, I fear. Middlemarch was written by George Eliot. I am Thomas Stearns Eliot.”

“Bring us George,” commanded the Martian voice, instantly.

“That will not be possible, I’m afraid,” said Thomas, with a nervous little laugh that rolled like cannon fire around the arena. “She, alas, is dead. I, however, am alive, and keen to read you my new poem, which I trust you will find...”

“Dead,” said the Martian voice, and froze Eliot’s words in his throat.

Fzz. “They’re functionally immortal,” gabbled Control in Eliot’s ear. “Unless killed. They bud off new versions of themselves. They don’t understand how foolish it is to ask for a writer who died half a century ago.”

“I’m going to read them my poem,” said Eliot, determinedly.

“Middlemarch contains the Key to All Mythologies,” said the Martian voice. “And we require that key. You, Thomas Stearn, are budded from George, that you can give us this key?”

“My friends,” said Eliot. Sweat was tickling his cheeks and neck. His heart was pipping along at a terrific rate. “This is not how the generations follow one another for human beings. I am not budded off, or indeed in any way related to, George Eliot. In point of fact, George Eliot was not her real name. She was called Marian Evans, and only wrote under Eliot as a nom de plume.”

“Plume?” repeated the Martian voice. “Pluuume?”

“I am not a novelist, and have no interest in reciting her work, or her satirical representation of Casaubon’s project for a key to all mythologies. But I am a poet, whose work may interest you...”

The quality of vibrations under Eliot’s feet changed.

“Deceit,” blared the Martian voice in its uncanny monotone. “Lies. This is not the Eliot we were promised. Here is no key.”

“Permit me to disagree, if I may,” said Eliot, his voice higher by a semitone and much more rapid. “In an essay I have recently published I make the argument that, although in prose one may be legitimately occupied with ideals, in the writing of verse one can deal only with actuality, and...”

Fzz went the communicator in his ear. “Run you fool,” yelled Control. “They’re firing.”

Eliot looked to his left. Heat rays were targeting the Imperial Troops, kicking up alarming gouts of dust and slicing right through the more lightly armoured cars. His ability to process what he was seeing stalled, stuttered, and then he saw clearly. Everything was ending. He saw the agony of the honour guard in that stony place, saw their faces distort behind the visors of their helmets and could easily imagine the shouting and the crying. There was a boom loud enough to be heard even inside Eliot’s helmet and a shuddering reverberation that almost knocked his legs from under him. Around him was chaos.

British Imperial troops were returning fire and trying to fall back. Behind the line of columns were sandbagged positions, and a dug-in heavy gun, and once out of the wide dish of the arena itself the landscape became more defensible. But the people inside the crater were horribly vulnerable to Martian fire.

The sound of a gigantic tuning fork sang through Eliot’s speakers, and resolved itself into a long-drawn-out ulla screech. Terror of lamentation. He picked up one heavily booted foot and clomped it down again. Then he did the same with the other foot. Moved his left, moved his right, a lumbering run towards the edge where the pillars were. To his right he saw the hooded hordes of Martian machines swarming round, one or two stumbling in the cracked earth as Earthly weaponry found its target. But still they came. Heat rays played over the ground, cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air. The suit was heavy but the Martian gravity was lighter than Earth’s, and his destination was ringed by an ever nearer horizon. He told himself I shall make it. Gasping and struggling. I shall. I shall, I shall. Chaos everywhere, screaming audible through his feed, falling towers—Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London, flashed through his memory—unreal. All of Mars is falling down falling down falling down. Le Prince d’Arcadia à la tour abolie. Fragments sheared from the masonry leapt and danced, as if possessed by mad spirits. Eliot was almost there—almost at the lip of the arena. He hurdled the eviscerated corpse of a human soldier, jinked around a toppled chunk of masonry, gasped for air, and told himself, I shall do it, I shall. And then, turning his head just a little, he saw a heat ray cutting into the dust like a plough, and sweeping in its inevitable path towards him. It must intersect with his struggling fragile form in moments, and he had time only to think, as to the possibility of him making it to cover, and with a sinking sense of the inevitability of his fate: I shan’t. I shan’t. I shan’t.

The Menagerie
a true history, by

EMMA BEEBY

COIRA CHECKED THE lane then waved the stuffed bear toy at the little girl across the street. The lane had to be empty; Newhaven village was small enough that one grown-up seeing them could ruin everything.

She’d never liked this part of the trade. Fear was the only way, though. Every time she saw the Royal Articulated Hussars scratching up the hillon those metal spider legs, she was sure they were coming for her. Fear was her only protection.

She beckoned the girl. Her name was Daisy and lookedabout as threatening as one. She had maybe six years to Coira’s ten.

“Ah’ve no got all day!” Coira said, and tugged Daisy into the lane.

Daisy quailed, but followed. Coira stopped where the late afternoon light fell helpfully through a break between the fishermen’s houses. Daisy needed to see what she was paying for. Coira set the bear on the ground. It flopped onto its side with a quiet clunk.

“K-Kenny said y-you can make it dance.” Daisy mumbled.

Kenny. That wee shite. That was twice now. Still, she needed the business. Her family needed it.

“Aye. Ah can make him do a Highland Fling, if ye like.”

Unseen by Daisy, Coira slid the smooth metal ‘switcher’, as she called it, out of one pocket. It sat like a cool pebble in her palm, apart from the bump in its centre. She pointed it at the bear on the ground. Her other hand she waved like she’d seen a street magician do once on the Edinburgh High Street. She wondered if anyone else had noticed his boy picking the pockets of the audience.

The bear righted itself. Daisy gasped, then stepped back in fright as the bear got to its feet and twirled on the spot before it flopped down and fell still. Coira grabbed the girl’s arm to stop her running, expecting this.

Then came ‘the look’. It was always the same. Wonder and worship with a hundred questions behind it, which only made the next part worse.

“How—” Daisy didn’t get to finish.

“—Let’s see yer own bear, then. Need to check it’s up to dancing before we agrees a price.” Coira thrust out a hand for the girl’s toy bear, which Daisy produced from her pinafore pocket. It was missing an eye. They were always missing something. Coira pretended to consider it, like maybe she’d changed her mind.

“Can ye do it?” Daisy’s eyes were hopeful.

Coira didn’t answer, waiting.

“I got sixpence and a ha’penny.” A pause. “And my pieces, for the whole week? Ma puts honey on them.”

Coira grinned. Good money, and a week of sandwiches.

“Aye. He can dance.” She turned her fierce glare at the girl, gripping her arm again.

“But ye have to promise. There’s rules. Kenny mention those?”

“Aye. I cannae let anyone else play wi’ him. An I won’t! I promise!”

“No, the rule is ye cannae let anyone else see it. No one. No yer ma, no yer pa, nobody. No even Kenny. Do ye ken what happens if you break that promise, Daisy?”

Daisy nodded, but Coira never took it on faith. She pointed her switcher and waved her other hand again, a more violent action this time, then watched the girl’s eyes go wide.

The bear on the ground shook and started issuing thick black smoke. There was a crack and the bear’s legs shot off its body, followed by its head which jumped straight up. Coira caught it and thrust it in the girl’s face.

“This is what happens if ye break yer promise. An’ I can dae this fae anywhere.”

Daisy’s eyes filled with tears. Good.

“Ye understand?” said Coira.

Daisy wiped away a tear and gave Coira a solemn nod, her eyes never leaving the decapitated bear head.

BRODIE WAS WHERE Coira had left him at the other end of the lane, asleep and curled up on her little wooden pull-along cart. He could sleep anywhere. She envied that; she found it so hard to sleep. Coira knelt and put a hand on his dark messy mop of hair. He stirred and almost immediately reached his little hands out to grab the bear, now reassembled.

“Dunk Duncan!” Brodie squealed, hugging the bear.

She’d made the bear for his second birthday, almost a year ago now. It got his name because it fell down every few steps, much like Duncan, the village drunk who near lives in their parent’s pub. Brodie had laughed whenever he fell down, almost as much as he laughed at the bear right now.

Coira grinned. “Duncan did his dance very well, but he wants tae go hame now.”

“Time go hame, Duncan. No mair dancin!” he scolded the bear.

She lifted the handle, and tugged the cart into motion, Brodie now sat cross-legged, cradling the bear. She headed for the street past the harbour, avoiding the hill for now. The tide was out, and on the beach children were combing for crabs and pennies. She looked away; she never went to the beach if she could help it anymore.

Coira turned the cart onto the hill and looked at her destination. The Whale’s Heid public house stood at the top of the Whale Brae, which rose right up from the harbour, short but steep. Supposedly a huge whale got beached on it once, though Coira no longer believed this; the pub’s main draw was a whale bone supposedly from that whale, which hung from the ceiling, but Coira knew Pa bought it from the City museum when it closed. The pub’s view of the Firth of Forth was rivalled only by the six flats stacked in the tenement above, though the only people who lived there now were Coira and her family.

Not far away, Coira heard the train announce its arrival at the Newhaven station, emerging from the tunnel underneath the hill. Her grandfather had helped make that railway as a young man, blasted through the hill, as he’d often told her. The train used to take people into the city, before, when there was work. Now it brought the Hussars for evening curfew.

Coira entered the tenement stair; the stone kept the air cool. She pulled her shawl higher over her shoulders.

“That you, Coira, hen?” her Ma’s voice called from the pub side door. Coira wouldn’t get away with going upstairs without seeing her.

Brodie leapt off the wagon and pulled Coira into the pub, which, with the sole exception of Duncan, was predictably empty. Brodie ran straight to Ma’s arms, waving Duncan’s stuffed namesake.

“Dunk went dancin!” he shouted, delighted to tell Coira’s secrets.

“Did he, aye?” Ma swept him into her arms. “What else did he do?”

“He... he do spinning an’ his head fwies!”

“Always got a tale, this one, just like my Coira,” Ma said, giving Coira a fond look.

Ma must have a sherry in her. Coira could tell she was going to tell the story. Again.

“You ken yer sister saw a giant crab when she were a wee lassie? Aye. You heard this one, Duncan?” she shouted at Duncan, at the end of the bar. Sherry for him, too, Coira noted.

“Naw,” slurred Duncan.

He had. At least twice. Coira sighed.

“She was at the beach, looking for crabs, it was gettin’ late, ken, but she could never be reasoned wi’, that one, even at three.

“Francis and I lost sight of her. I thought she’d drooned. I was screamin’ an’ ballin’; what a state I was in! Francis ran to the Port Free House and roused every man, but soon as they set foot on sand and there she was!” In full flow, Ma turned her attention back to Brodie. “Tellin’ the funniest tale of a giant crab catching her and waving her in the air!”

Pa walked in, filling his pipe. Hearing the last of this, he cast Coira a sympathetic glance.

“I remember it wis the day after they Martians landed in England. She must’ve heard a tale fae one o’ the other bairns.”

Coira nodded. That made sense.

“What did ye say tae it again, Coira?”

“I telt it, ‘put me doon!’” Coira said and waved her finger with all the expected emphasis.

Ma laughed. She probably wouldn’t be laughing if she knew that same giant metal crab was two floors above her head.

Coira didn’t know why she’d gone back, all those years later. The memory had stayed fresh and frightening. The deep mud behind the harbour mouth she wasn’t supposed to play beside had sloped straight down into deep cold salt water, even at low tide. She’d thought she’d found a sunken cave: a perfectly round entrance just under the water. She’d seen a glint in the water, and reached down a cautious little hand... then that claw shot out, clamping her by the waist, before the thing itself emerged from the water; a silver crab was a fair description, but it was no crab. Coira had been as fascinated as she was annoyed at being picked up like this, but not afraid. Not then. That came later, in the nightmares.

“So typical of ye, to gie it a tellin’!” Ma laughed.

Coira had never understood why it let her go.

“Aye.” Pa chimed in. “Who needs the British army when ye’ve got fearless Coira.”

Coira held out Daisy’s sixpence. Anything to change the subject.

“Found this on the Brae.”

“A sixpence!” Her father reached for it, wondering.

“Is that true, Coira? You find so many coins,” her Pa asked, stern.

“Well... Brodie saw it, but ah picked it up,” Coira said, as if that was the worst of it.

“Clever laddie!” Ma smiled at Brodie, convinced.

Brodie yawned. That was her cue.

“Coira, our meetin’s startin—”

“—Ah’ll get his supper.” Coira said. There was never any argument.

COIRA, HOLDING BRODIE’S hand, was almost a flight up when she heard muffled voices below.

“Ah’ve got them, Francis!”

“Not here, Doug. The stair.” The pub door flew open and the two men stopped below. Coira paused. She was curious at what her parents were planning this time. The Hussars called them ‘seditionists’, she’d heard her Pa say. Coira wasn’t sure what that meant. She’d worked out enough, even though she wasn’t allowed at meetings. She used to think they came to drink for free and shout about the Hussars and the Prime Minister. One night they all went out after curfew, and the next day she’d heard the Hussars barracks had been set on fire. After that, the Hussars moved elsewhere, using the train to return each night and leave in the morning. Her parents had acted as if this wasn’t interesting news. She’d had enough experience of lying by then to know what that meant.

Doug, an old fisherman, held a wooden box open with what looked like old yellow-brown rolls of paper inside. There was writing on them Coira couldn’t make out, and a few were gunky with something that reminded her of her Gran’s broth.

“Ah got two mair boxes. A bit auld, but they’ll dae the job.” Dougie grinned.

Pa’s voice was almost a whisper.

“This... this is mair than enough for tonight. We could blast a—”

“Pa! I ca see woo!” Brodie was leaning though a gap in the banister rail, waving.

“Coira! Get him out of here! I dinnae want to see either of you here!” The rage was instant, Pa’s face red.

Brodie wailed. Coira lifted him, though he was really too heavy for her now. “Yes, Pa.”

She wasn’t going to start a fight. Let them go set something on fire if they wanted. She had her own work to finish tonight.

The kitchen was above the pub and Coira could hear shouting. More of the group were there now, sounding excited. Brodie picked at his stovies until, with no prompting, he announced, “s’bed time” and stood, shuffling his feet. Coira sighed.

She lifted the lamp and led the way, but pulled him past their room. His little face frowned, then he broke in to a wide smile, then a run. He knew where she was taking him.

“Come oan!”

“Shh, Brodie!”

Up a flight and into the room she’d told her parents was a play room. It was a dark, uninviting space. Its only furnishings were an old school desk (which, along with a few books, had been stolen by her Pa for her when the school closed down); a moth-eaten rug, and a makeshift cot bed in the corner for Brodie. That was the only part of the room not caked in dust. It had no window, for good reason.

Coira slid the cot to the side to get to the hidden panel, and slid it aside. Brodie jumped on the spot, impatient.

He ran inside. A green glow filled the space. Then another; then a third, higher up. The room rose from the second floor into the third and straight up into the attic, through the large crude holes she’d cut into the floors above. Now it was near thirty feet high and almost as wide. She’d used some of the leftover floorboards to board up the windows and construct a workbench and shelves to make and store her creations. The rest were piled against the wall by the panel. The back of the room had her pile of parts which glittered in the low light. Still the room was only just big enough.

It was her favourite thing, seeing it lit up, the silver reflecting the green. Its three legs dangled above the floor. They should be much longer, but she’d only had this much room. Each of its articulated leg sections were near twice her height; its head, so big she could have put her bed inside, was just over half the size it used to be. It had an open basket strapped to its back. Suspended from the roof by the ropes she’d stolen from the fishing boats, the head lolled to the side, and those big eyes—which Coira had to remind herself were not eyes at all, it was not a living thing—looked sad. She took it in. Then she noticed the impatient pulling on her hand.

“Dis way!” Brodie said, tugging harder.

“Two minutes, then bed,” she said, trying to sound firm.

Brodie near dragged her to the shelves. Her ‘Menagerie’—that’s what she called it, a word she’d found in one of her stolen spelling books. Pa told her it meant a collection of animals that rich people brought from strange, far away lands and kept in glass cages, sometimes letting other rich people see them. She imagined them, in fine clothes, marvelling at bright coloured monsters, daring each other to tap the glass.

Her Menagerie had no glass, but they came from further away than any tiger or bright coloured bird, though she’d found everything she’d needed to make them in that pool. She was almost five, then. She’d put it off that long, but the desire to go back had only grown. She’d gone after curfew; so easy to avoid the loud tapping of Hussars on the cobbles, even with her little pull-along cart. She’d tied rags over the wheels to muffle them. She’d remembered where it was. She’d taken off her shoes and smock, taken a deep breath and jumped in. Nothing grabbed her, but her presence had provoked a reaction—green light. The water had been murky, but lit well enough to see their faces. Huge and rotten, somehow still recognisably faces, even with the tiny crabs that pinched at their lips. She’d screamed. A scream of muffled bubbles. Gasping, she’d scrambled out to the surface again, crouched into a ball, her teeth chattering. She’d stayed like that, counting her thudding heartbeats. After a hundred, she’d walked to the edge and jumped back in. They were dead, those Martians. They couldn’t hurt her. She swam past their swollen, rotten bodies dozens of times over the next few months, and every night a few more pieces filled her wagon. The metal was so light, even large pieces were easy to move.

Here was the result: the forty-one toys she’d made from those broken pieces of the Martian killing machines. The porcelain doll had been hardest. It was the most precious thing she owned. Her Pa had given it to her when she’d turned five. “Looks just like you,” he’d said. Dark curls, blue eyes, rosy cheeks. It looked nothing like her, Coira thought. The doll’s clothes were never torn or muddy, her curls never matted. It was too still; it bothered Coira, so she’d decided to fix it. The doll’s cloth body had to be unstitched, the metal skeleton inserted and the stuffing padded around. She aimed her switcher at it now and the doll, its legs hanging over the edge of the high shelf, swung them to and fro, and waved. Beside the doll, the first bear she’d made. Above them, several spider creatures she’d stopped making—they were easy, but too like the Hussars. There was a crab-like one, too. She picked up and set it on the wooden floor. It darted away just like the crabs at the beach in a funny sideways tiptoes dance. She’d called it Claws as it could carry things in its pincers—it always made her laugh. It was her favourite.

“Biwdie!” Brodie pointed at his favourite.

She reached up for the metal bird. Smooth and silver, it had only a passing resemblance to a bird. No feathers; she’d added a beak eventually, but it had no feet, its wings permanently outstretched. Coira gave it to him.

“Throw!” she said, and he did.

She aimed the switcher. The bird soared high in an imitation of life, and was soon zooming in low circles above their heads. Brodie chased it, laughing and jumping, trying to reach.

Coira had no idea how it worked, but she’d known how to make it. She’d only made one, as it had been too unsettling. She’d tried to sell it, to be rid of it, but the little boy she’d showed it to ran away terrified, screaming she was a witch. After that, she’d covered her toys with material. Sacrificed a much hated dress, stole her mother’s needles and thread. The bird only worked uncovered, so the only one who enjoyed it was Brodie.

She caught the metal bird and switched it again, letting Brodie take it. He cuddled it despite its hard edges.

“Ca... can biwdie sweep side Bwodie?” he asked, as he always did.

She was about to give her usual answer, but this was a special night.

“Aye, just for tonight. Sleep up here, he cannae go to yer room.”

“Biwdie!” He ran out the room to his makeshift cot. He showed Birdie his bed and introduced it to Dunk Duncan. He tucked them in and turned, comically stern-faced to Coira.

“Shh! Biwdie and Duncan sweeping!” he shouted.

He climbed in beside them, and she went to tuck him in, his hands clasped around the eerie metal bird.

Coira waited until his eyes closed and returned to the workshop, sliding the panel shut.

She breathed out, as if she’d been holding it. Her eyes looked where they always did.

“Hello, Pod. Ready to wake up?”

COIRA GRABBED HER most important tool from her workbench: the cutter. She’d used the cutter to cut through the floors above, but had to keep buckets of water nearby for when the floorboards started to burn. The long and narrow line of flame could burn through anything, as well as melting and softening the Martian metal so she could re-form it into any shape she could think of.

When she sat at the workbench she moved almost without thought—cutting, heating and forming the pieces of each creation until light spilled through the boards over the windows.

She strapped the cutter to her waist by a piece of fishing rope, then turned back to Pod. She ran toward it, and launched herself to catch a knotted rope that hung next to the Pod’s three legs, and started to climb.

“Is not a monster” was always Brodie’s comment on Pod, aping her reassurances. Not a monster. Not anymore. It felt like... a friend. Coira didn’t have friends; she had too many secrets. She had customers, she had Brodie and she had Pod.

“Last piece now,” she told it.

As she passed the first boarded window, she heard the pub empty. Curfew about to begin. Between the broken boards, she saw Pa as he wrapped his jacket around some of those rolls of paper she’d seen him looking at earlier, followed by Ma and other men she didn’t know.

Coira smiled and kept climbing. Good. They’d gone.

At the underside of the metal head she raised her hand and knocked. It swung open, the dark gaping mouth she’d made, with space only just big enough to let her in. Coira jumped.

It closed behind her. The last piece was waiting by the panels and pistons. In the green light, she was soon at work.

THE SCREAM BROUGHT her out of it. Brodie. She dropped the cutter, and kicked the mouth open, leaping to grab one of the smooth articulated legs to slide the twenty feet to the ground.

As she opened the panel she had to duck as something flew straight at her head.

“Brodie, what ye doin?!”

Brodie cowered in the bed, wailing.

She turned to see where it landed, and realised it was Birdie, flying, zooming to and fro in the workshop. Then she noticed: the bird wasn’t the only thing moving. Every toy on the shelves was moving, waving, stamping their spider legs. A bear stood, then fell, then stood again. The porcelain doll kicked its feet and clapped its china hands. She hadn’t noticed over the screaming. She fumbled for the switcher in her skirt pocket, but they were already silent. The bird fell to the ground with a loud clang. Coira jumped.

She rushed to Brodie. “I’m here!” He clutched her, making gasping sobs.

Dunk Duncan’s head was on the floor. Black smoke was in the air. Maybe she’d hit the switcher. Maybe this was her fault.

“I’m so sorry, Brodie. Shall ah put his heid back?”

He wiped his nose and nodded.

“What happened?” she asked as she put the head back on the bear.

“‘Sjuss deam, Coywa. Juss a deam,” he said.

It’s what she used to say to him when she woke them up screaming. The strange visions of other worlds, other... creatures, some like men, and then the Martians, flat and wide headed and terrifying. The dream always ended the same way.

“Fiya,” he whispered.

Fire. Her heart pounded.

She rocked him and he calmed, soon going back to sleep.

Laying him back down, Coira tucked Dunk Duncan and Birdie back beside him, pulling the blanket around them all.

Coira didn’t get up yet. She needed to work out what had happened, she needed to not be distracted. So the sudden banging was less alarming than it was irritating. She knew immediately what it was. No one else dared make that much noise after curfew.

“Open up!” the voice shouted below. “It’s the Hussars. Open this door!”

She sighed, pulled the panel shut, and trudged to the stairs.

The banging grew louder, and by the time she got to it, the door was shaking. She twisted the key in the lock and tugged it open.

“Aye?” said Coira. There were two Royal Articulated Hussars outside.

The sight of them made her feel almost sick. Those long metal legs. The goggles that turned their eyes into black pools.

“Where are your parents?”

“Workin’?” she offered, refusing to be intimidated.

“They were observed leaving after curfew.” The man’s grey whiskers bristled under the goggles.

“Then why don’ you ken where they are?” Coira shrugs.

The two men looked at each other. Her parents had evaded them.

“We will look inside,” said the younger man.

“You will not! My Pa says you cannae jus’ go into people’s hames.”

THUD. The noise came from upstairs. They all looked up.

“Coiwa!” Brodie’s scream was piercing.

“Yev gone and woke my wee brother! Come back when Ma and Pa are hame,” Coira shouted, and slammed the door.

The only reason they didn’t break it down, she guessed, was that they knew her parents were not inside. They’d be back, though.

“Brodie!” she shouted as she ran.

Inside the room again, she rushed to the cot.

“Did ye fall? Wis it another dream?”

He wasn’t there. The blanket was gone, so were the toys. The panel was open. She ran in.

“Brodie, I’ve telt you, you dinnae go in there alo—”

Pod was staring at her. Not lifeless, not hanging at an angle, its eyes on her. She took a step back. The head moved, tracking her movement. She looked at it. Then she grinned, marvelling.

“Pod!” she shouted. “You’re awake! You can move...”

Coira rushed forward to get a better look, and tripped, landing on something on the floor. A pile of rope. She hadn’t left rope there. Then she remembered what she came in looking for.

“Coiwa..?”

There on the floor, looking up at the alien machine, she understood many things at once. Pod wasn’t suspended from the roof anymore. It was standing. She understood what the Tripods had used the baskets for, which the grown-ups had never wanted to explain. Tiny hands stretched out of Pod’s basket. This was what it was for. It caught people. It had caught Brodie.

Coira didn’t get a chance to scream. A flash of metal whipped past her face. A long curling arm snatched for her. She rolled as another swiped the floor.

She saw where to go and scrambled toward it: the shelves. Pressing herself flat on her chest she reached a hand in; her nails grasped the edge of a floorboard as she tried to pull herself under. She turned her head to look back. Then she screamed.

Pod’s eyes were right there. It has dropped into a crouch, its long legs folded at the knees she’d so painstakingly reassembled. They look at each other for a long moment.

“Dinnae... dinnae hurt him.” Her voice was small.

It wasn’t going to listen, she realised. This was what it wanted. What it had always wanted, since that first meeting at the pool. Someone who would fix it and set it loose. Somehow it had reached out to her young mind, telling her how it worked. The toys were only practice until she was ready. It had never been her friend. There was no escape. This pause was all the thanks she would get. A sob escaped her mouth. Stupid. Stupid and pointless to cry now.

“Git oan wi’ it, then!” she shouted.

Coira closed her eyes. She didn’t want to look. She wanted her Ma. Coira tried to picture her.

BOOM.

Her eyes flew open. The sound wasn’t inside. It was outside, but not far. The vibration shook the house, the panes shook in the windows.

Something fell on the floor next to Coira, issuing a crack. It was the porcelain doll, a long line spidered across its face.

Pod was gone. She slid herself out from under the shelf. Pod was stretched up to the window, its long curling silver appendages feeling out the nails on the boards, pulling them.

Another boom. Pod reacted, as if listening. Coira took her chance. Leaving the doll, she dragged herself onto her feet, started for the panel, then stopped. Brodie. She couldn’t leave Brodie. She needed a hiding place. She took in the available hiding places: the pile of floor boards against the wall, the desk, the shelves, the piles of parts from the Martian pool. She darted behind the floorboards. She could see Pod and make a plan, or run, if she had to.

One of Pod’s metal arms scraped against the window, a noise like nails on the old school blackboard. Coira pressed her hands to her ears. It wasn’t enough to block out the screech, or the crack and smash of glass.

Pod was trying to get out. It couldn’t fit through the window, Coira thought.

There was a whirring and then a familiar hiss. A bright, white light split the green gloom. A fierce heat. Pod had started up its heat cutter. She’d made it one just like her own, out of the much bigger one she’d found on it originally. It was aiming at the wall. It was going to make a door.

She fumbled at the rope tie around her waist. She couldn’t let it out—she’d stop it, use the cutter on its legs if she could get near enough, she...

...she had left it inside Pod when she’d checked on Brodie. She only had her switcher. Useless. She pulled it out of her pocket, flicked it in frustration, wanting only to throw it away, but afraid to make a sound. The porcelain doll on the floor sat up. She hadn’t meant to aim it, but at least it looked like the switcher was still working, though she couldn’t think what help that might be. The doll stood, then started to walk, its little porcelain feet clack-clacked against the wooden floor. It stopped and waved, as if it could see her. Coira found it strangely reassuring.

With no warning, a white line of flame engulfed it. Coira fell back, clamping her hand over her mouth as she watched the precious doll burn. Soon it was just a charred, smoking mark on the floor.

She pressed herself against the wall behind the boards. Pod towered above, looking down, cutter ready. She kept her hands over her nose and mouth, trying to quiet her terrified breaths. Hot tears ran against her hands. Stop crying, she thought. You have to get Brodie. Get Brodie, get out. Run, as far and as fast as you can.

But Pod would get out. Of course it would. And how long would she, Brodie, or anyone last? Ma and Pa would come back soon. What if it saw them first? Where were they?

She thought of Pa’s face, that the last thing he’d said was he didn’t want to see them. She thought of those rolls of yellow-brown paper.

Noise spilled in from outside, clear through the broken window—people running, shouting.

“Ah see it! Aye, it’s the train station!” a woman yelled.

“Git back in here!” shouted another.

“Ahm goin tae help! Someone might be hurt.”

Pod turned toward the new sounds, but she couldn’t feel any relief because it was suddenly obvious where her parents were, and her heart jumped in her chest again. Those paper rolls were not paper. They were explosives. Ma and Pa had used them on the Newhaven Station, blown it into pieces, like her grandpa had used them to blast the railway tunnel. They needed fire to work.

Fire. It always came back to fire.

She refused to think about her parents, to worry that they were...that they might be anything other than safe and waiting.

She already knew what she’d have to do to stop Pod. Pod was busy, prying away another floorboard from the window. Coira had a few seconds, she hoped. She stepped, tiptoe to tiptoe, out of her hiding place and toward the shelves of toys. She reached up, her eyes on Pod, as another board crashed to the floor. She could see Brodie now. He was wrapped in his blanket, eyes closed. She hoped he was sleeping.

She grabbed a spider, pocketed it, took another, then reached for a third. She dropped it. Pod swung round, leaving the boards, cutter raised. She darted behind the edge of the shelves, shaking. The dropped spider was facing Pod. She pointed and flicked the switcher. The spider took off. It was the first one she’d made, incapable of going straight. The first blast was close and so bright it must have revealed her location, but Pod ignored her, moving to follow the spider.

It lumbered in a circle after the spider, and blasted again and again, more charred holes appeared in the floorboards. Coira took her chance and ran toward Pod, timing her move for the next blast. She jumped, catching the knotted rope and tensed, waiting for Pod’s reaction. Nothing. It was still blasting the spider. She climbed, as fast as she could, the rope swinging from Pod’s attempts to follow the scuttling creature. Flashes of light and heat burst around. The spider was soon incinerated.

She clung on tight with one hand, and with the other she pulled the second spider out of a pocket, dropped it, then pulled out the switcher and aimed. It took off. Coira was level with the basket now. Brodie was curled up in his blanket. He was clutching Dunk and Birdie close, eyes wide. He saw her and started to speak, but she put a finger to her mouth, struggling to hold on.

She dropped the third spider, wishing she had more, and reached up to rap on Pod’s underside. Pod stopped moving as the spider tapped across the floor, forgotten. She held her breath, and looked up.

She didn’t see it coming—the silver arm wrapped around her waist.

She gripped the rope, fighting. The rope came free, and still holding it, she felt herself raised high into the air. Soon she was eye to eye with Pod, again at its mercy.

“Put me doon!” Coira shouted, unthinking, but it wasn’t like last time. She was terrified. She didn’t understand what she was facing last time; she was little more than a baby. She did now, as it squeezed her harder. She gasped, trying to breathe.

“Coiwa!”

Brodie was staring through the basket. He had Birdie. Birdie. Her arms were still free. She grabbed the switcher out her pocket.

“Throw!” Her voice was hoarse, but he seemed to understand, because he frowned and hugged it closer. Lights burst in her eyes.

“Brodie... dae it!”

He threw it. She managed to click the switcher and Birdie took to the air.

Pod let her go.

She hit the floor hard, winded. She watched as Pod swiped and shot fire at Birdie. Brodie wailed. It took everything she had to move. The air came back to her chest at last as she pushed herself up. With a last look back, she ran out through the open panel, past Brodie’s makeshift cot and slammed the door behind her, stopping on the landing. She jumped as a blast of heat burned the air behind her. The door was burning.

It was impossible to go back, but she’d left Brodie in there. Looking at her hands, she saw she was still holding the knotted rope. That was all she needed.

She turned, ran up the stairs, turning and turning again until she was at the top, and launched herself at the small door to the attic. It sprung open. She stopped herself going further, peering inside. Pod was below, turned back to the window. She was above it by only a few feet.

Coira wrapped the rope around her arm and held the rest tight, her eyes never leaving Pod. She took a tentative step forward. The cut edge ran in a wide arc around what used to be the attic floor. There was just enough room to walk around the edge. Pod had its cutter aimed at the wall again.

She was as close as she dared get. The basket was almost directly below, Brodie curled up inside with Dunk Duncan and his blanket.

The cutter started up, shooting its long thin line of flame with a loud hiss.

“Brodie!” she whispered. He didn’t react.

Crouching, Coira gathered the rope and threw it down. It glanced off the edge of the basket. Brodie looked up, terrified until he saw her. She pulled the rope back, watching as the Pod’s cutter started to melt through the soft sandstone.

On her third throw it landed in the basket. She jerked it, motioning for Brodie to grab on. He shook his little head, pulling Dunk closer. Of course, he had to be difficult now. She jerked the rope again and tried to smile encouragement. He shrank back further.

“Please,” she mouthed. He shook his head again, tears flowed down his face.

The sound of burning and cracking stone got louder.

“Brodie! Get on that rope right now or ah’ll gie you somethin tae cry for, ah swear ah will!” She said it as loud as she dared, trying to get that tone her mother used. He stood and sniffed. She glared. He reached a little hand to the rope.

“Now!” she warned.

Brodie grabbed on with one hand and lifted a foot onto a knot, still holding the bear. Coira wanted to tell him to leave it, but didn’t want to push her sudden luck.

“Dinnae let go,” she said, and pulled the rope up, bracing it against the edge. He was soon out of the basket. There was a hole right through the stone now, the bright line of fire working to make it bigger.

He was almost at the top when he dropped the bear.

“Dunk Duncan!” he screamed, almost letting go.

Pod reacted, the heat blasting toward them as she dragged the thrashing Brodie over the edge. She picked him up, her muscles protesting almost as much as he was, and started down the stairs, now blanketed in smoke.

The workshop door was almost completely burned away, an arch of fire reaching toward the ceiling, smoke rising. She put Brodie down, edging him to her side. The steps were stone, she reminded herself, and stone is hard to burn. She listened. All was quiet. Maybe it had burned through the wall and was gone.

“Shh!” she hissed.

Brodie clutched the back of her smock.

She moved forward, peering through the flaming doorway, close as she could, a hand raised to keep Brodie back.

Pod was still blasting the attic. The shelves were on fire now. Her toys engulfed in flames. On the floor at its feet she could see Dunk Duncan and Claws. An impulse gripped her, or some madness.

“Stay!” she whispered back at Brodie and she was inside the workshop before she could think about it. Pod was standing right above the toys. She ran forward, and stopped directly underneath. It had heard. It turned, hunting. She dropped into a crouch, and reached out her hands.

She had them. Pod was turned away as she took off, it bought her only a second before a line of fire stuck so close her hair sizzled at her ear.

“Go!” she pulled Brodie down the stairs, away from the fire, away from Pod, her only thought to get out. They passed their kitchen. Something made her pause, halting Brodie as she turned to stare at the kitchen table. There was a box on it. The box with rolled up paper inside. The paper that was not paper at all. She looked down at the toys she carried.

Below, metallic banging started on the stair door.

“Wha’s tha noise?” Brodie was shaking with terror.

“It’s the Hussars, Brodie. They’ve come tae... they’ll get ye out. You go doonstairs and find them. Take this,” she said, thrusting the bear into his arms.

“No. Ah stay wi’ Coiwa!” he insisted.

Coira was already in the kitchen, picking up what she needed.

“Ah have to go back, Brodie. Ah have to stop Pod.”

“Is not a monster,” Brodie frowned at her, not so sure now.

The door downstairs cracked open.

“Who’s up there?” a man’s voice shouted, and then less certain, “Is that smoke..?”

“There’s a wee boy here, get him out!” she shouted, already running into the heat again.

“Fiya, Coiwa!” Brodie shouted.

“Aye, that’s the idea,” she said, more to herself than him.

A terrible idea is what she thought, when she got up there. If it needed fire, there was too much of it. But the Hussars were no match for Pod. She’d made it; she had to destroy it.

Her fingers shook as she lifted it. ‘DYNAMITE’ was written on the side.

She set down Claws and opened his little pincers, and placed the dynamite in its tight grasp.

Spinning the creature, she placed it side on to the burned away door. Then she was running down the stairs. Five steps down, she pointed the switcher and Claws danced out of sight.

Brodie was still there. She swept him up. One of the Hussars was crawling up the stairs.

“Halt!” he raised his gloved hand.

She didn’t even pause, ducking under his legs. She could see the door. Above, the blasts of fire started as Pod took the bait.

“Get out!” she screamed back at the Hussar.

“What is that?!” He was already too far up the stairs.

She and Brodie were at the door.

“Christ! Christ it’s one of them! James, it’s...”

Outside now, Coira pulled Brodie into a run.

She stopped behind the house on the corner opposite, peering around just in time to see the front of their tenement blast apart. Burning rubble, the Hussar and the Pod all fell. She could just see them through the smoke as they crashed into the bar. The last thing she saw, before the fire and stone engulfed them, was the whale bone as it impaled Pod through one of its huge eyes.

Houses nearby started to empty.

“Another explosion!”

She knelt down and put her arms around Brodie as they watched their house burn.

“Fiya,” whipered Brodie.

“Fire,” she agreed.

Hands grabbed her arms.

“Coira! Brodie! They’re here, Francis!” She looked up at her Ma and Pa and flinched as another explosion rocked the street.

Pa took off at a run. The pub door was still standing and someone stumbled out of it, coughing.

“Dunk Duncan!” Brodie pointed.

It was Duncan. He fell into Pa’s arms.

“It wis a Martian, Francis! Big brute crashed intae the pub as I wis leavin...”

“Duncan. This way.” Pa pulled at him.

“Martians! Thought they were deid.”

Pa led Duncan away.

Coira clutched her mother, letting the tears come. Brodie held Coira’s hand.

“Ahm so-sorry, Ma...”

“It’s aw right, Coira. You got your brother out. Ahm sorry we werenae there.” Ma stroked her hair. The truth could wait, Coira thought.

Brodie let go of Coira’s hand, bored. He sat Dunk Duncan on the ground. Then he reached down for something shiny he’d spotted there. He knew what to do with it. Pointing it at the bear he pressed it, just like he’d seen his sister do.

The bear stood up and spun, before falling down. Brodie giggled and pulled at his Ma’s arm to get her attention. He pressed it again.

Ma screamed.

The Adventure of the Wheezing Man
a mystery, by

JAMES LOVEGROVE

“Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.”

—D’Israeli

“I KNOW I have spoken many times about retirement,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes one February morning in 1904. “The notion of a rural smallholding and a life of tranquil beekeeping has not lost its appeal. Yet I am happy to postpone the day for now. London has become altogether too fascinating a place to abandon.”

He gestured out of the window. Baker Street, for all the chilly inclemency of the weather, was busy. Hansoms scuttled to and fro on their cunningly articulated arachnid legs. An airship passed overhead, casting a shadow larger than any whale’s. The Westway viaduct, in its third year of construction, loomed above the rooftops, its immense unfinished arches encased in skeletal scaffolding over which workmen swarmed like aphids on a rose stem.

“The capital, indeed Great Britain as a whole, is experiencing a period of scientific and social advancement unparalleled in history,” Holmes continued. “The Renaissance and the Enlightenment pale into insignificance by comparison. It is, simply put, an electrifying time to be alive, and only a fool would not wish to be here, at the very hub of it.”

He seemed set to expand upon his theme, but then came a ringing on the doorbell, followed by footfalls ascending the seventeen steps which led to the first floor.

“Unless I am very much mistaken, Watson, we have a client.” So saying, my companion sat back and steepled his fingers in anticipation.

The man who entered our sitting-room was a wiry, flaxen-haired fellow in his late thirties. He wore a well-tailored sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers but had the pinched, somewhat withered look of one who has been accustomed to hardship and deprivation.

He presented Holmes with his card, which my friend perused. “Major Robert Autumn. The rank and the ‘DSO’ after your name betoken a military background, of course, as does the handkerchief tucked inside your shirt cuff, a sartorial practice I have long deplored in Watson here. The length of your hair, a good half-inch over regulation, indicates that you are serving no more. Your regiment was the Coldstream Guards.”

Autumn cocked an eyebrow. “All those inferences are true, and you have accounted for every one of them save the last.”

“Oh, as for that, it is easy.” Holmes waved a dismissive hand. “Your cufflinks bear the George Cross encircled by a blue belt emblazoned with the legend ‘Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense’. Together those two elements constitute the regimental badge of the Coldstream Guards.”

“I had forgotten I had them on,” said Autumn, eyeing the cufflinks with a self-deprecating laugh. “You know, Mr Holmes, he warned me you would ‘read’ me the way you have just done. He called it a parlour trick which you cannot help playing on those whom you meet for the first time.”

“He?” I said. “Who is this he?”

“Major Autumn can only be referring to my brother,” said Holmes. “No one is quite so contemptuous of my powers of deduction and logical analysis as the sainted Mycroft. That is not least because he possesses those same powers himself in greater degree and considers the uses to which I put mine as trifling and unworthy. I had you pegged for an adventurer, Major. Your burnished skin and weather-worn demeanour spoke to me of Africa and big game hunting, in the manner of an acquaintance of ours, the late Allan Quatermain. Furthermore, you walk with a very slight limp, an injury one might ascribe to attack by a predatory animal such as a lion.”

“I have spent time on the dark continent.”

“Yet now I perceive these physical aspects in a new, if shadier, light. The fact that you know Mycroft personally is suggestive of service to the Crown in some clandestine capacity. In short, pursuant to your soldiering you were a secret agent, until invalided out of the profession.”

Autumn nodded. “The senior Mr Holmes advised me not to be impressed by your perspicacity, and yet I find myself doing just that. May I?” He indicated the chair opposite Holmes’s, the one customarily reserved for clients. “And the brandy in that decanter on the sideboard looks rather appetising. I don’t suppose...?”

With tacit permission from Holmes, I poured Autumn a drink. He swallowed it thirstily.

“That’s better,” he gasped. “Warms the cockles. Winter really does work its way into these bones of mine. Perhaps, given my dislike of the cold, I should change my surname to Summer. Another?”

I recharged his glass, and the eagerness with which he drained this second helping suggested that his fondness for alcohol was in no way seasonal. He studied the empty tumbler, as though sorely tempted by the thought of asking for a third portion, but decorum won the day.

“It was my erstwhile employer who pointed me in your direction, Mr Holmes,” said he. “I have a predicament, you see, which the other Mr Holmes reckoned you would be able to help me with. ‘Right up Sherlock’s street’, those were his very words.”

“Pray go on. You have my interest.”

“It involves a friend of mine, Nahum Throgmorton.”

“The motorised vehicle magnate.”

“None other.”

“Did he not die just the day before yesterday?” I said. “I recall something in the newspaper about a tragic accident.”

Autumn nodded rather stiffly. “A house fire. His place in Mayfair burned to the ground. Three of Nahum’s household staff perished in the blaze, along with his wife Kathleen. His valet managed to get him out in time. He was fortunate to escape with his life. Yet his injuries were terrible—fully half his body was badly burned—and he died in hospital a day later.”

“My condolences.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Nahum and I were at Harrow together and had kept up a cordial relationship since. I was at his bedside when he passed away.”

“That is queer,” Holmes interjected. “By the sound of it you were not close friends, Major, yet you, rather than a relative or another intimate, were with Throgmorton during his final moments.”

“That is because Nahum summoned me to see him. He told his doctors he wished to share something with me regarding the circumstances of the fatal fire—a piece of information which he felt I, above anyone else he knew, above even the police, might be able to act upon.”

“He was aware of your former career.”

“He knew that I moved in certain rarefied circles. He knew, too, that I have a modicum of skill in winkling out hidden truths, not unlike yourself, although I do not profess to be nearly as proficient as you in that respect. Alas, by the time I reached him Nahum’s pain was so severe that he had lapsed into delirium and was barely cogent. He recognised me but I could not get any sense out of him. Clutching my arm with one bandaged hand, he merely repeated a single, just-intelligible phrase over and over. Such was the insistency with which he said it that I can only assume it was of vital importance. Uttering it took its toll upon him, however, and he sank into an unconsciousness from which he never awoke. He was pronounced dead shortly afterward.”

“This phrase, what was it?”

“‘The wheezing man’.”

“That is all?”

“That is all. ‘The wheezing man’.”

“And you are sure those were the exact words?”

“Quite sure, Mr Holmes, although I cannot make head or tail of them.”

“You know of nobody who fits that description?”

“I have racked my brains and failed to come up with an answer. I have consulted my manservant Currie, likewise to no avail.”

“Would this Currie be the one-eyed, overcoat-less Scotsman presently standing on our doorstep?”

“You have spied him from the window,” said Autumn. “But how did you know he is Scottish?”

“Currie is Scots clan name, derived from the Gaelic ‘currach’, meaning ‘marsh’. That in tandem with his clear disregard for the low temperature outside suggests he hails from north of the border. He stands to attention like a soldier, so I would wager that he was previously your batman.”

“The most loyal and courageous associate I could wish for.”

“I have one of those myself,” Holmes said with a gracious bow towards me. “Such an individual is worth his weight in gold. But back to the matter of the ‘wheezing man’. It seems indicative of an asthmatic, or a person suffering from some other form of bronchial affliction.”

“Precisely, but again, I am not on familiar terms with anyone such. My enquiries amongst colleagues of Nahum’s have drawn a blank. I am at a loss, frankly, and that is why I have, upon your brother’s advice, come to you. I am certain that the wheezing man and Nahum’s death are connected. I simply cannot fathom how.”

“This is all suitably intriguing,” Holmes averred. “I shall gladly take up the investigation on your behalf, Major. Give me a few days and I will report to you with my findings.”

“Thank you, Mr Holmes.”

“Good day to you, Major Autumn.”

NO SOONER HAD our visitor departed than Holmes instructed me to fetch down certain of his scrapbooks from the shelf. In these he was wont to compile clippings from newspaper articles which piqued his curiosity.

I left him thumbing through the scrapbooks, his clay pipe clenched between his teeth. When I returned from conducting my rounds, he was still poring over the volumes and the room was thick with tobacco smoke, so much so that it reminded me of one of the noxious ‘London particulars’, now a thing of the past. I would have opened a window to let in fresh air, had it been any less wintry outdoors.

“There have been five deadly house fires in the capital over the past six months,” Holmes announced. “Five which stand out, at least. Raging, devastating infernos, and in every instance a common thread is that the homeowner was a person of distinction.” He pointed to one scrapbook, open at his feet. “Here a baronet.” He pointed to another, canted over the chair arm. “Here a High Court judge. A second common thread is that the blaze started as a consequence of a faulty water boiler.”

“That is not perhaps as rare an occurrence as one might think,” I said, “especially with these new-fangled boilers, the ones whose design is based upon Martian Heat-Ray technology. I have heard they’re the very devil for going wrong. The manufacturers have yet to iron out the problems, but still the boilers are deemed sufficiently safe to be sold.”

“When offered something new, people will rush to adopt it regardless of the risks.”

“I would not have one in my house, that’s for sure. A good old gas-fired appliance will do me.”

“I might not disagree with that, Watson. However, I will take issue with your assertion that the faultiness of the boilers is not unusual. It is. For our purposes it is, at any rate, since the five boilers in questions were all built and installed by the same company.”

“Ah. Now it does begin to look less like coincidence.”

“Quite. The company concerned is Cavor Calorics Ltd.”

“Cavor. Would I right in thinking its founder is Professor Cavor, the inventor?”

“None other. The ‘moon man’, as he was dubbed by the press. In the aftermath of the late interplanetary hostilities he turned his focus away from our lifeless satellite and further afield, towards all things Martian. It was Cavor who first spied the potential commercial applications of the Heat-Ray devices. He turned a weapon of war into a domestic convenience, beating a sword into a ploughshare. It has netted him a small fortune.”

“Perhaps he ought to have tested his boilers somewhat more extensively before putting them on the market.”

“Cavor has come out with a robust defence of his product.” Holmes grabbed one of the scrapbooks and flicked through it. “Here. From last Friday’s Times. ‘In response to accusations that his appliances are a hazard to life and limb, Professor Cavor has this to say. “The Cavor Calorics boiler is not only a tremendous scientific advance but the safest and cheapest way to heat a home and meet one’s every hot-water need.” He adds, “It has not been conclusively proven that our boilers are responsible for this string of dreadful mishaps. It is quite possible that incorrect usage by the customer may be to blame.”’ What do you think of that?” said Holmes, snapping the scrapbook shut with a flourish.

“He seems rather keen to exonerate himself.”

“And why not? Shares in Cavor Calorics have slumped. Those in the financial know are deserting the company in droves. If the fires continue and it is shown that his boilers are the problem after all, he faces ruin. Were I in Cavor’s shoes, I would be fairly worried right now.”

“You do not think Cavor is in any way culpable?”

“Not unless he has a self-destructive streak and wishes to put himself and hundreds of employees out of work. But the Cavor Calorics connection is nonetheless a useful lead, one I intend to pursue. Watson, you may not see much of me in the coming days. I trust you will be able to survive without my company?”

“I shall endeavour to cope,” I replied.

TRUE TO HIS word, Holmes was absent from our lodgings for some while—three whole days, in fact—and I saw neither hide nor hair of him until the afternoon of the fourth day, when he reappeared full of vim and gratification.

I say he reappeared, but in the event it was a grizzled old seadog who walked through the door to our apartment, one whose chapped cheeks and perpetual squint betokened many a year spent on the foredeck, scanning far horizons while waves lashed over the bows. This sailor also carried his right arm close to his chest, crooked at the elbow as though it was paralysed, the hand hanging limp. As he shambled across the sitting-room I thought for one moment that he must be a client. It was only when he planted himself confidently in Holmes’s chair and I perceived a familiar pair of keen grey eyes twinkling at me beneath those bushy white brows that I realised this was my friend sporting one of his excellent disguises. The apparently paralysed arm reached for the Persian slipper in which Holmes kept his shag and tamped a generous pinch of it into Holmes’s pipe.

“Captain Basil, I presume,” I said. “Or is this some other jolly jack tar who has spent a long life roaming the seven seas?”

“Able Seaman Arthur Tregowan at your service, sir,” Holmes replied in a gravelly West Country burr. “Formerly a naval rating. Survivor of the sinking of the ironclad torpedo ram, HMS Thunder Child. Now Oi’m something of a vagabond, in search of gurt gainful employment.”

“Hah!” I ejaculated. “A likely story. The Thunder Child went down with all hands, utterly destroyed by a Martian tripod.”

“Oi jumped overboard just before the Heat-Ray hit her and swam for moy life,” Holmes said, still impersonating his salty alter ego. “Lost the use of an arm in the process, Oi did, but Oi made it to the banks of the Blackwater all the same. Moy story has earned me a few free pints in various pubs and a sympathetic ear wherever Oi go. More to the point, it’s helped get me a job interview with Cavor Calorics and the offer of employment as a boiler engineer, which Oi readily accepted. Oi’ve already worked two days as an apprentice.”

“A somewhat long-in-the-tooth apprentice.”

“Pity and admiration granted me leeway. Moy new employers, they consider me not so ‘aged’ as ‘experienced’. It makes ’em look good to have someone like Arthur Tregowan on their books, both senior and a war hero. Oi have, in consequence, learned plenty about boiler fitting and also, courtesy of moy colleagues, plenty about other members of the Cavor Calorics workforce.”

“And how does that help?”

“You shall see, Watson,” said Holmes, adopting his usual voice, “for you and Major Autumn are invited to accompany me to a Cavor Calorics appointment tomorrow morning at the home of Sir Walton Bellows.”

“The Liberal politician?”

“None other. Are you busy?”

“I can rearrange my patient schedule.”

“Capital! It is not like you to miss the dénouement to one of our cases.”

“Not if I can help it,” I said with a grin.

THUS IT WAS that Holmes, Major Autumn and I travelled by cab to Kensington the next day. Our jarvey steered a dextrous course through the hordes of traffic that trooped antlike along London’s broad thoroughfares, each vehicle expelling its own little fog of green fumes. The city seemed to be assuming more and more fantastical proportions by the week. Wherever one looked, some enormous structure was going up—here a cantilevered bridge, there a shimmering cylindrical tower—all of which were conspiring to make our capital the envy of the world. Other nations looked on at Britain’s remarkable rate of progress and marvelled, wishing they could share in our bounty. Few appreciated the cost at which these glories had been bought: hundreds of thousands of lives. Only one country had suffered the Martians’ depredations. It was fitting, therefore, that we should be entitled to reap whatever rewards we could, by way of compensation.

Sir Walton Bellows’s townhouse was undergoing all manner of modification. Its roof was being crowned with one of those domes which aped the Martian fondness for rounded contours. Remote-controlled tripodal cranes were working on every storey, inserting new windowpanes made of green-tinted glass which darkened automatically at night and obviated the need for curtains or shutters. The front porch was being remodelled so as to incorporate a small flight of moving steps. A lot of money was being spent to render the property as modern as possible, at the expense of some of its intrinsic Georgian splendour.

As we arrived, a Cavor Calorics van was drawing up at the kerb in front. Two workmen in overalls clambered out and one of them went round to the back to open up the rear doors, revealing a hulking, pipe-festooned contraption within that could only be a boiler. The other workman rested against the side of the van, a hand clamped to his ribs. He was breathing heavily, as though even the simple act of standing required considerable exertion.

Up to this latter fellow Holmes strode, greeting him with a hearty salutation. “Davey Milford! It is Davey Milford, is it not?”

The other blinked at him. “And ’oo might you be?” he enquired in a hoarse rasp.

“I am known to the company for whom you work—and for whom I work, in a manner of speaking—as Arthur Tregowan.”

“I’m none the wiser.”

“You might know me better as Sherlock Holmes.”

“Oh,” said Milford. “Ah.” He took a deep breath, and I heard the wet rattle of damaged lungs, the sound not unlike that made by a consumptive or an emphysematic.

The wheezing man, I thought to myself. This was he.

I could see, by the widening of his eyes, that Autumn had arrived at the same conclusion. “You’re the one Nahum spoke of,” said he, jabbing an accusatory forefinger at Milford. “He worked it out. He knew somehow that you were a miscreant.”

“Nahum Throgmorton?” Milford nodded. “Well then, the jig is truly up, isn’t it? ’Ere’s Mr Sherlock ’Olmes, the detective bloke, and ’ere’s you, sir, a friend of Throgmorton’s.” The wheezing man drew another laboured, whispery breath. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about all of ’em.”

“What are you talkin’ about, Davey?” said the other Cavor Calorics workman. “What the bloomin’ ’eck’s goin’ on ’ere?”

“It’s all right, Jed. These men ’ave found me out, that’s all. It was only a matter of time.”

“Found you out doin’ what? What is it, Davey? What ’ave you bin up ter?”

Milford looked contrite but not rueful. “Murderin’, Jed, that’s what. There en’t no other word for it. And I’ll swing for what I done, that’s for sure, but people will know. They’ll know ’ow I feel about this damned Martian tomfoolery they’re bringin’ into their ’omes, and like me they’ll turn against it. You mark my words.”

“You have been sabotaging the boilers, have you not, Milford?” said Holmes. “Rigging them so that they malfunction, disastrously.”

“It’s just a case of fiddlin’ with a few of the valves while settin’ ’em up. Child’s play. So ’appens that Throgmorton caught me at it. I told ’im I was only tinkerin’, makin’ sure everything was all shipshape and tickety-boo, and it seemed ter put ’is mind at rest but ’e still ’ad ’is suspicions, I could tell. Not surprisin’, ’im bein’ an engineer ’imself and all. Didn’t do ’im any good in the end, though.”

“But why?” I said. “What do you stand to gain?”

“I did it because I ’ad ter. I ’ad ter show the world. Usin’ ’Eat-Rays for ’ot water! It en’t proper. What next? The Black Smoke to fumigate vermin?”

“The Black Smoke,” said Holmes. “The same substance which ruined you, no doubt.”

“Too right it did!” Milford declared with some asperity. There followed a coughing fit so severe, I feared he might asphyxiate. “I lived through a direct ’it from one of those Martian shells what gave off that gas. I covered my face with my scarf and ran for cover while all around me folk was chokin’ and staggerin’ about, vomitin’ up their guts—literally. I dunno ’ow the Smoke didn’t get me the way it did them. Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe I wasn’t exposed to it as much. Maybe I ’ad some kind of natural immunity to it. All I know is I was in Covent Garden mindin’ my own business one moment, and the next there was tripods comin’ up the Thames and I was in the middle of ’ell, with Londoners droppin’ like flies to the left and right. I never bin right since. My lungs don’t work a quarter as well as they used ter.”

“And as a result you harbour a deep-seated grudge against all things Martian.”

“Don’t you, Mr ’Olmes? Don’t everyone? Not just a grudge—a loathing. It can’t be just me. What those bloody alien abominations did to this country! And ’ere we are, adaptin’ bits and bobs of their terror machines to make our lives more comfortable. It’s a disgrace, is what it is. A godawful disgrace!”

The more impassioned Milford became, the more the quality of his breathing deteriorated. He was barely able to gasp words out now. Yet he seemed keen—not to say relieved—to have this opportunity to unburden himself.

“So I took a job with Cavor Calorics. Their business was boomin’ and they were signin’ up practically anybody, even a cripple like me. I’d set my mind to makin’ people understand, see.” He jerked his head in the direction of the boiler. “Understand ’ow this stuff’s wrong and you shouldn’t welcome it. All these toffs puttin’ expensive ’Eat-Ray boilers in their ’ouses—set a few of them posh pads on fire and everyone’d sit up sharpish and take notice.”

“There are better ways of making a point than committing arson,” said Holmes. “Better ways than killing, for that matter.”

“I didn’t mean to kill,” said Milford, “not at first. I ’ated the fact that lives were bein’ lost in the fires. But once I’d started, I couldn’t ’elp myself. I couldn’t stop. I was on a path and I just ‘ad to carry on.”

His eyes glinted with a madness that was half malice, half perverted righteousness.

“But now you’re ’ere,” he went on, “it’s over. It’s over at last. I’ll ’ave my day in court, and I’ll ’ave my say, and the world will listen.”

“No, you won’t,” said Autumn, and from within his jacket he drew a gun—one of the new ray pistols. “You will pay right here and now for your crimes, Milford.”

“Autumn, no!” Holmes declared. “He deserves a trial, not summary execution.”

The wheezing man eyed Autumn’s weapon with contempt. “Go ahead, mate. Blast me to ashes with that wretched thing. Pull the trigger and you’ll be no better than one of them Martian beasts. Is that what you want? Ter be one of the new breed of Englishman ’oo’s as bad as the monsters what tried ter conquer us?”

Holmes was poised to seize the gun off Autumn, but it seemed that Milford’s argument had some effect. Autumn hesitated, the pistol buzzing softly in his hand, charged with energy. Then, with reluctance, he disengaged its power cell and lowered it.

“No,” he said to the wheezing man. “You are correct.”

He took three swift paces forward and punched Milford on the jaw, knocking him flat to the ground, out cold.

“But that doesn’t mean I can’t get some satisfaction for my friend’s death.”

LATER, AFTER A police van had carted Milford’s unconscious form away, Major Autumn said to Holmes, “I can be hot-headed at times. It is a failing. You were right, Milford must face justice.”

“You would have regretted shooting him,” said my friend.

“Probably. I was sorely tempted.”

“But you resisted, that’s what counts.”

“Are we becoming like them?” Autumn pondered. “The Martians? Are we letting ourselves turn into the very things that came so close to exterminating us? If so, what does that say about us?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps all it means is that we must try harder to stay human.”

“Humans are not always wise and noble.”

“But we can be,” said Holmes.

Autumn nodded. “If nothing else, I have learned today that I must control my baser impulses. I have learned, too, that consulting detective is an interesting vocation, with many signal virtues and benefits. It may be that I shall take it up myself in future.”

“Do you so,” Holmes said with an avuncular smile. “There is always room for more like me, fighting the good fight, and I can foresee you faring rather well in that regard, Major.”

He and Autumn shook hands.

“Well, seeing as I’ve been given your blessing, Mr Holmes,” Autumn said, “I might just chance my arm at it. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?”

Voice for a Generation
an inspiring homily, by

NATHAN DUCK

Birmingham, 1967

STEAM HISSED FROM the kettle, rising to a whistle as the song on the radio ended and the DJ’s chirpy patter began again; “That was David Bowie and his minor hit from earlier this year, ‘The Chuckling Martian’.” Wilf Hardy lifted the kettle from the hob and poured the steaming water into a teapot and stirred its contents.

“Next up is the news on the hour and we’ll be right back after with more pop hits. I’m Tony Blackburn and you’re listening to BBC Radio 1.” The DJ’s voice was replaced with a jaunty jingle cuing in the news. A more formal voice intoned, “This is the BBC morning news with David Dimbleby on Monday, the second of October, 1967. Tensions between Rutland and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick continue to rise...”

Wilf tuned out the voice from the radio, concentrating instead on pouring a mug of hapa tea and moving to the small table in the cramped kitchen. He sat down and began to dig into his bowl of cereal, eyes studiously focused on the back of the Cornflakes packet in front of him on the table. He munched on the soggy flakes, spooning them almost unconsciously into his mouth, oblivious to the fat drips that fell, splashing his school tie.

“Gods offer my wife relief in her travails,” the gentle voice of one of Wilf’s fathers, Dalfron, intoned as he bustled into the kitchen, the bright fabrics of his clothes a jaunty counterpoint to his washed-out blue face. Wilf had a vague memory of his Popa Dalfo being full of fun and energy when he was a young boy, brimming with endless enthusiasm and delight at the antics of his sons, but now his golden eyes only looked tired, the sparkle of vim evaporated. Looking after Wilf’s mother was taking its toll on Dalfron, and as the youngest husband in the marriage, the responsibility for the matriarch’s care fell to him. “Make sure you clear your breakfast things away, Wilfron.”

“Yes, Popa,” Wilf replied, rising from his place at the table and clearing his nearly empty bowl. He placed the bowl in the sink, returning to the table to drink his hapa.

“At least you will have finished your schooling soon and you can help the family. Your poor mother, gods bless her, needs all our support. She isn’t getting any better,” said Dalforn, fussing with the contents of a shelf, lifting and inspecting each of the small jars and bottles in turn, inspecting their labels and content. They contained traditional medicines from the home planet, Venusian cures—difficult and eye-wateringly expensive to obtain on their adopted world—mixed with supposedly efficacious Earth medicines. It was true; Wilf’s mother had been sick for as long as he could recall. He had been told countless times about the toll the family’s flight from occupied Venus had taken upon her health, how the family had been much reduced in wealth and status to the point where they were struggling refugees in a crumbling council house in Birmingham.

Wilf felt his shoulders tense at his father’s words, conscious of the silence that now hung in the room. It was true, Venusian tradition had it that the youngest son would stay at home upon reaching adulthood and help in the home, learning the skills that would make him a prized match when it was time for him to marry into his own polygamous matriarchy.

But Wilf, raised in the second city of the world’s greatest empire, had absorbed too much of the independent will of the British. He wanted more than to tend house and see to the needs of some faded Venusian clan-mother. He wanted to break out of the narrow confines of his immigrant traditions. Here the future had opened out before him: there were opportunities at every turn. Living on Earth, knowing the history of this country and its Wars of the Worlds, he wished to choose his own path and not the one dictated by the redundant expectations of a now lost home world or those of his family.

But right now he couldn’t face another of the inevitable arguments that would grow out of the revelation of his rejection of Venusian cultural heritage. He would continue to bury it, hide it, almost hoping that once a decision had to be made, it would be too late—and he would be free. So all he said in response was, “Yes, Popa Dalfo.”

“You’re a good boy, Wilfron. Your Moma and Popas know you won’t let us down.”

He fled the home for school, the weight of an entire world upon his shoulders.

The door closed behind Wilf as he stepped out onto the street. Out of many front doors all along the terrace of orange-bricked houses people were emerging to start their days of work or school.

A few younger kids punted a heavy leather football to each other across the road, attracting the ire of passing motorists who had to stop abruptly to avoid hitting a child. Men in practical clothes stalked along the path to catch a bus or a tram, many sporting lit cigarettes they would puff on their way to one of the many factories in the city. They were of all races—white, black, Asian. And even a smattering of newer arrivals from Venus, their blue skin pale as cornflowers in the sullen overcast autumnal sky.

The door of a house further down the street opened and a peal of laughter added to the morning symphony. A tall man in a rough woollen suit, his head capped with a shock of brylcreamed white hair, was pursued by a young woman in a blue nylon housecoat.

“I’ve got to go to work, love,” the man pleaded as the woman put her arms around his neck and pulled his grinning face toward hers.

“Wouldn’t you rather stay ’ere?” said the woman, her mouth close to his.

“‘Allo Alfron,” said Wilf, greeting his older brother with an amused tone. “Aren’t you going to be late for work?”

Alfron and the woman—Norma, Wilf thought she was called—separated. Norma’s face was pale, her lips coloured an electric blue that matched her eyeshadow, her hair an actinic platinum blonde. Her annoyance faded quickly as she focused on Wilf, her hands resting on her hips, and a leering smile came to her face. “Who’s this, Alfie? ’E’s never your little bruvver is ’e? Where you been ’idin’ then, bab?”

“Now come on, Norma, leave the kid alone,” said Alfron, his hands grasping Norma’s shoulders. “Look, I’ve got to go to work, so I will see you later, love.” He planted a kiss on her forehead.

“You bloody well better see me later!” Norma replied, her right hand curling around to squeeze Afron’s buttock with a wink. “Ta-ra a bit, bab.”

“Ta-ra, love,” replied Alfron. “Come on, squirt, I need a bit of grub before I go to the bladder factory.” This was the name everyone used to call the Wright, Layman and Umney spacesuit factory Alfron worked at. Like many trades that supported Britain’s Empire in the stars, they had a plant in Birmingham, City of a Million Trades. With the bulk manufacturing done in the North on the mechanised works, it fell to the venerable cities of the Midlands with their history of precision engineering to produce much of the high-specification technology such as spacesuits. The boost received by the temporary relocation of the capital in the thirties after the Bombardment had also cemented its formidable place in the Empire’s machinery of interplanetary conquest.

“Good night then, ‘Alfie’?” Wilf said sarcastically, digging his elbow into his brother’s side. “Like a bit of Venusian sausage, does she?” He started to giggle.

“Sod off, you cheeky little bugger.” He said this around a cigarette he had retrieved from his jacket pocket. His hands fished around for something to light it, eventually doing so with a match which he then casually flicked away. He drew on the rather crumpled cylinder, pinching it tightly between thumb and forefinger as he exhaled a cloud of grey smoke that dissipated quickly. “’Ow’s herself today?” he asked, face turning serious for a second.

“Dunno. Another rough night, I think,” Wilf replied.

“Best off out of it then, I reckon,” replied Alfie around his cigarette. “Few pints down the Woodbine, chat up a bit of skirt, fish’n’chip supper and a cosy bed for the night. Sounds better to me.” They turned onto a busier street, the noise of the road a mixture of electric buzzing and the ‘tick-tick-tick’ of older vehicles with their Martian-style articulated legs. Vans unloaded their goods to shopkeepers who in turn laid out their goods for customers—the multifarious exoticism of multiple cultures from not just one but two worlds. Venusian fruits sat beside cloth from the far-flung outposts of the British Empire, cheap Chinese gadgets next to LPs of American pop music. Britain of the 1960s was a veritable cornucopia in the grip of the ‘white heat of modernity’ as some government minister had said.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit weird, these human women who…you know?” Wilf raised his eyebrows knowingly.

“Why should I judge? It’s not like it’s a chore or nothing,” responded Alfie, slightly defensively, “And if it gets me out of the house, what do I care?”

“But don’t you care what our Popas think? Or Moma? What about when you get bonded to your wife? What are you going to do then?” Wilf could feel his jealousy at his brother’s apparent disregard for Venusian traditions making his voice rise.

Alfie took a long drag on his dwindling cigarette and flicked it away into the road. He shrugged his shoulders and let out a cloud of smoke with a sigh. “Dunno. Don’t care. It’s my life, I’ll do what I want. I’m not going to be ruled by the ways of the old world that we won’t ever see again.” He paused, evidently warming to the subject. “The oldies think that one day we’ll go back, the Martians will be kicked off Venus by the brave humans and their armies, but it ain’t ever going to happen.” He seemed to shrink slightly, his tirade robbing him of his usual bravado. “I’m going to make the best of it here, now. And as long as I have a few bob in my pocket and a bird to shag on Friday night that’s enough for me, and family tradition can sod off.”

Wilf was shocked by the candour of his brother’s words. He clearly too felt the burden of tradition upon him, but he had embraced the new possibilities that life on Earth offered him. But he wasn’t the youngest. He had some power to determine his own path. The wayward middle son. “It’s fine for you, Alfie, you’re not the youngest, you don’t have to stay at home.”

The silence of a bald truth hung between the brothers who had stopped in front of the steamy windows of a café. ‘Figgy’s’ it proclaimed above the door, a common sight on the streets of most towns and cities of Britain, a place for a brew and a natter. “You’ve got to do what’s best for you Wilf. It’s a new world, a new way of life.” Alfie paused, the honesty in his earnest expression quickly dissipating to be replaced by his usual insouciance. “You want anything, or have you got to scuttle off to school?” Alfie asked, a softness entering his voice.

“Better go. Don’t want to bring the family into disrepute by getting the cane for being late,” replied Wilf, rolling his eyes in mock disgust. But it quickly changed into something all too real. The expectation of his family, his people, tightening his throat and making it hard to swallow.

“All right then, mate. Ta-ra,” Alfie said and watched as his brother turned away and walked off down the bustling street to school. He understood the pressure Wilf was under. He felt it himself. But rather than face it, he ducked and dived and ran away from it, choosing instead the oblivion of booze and casual sex. He turned and pushed the door to the café open, “Oi, Gino, cup of that fancy frothy coffee mate!” he called to the proprietor. Another day.

THE BOYS OF Handsworth Grove Grammar School shuffled into the hall and arranged themselves in ranks before the stage at the front of the space. From his vantage point on the balcony at the rear of what was known as ‘Big School’, Wilf looked down upon his fellow schoolboys. Only the sixth form were granted access to the balcony for assemblies to physically embody their status as the top of the school. The light came in through the tall church-like windows of the hall, and it also made the large stained-glass memorial to Old Boys who had fallen in the Wars of the Worlds glow with vibrant detail. The window depicted various English heroes of the past, kings and commoners alike—Alfred the Great, Henry the Fifth, Drake, Nelson, Captain Chambers of the Thunder Child—embodiments of the values of the Empire. It meant little to Wilf beyond what he had learnt in his history lessons.

The hall was flanked by panels of dark wood with the names of those Old Boys who had attained the highest academic honours from both within the school and beyond in the lofty heights of academia. These memorials to past glories held more sway over Wilf’s imagination than the depictions of heroism and conflict. The exotic language of learning, the litany of places beyond the teeming industrial vistas of Birmingham and the Black Country, spoke to Wilf, tugged at his imagination.

Gave him hope of a different life.

The susurrus of whispering schoolboys ceased as the headmaster and his retinue swept toward the stage, gowned and be-mortared in academic dress. The headteacher took his place behind the lectern and cleared his throat. “Good morning, boys,” he began.

Very quickly Wilf lost interest in the dry words of the headmaster with his usual intonements of displeasure and appeals to good scholarly effort. Like probably many in the room, Wilf allowed the clipped words to form a background to his own thoughts. That was until a sharp dig in the ribs brought him back to the there and then. The elbow came from the boy next to him, his friend Harshdeep Dhillon. Like Wilf, he was a child bound by the expectations and traditions of his family and culture and somebody whose ethnicity made him stand out amongst the rest of the school. As a result, Wilf and Harshdeep had become firm friends, their difference drawing them together.

“Old Hilly is going off on one again today, eh Wilf?” whispered Harshdeep as he tipped his head toward Wilf.

“Chapter and verse, chapter and verse,” he replied through a closed mouth, a slight nod of his head underlining his agreement with his friend.

Eventually the assembly concluded and the boys began to shuffle back to their lessons. The sixth-formers exited the balcony with more chatter and jostling than the younger students, not being under the watchful eyes of the teaching staff. Wilf and Harshdeep too were chatting enthusiastically when an imposing figure stepped into their path.

“You two need to be more respectful when the headmaster addresses the school.” The rebuke was loaded with menace and was uttered by Conrad Turner, the Head Boy. He stood before the pair, tall and broad-shouldered, jet black hair capping a contemptuous face with cruel, piercing eyes. He was flanked by two prefects, heavy set and intimidating gazes. His blazer sported the school badge of Full Colours and his cuffs bore three stripes of golden piping. Everything in his manner was one of imperiousness and superiority.

Harshdeep was unperturbed by Turner’s words and responded dismissively, “Very good, sir!” he mockingly came to attention and saluted, eliciting a guffaw from Wilf. It was well known that Turner was heading for Sandhurst and he happily adopted the manner of the sneering officer class from his position as Head Boy.

Turner stepped toward Harshdeep, his finger stabbing into his chest. “Watch it, you little brown shit, don’t think you’re special just because you’re the only one with a towel on your head.” His head jerked, indicating Harshdeep’s blue turban. “We may have let darkies like you in, but you still need to show respect to your superiors.”

Wilf stood by his friend as Turner’s abuse took place, his face a carefully composed neutral. It was the best way to deal with these kinds of confrontations with the likes of Turner—remain passive, don’t give them a reason to spend any more time than necessary focusing on you. It was a lesson Wilf, like all the non-white pupils of the school, learnt very early on, frequently after a sound beating in the school quad. Bloody noses, but lesson learnt.

But sometimes even passivity failed as a defence. Turner rounded on Wilf, warming to his false sense of offended school honour. “And you, you blue space wog, remember what we do to invaders from another world.” He cuffed Wilf around the head, just hard enough to send him stumbling slightly.

“Bloody hell, Turner, there’s no need for that!” Harshdeep cried out indignantly.

“Shut it, darkie!” was Turner’s response. His eyes narrowed as he looked Wilf up and down, clearly disliking what he saw. “You blue goblin bastard! I will never understand why we let you lot land. Should have let you rot in outer-space. Is it true you all have a gang-bang every night and your mum watches your dads shag each other?”

“Lucky for us that there are nicer people than you running the place,” countered Wilf, not rising to the ignorant interpretation of the Venusian matriarchy.

Turner started abruptly forward, as did his wingmen. He pushed his face toward Wilf, spraying his face with spittle as he snapped his words. “But I am as far as you are concerned, you cheeky little sod. You and your darkie bumboy here need to watch your step. This world belongs to us.” He jabbed his thumb toward his own chest. “We kicked the Martians off and we’re wise to you blue Venusian bastards trying to destroy us from the inside with your weird food and queer families.”

“Push off, you freaks,” chipped in one of Turner’s chums.

They stood facing each other for a few more seconds, Harshdeep wide-eyed with intimidation and Wilf impassive. “Come on, mate,” said Wilf stepping forward toward the unmoving Turner and his henchmen. He shouldered his way between Turner and one of the prefects and Harshdeep followed sheepishly.

“Sod off back where you came from,” was Turner’s parting shot as the pair joined the thronging corridor. “If it was down to me, I’d go to where they came from and shoot the bloody lot of them,” he added to his appreciative audience.

“I’m from bloomin’ West Bromwich!” muttered Harshdeep, regaining a little of his courage again. Wilf smiled in response to his friend’s minor defiance, and the pair headed toward their first lesson of the day.

Later that day, over steaming bowls of some stodgy school pudding, Wilf listened to his friend lament the weight of expectation upon him. “You will go to medical school and become a doctor!” Harshdeep recounted with his best Panjabi accent, his finger wagging admonishingly. “You will not bring shame upon this family by becoming a journalist concerned only with the gossip of idiots!” He spooned more dessert into his mouth, smiling around it.

Wilf chuckled in response to his friend’s impression, but it quickly faded as he considered his own circumstances. “At least you will get out, do something. I finish here and I’m straight home, never to leave until I’m married off to some fat or wrinkly old matriarch to improve the status of the family in the community.” Stating his fate so plainly only made the feeling of being trapped by his future stronger.

“Why can’t you apply to university?” Harshdeep asked.

“Same reason you can’t not do Medicine—my family have expectations of me,” Wilf replied despondently. There was indeed no academic barrier to Wilf’s progression to university. He was an excellent student. Certainly the school expected and were prepared to support him in his application.

“Why not just apply anyway? You don’t have to go if you can’t face it?” suggested Harshdeep, finishing the last of his pudding. He collected his dinner things together and went to stand up. “Come on, let’s go, it’s too noisy in here.”

Wilf too piled his plate and cutlery and stood. They walked to the ‘pig bin’ where any excess food was scraped from their plates and then pushed their way through the crowds of hungry students queueing for their own lunches.

Just as they arrived at the exit from the dilapidated prefab that served as the dining room, they were confronted by a be-robed member of staff—Mr Kemp, the master in charge of the progression from the upper-sixth to university. “Ah, Dhillon, I wondered if you might pop along and see me at some point—application to study Medicine, yes?” the avuncular teacher asked.

“Yes, sir, that is correct sir,” responded Harshdeep deferentially.

“Excellent, excellent,” Mr Kemp commented and then turned to Wilf. “And what about you, Hardy? I trust you intend to make an application? History, I should imagine, according to Mr Wood.”

Wilf wasn’t certain how to respond. It was true he excelled at History and it was a subject he loved. But to study it at university went so against the future mapped out for him by obligation. “No sir, not yet sir,” he responded. “I’m not sure my parents want me to continue my studies.”

Mr Kemp seemed only slightly baffled by this. “Seems a shame, Hardy, for such a bright lad. Still, I suppose somebody such as yourself...” His words dried up as he took in Wilf’s Venusian appearance. “Probably, erm, has little interest in human history, eh?”

“Indeed, sir,” replied Wilf with little enthusiasm. He would dearly have loved to reach the lofty heights of academia, but it wasn’t going to be.

“Well, carry on then, boys,” Mr Kemp said indicating the conversation was at an end. His attention returned to the queue and the prospect of lunch.

THE REST OF the afternoon was uneventful, and finally the bell for the end of the day rang and the daily scrum to catch the bus or tram began. Wilf waited on the Soho Road with a gaggle of younger boys for the overhead tram to arrive and carry him back to the city centre where he could catch a bus home.

The raised platform vibrated with the approach of the tramcar hanging on its arm from the elevated rail above it. The doors hissed open and the schoolboys pushed and shoved their way on with Wilf in their midst. Seats and spaces were quickly filled on the lower deck and as the tram pulled away from the station Wilf made his way up to the upper deck. The swaying of the tram on its journey made it difficult but he finally ascended the stairs. He turned to make his way to the back of the upper deck and stopped.

Already occupying the rear area were Turner and a collection of his acolytes. They were surrounding a couple of older Venusian men, who were hunched in their seats wrapped in brightly coloured coats. They clutched shopping bags on their laps, and they had expressions of quiet panic on their wrinkled faces.

The menacing group of schoolboys around them hooted and brayed, muttered abuses barely concealed behind hands. And leading it all was Turner, his tall figure leaning over the two Venusians menacingly, his face in a leering grin.

“So do you blue bastards only do it with your missus, or do you do it to each other too?” His audience guffawed at his words. “I bet you do, that queer space-wog stuff. Bet you’re all deformed and strange down there!” Again gales of laughter from his fellows.

The two Venusians refused to respond, although one of them had visibly started to weep. Tears trickled down his cheeks but he made no attempt to wipe them away.

“Look, the blue poof is crying!” one of the other boys pointed, eliciting further amused catcalls from his comrades.

“Well if it’s too scary here, he should sod off back to Venus then! Go on, you’re not wanted here mate!” Turner reached out and grabbed the shoulder of the nearest Venusian, making the poor man jump with fright.

It was enough for Wilf. Seeing these poor old men pushed around by somebody who thought they were less worthy of respect, just because of where they were from, stirred him into action. In the two of them he saw himself in the future, cowed and fearful, robbed of potential. All his feelings of helplessness in the face of others making choices for him, pierced something in him. He wouldn’t be a victim of circumstance, beholden to dead traditions from a lost world. Alfie was right—this was a new world and they had to build a new life here, not be bound to a way of life which, thanks to the Martians, no longer existed. Nor did he want to grow up frightened to be himself in his adopted nation. He was British too, regardless of the colour of his skin.

Wilf’s feelings crystallised into resolve and he walked down the aisle. “That’s enough, Conrad,” he said levelly.

The laughing ceased and all eyes swivelled toward Wilf. Last to face him was Turner, who drew himself up to his full height, slowly twisting around away from the Venusians to face Wilf. “If it isn’t our resident space wog? Piss off out of it, Hardy,” Turner delivered the order with a growl, the contempt for Wilf’s adopted Earth-name obvious.

“No, Conrad, you are going to stop and let these poor people alone,” Wilf replied and turned to the Venusians, telling them calmly in their native language. “These boys are sorry for their rudeness. You can go and sit where you feel more comfortable, Popas.”

The older men gathered their shopping bags and stood, bracing themselves as the carriage swayed on its track. As they shuffled past Wilf the taller man said, “Gods be with you, youngster. Please be careful,” in Venusian.

The eyes of the pack of schoolboys followed the pair as they made their way forward to the stairs. All except Turner, who continued to fix Wilf with a penetrating stare. There was no sound except the buzz and clank of the tram car. Wilf stood facing them, anger and fear competing for dominance.

“You shouldn’t’ve stuck your blue nose in, Hardy,” Turner said as he swung into the aisle, menacingly moving toward Wilf. “But at least we still have one of you blue space wogs to teach a lesson in British manners.”

Wilf was now toe-to-toe with Turner. He looked up into the face of the Head Boy and could see pure hatred of anyone who was different, other. That difference could be used against him and all the others of his people by racists like Turner. Or it could be an opportunity, a chance to change the people of both worlds.

He was not of the Venus of his parents, a powerless migrant desperately trying to fit in on an alien world. No, he was of this new world and the chance it offered to build a new fate. And by intervening he was doing something himself, defining himself by his actions. He could spend his life in obligation and obedience to other people’s expectations of him, or he could shape his own future. Today it might result in a beating, or cause ongoing repercussions at school, but it was his choice.

“I don’t think what you were doing was very polite, for somebody who thinks they can teach others ‘good manners’,” was Wilf’s retort. He continued to look Turner in the eyes, his body rigid, swayed only by the motion of travel.

The silence extended. “One day we’ll deal with all of you alien filth,” Turner threatened. “But today I will just start with you.” He moved to grab Wilf’s tie but was knocked off balance by the quickly decelerating tram. He had to reach out to grab one of the hanging straps to steady himself as the tram stopped, the pneumatic sound of the doors drowned suddenly by the chatter of voices belonging to the pupils of the girl’s grammar. Quickly a tide of bubbling teenage girls boiled up onto the top deck and started to fill the empty spaces. They jostled the pair of boys as they pushed past, and the moment was broken.

The tram began to move again and Turner continued to eye Wilf over the heads of the new passengers that surrounded them. The message was clear—to be continued.

Wilf would be ready.

WILF TOOK OUT his key and stood poised before the threshold of his future. He would tell his parents tonight that he wanted to go to university. He would tell them about what he had witnessed and why if he stayed at home and followed tradition he would never be able to help to change the status of Venusians in British society. They would always be the blue immigrants from another world, forever second-class citizens. His people needed a voice.

Time for him to speak up.

Spitting Blood
a chilling story, by

MARK MORRIS

“DON’T WORRY,” WILL said. “I won’t let him eat you.”

Victoria twitched her nose. Albert chewed a mouthful of grass. Neither seemed perturbed by Will’s father’s threat that one of them would be in the supper pot by Friday. Pa’s comment had been a joke at first, but the more he repeated it the more Will thought he was actually coming round to the idea. He’d never have suggested such a thing when Will’s mam was alive, but when the fever had taken her three months back, it had taken all Pa’s joy, good humour and compassion too.

Unlocking the hutch, he reached in and stroked Albert, his hand sweeping across the bony head, flattened ears and silky hump of the animal’s back.

“Pssst.”

The hiss from behind him made Will jump. He spun round, half-expecting to see a snake zigzagging towards him through the meagre vegetable patch. But there was nothing. Then a shadow shifted in the gloom by the gate.

“Who’s there?”

“Has he gone?”

“Who?”

“Your pa?”

Will glanced behind him. The curtains at the windows of their soot-blackened house had once been white, but were now drooping grey rags.

“Yes. He’s just back from the factory. He’ll be having his tea by the fire now.”

The shadows shifted again, then a tangled clump of them rose up over the gate. They hesitated until Will said, “You can come in. He won’t see you.”

The gate creaked, and a dark shape entered the back yard. It was shorter than Will—who himself was not tall for fifteen. He squinted to make it out, but the muddy twilight sky had drained the world of detail, and it wasn’t until the shape was within touching distance that he recognized it.

“Meg. What brings you here?”

Meg Bracknell, a year younger than Will, was one of a group of youngsters who sometimes met up to play in the woodland that lay between the town and the cluster of farms that provided much of the local produce. Meg lived on one of the farms with her parents, Jack and Blanche. They kept cows and chickens, though since the invasion a decade ago the volume of milk, butter and eggs they produced had dwindled year upon year. Some said the Martians had poisoned the air and the land, and that the effects were still being felt all the way up here in the north. Will’s father, though, said it was simply that increased automation in the mills and factories had resulted in unemployment, which meant there was less money to go round—which in turn had had a knock-on effect on the local economy.

Will listened to Pa’s frequent rantings, but didn’t really understand it all. All he knew was that Pa still had a job at Roebuck’s when many others didn’t, and for that he was grateful.

“Yes,” Meg said, moonlight pushing the shadows back from her face, “it’s me.”

Normally red-cheeked and laughing, she currently looked washed-out, watery-eyed, her russet curls a damp, tangled mess.

“What’s wrong, Meg?” Will asked. “Are you ill? Or lost?”

“I fear I may be lost,” Meg said, her voice weak, “though not in the way you mean.”

Abruptly, shockingly, she burst into tears, and stumbled forward as if the strength had gone out of her legs. Will caught her before she fell. It was the first time he had held a girl in his arms, and despite his alarm there was a part of him that relished the contact.

“There, there,” he said awkwardly, gently patting Meg’s back as she sobbed into his shirt. “Everything will be well.”

“Oh, I wish I could believe you,” she wailed.

“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

She detached herself from him and stood sniffing, trying to control herself. Finally she said, “Oh, Will, I need your help. I didn’t know where else to go.”

“You have it,” he promised her.

“Something has happened at home. There are men searching for me.”

Will’s mind reeled. “What men? Why? What’s happened?”

She buried her face in her hands, her voice dropping to an exhausted murmur. “I can’t speak of it. It’s too terrible.”

Will glanced at the house, afraid his father might have heard Meg’s anguished voice. “Don’t speak of it if you don’t want to,” he said soothingly. “Just tell me what I can do.”

“Hide me,” she replied. “That’s all I ask.”

Will thought of the tiny house he shared with his father. How could he hide Meg in there? Then his eye moved to a small building against the left-hand fence beside the vegetable patch.

“There’s only the shed where my father keeps his gardening tools. But it’s cold and dirty, full of woodlice and spiders.”

“Insects can’t harm me,” she said, and reached out with a tentative hand to touch his face. “Thank you, Will.”

Her fingers were cold, but his face felt hot. To cover his embarrassment, he slid past her, towards the outhouse. Opening the door, releasing the smell of mould and damp wood, he said, “Make yourself as comfortable as you can. When I’m able I’ll bring you a blanket and something to eat.”

WILL WAS CLEARING up after breakfast the next morning when three sharp raps sounded on the front door. Wiping his hands, he walked down the narrow hallway, whose walls seemed forever impregnated with the smell of wood smoke, cabbage and mouse droppings. He opened the door to two gentlemen wearing dark suits and overcoats, top hats on their heads. One of the gentlemen was tall and slim, spectacles perched above a pointed nose and bristling moustache. The other was short, wide, and as jowly as a bulldog. He gripped a cane topped with a snarling silver wolf’s head.

Will was about to inform them that his father was not home when the bespectacled man said, “William Crouch?”

Startled to hear his name spoken, Will could only gape.

“Cat got your tongue, boy?” barked the bulldog.

“No, sir, I...” Will stammered, and then nodded vigorously. “I mean... yes, sir. I’m William Crouch.”

“May we come in, William?” the bespectacled man asked. In contrast to his partner he was all politeness and warmth.

“As I said, sir, my father is not at home—”

“It’s not your father we want,” the bulldog said. “I thought we’d made that clear.”

The bespectacled man raised a hand. “Let us not alarm the poor fellow, Theodore.” To Will he said, “Allow us to introduce ourselves. I am Mr Soames and my colleague here is Mr Drayton. We are looking for a young lady who we believe to be a friend of yours. Meg Bracknell?”

Will stared at the bespectacled man, and gave a sharp nod. “I know Meg.” There was no point in denying it.

“Do you know where she is?” Drayton asked, narrowing his eyes.

“No.”

“Can you recall when you last saw her?” Soames asked, smiling.

Will tried to remember when he’d last seen Meg prior to yesterday. “Sunday, I think. A group of us met in the woods. We raced paper boats down the stream.”

Soames’ eyes twinkled, as if this was the answer he’d been expecting. “And you haven’t seen her since?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t be lying to us?” Drayton said.

“No, sir.”

“So if we was to search your house...?”

His eyes flickered past Will, to the dingy hallway behind him.

“I doubt I would be able to stop you, sir,” Will said evenly, “though I assure you that Meg is not within.”

Drayton’s eyes bored into him, and although he stood his ground, Will half-expected the man to suddenly barrel forward and shove him aside. But it was Soames who moved first, stepping in front of his colleague and placing a hand on Will’s shoulder.

“We wouldn’t dream of imposing on your privacy without your permission. Would we, Theodore?”

“Of course not,” Drayton growled, keeping his eyes fixed on Will.

Releasing Will, Soames stepped back. “Thank you for your help, William. Good morning.”

He touched the brim of his hat, then abruptly turned away. Drayton shot Will a final glare, then waddled after his colleague.

“Why are you searching for Meg?” Will couldn’t resist calling after them.

Soames looked back over his shoulder. Softly he said, “It is for her own safety. We fear poor Meg may be a danger to herself and others. If you do see her, William...” his moustache twitched “...have a care. She is not as harmless as she appears.”

Will watched the men walk away up the street and disappear around the corner before closing the door. He stood a moment in the hallway, his heart fluttering like a bird.

What had Soames meant about Meg being a danger? Was it a ruse intended to alarm him—perhaps to give her up? Meg was a scrap of a thing. There was no conceivable way she could ever harm anybody. He waited ten minutes, until he was certain the two men really had gone, and then he opened the back door and hurried outside.

It was a grim day, dark clouds massing like a manifestation of Pa’s mood since Mam had died. Will was sad too—there were times he still secretly wept into his pillow at night—but his daily chores, while his father toiled in Roebuck’s textile factory, generally kept him busy enough to hold his darkest thoughts at bay.

He hurried to the outhouse and knocked on the door. “Meg? It’s me, Will.”

No response. He tried the door, hoping she hadn’t locked it from the inside, and was grateful when it opened, causing dust to swirl. “Meg? Are you here?”

It was immediately clear she was not. Beneath his father’s workbench was the blanket he’d brought to her last night, along with an empty wooden bowl, licked clean of mutton stew, and a sprinkling of breadcrumbs.

Closing the door of the outhouse again, he started back towards the house, deep in thought. He stared unseeingly at the path, only looking up when he heard a creak.

The door of the rabbit hutch was hanging ajar.

He rushed up to it and threw back the tatty canvas covering he draped over the hutch at night. Opening the door fully and peering inside, he let out a small moan of denial.

Victoria and Albert were gone, but the evidence suggested they hadn’t departed of their own free will. The hay inside the hutch was soaked in blood, and here and there were clumps of white fur and gobbets of stringy red stuff that Will had no wish to examine too closely.

HE APPROACHED BRACKNELL’S from the rear, moving cautiously through the woodland that abutted the property’s back field. Crouching behind the stone wall that marked the boundary between the farmland and the trees, he peered at the cluster of buildings some distance away—stone cottage, wooden barn, a few scattered outhouses—his senses alert for any sound, any indication of movement.

But there was nothing. No sign of life of any kind. The place looked deserted, abandoned, leading Will to wonder whether he had come here on a fool’s errand.

In terms of finding Meg, the journey had admittedly been made more in hope than expectation. If she had fled and not been taken, then she could have gone anywhere after spending the night in his father’s shed—and hadn’t she been on the run from home when she had sought him out? In which case, what reason would she have for returning here? Unless...

Unless the men she claimed were pursuing her had been and gone, in which case doubling back might not be as foolhardy as it seemed. After all, home was home. The place where the heart instinctively sought refuge.

But even if Meg wasn’t here, Will hoped he might find some clue as to why she had fled in the first place. What could she have done that had turned her into a fugitive? Or perhaps it was not a case of what she had done, but what she had seen. She had said that something terrible had happened here. But what? Robbery? Murder?

Climbing over the stone wall at its furthest corner, and edging towards the cluster of silent buildings, Will’s thoughts returned to his rabbits. Who had killed them? Surely not Meg? Her pursuers then? But why? Had they searched his father’s shed, found evidence of Meg’s occupancy, and then torn his pets apart in retaliation?

Or was he barking up the wrong tree entirely? Perhaps it was a fox that had done the deed, and it was only the coincidence of timing that had led him to suppose the deaths of Victoria and Albert were intertwined with whatever Meg was embroiled in?

Clambering over a stile in the stone wall that bordered the back yard of the farmhouse, he scampered across the yard to the house itself. Crouching down, he moved along the back of the building, peering in at one window after another, fearful on each occasion of seeing Drayton’s bulldog-like face glaring back at him.

But the ground floor of the cottage was empty, the rooms seemingly undisturbed. No less reassured, he sidled along the side of the house, towards the small vegetable patch beneath the kitchen window beside the front door, and the muddy, rutted farmyard beyond. Reaching the corner, he peeked around the edge of the wall, but all was still. Even the long grass in the fields beyond the farmyard, and the tips of the distant treetops, were as motionless as an oil painting. A flotilla of dark clouds hovered overhead, threatening rain. The stink from the nearby silage pit saturated the air like drizzle, coating the back of Will’s throat and making him cough.

Something reacted to the cough. He heard a scratching, or a scrabbling, coming from the direction of the barn. He tensed, though the sound was too slight to have been made by anything much larger than a cat. More likely it was a rodent, alarmed by his proximity. He began to creep across the yard towards the barn, intending to make as thorough a search of the outbuildings as possible. He was a dozen steps from the barn door, which was standing ajar, when something lurched into the daylight.

He faltered, and then barked a nervous laugh. Although the chicken that had emerged from the barn was the first sign of life he had seen here, it was a pitiful-looking specimen. Almost devoid of feathers, it staggered and tottered, as though drunk. Its eyes, leaking some viscous greenish fluid, appeared to be pointing in different directions, and it kept opening and closing its beak, as if attempting to form words.

Hands on knees, Will bent forward. “Hello, you poor old thing,” he said. “What ails you then?”

As if stung, the bird jerked upright, its head snapping towards him. A shudder ran through its scrawny, yellow-pink body, and then it let out a raucous screech and hurtled across the farmyard, its beak snapping wildly.

Although the creature should have been pitiful, the ferocity of its attack made it terrifying. Will felt fear ripple through him, then he turned and ran, his legs pistoning, the frenzied screaming of the thing behind him driving him on.

Suddenly, in his peripheral vision, he saw a blur of movement, as something considerably larger than the chicken appeared from around the side of the cottage, almost parallel with him. He had an impression of the thing shooting across the garden, over the fence and into the farmyard as if fired from a cannon.

Will’s body lurched with shock, causing him to stagger sideways. His feet tangled together, and to his horror he fell sprawling, the gritty dirt grating his palms as he put his hands out to break his fall. Immediately he rolled on to his back, half-raising his legs to kick out at the crazed chicken and this new assailant.

But he had no need to defend himself. He looked up just in time to see the larger creature hit the smaller one side-on. With a squawk, the chicken flew sideways, shedding most of its few remaining feathers. It landed in a scrabbling heap, head jerking, legs instantly clawing to right itself. But before it could, the larger creature was upon it. Will saw a foot rise into the air and stamp down, crunching the chicken’s head into a bloody pulp. Brains squirted across the farmyard in a red-grey fan, but even so, the chicken’s body continued to thrash and jerk for some time, as if the sheer intensity of its insane fury was not to be outdone by something so trivial as death.

Eventually, however, it gave a final shudder and was still. Heart threatening to punch its way out of his chest, Will focused on his saviour.

It was Meg. She stood staring at him, panting like an animal. “Why did you come here?” she said.

“I came looking for you. I couldn’t think of anywhere else you’d be,” replied Will.

“You shouldn’t have come. It’s dangerous.”

“I found you, didn’t I?”

She rolled her eyes. “And you almost died because of it.”

Will looked at the chicken with the mashed head and swallowed. “What’s wrong with that creature?”

She sighed, then walked across to him and pulled him to his feet. “Let’s go inside.”

Once they were sitting at the kitchen table, she said, “In the summer some men came to see my father. They came from Roebuck’s.”

“The factory?” Will said, puzzled.

“No, the big house. Where Mr Roebuck lives.”

He nodded his understanding.

“There were three men—two in suits, one short, one tall—and another in a white coat, like a physician or a scientist. They came to an agreement with my father, after which our chickens were confined to the barn, and I was forbidden to go near them. I could hear them, though, screeching, as if they were furious, or in pain. I sneaked out once to see what the men had done to them, but the barn was locked. Then one night, while we were all in bed, some of the chickens escaped by chewing their way through the wooden walls of their cages, and then through the walls of the barn. Da heard a commotion in the farmyard, and went to see what was happening, and the chickens killed him. And then they came into the house and found Mam, and they killed her too...”

She had high points of red on the sharp cheekbones of her thin face as she related her story, but her voice and eyes were steady.

“My lord...” breathed Will.

“I was woken by screaming. I started down the stairs, but when I saw what was happening to Mam I ran back up again. I was frightened and there was nothing I could do. Most of the chickens were occupied with Mam, but one flew at me and scratched me.”

She rolled up her sleeve and showed him three thin, inflamed scratches on her forearm.

“I managed to kick it away and ran up the stairs. I took refuge in the attic, pulling the ladder after me, so they couldn’t follow. And there I remained for most of the next day, until late afternoon, when I came to you for help...”

Stunned by her story, Will asked, “When did you... How did you get away?”

“There is a window in the attic, and the next day I saw the men arriving in their fancy carriages as usual. By now the chickens had killed all the cows, and when the men saw what had happened they left again immediately. A little later more men appeared, wearing canvas suits and helmets, like deep sea divers, and carrying tubes that shot fire. They killed all the chickens—”

“Not all,” Will said.

“All but the one that attacked you. That one they must have overlooked.” She paused, bit her lip. “And they took away... the bodies.”

“Your parents?”

She nodded. “And the cows.”

“But they didn’t find you?”

“No. They looked, but it didn’t occur to them that I might be in the attic. I heard them talking. They thought that either I’d attempted to escape and was lying dead somewhere or that I’d actually managed to get away—and that concerned them.”

“Why?”

“In the event I was carrying an infection.”

Will thought of the scratches on Meg’s arm, which she had covered again now. “And are you?” he asked.

She didn’t answer for a moment—and then silent tears began to fall from her eyes and run down her cheeks.

“Meg?” he said softly.

Her shoulders heaved for several more seconds, then she gave an almighty sniff and looked at him with wet but suddenly defiant eyes.

“I fear I may be,” she said. “I have such a... hunger on me.”

“A hunger?”

She swiped the tears from her face. “I’m sorry, Will, about your rabbits. I... couldn’t help myself.”

His head swam. “You killed them?”

“The thing inside me did. The appetite. It takes over.”

Instinctively he pressed himself back in his seat. “And are you hungry now?”

She smiled thinly. “Fear not. For the moment I’m sated. But it may not be in your best interests to remain in my company.”

“I want to help you.”

“I’m not sure you can.”

“You say the men who caused this are staying with Mr Roebuck, at the big house?”

She nodded.

“Then that’s where we’ll go. If there’s a solution to be found, we’ll find it.”

WILL’S FATHER HAD often described the factory owner Mr Roebuck as a kindly man, even though increased automation using Martian technology had resulted in dozens of job losses at his factory in recent years. Will clung to that endorsement now as he and Meg climbed a tree whose branches overhung the high wall that surrounded Roebuck House, thinking that if the factory owner was as philanthropic as his father claimed, then he ought to give them a fair hearing. His hope was that the scientist who had been experimenting on the Bracknells’ chickens could do something for Meg, give her medicine to make her better, perhaps. He even harboured a hope that that was why Soames and Drayton had been searching for her—in order that her affliction could be successfully treated.

His initial idea had been to announce themselves at the front gate, but peering through the wrought-iron railings they had seen a group of men by the door of the gatekeeper’s lodge, forbidding in dark uniforms and peaked hats, each holding what appeared to be a long rod or night stick, and it hadn’t taken Meg long to convince Will it might be advisable to seek an alternative means of entry. So it was that they now found themselves creeping along a sagging tree branch like a pair of monkeys and dropping into the leaf-strewn undergrowth just inside Roebuck House’s boundary wall.

They found themselves in an apple orchard, the ground clumped with leaf mould and decaying fruit. It was late afternoon now, though the oppressive sky made it feel like twilight. At least, though, the lack of light and the trees provided them with cover.

“Which way?” Will said, looking around.

Meg hunched her shoulders. “Shall we try straight ahead?”

They marched through the trees, dead leaves crunching beneath their feet. After a few minutes the trees thinned out and they found themselves facing a long, high hedge, which stretched across their path. The hedge had been so meticulously pruned that its top was flat, its corners sharp.

Meg indicated a number of arched openings set into the hedge at regular intervals. “It’s a maze,” she said.

“Let’s go this way,” said Will, and turned right, keeping close to the hedge, trailing his fingers along its rough surface of compacted branches and waxy leaves.

When they reached the corner, Will stopped and peered around it.

“What can you see?” hissed Meg.

“A pig.”

“A pig?” She frowned, then leaned forward to peer around him.

He was right. There was a pig. On a flat patch of ground, beyond which were flowerbeds, a greenhouse, and a set of wooden steps leading to an elevated lawn, was a sizeable compound enclosed by a metal fence. At one end of the compound a fat pink pig was tied to a stake, which had been hammered into the ground. The pig seemed quite content, gorging itself on a heap of vegetable peelings and cabbage leaves.

As well as the pig’s soft grunting, Will and Meg could hear a faint crackling sound, which seemed to come from the fence itself.

“It’s electric,” said Will.

“Why would you need an electric fence to stop a pig from getting out?” Meg wondered.

He gripped her arm. “Shh.”

Three men had appeared and were descending the wooden steps. One of the men was wearing a white doctor’s coat over a grey suit, and holding a small black box in his hand. The two men behind him, one tall and thin, the other short and squat, were wearing dark suits and top hats.

Will’s back stiffened and he looked at Meg. “Those are the men who were looking for you. Are they the same men who came to your farm?”

Meg nodded, eyes narrowed, lips pressed tightly together.

They watched as the white-coated man moved forward, and stood close to the electric fence. The tall man—Mr Soames—said something to him, perhaps warning him not to get too close, but the scientist’s response was dismissive. As he raised the black box, Will and Meg saw Soames and Drayton tense slightly, the smaller, broader man raising his silver-topped cane, as if in readiness to use it. The scientist pressed a button on top of the box, and immediately there was a grinding sound, like two heavy sheets of metal sliding together. The sound continued for several seconds, and then stopped. Meg and Will looked at one another. Neither of them knew exactly where the sound had come from.

The three men beside the compound were now standing motionless, as if waiting for something to happen. Will noticed they were looking not at the pig, which was still munching cabbage leaves, but into the empty area of the compound behind it. He was wondering what they were waiting for when something suddenly shot out of the ground, making him step back so quickly he almost knocked Meg over.

At first he thought the thing was a silvery jet of water, but then, when it was twelve or fifteen feet above the ground, it halted and reared back, into a sort of question mark shape, and all at once he realised with horror that, vast though it was, what he was looking at was a living creature. An eel. Or a worm.

The worm was a greyish-yellow colour, and its flesh was slick and wet looking. It didn’t appear to have a head as such, the uppermost portion of its body simply flaring out into a funnel shape, that was surrounded by a frill of yellowish flesh framing circular rows of razor-sharp teeth. Its ‘head’ weaved to and fro for a moment, as if tasting the air, and then its body flexed and with incredible speed it shot towards the pig. Before the animal could even let out a squeal of alarm, the worm latched on to it, plucked it into the air, and retreated with lightning speed into its hole, taking the pig with it.

Will jerked back behind the corner, shaking as he leaned against the hedge. He looked at Meg, and saw her eyes were wide, her mouth hanging open. She clutched his sleeve, as if she needed something real to hold on to. Then, in silent mutual consent, they turned and ran.

THE URGE TO retrace their steps through the orchard, and put as much distance as possible between themselves and Roebuck House, was almost overwhelming, but they knew that if they fled now they would simply be postponing their problems, not solving them. Instead, therefore, they ran along the length of the high hedge until they reached the opposite corner. There they stopped and rested a moment, Will clutching his knees, his breath coming in short, rapid gasps, his stomach churning in fright.

“What was that thing?” Meg panted.

“A monster,” gasped Will.

Meg leaned against the hedge, sliding down until she was in a sitting position, her chin on her bony, upturned knees. “It looked like a lamprey.”

“A what?”

“My Uncle Tom used to see them when he went fishing. They latch on to other fish and suck out their blood.” She held her hands about six inches apart. “They don’t usually grow much bigger than this, though.”

“They must keep it underground and let it out to feed,” Will said. “At least now we know what the electric fence was for.”

“Do you think those men grew it?” asked Meg.

“Must have.”

“But why?”

His fear made him snap, “How should I know?”

Meg looked at him a moment, then quietly said, “I’ll understand if you want to go home, Will.”

Although tempted, Will shook his head. “If you’re to be cured of your... ailment, we must see this through together.”

She grimaced, placing a hand on her stomach.

“Are you hungry again?” he asked warily.

“A little. But I shall be fine for the time being. Let’s go.”

They sidled around the corner of the hedge and followed a meandering path past flower beds, colourless and bare now in the approach to winter, a bower containing an unoccupied bench, and a vegetable garden, on the far side of which knelt a gardener in shirt sleeves and a flat cap, digging weeds out with a trowel. They sneaked quickly past him, hoping he wouldn’t turn and see them; he didn’t.

Beyond the vegetable garden the path dipped into a wooded area, a lake sparkling in the trees to their left. After five minutes the path climbed again, and they trudged uphill.

“Do you recall the steps the men came down?” Meg said.

Will nodded.

She pointed to their right. “If I’m correct, this slope runs parallel to those steps, which must mean the house is through those trees.”

They turned off the path and wove a route through the trees Meg had indicated. Sure enough, after a few minutes the foliage thinned out, and they found themselves on the edge of a neatly mown lawn. To their left the grass rose in a shallow bank to a stone walkway. The walkway surrounded Roebuck House, a mansion, rendered in pale stone, of so many turrets and roofs and windows, that it looked to Will and Meg as though an entire village had been crammed together into a single, vast dwelling.

Now they were here, Will felt doubts building in his head. “How will we get in?”

“We could always knock on the front door,” Meg suggested.

Will looked at her, uncertain whether she was teasing him. She tilted her head defiantly, as though defying him to question her right to both an apology and an explanation. After a moment, though, she sighed and said, “Perhaps it would be wiser to seek a less... obvious route.” She pointed towards a gravelled path that led down the side of the house. “Let’s try that way.”

They hurried around the edge of the tree line and across a short expanse of lawn, Will expecting at any second to hear angry shouts, perhaps even the frenzied barking of dogs. But they reached the house unchallenged, and crept along the path at the side, sheltered at least partly by a line of bushes on their left.

They kept low, crouching beneath windowsills, until eventually they came to a raised patio, served by a set of French doors, one of which was standing open. Meg cast a quick glance at Will, and then stepped up on to the patio and marched across to the open door. She hesitated for a second, then stepped inside.

Swallowing the instinct to call her back, Will followed. As soon as he entered the house, he felt shadows closing about him. He smelled leather, old books, and wood smoke from a fire that was crackling in the grate on the far side of the room. His heart began to thud with a hefty rhythm, as though the pressure inside the house was different to that outside.

He rubbed at his face, as if the gloom was a swathe of cobwebs into which he had blundered. For several seconds he could see nothing but blurred, dark shapes around him, and he half-expected to hear a gruff voice in his ear, to feel a large, heavy hand come down on his shoulder. The first thing he saw when his vision began to clear was an armchair, a book bound in cracked red leather on its seat, a small table beside it. On the table sat a delicate china cup containing a quarter-inch of tea that looked considerably paler than the brick-red stuff his father drank.

Meg had already crossed to the far side of the room, and was peering around the edge of a partly open door. Now that his eyes were adjusting to the dimness, Will saw they were in a small library, or study, with a desk to the left of the fireplace and hunting prints on the few sections of wall not occupied by bookcases. Beady eyes regarded him impassively, glinting in the firelight, but they belonged to stuffed animals: a snarling fox on a shelf by the desk; a snowy owl with outspread wings dominating the mantelpiece above the fire.

Meg pulled the heavy door open and stepped out on to a tiled floor. Light from her right spilled over her, turning her into a half-ghost. Will saw her squint and look up to her left, and as he crossed to the door and passed through it, he followed her gaze to a wide staircase. They were in a high-ceilinged entrance hall, the imposing front door to their right flanked by long windows, through which daylight streamed and stretched across the floor in long rectangles, broken only by their elongated shadows.

There was no one about. Will wondered if they should make themselves known, so as not to be accused of breaking in with criminal intent. Before he could suggest this, though, Meg was scurrying across the tiled hallway and up the stairs, leaving him no option but to follow.

She moved with purpose, as if she knew where she was going. Halfway up the first flight of stairs, Will saw her raise her head and sniff the air like a dog on a scent. He would have called after her, but was scared of attracting attention. As he trailed in Meg’s wake, his eyes darted everywhere, fearful that someone might suddenly appear from one of the many closed doors on the first floor landing.

The fact that no one did was not much of a relief, because as soon as she reached the first floor, Meg began to ascend towards the next. When they reached the second floor, the landing of which contained as many closed doors as the first, she turned immediately left along a long corridor, breaking into what was almost a run. Although he knew that if they were caught now there would be no escape, Will stuck doggedly to her heels.

At last Meg came to a halt—though only because she was standing outside a door at the end of the corridor. She placed a finger upon it, as if testing for vibrations.

“It’s in here.”

“What is?” Will asked, panting for breath.

She fixed him with a curious look—half-knowing, half-confused. “I... don’t know.”

They looked at each other for several seconds. Finally Will said, “But you know something is?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I can... feel it.” Consciously or unconsciously she placed her hands on her stomach.

“In your belly?”

“It’s... the appetite. It has a voice. Like calls to like.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” Her reply was irritated, almost angry. “Let’s find out.”

Before Will could advise caution, she twisted the doorknob. As the door opened, his first impression was of warmth flowing over him in a wave. With the warmth came a scent—or perhaps a blend of scents: camphor, sickness, hot metal, something sweet and almost overpowering, like the scent of lilies. Alarmed, he reached towards Meg, but she was already pulling away from him, moving into the room.

He had no option but to follow her. Stepping through the door, he found himself in the most luxurious room he had ever seen. It was furnished in rich reds and shimmering golds, and was dominated by a four-poster bed, around which elaborate machines of wood and brass clicked and whirred. The machines were disconcertingly mammalian, perched on multi-jointed, spider-like legs, developed from technology salvaged from the Martians. Although the machines were not living creatures, Will couldn’t help thinking they were both standing guard over the room’s occupant and aware of his and Meg’s presence. Tearing his eyes away from them, he focused on the pale figure in the bed.

It was a woman in a plain white nightgown. She was lying on her back, like a saint on a tomb. She might once have been beautiful, but now she was cadaverously thin, her skin as sickly as curdled milk. If it wasn’t for the faintest rise and fall of her chest, Will would have believed her dead.

Various tubes and attachments, some containing colourless fluid, linked the woman to the machines. Most of the tubes were thin, connected to her via the insides of her wrists and elbows, but a larger tube was attached to the side of her ribcage, and made a sucking sound each time a set of bellows on top of one of the machines rose and fell.

Will hung back, feeling a sense of trespass, of violation even, but Meg moved closer to the bed, her eyes fixed on the woman’s face. She was reaching out to touch the woman’s hollow cheek when a voice behind them barked, “What the devil are you doing here?”

Will spun, and Meg’s head snapped round. The man behind them wore a dinner suit over a silver waistcoat. Above his bow tie and the wing tips of his starched collar, his face was florid, his thick grey moustache bristling in anger.

“We’re... terribly sorry, sir,” Will stammered, his voice fading as the man glared at him.

Meg, though, remained composed. Stepping forward she said, “Mr Roebuck?”

The man turned his fury on her. “Who I am is of no concern—”

Astonishingly Meg raised her voice over his. “You are Mr Bartleby Roebuck?”

The man gasped, clearly taken aback. “What if I am?”

“Mr Roebuck, we are here to see you on a matter of the utmost urgency. We’re sorry to enter your house in this manner, but we needed to see you and only you. We were afraid that if we requested an audience via conventional means, we would be turned away.”

Roebuck stared at her. His face was still red, but Will could see his initial fury was dissipating. Anger was clearly not a natural state for him.

“How did you get in?” he demanded.

“We climbed over the wall, and entered the house via an open patio door,” Meg said truthfully.

“And who are you, may I ask?”

Meg indicated Will, as if introducing a party guest. “This is my friend, William Crouch. His father is one of your employees. My name is Megan Bracknell. From Bracknell’s farm.”

The effect on Roebuck was startling. His face drained of colour and he took a step back, guilt and horror chasing themselves across his features.

“Reginald Bracknell’s daughter?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Oh, my dear,” Roebuck said. “I’m so sorry.” He looked at his wife in the bed, and then at Meg, and seemed to recover a little of his composure. “But what are you doing here? In my wife’s room, I mean?”

“She... she called to me,” Meg said.

“Called to you?”

“Something in her...” Meg glanced at the sleeping woman “...called to something in me. I cannot explain it any clearer than that.”

“What’s wrong with your wife, Mr Roebuck?” Will asked before the factory owner could respond. Then, remembering where he was, he mumbled, “If you don’t mind me asking.”

Roebuck sighed. “She is ill,” he said. “Very ill. She has consumption.”

“Will she die?” asked Meg gently.

Roebuck took a deep breath and tried to sound defiant. “We are trying to prevent it.”

“With these machines?”

He looked at them with something like doubt, or perhaps distaste. “It is one of several methods we are currently exploring.”

“We?”

“I have employed a learned man. A scientist.”

“The one at the farm?” said Will.

Roebuck’s face was troubled. “Just so.”

“What was this scientist doing at my father’s farm, Mr Roebuck?” Meg asked.

Roebuck looked evasive. “I’m not sure that I...”

“Please, Mr Roebuck,” Meg said. “I have a right to know.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed him the scratches on her arm. “Whatever he was doing caused the deaths of my parents. And also, as you see, it has affected me directly. One of the chickens on which your scientist was experimenting scratched me.” She placed a hand on her stomach. “And now I have a terrible hunger.”

The colour had drained entirely from Roebuck’s face now. He slumped in to a nearby chair. “Oh, what have I done?” he said. “What folly have I wrought?” He gestured at his wife’s prone body. “Patricia would never have agreed to this. I would never have agreed to it, had I known the outcome.”

“Please, Mr Roebuck,” Will said, “can Meg be cured of her... affliction?”

Roebuck looked at Meg, who was still standing with her hand on her stomach, a grimace on her face. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “We must speak to Dr Fendlesham.”

“The scientist?” said Will.

Roebuck nodded. “He leads the... quest to restore Patricia to health.” He stood up wearily and crossed to the door. “Come. Let’s leave my poor wife in peace.”

UP CLOSE, DR Fendlesham was a small man with thin lips and a weak chin.

“Everything?” he said to Roebuck, his eyes narrowed behind his spectacles.

“Everything,” Roebuck confirmed, indicating Meg. “This is Megan Bracknell. Thanks to us, she is now an orphan. She deserves to know why.”

The four of them were gathered around the fire in the library on the ground floor, the patio doors, which Will and Meg had used to enter the house, now closed against the encroaching darkness. Fendlesham peered at Meg without expression. If he felt any guilt or shame for what had happened at the farm he didn’t show it. Indeed he said, “Ah, yes. The outcome of that endeavour was... regrettable. But you must understand, Miss Bracknell, that your father was more than open to our proposal; I have his agreement in writing. Moreover, he was fully cognizant of the potential risks, and as such was handsomely—”

“Yes, yes,” snapped Roebuck. “Miss Bracknell is not here for recompense. She simply requires an explanation. I felt that you, Dr Fenbdlesham, were best placed to provide her with one.”

Fendlesham looked at him implacably. “Of course.”

“And in terms that we can all understand,” Roebuck added.

Fendlesham’s expression remained blank, but beyond the blankness Will sensed disdain, not only for the man who had employed him, but for all those whose intellects fell short of his own.

Without preamble he said, “Ten years ago, once the Martian threat had ended, I was invited by a representative of Her Majesty’s government to become part of a scientific initiative whose purpose was to assess and, if possible, adapt and develop the wealth of technology left behind by our invaders. Over the course of several years, my colleagues and I made great inroads in our endeavours, to the extent that many of our discoveries are now providing benefits for the citizens of our Empire on a daily basis. When Mr Roebuck contacted me, some months ago, I had branched out into private medical research, concentrating on two areas—the mechanical and the biological.”

“The worm!” Will blurted.

“I beg your pardon?” Fendlesham said, fixing him with a piercing look.

“We... we saw it,” Will admitted. “We weren’t spying. We just happened to be there when it... took the pig.”

Fendlesham stared at him a few seconds longer, and then said, “The worm, as you term it, is an alien parasite. We discovered colonies of them living within the digestive systems of dead and decaying Martians. Research proved them to be remarkable creatures, imbued with many startling, and potentially beneficial, properties.”

“But the thing we saw was huge,” Meg said. “Surely—”

“Naturally, the creatures we harvested for our research were small,” Fendlesham interrupted, “the largest no bigger than your little finger. The specimen you saw has been augmented via chemical manipulation.”

“But why create such a monster?” asked Will.

“Would you ask that question, young man, if the creature were a cow, able to provide vast quantities of milk and meat to a starving populace?”

As Will pondered on that, Meg asked, “But what does the worm provide, Dr Fendlesham?”

Fendlesham’s eyes glittered behind his spectacles. “An eradication of our susceptibility to illness.”

She blinked. “All illness?”

“In theory, yes. This creature has the ability to regenerate diseased cells, to literally expel illness from its body and renew itself. I believe that if we can isolate and harness this, we can transfer it to other species—including ourselves.”

“That is what Dr Fendlesham and his team were trying to achieve with your father’s chickens,” Roebuck explained.

“But you failed,” said Meg bluntly.

Although she was slight in stature, the accusatory look she gave Fendlesham would have caused many men to squirm with shame, but the scientist regarded her with insouciance. “Up until now we have been unable to instill another species with the parasite’s regenerative powers without also imbuing them with the creature’s voracious instincts and appetites. The problem is a perplexing one—but I feel sure we will overcome it eventually.”

“And how many more people will die in the meantime?” Meg said angrily.

Fendlesham waved a hand, as if the problem was a minor irritant. “All scientific progress requires sacrifice. It is unfortunate, but there you are.”

Will saw Meg’s eyes blaze, and in order to deflect an argument said quickly, “You mentioned two strands to your work, Dr Fendlesham—the biological and the mechanical. Could you tell us a little about the other? We saw some machines in Mrs Roebuck’s room...”

“Insignificant devices,” Fendlesham said dismissively.

Now it was Roebuck’s turn to bridle. “Hardly insignificant, Doctor. Those devices are keeping my wife alive.”

“But they are not curing her, Mr Roebuck.”

“So why not invent a machine that can?” said Meg.

Fendlesham flashed her a withering look. “Do you not think that is precisely what we’ve been trying to do? Progress is ongoing, Miss Bracknell. Indeed, in these very grounds is a machine whose purpose is to scan the body, identify the illness that is attacking it, and extract that illness as one would extract bindweed from around the stem of a healthy plant.”

“Thus far it has failed to work,” Roebuck said dejectedly.

“It has not been entirely unsuccessful,” argued Fendlesham. “It simply needs some refinement. Think of human cells and foreign cells as two distinct colours that, when brought together, gradually blend into one another. If my machine can differentiate between the two ‘colours’ before that blending process starts, it can separate them. But if, for example, blue and red become purple it merely identifies them as a single entity.”

“And so the illness must be identified and extracted before it can fully take hold?” said Will.

“Precisely.”

“Unfortunately, in poor Patricia’s case, her consumption is too far advanced.”

“But we shall defeat it, Mr Roebuck,” said Fendlesham evenly. “And we shall continue to hold the illness at bay until we can.”

“And what of Meg?” asked Will, who he could see was clutching her stomach once again, eyes narrowed as if suppressing some inner turmoil. “Can she be—”

Before he could finish his question, the lights went out.

Will hadn’t realised how dark it had become until that moment. Suddenly they were plunged into a gloom which left them with nothing but flickering firelight for illumination. He didn’t feel overly alarmed—electricity was a notoriously fickle beast—but Roebuck sat up straight in his chair, alarm on his face.

“The electrical barrier,” he said, and Will thought of the crackling fence around the compound in which the vast worm had been contained.

Fendlesham was already out of his seat. “Fear not, Mr Roebuck. Soames and his men will contain the beast, if needs be. I shall check the generator. For the time being I suggest you sit tight.”

He crossed the room swiftly, his face an orange smear in the light from the fire, and slipped through the door into the darkness beyond.

Meg groaned and bent over double in her seat.

“Are you ill, my dear?” asked Roebuck.

Her voice was thick, strained. “I’m hungry.”

Before either Will or Roebuck could respond, there came the rapid thud of descending footsteps and a high-pitched cry. “Mr Roebuck! Mr Roebuck, sir!”

Roebuck jumped up and rushed to the door. Will glanced again at Meg, who was still bent double, then stood up and hurried after their host.

Stepping into the hallway, he saw Roebuck, carrying a hastily lit candle, striding towards the wide staircase. A middle-aged woman, clearly a housekeeper or a lady’s maid, was descending the final flight, her face stricken. Seeing her employer, she cried out, “Oh, sir!”

“What is it, Hortense? Whatever’s the matter?” Roebuck said.

Will saw tears on Hortense’s cheeks, shining in the candlelight.

“Oh, sir!” she wailed. “It’s the mistress! I’m so terribly sorry!”

UNCERTAIN WHAT ELSE to do, Will followed Roebuck upstairs. Driven by panic, the older man drew ahead of him, and Will was just entering the corridor that led to Mrs Roebuck’s bedroom when he heard a wail of distress coming from behind the door at the far end. He paused, unsure whether to intrude, but then heard Hortense puffing up the stairs behind him. Rather than face the awkwardness of making her think he was turning tail like a coward, he pressed on, bracing himself as he stepped into the room.

The warmth swept over him as before, but now there was another smell overriding the previous fragrances—a charred, unpleasantly meaty odour that turned his stomach. He saw Mr Roebuck on his knees beside the bed, sobbingly exhorting his wife to wake up. His broad back obscured most of the bed’s occupant from view, but in the flickering candlelight Will caught enough of a glimpse to be thankful that the dimness prevented him from seeing more. Previously supine, Mrs Roebuck’s body now appeared to be twisted, as though she had died whilst writhing in pain, and smoke was rising from her in wisps that hazed the air. One outflung arm seemed to have toppled a table lamp, which lay on its side, its glass shade shattered. The flesh of that arm was blackened and withered, as was the hand on the end of it, whose fingers had curled in on themselves like the talons of a dead bird’s claw.

Will stood just inside the door, horrified and sickened. When Hortense bustled past him and fell heavily to her knees beside her employer, he decided to make a strategic withdrawal. He sidled from the room and scurried away along the corridor, trying to tread lightly for fear he might be called back. He groped his way down the darkened stairs, and when he reached the ground floor followed the glow of firelight back to the library.

Entering the room, he expected to find Meg still huddled by the fire, but her chair was empty. A creak on the far side of the room made him spin round. By the moonlight sifting down through the clots of dusky clouds he saw that one of the French doors was once again hanging open.

He crossed the room quickly and stepped out on to the patio. On the far side of the path that led up the side of the house, the line of bushes was a mass of rustling black. Hurrying to the edge of the patio, Will looked to his left, and made out a hunched shape, a little darker than the shadows around it, moving away from him.

“Meg!” he shouted. “Meg!”

The shape paused a moment, then stumbled on.

“Meg, wait! Come back!” he called again, but the figure ignored him.

Resisting the urge to go back inside, close the door and huddle by the fire, Will jumped off the patio onto the path, and hurried after her.

DRAYTON, WHO HAD laid aside his cane in favour of one of Dr Fendlesham’s electrical rods, held up his lantern. “What the devil is wrong with you, boy?”

The object of his attention, the youngest of three uniformed guards ordered to stand sentinel around the covered well inside the compound, was so startled he almost dropped his electrical rod.

“Nothing, sir.”

“You’re shaking like a frightened child.”

The man opened his mouth—but apparently could think of nothing to say in his defence. “I’m sorry, sir,” he finally mumbled. “I’ll be fine.”

Resembling a belligerent troll from a fairy tale, Drayton marched forward and rapped the well cover with his rod. It made a dull clong sound.

“Do you know what this is?” he said.

The guard looked at him as if unsure whether his superior was trying to catch him out.

“This is six-inch iron,” Drayton said, answering his own question. “It responds only to an electrical opening device devised by Dr Fendlesham. While the power is out this cover will therefore remain shut. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you have nothing to worry about, do you, boy?”

“No, sir.”

Another guard piped up—older, thickly set, sporting a fine set of whiskers. “Mr Drayton, sir?”

“Yes?”

“If there’s nothing to worry about... why are we here?”

Drayton glared at him, and was about to reply when they all heard a rumbling beneath their feet. The men looked at one another in alarm. The youngest said, “Mr Drayton, I can feel the ground shaking.”

Drayton pressed a button on the handle of his rod. Immediately there was a crackle, and jagged blue-white threads of electricity began to flicker around its tip.

Following his lead, the three guards activated their own rods, their faces instantly bathed in jittering, icy light.

The rumbling grew louder. Drayton looked grimly at the iron well cover around which they stood. “It will hold,” he muttered. “That monstrosity will never break through.”

Suddenly, however, the ground surged and rippled, causing all four men to stagger. The man with the whiskers went down on one knee, dropping his rod, which went out with a sizzle.

“How is the creature beneath us contained?” asked the third guard, once the ground had settled and he had recovered his balance.

“It is confined to a series of tunnels and chambers,” Drayton said.

“But how is it confined?” the guard persisted, fear making him insolent. When Drayton’s stare grew unfocused, he said, “Is it not by electricity? Are the tunnels not lined with an electrical charge, to prevent the creature from burrowing through them?”

In horrified realisation the youngest guard staggered back from the well cover. Throwing his rod to the ground, he turned and ran.

Before Drayton could bellow at him to come back, the ground erupted beneath the man’s feet, and the huge alien parasite burst out of the earth in a shower of rocks and dirt. It rose straight into the air, like a tree growing at tremendous speed, the young man rising with it, his arms and limbs pinwheeling, his mouth gaping to let loose a hideous shriek of primal terror. The men on the ground watched, transfixed, as the creature’s funnel-like mouth widened and the young guard dropped into it. For a second his shriek seemed to shred the air—and then it stopped abruptly. Now all the men could hear was the dull patter of rocks and dirt hitting the ground.

As quickly as it had emerged, the parasite retreated back into its hole. It left nothing of the young guard behind, not a shred of clothing, nor a drop of blood. Drayton waited a few seconds, then approached the hole it had made and peered down it. He could see nothing but blackness. He wondered about dropping something flammable into its lair, burning the monstrosity underground.

He turned to speak to the two remaining guards, but they were no longer there. They had clambered over the fence surrounding the compound and were now running towards the gatehouse.

“Come back here!” Drayton bellowed. “Come back, I say!”

He heard a slithering behind him. He whirled to find that the parasite was emerging again, more slowly this time, perhaps attracted by his voice. Still rising, it cricked its ‘neck’ into a question mark shape, tilting its circular maw towards him.

Drayton snarled and pressed the button on his electrical rod, which burst to life. Before he could raise it in defence, however, the funnel-like mouth suddenly flared open and the creature attacked, its body flexing, its ‘head’ snapping forward like a striking cobra.

The last thing Drayton saw before he was engulfed was a gaping red maw lined with spirals of razor-sharp teeth.

“MY LOVE,” ROEBUCK said softly, his head bowed, Patricia’s limp right hand held tenderly between both of his, “my poor, dear love.”

She had been nineteen when Roebuck had met her, and they had been married a year later. Although they had tried, they had never had children, a fact which had saddened both of them, though their devotion to one another had been such that their mutual disappointment had strengthened rather than weakened the bond between them. The time and energy Patricia would have given to her offspring, she had instead diverted to the needs of the poor. A vibrant and compassionate woman, she had been on the boards of various charitable organisations, and had been instrumental in founding two hospitals and an orphanage in the area.

She had helped, too, in securing accommodation for those fleeing the Martian invasion in the south ten years earlier. For a while their part of the country had been awash with refugees, and the strain upon local resources had been great. Illness had been rife, and Roebuck believed it was during this time that Patricia, who was mixing daily with vast numbers of the impoverished and homeless, may have contracted the disease that would lurk within her for the next few years before eventually rising up and claiming her. The fact that her illness—and now death—may have been a direct result of her philanthropic nature was a bitter pill to swallow, but even before today Roebuck had been determined that, should the worst happen, he would not allow bitterness to consume him. He felt sure that Patricia’s Earthly misfortune would guarantee a just reward in Heaven.

Even so, he would have given anything to have her back with him now, hale and hearty, and full of laughter. If only, he thought. If only she had hung on a little longer. He knew how hard her illness had been for her to endure, but if she had been thinking straight, if the disease, or Fendlesham’s experimental serum, had not befuddled her brain, he felt sure she would have retained the presence of mind to give Fendlesham the extra time needed to find a cure.

Not that he was certain her death had been suicide. She had electrocuted herself, yes, but it may have been an accident. She may have flailed out unthinkingly, or been gripped by a sudden mania, and torn the wires from the bedside lamp without realising what she was doing.

But whatever her thinking—and the truth is, he would never know—it did not alter the outcome. Self-murder or not, Patricia was dead, and Roebuck would have to live with the anguish of that for the rest of his life.

Guilt too, because it was he who had insisted that Fendlesham administer his serum. Extracted from the parasite, it had seemed at the time a miracle cure, and although the scientist had advised caution, pending further investigation into its full effects, Roebuck had been desperate to reverse his wife’s decline, and so had urged Fendlesham to administer it, arguing that without it she would surely die anyway.

“What do either of us have to lose?” had been his fateful words. With hindsight, the answer had been: a great deal. Because although the serum had seemingly arrested Patricia’s illness in its tracks, Roebuck had watched his wife change in a matter of weeks from a gentle, intelligent woman into a slavering creature, driven by little more than her voracious appetite. It was only after Hortense had narrowly avoided being savaged by Patricia (she had come within a hair’s breadth of losing several fingers to Patricia’s snapping teeth), that Fendlesham had advised putting her into a state of unconsciousness while he redoubled his efforts to find a cure. Roebuck had agreed, as a result of which Patricia had spent the last few weeks in a laudanum-derived stupor, while machines satisfied her appetite by feeding her a diet of animal blood. During this time, Roebuck had remained stoic, visiting his wife daily, and assuring her unconscious form that soon she would be well and they would be together again.

“God will not let us down,” he had told her. But God had let them down—although as soon as this thought crept into his head, Roebuck stifled it. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” he whispered, as if to cleanse himself of blasphemous thoughts, “his wonders to perform.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he felt Patricia’s tiny hand twitch in his.

His head jerked up and he looked at her face.

Her eyes were open.

Wonder filled him. No, more than wonder. A kind of disbelieving rapture. Could it be true? Had the Lord heard him? Roebuck couldn’t speak, could barely even think. He could only stare at Patricia as she stared back at him, her eyes as wide and blank and uncomprehending as a newborn’s.

He wanted to cry out to Hortense, to Fendlesham. He wanted to acclaim the miracle. Wanted to mark this moment in case it slipped away from him again.

Patricia, he tried to say, but the words simply wouldn’t come. He felt tears forming in his eyes; one spilled over on to his cheek. Patricia’s wide eyes flickered as she watched it in seeming fascination.

She sat up slowly, but without apparent effort, as if her recent weakness had left her. Still staring at the tear on her husband’s cheek, she reached out with her left hand as if to tenderly brush it away.

His lips moved. Patricia, Patricia. He had never felt such happiness.

Her hand hovered in the air for a moment.

Then her fingers hooked into claws, and with a snarl she tore out his throat.

IT WAS TOO dark to see the hole in the ground until it was directly in front of him. Another step and Will would have plunged right into it. He saw it at the last second and jerked back so suddenly that his weight shifted from his front to his back leg, causing him to topple onto his backside.

He sat on the damp grass as his heartbeat slowed. How far would he have fallen? It was impossible to say, because the near total darkness made the hole look like a black pool. Groping around him, he found a stone and tossed it into the centre of the dark circle. After ten seconds he still hadn’t heard the stone land. It was as though it had been swallowed by silence.

Scrambling to his feet, he circled the hole slowly, one eye on the darkening landscape ahead. Because he was looking for Meg—he had lost sight of her for the time being, but he knew she had come this way—he tripped over something lying in the grass on the far side of the hole. Down he went again, on to his knees this time. He glanced back irritably, fully expecting to see a tree branch or a rock—and so let out a cry of shock when he saw that what he had tripped over was, in fact, a human arm.

It was clad in a dark sleeve, the hand palm upwards, fingers slightly curled, like that of a beggar hoping for a coin. The arm had been severed just beneath the shoulder, and the end looked mangled and wet. Will dug his heels into the earth and propelled himself away from it, as if afraid it might suddenly flip over and come scuttling towards him. As his hands pawed the ground, trying to find purchase, they came down on something hard.

His head whipped round. Another arm? But no, this object was thinner, straighter, and cold like metal. He peered at it a moment before recognising it as one of the electrical rods he had seen the guards carrying. He felt uncomfortable at the prospect of touching something that had been clutched, if only briefly, in a dead hand attached to a severed arm. But as soon as he had seen the arm he’d realised whatmust have attacked the man, and ultimately self-preservation won out over squeamishness and he snatched up the rod.

His thumb found a button on the handle, and as soon as he pressed it the rod crackled, and blue-white energy, like trapped lightning, began to flicker around its tip. He watched it a moment, then lifted his thumb from the button. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself. He looked around nervously.

All was quiet, the separate elements of the landscape now losing definition as darkness filled in the gaps. Will had followed Meg up the side of the house, across the wide gravel forecourt in front of it, and was now floundering through a more informal garden to the right of the building, her small form having been swallowed up by the gloom a few minutes earlier. Ahead of him, across an expanse of lawn, he could see trees and bushes, with some sort of outhouse nestled in their midst. Although lamps burned at the front of the house behind him, and in several of the side windows, the range of their illumination was limited, and made little impression out here.

With no idea where Meg had gone, Will’s only option was to keep moving forward. Gripping the rod he crossed the lawn, scanning the ground for darker patches that might be further holes, his ears attuned to every scrape and rustle of foliage. On the edge of the lawn he found a path between bushes, which led to a stone courtyard. On the far side of the courtyard was the building he had seen, long and low, which he guessed was probably used to store supplies or shelter livestock. The instant he stepped on to the cracked, uneven courtyard, a high-pitched squeal of panic ripped through the darkness. He leaped out of his skin, thinking he had set off some kind of alarm.

It only took him a second to recognise the sound for what it really was: the frenzied squealing of pigs. Heart beating wildly, gripping the electrical rod so tightly it felt as if it was bruising his hand, he crossed the courtyard in a half-crouch. By the time he reached the door of the building, the squealing had died down, to be replaced by an ominous silence. He twisted the heavy iron ring that served as the door’s handle, and when the lever inside released with a click, applied his shoulder to the door and slowly pushed it open.

The darkness inside the building was so musty it seemed to flow over him, like warm mist. He smelled pig flesh and feces, rotting food and the sweet, grassy scent of hay. “Meg?” he said in a voice which, to him, sounded thin and weak. “Are you there?”

He heard a snuffling and a wet sound, like the smacking of lips. Then a small, teary voice said, “Yes.”

A blend of dread and relief washed over him. “Where are you? I can’t see you.”

“Don’t come in.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not...” She released a shuddering breath. “I’m not fit to be seen.”

Unsure how to respond, he was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Are you... hurt?”

“No. I was... hungry. The appetite overwhelmed me. I couldn’t... help myself.”

Will pushed the door wider, edging a couple of steps further into the building. Peering into the swirling darkness, he said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s not your fault. I’ve come to help you. I want to help you.”

“How?”

“We should go back to the house, speak to Dr Fendlesham. Will you come?”

He heard her sigh. “I’m ashamed.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I’ve become. Of the stain of my sins.”

He took two further steps into the building. Somewhere ahead of him he heard movement. Remembering the severed arm on the ground, he felt suddenly afraid, and without thinking he pressed the button of the electrical rod in his hand.

The low-roofed building filled with flickering, icy light. Shadows fled like cockroaches into the darkest corners of the building, and there in front of him, not twelve feet away, stood Meg.

She was swaying, as though on the verge of a faint, and she was covered in blood. The bright, slick redness of it coated her mouth and chin, and spilled down the front of her clothes like a shiny bib. Yet more blood gloved her hands, which were outstretched towards him, and drooled between her thin fingers to spatter on the floor. Behind her, in a wooden pen, Will could see the ruins of what must have been a piglet, ripped to shreds and half-devoured. The other pigs were huddled in a terrified, silent knot in the pen’s furthest corner.

As soon as the light hit her, Meg let out a wail of distress and covered her face with her bloodied hands. Fighting down his revulsion, Will said, “It’s all right, Meg. It’s not your—”

The door behind him crashed open.

He spun round to see the doorway filled with a circular maw of spiraling teeth. The worm’s ‘head’ rose to tower over him as its thick, grey body slithered through the door. He backed away, holding the still-crackling rod in front of him. Behind him, Meg screamed and the pigs began to stamp and squeal in their pen.

The parasite seemed fascinated by the crackling blue-white light. It swayed from side to side, like a cobra mesmerized by a fakir’s flute. It dipped its head towards the light, in a curious rather than aggressive manner. However, as soon as its flesh came in contact with the light, there was a sizzling snap of energy, and the parasite jerked back, a shudder passing through its body. For a few seconds it seemed disorientated, its ‘head’ thrashing from side to side, its body jerking and coiling as if gripped by a series of after-shocks. Will might have simply stared at it in fascination if Meg hadn’t appeared by his side and grabbed his sleeve with a gore-streaked hand.

“We should make haste,” she said.

He nodded, and the two of them dodged around the still-shuddering creature and out of the door. After the mustiness of the piggery, the fresh air hit Will like cold water, making him gasp. He and Meg ran back towards the house, Will propelled by the terror that the parasite, newly enraged, might recover and chase after them.

After a few moments, though, the squealing of the pigs reached a new crescendo, suggesting that the monster had discovered an alternative feast.

THEY ENTERED THE house—once again, via the French doors of the study—just as the lights came back on. Meg looked at her bloodied hands with dismay.

“I am an animal,” she whispered.

“You are ill,” said Will. “Let’s find the kitchen, so you can wash the blood away.”

She shook her head, wiping her hands on her blood-spattered skirt. “There’s no time. Already I feel the appetite returning.”

Will snatched an antimacassar from an armchair by the dwindling fire and handed it to her. “Use this to wipe your face. I’m sure Mr Roebuck won’t mind.”

Meg did so, and the two of them went out into the hallway. “Dr Fendlesham must have repaired the electrical generator,” Will said. “We should find him and ask what can be done to help you.”

Meg nodded, looking unconvinced. “Where would the generator be housed?”

“The cellar perhaps? We should be able to—”

“Will!”

Her voice was harsh, and for an instant Will thought the appetite must be overwhelming her again. But then he saw she was looking beyond him, at the staircase. He turned.

Mrs Roebuck, who he had last seen lying dead in her bed, was lurching down the stairs towards them. She was horribly emaciated, barefoot, and one of her hands was blackened and twisted. She should have been pitiable, but instead she was terrifying. Her deep-sunken eyes were shards of black flint; her face, hair, hands and the front of her nightgown were smeared and splashed with blood. She moved in a way that was wholly bestial—hunched over, her fingers hooked into claws, her teeth grinding together as her lips writhed in a snarl.

“Mrs Roebuck,” Will said, hoping that hearing her name might bring her to her senses. All that happened, however, was that her head snapped round as her eyes fixed on him, blood flying from the ends of her hair to spatter the walls.

“She’s beyond reason,” Meg warned—whereupon the scrawny woman let out a ragged screech and hurtled down the remaining stairs.

Will brandished the electrical rod as she flew at him, his thumb depressing the button on the handle. Even when it buzzed into life, however, it didn’t deter her. Swinging out her blackened arm, she smashed the rod aside, the sizzling zap it made as it connected with her flesh barely slowing her down. Surprised by her strength, Will felt the rod wrenched from his grasp. It clattered away across the floor, leaving him defenceless. A wisp of smoke still rising from her charred arm, Mrs Roebuck launched herself at him.

Will raised his hands to grapple with her—but before she could reach him, a heavy vase smashed into the side of her head, snapping her neck to one side and knocking her over. Her tiny frame sprawled across the floor like a jumble of sticks, leaving a bloody skid-mark across the polished tiles.

Will looked to his left, where Meg, having hurled the vase, was now running towards him.

“Quickly, before she recovers,” she said. She held out a hand, the fingernails of which were still encrusted with blood.

The electrical rod was lying on the other side of the hallway, beyond Mrs Roebuck’s body, and fleetingly Will debated whether to rush across and snatch it up. But already the semi-conscious woman, blood pouring from her forehead, was beginning to stir, and so instead he grabbed Meg’s hand and the two of them ran along the corridor to the left of the staircase that Will hoped would lead to the kitchens, where he hoped to find Fendlesham.

As it happened, they ran into Fendlesham before reaching their destination—almost literally, in fact. They entered the kitchen just as he was leaving it. He jumped back as they burst in, looking at Meg’s bloodied clothes with alarm and distaste.

“It isn’t human, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said.

Making a valiant attempt to recover his composure, Fendlesham said curtly, “I’m gratified to hear it.”

He was about to push past them when, from the hallway beyond the end of the corridor, they heard a low, animal-like snarl. Fendlesham shot them a questioning glance.

“Mrs Roebuck,” Will said. “She attacked us.”

The scientist scowled. “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s—”

“She was dead, but she’s back now,” Will said bluntly.

As if on cue, Mrs Roebuck lurched into sight at the end of the corridor. She moved awkwardly, her head tilted to one side. But she looked terrifying too, and not only because she was drenched in blood. There was a mad glitter to her eyes. A hungry glitter.

“All that blood...” Fendlesham gasped.

“Mr Roebuck’s, I’ll wager,” said Meg. “Or Hortense’s.”

“Or both,” added Will.

With Mrs Roebuck blocking the route back into the house, it was clear their options were limited. Suddenly Fendlesham seemed to take charge. He slammed the door in the advancing woman’s face and said, “Come with me.”

He led them past the cellar door and across to a short flight of stone steps, at the top of which was a door that clearly led outside.

“Where are we going?” asked Meg.

“I have a plan,” Fendlesham replied, “but I will not delay our progress with needless explanations—particularly as your own appetite may soon engulf you as Mrs Roebuck’s has engulfed her. All I require for now is that you follow my instructions. Is that clear?”

Will saw Meg bridle at the arrogance and disdain in the scientist’s voice, but before she could respond he nodded.

“Clear,” he said.

MINUTES LATER WILL and Fendlesham were loading sides of beef and pork on to a trolley, which Meg was holding steady. The meat store was in a stone building whose inner walls were lined with blocks of ice, on the far side of an enclosed stone yard opposite the kitchen. Although the interior of the building was cold enough for their breaths to emerge as vapour, both men were sweating. Meg, meanwhile, was panting shallowly, her eyes closed.

“Are you all right?” Will asked.

It was Fendlesham who answered. “The meat is reawakening the appetite inside her.” He grabbed a joint of ham from a shelf and thrust it towards her. “Take this and tame the beast inside you.”

Meg grabbed the meat, looking both grateful and shame-faced. As she scuttled away to a dark corner, Will and Fendlesham finished loading up.

Once Fendlesham was satisfied they had enough, he called for Meg—who had gnawed the ham joint almost down to the bone—to open the door, and then he and Will pushed the trolley up a short slope and out into the open air. The scientist directed them through a gate on the right hand side of the courtyard, and up past a paddock to what had once been a stable block. As the trolley rattled over the stones, all three looked around nervously for any sign of Mrs Roebuck or the parasite, but the night was quiet and still. Will felt he’d almost have been happier if the pigs had still been squealing in panic. At least then they’d have known where the parasite was.

When they reached the stable block, Will noticed that all but one of the traditional half-and-half doors on the building had been replaced by metal shutters. The only exception was the entrance in the centre of the block, which had been replaced by a stout oak door with three locks. Fendlesham produced a set of keys and tackled the locks one after the other. Opening the door, he ushered them inside, tugging at the front of the meat trolley as Will and Meg pushed it from the rear.

Once they were inside, he closed the door and pulled a lever on the wall. More than a dozen electrical lights suspended from the ceiling stuttered into life. As the interior of the building was illuminated, Will and Meg gasped. The place had been stripped of the equine trappings that the building must once have contained, and the open space had been filled with machinery more elaborate and complex than either of them had ever seen before.

Will had visited Roebuck’s factory several times, but the cumbersome, grinding, dirty machinery that occupied the factory floor was archaic compared to this. The mass of pipes, tubes, wheels, cogs and oddly-shaped components, whose function Will couldn’t even begin to guess at, were rendered in a variety of materials—brass, glass, rubber, even wood—and were attached, one to another, in what appeared a vast, dazzling, three-dimensional jigsaw, that whirred and bubbled and spun and turned and slid and interacted with such seemingly perfect harmony that it put him in mind of a living organism, whose every component, no matter how small or apparently insignificant, was a vital part of the whole.

The central focus of all the activity—the literal heart of the machine—was a transparent chamber, capped with a dome that was crammed with complex circuitry and crawling with a myriad of multi-coloured wires. From the dome sprouted four metal attachments, like vast, segmented legs, which in turn were linked to the rest of the machinery surrounding the central chamber via a mass of connections that put Will in mind of arteries and veins carrying blood to and from a human heart.

“What is this?” Meg gasped, looking around with wonder. “What is it for?”

“I call it my cell-splitter,” said Fendlesham proudly.

“This is the machine you told us about?” said Will. “The one whose purpose is to extract illness from the body?”

Fendlesham puffed out his chest. “It is.”

Meg tore her eyes from the cornucopia of marvels in front of her. “But did Mr Roebuck not say that so far it has failed to fulfill its function?”

Now Fendlesham frowned. “It needs some refinement, it’s true. But the cell-splitter has more than one function. And I am hopeful that it will more than suffice for our purposes.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Now leave me to my work.”

Meg bridled, but Will placed a hand on her arm and drew her aside. Fendlesham was a rude man with a superior attitude, but there was nothing to be gained from telling him so.

For the next ten minutes they watched him scuttle about, pulling levers here, making adjustments there. It reminded Will of the time his father had taken them to the music hall as a treat for his mother’s birthday—her last, as it turned out—and they had marvelled at a man who spun multiple plates on multiple sticks. Thinking of his father made Will realise he’d be home from work now, and no doubt wondering why the house was empty, and why there was no food on the table. He hoped beyond hope that even if it earned him a leathering for neglecting his duties, he would survive this night and get the opportunity to see his father’s face again.

Eventually Fendlesham completed his modifications and gestured towards them. “Now,” he said, “place the trolley of meat in the chamber.”

Again Meg scowled, but Will obediently went over to the trolley and took one of the handles, indicating she should do the same. After a moment she complied, and the two of them pushed the trolley through a metal door, into the centre of the chamber.

“Now, boy,” Fendlesham said, “open the door and then retreat to the shelter of that panel over there.” He indicated a metal podium to the left of the chamber inset with levers and dials.

“If you please,” muttered Meg, but Fendlesham turned away, oblivious to her sarcasm. Will squeezed her hand, then hurried across to the main door. He unlocked it and nervously pulled it open, bracing himself for what might be waiting on the other side. But there was nothing except a cool night breeze, which pushed past him and entered the building, ruffling his hair.

When he had scurried across to join the others, Fendlesham said, “Now cover your ears.”

Before either of them could ask why, the scientist threw a switch and plugged his own ears with his fingers. Immediately a high-pitched, ululating sound filled the room, which tore into Will’s head, causing his brain and the backs of his eyes to throb with pain. He clapped his hands to his ears, which reduced the agony at least enough to enable him to think and take an interest in his surroundings. Beside him, Meg was hunched over, her hands pressed to her ears, her teeth clenched, her eyes squeezed tightly shut.

Noticing that Fendlesham’s attention was focused on the open doorway, Will turned his own gaze in that direction. For a minute or so the door framed nothing but darkness, and then Will glimpsed coiling movement, and the next moment the alien parasite oozed into the room. The yellowish frill around its circular maw rippled, as though it was tasting the air, and its ‘head’ weaved from left to right. For a moment Will thought the creature—which appeared unaffected by the hideous ululating wail—had sensed them and was preparing to attack. But then he saw it veer towards the open door of the central chamber, and the trolley of stacked meat.

Fendlesham bared his teeth in satisfaction as the creature slid into the chamber, lowered its maw and began to feed. The instant it did so, he twisted a switch and the ululating sound mercifully ceased.

For several seconds Will’s head and teeth continued to throb, and then thankfully the pulsing began to abate, and the pain along with it. Meg’s eyes opened and she uncurled from her hunched position, like an animal emerging from hibernation.

Already Fendlesham’s hands were moving over the controls of the panel in front of him. Will saw him turn a row of dials up to maximum, which caused needles on the readout quadrants above to flip into the ‘red’ zone. He glanced at Will, a look of grim determination on his face, then moved to the right of the panel, and with an almost theatrical flourish, slammed a metal lever.

The result was spectacular. The dome above the central chamber flared with light, and instantly the parasite began to thrash in agony, as though dropped into boiling water. Contorting madly, it began to throw itself around the chamber, its body booming off the transparent walls, leaving grey smears behind. With each shuddering impact, Will expected the walls to shatter, but they were thick enough to hold firm. Within thirty seconds the contortions of the parasite began to grow weaker, its flesh blackening and splitting, releasing a black smoke that stank of carrion. Meg gagged and put a hand over her mouth and nose; Will breathed into the collar of his shirt. The charred patches on the creature’s body spread and blended together, and then all at once it burst into flame. The parasite shriveled into itself, curling up as the flames devoured it. They burned in all colours of the rainbow—green and blue, violet and yellow. Less than a minute later they too began to die away, leaving nothing but a mound of black ash.

Fendlesham switched off the machine and sighed. “It was a magnificent creature.”

“It killed people,” said Will.

“Even so...”

Without another word the scientist began to move around the room once more, tinkering with the machinery. Will and Meg watched him, wafting at the odious smoke, both still feeling a little ill. Eventually Fendlesham rejoined them and spent a minute or so studying various readings on the control panel. At last, seemingly satisfied, he turned to Meg.

“Step into the chamber,” he said.

She took a step back. Her eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?”

Fendlesham frowned. “You want to be rid of the appetite, do you not?”

“Yes, but...”

“Then step into the chamber. It is the only way.”

Meg glanced at the ashen remains of the parasite. Will asked, “Is it safe?”

“Of course it’s safe,” snapped Fendlesham. “I have made the necessary adjustments. The appetite is not an illness as such, and has therefore not been integrated into the body. It is a separate entity, like a tapeworm. My cell-splitter should be able to identify it and extract it.”

“And if it doesn’t?” said Meg.

“Then you shall be no worse off than you are now,” said Fendlesham curtly.

Meg looked at Will. “What should I do?”

Instead of answering her, Will turned to Fendlesham. “Do you give your word that Meg will not be harmed by your machine?”

Fendlesham scowled. “Yes, yes.”

“Then I shall do it,” said Meg. She clasped Will’s hands briefly, then turned and marched to the door of the chamber. After a moment’s hesitation she went inside, stepping gingerly over the powdery remains of the parasite.

“Where shall I stand?” she asked, looking nervously at the domed ceiling above her.

“It’s not important,” said Fendlesham. “As long as—”

“Meg, look out!”

It was Will who shouted. He had glimpsed movement at the open doorway of the building, and next moment Mrs Roebuck lurched into the room. Twisted, hair awry, drenched in blood, she looked like the victim of some terrible accident—but even so, she moved with remarkable speed. Before Will could react she scuttled across the room and entered the central chamber. Meg looked round in horror as the woman released a bird-like screech and launched herself at her, arms raised, hands hooked into talons.

Meg grappled with the woman, trying to hold her off. She reared back as Mrs Roebuck’s hand clawed at her face, missing her cheek by inches. Pedaling backwards, she slipped on the greasy ash coating the floor and fell, landing on her back with a thump.

“Meg!” Will yelled, just as Fendlesham threw a switch on his machine.

Once again the transparent chamber filled with light, though it was not so harsh this time. Indeed, it was a soft, golden effulgence that seemed to flow downwards from the ceiling, accompanied by a throbbing, like a rapid but soothing heartbeat.

The instant it flowed over the two women they froze in place—Meg lying on the floor, Mrs Roebuck looming over her—like insects trapped in amber. Will, a few feet from the door of the chamber, halted too, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the bright light. Through the golden haze he saw Meg smile and close her eyes, as if she were sinking into a deep sleep. He saw Mrs Roebuck crumple slowly, almost gracefully, to the floor. The golden light played over them for a few more seconds, and then it began to ebb, the radiance and the throbbing fading slowly away.

For a few seconds there was silence, and then Fendlesham said, “You can go in now.”

Will looked at him, not entirely sure whether he could trust the scientist. But then, taking a deep breath, he entered the chamber, glancing at Mrs Roebuck. She looked as inert and fragile as a collection of twigs, her skull-like head turned to one side, eyes glazed and mouth partly open.

“I think she’s dead,” Will said.

Fendlesham nodded, and Will thought he detected a hint of sadness in the scientist’s voice. “It was only the appetite keeping her alive, and that has gone now.”

Lying just beyond Mrs Roebuck’s body, Meg stirred and groaned.

“Meg!” Will said, and ran across to her, falling to his knees in the ash.

Her eyes opened. She looked up at him. For an instant she seemed to recognize neither him nor her surroundings. Then she smiled.

“It’s gone,” she murmured.

“It?”

“The appetite. It’s no longer inside me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.” Her smile widened into something wondrous, and she reached out a hand, which he grasped. “I’m free of it, Will.”

He helped her sit up, and suddenly she threw her arms around him. Will responded, wrapping her in his embrace. He felt wild, abandoned, almost delirious with joy.

When they broke apart, he was surprised to see tears running down her cheeks.

“Whatever’s the matter?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m an orphan,” Meg said, as though, now that the terror was over, she was finally allowing the truth of her circumstances to sink in. “My parents are dead. I have no one.”

“You have me,” Will said. “And my father. We’ll look after you. From now on, you’ll be part of our family.”

She looked at him, eyes shining with tears. “Your father will not agree to such a thing.”

“He will,” Will said firmly. “I know he will.”

He helped her to her feet, and then, arm in arm, the two of them took the first steps towards their new life.

The Alarmist
a tell-all account, by

DAN WHITEHEAD

SLEEP WAS NOT a comfort to Herbert George Wells tonight. Nor had it been for many nights. Not since the business beneath the Thames. Not since the creature in the jar.

Lucid and aware despite his slumber, he realised with disappointment that the dream was once again the same. Even in the dark folds of his subconscious it seemed the gift of imagination had abandoned him.

In the dream, which was now almost a nightly occurrence, he sat behind his office desk. In this liminal state the desk’s dimensions had become distorted, stretching before him and to either side like a vast beechwood expanse. Spread all over were what appeared at first glance to be documents and papers relating to his job as a general dogsbody and underling to Dr Davenport Spry.

As always Wells looked back across the papers and noticed a newsprint pamphlet poking conspiratorially from the mess. The bold masthead identified the publication as The Alarmist, with a slogan that promised the reader “the unpalatable truth behind the new Imperialism”. No sooner had Wells spotted one copy, hidden among the reams of paper, than he spotted another, then two more, then dozens, until he realised that the entire impossibly vast surface of the desk was covered by this tabloid interloper. The pamphlet that threatened the very government for which Wells worked. The pamphlet that he himself edited and published, anonymously.

“Wells!” The rasping voice of Sir Davenport Spry echoed down the corridor outside the room, followed by the methodical plod of his footsteps as he heaved his considerable bulk towards Wells’ office. The journey, in reality, would have taken no more than a matter of seconds, but time was as elastic as the surface of his desk in this dream state, and the anticipation of Spry’s arrival stretched out agonisingly. Wells scrambled to hide the hundreds of copies of the forbidden newspaper, but no sooner had he scooped one armful into a drawer than more had appeared.

Panic spread from an icy pit in his stomach and manifested as a clammy chill which wrapped itself around him, distracting him further as he fought against the endless tide of inky treason. Soon, he was buried up to his neck in the paper, its screaming headlines and standfirsts closing in on him from all sides, just as the door handle gave its tell-tale squeak heralding Spry’s imminent presence...

WELLS WOKE WITH a start, his heart pounding. Wiping sweat-slick fingers on the blankets, he reached for the bedside table and found his glass. A gulp of slightly stale water allowed him to slow his breathing and mentally rebuke himself for once again being driven to the brink of mania by the same nightmare.

Mostly, he was annoyed with himself for the tiresomely obvious nature of the dream, as well as its repetition. It was all glaring metaphor, its meaning barely even concealed behind any narrative flourish. Nor had the scenario evolved or grown more complex over the dozens of times his sleeping mind had confronted him with it. This was what stung the most. Not that he was wracked with fearful paranoia that his odious employer might discover his involvement in a noted journal of insurrection, but that his subconscious could not turn the base metal of his fears into narrative gold.

The Alarmist was tame stuff, by most standards. Mostly intellectual screeds and exercises in blunt satire, not Fawkesian calls for violent rebellion. He had taken the name from a similarly insolent newsletter he had created as a child, documenting the foibles and gossip of Uppark house in West Sussex, where his mother had worked below stairs. Written on kitchen paper, and with a circulation that never rose above single digits, it nevertheless awoke in Wells a passion for using the written word to set the world to rights. Its latest incarnation was doing somewhat better in terms of readership, with a few thousand copies passed surreptitiously under alehouse tables or slipped from one academic briefcase to another. Writing it allowed Wells to give voice to the clamouring objections that his official work entailed, though he was careful not to include anything that might reveal the source of this rebellious journal to his employer, the aforementioned and odious Spry.

Wells heaved himself upright with a grunt, glancing at the shapeless form of Amy, his former student and more recently his second wife, gently snoring under blankets and eiderdown. Once she had seemed like a new start, a doorway to a life outside of a smothering first marriage. He had been bright and ambitious then, so sure of his insights and opinions. Now... well, he pushed those thoughts aside, just as one dismisses an unwanted bill they are unable to pay, banishing it to the bottom of the pile. From outside, he heard the tell-tale skittering clatter of a hansom cab, ferrying its first passenger of the day on mechanical spider legs of bronze and steel. He shuddered. Sliding feet into threadbare slippers, he shuffled quietly from the room.

THE SUN WAS just starting to creep through the window in his study, creating a rhombus of pale light that would spend the morning slowly inching across the rug, along the stacks of papers and books, up the side of the desk and towards the typewriter waiting ominously in the centre. Wells settled into his hard-backed chair with a comfortingly familiar creak and gazed at his opponent. It gazed back, a goading grin made of fading keys, a stern brow of inked ribbon.

These were both his most treasured moments, and his darkest. An hour or so alone, with nothing to do but commit his thoughts to paper, still carried enough of an echo of life before the invasion that he could take some comfort from it. Those years when his brain had fizzed with ideas, with concepts that explored human frailty and hubris through fantastical inventions or otherworldly adventure. He had moved to Woking with Amy, intent on committing this swarm of thoughts to the page, shaping them into stories, novels maybe, that might finally give him some direction and satisfaction in life. The alternatives—a return to education or, heaven forbid, the toil of drapery—could not be countenanced.

But then they had come. Flashes of green light seen from Mars. The strange pod that crashed into Horsell Common, the pods that followed, and from them the terrible creatures, and mechanical tripods and heat rays and red weeds. The world had been upended, and with it all the great plans Herbert George Wells had once made.

When the rubble had been cleared, the bodies committed to the earth, the Martian machines and the corpses of their fragile occupants dragged from the streets and into government laboratories for dissection and study, England had returned to normal. Or, rather, it had settled into a new definition of normal. The Martian technology opened up incredible new vistas of opportunity, but when spacemen could thunder from the sky and alien engines of war could prowl across leafy meadows and serene suburbs alike, what use did the world have for fiction? Ten years hence, and reality was more than fantastic enough now, as the spoils of the Martian war had propelled Britain to a new gilded age of power and influence. Unlike previous glories, however, this new era required no invention. Everything needed had been scavenged from the fallen invaders. Far from building itself up through grit and determination, the glorious second age of British Empire had been handed on a plate, requiring no more imagination or ambition than a feckless scoundrel inheriting someone else’s fortune. And, as the world’s need for imagination had diminished so Wells’ literary ambitions had sickened and died, as surely as the Martians themselves had before the common cold.

He scolded himself. The past was past, yet his restless mind kept returning to the cloying terror of those first days of the war, when the idea of Martians still seemed too fanciful to believe. He had been quicker to accept the unthinkable nature of the invasion than most, for hadn’t a similar idea been swirling in his imagination for some months before? Had he not toyed with the idea of a story about alien invaders, rampaging across England in the very same tripod vehicles, stamping their dominion into Albion’s sovereign soil?

He was a practical man, an atheist by nature and one who sought rational truth in all things. The thought of predestination and prophets was ludicrous, let alone the idea that he himself may have glimpsed the future in all its dreadful detail. And yet there it was, and here he sat, both world and man in alignment as proof of the impossible. He had dreamed of Martians, and Martians had indeed come, just as he pictured them. The moral dimension he intended to lay upon the story, however, had not followed suit. Instead, the empire he wished to chastise had been instead emboldened, and now seemed certain to endure for centuries more to come. The Martians had gone and left in their place men like Davenport Spry, and no mere parable would contain him.

Wells sighed, a shuddering exhalation dredged up like riverbed silt. He gazed listlessly out of the window, catching the faintest reflection of himself as the dawn chased the last of the night away. He was barely 40, yet already the promise of youth was giving way to the slow collapse of middle age, his face rounder, his hair retreating a little more from the forehead, the moustache neatly trimmed as ever but noticeably flecked with grey.

He turned back from the window but found no respite in the blank page that confronted him. It taunted him with its emptiness, an unspoiled field of snow, daring him to leave a footprint. Would this be the day? Would his fingers begin their dance, and a story would spring to life? Perhaps the one about the doctor and his island of half-breed creatures? The whimsical tale of the inventor who floats to the moon? Or some other half-finished idea, still hoping to be plucked from the ether and made real on the page?

He looked down at the dark leather bag by the desk. He thought of the device inside, its disruptive power hidden only by small metal clasps. No, the time for fictional escape was as dead and buried as the Martians. His fingers brushed the keys, at first too fearful to commit, then tentatively pushed one. It made a mechanical clack sound, as tiny levers moved a tiny arm, striking the inked ribbon, hoisted aloft to receive it.

The sound unspooled a slippery coil of nausea in him. Too similar to the clattering Martian engines that still scuttled about the streets. His fingers hovering, he exhaled slowly, and began to write. Not stories, but facts. He would drain the poison that sickened his soul using the one gift he retained: language. All the things he had seen in Spry’s underground laboratories. All the secrets. All the sins. It would all come out. It would all end, one way or another.

After an hour of writing, at a pace which quickly increased from uncertain to feverish, he pushed the typewriter away, rose and shuffled back to the bedroom to get dressed for work. It was time to return to the mire. Appropriately attired, and with no appetite for breakfast, he went out into the world to look for one of the few cabs still pulled by flesh and blood horses.

DAVENPORT SPRY CHUGGED down the corridors of Whitehall, a stocky traction engine in a tailored suit. Arms clasped behind his back, his fingers intertwined in a fleshy tangle that constantly twitched and fidgeted as he stamped relentlessly along. Civil servants ducked out his path and whispered fearfully after he had passed. Wells caught fragments of their gossip as he trailed behind at an appropriately subservient distance.

Spry pursed his lips. The sound created was little more than a faint wet pucker, a warning that he was about to speak and all present should prepare to receive his wisdom. It was a sound that never failed to turn Wells’ stomach, a reaction that had only got worse since the incident under the Thames. Worse, Wells knew that Spry’s most skin-crawling habits were entirely deliberate, a method of psychological control that had proven worryingly effective.

Spry was a man who deliberately cultivated a level of unease and even disgust in those around him. It was, Spry had told Wells during one of his many rambling, overbearing lectures, the best way to keep others off guard. Too much effort was expended attempting to be liked, Spry had insisted, rather than making oneself necessary. Make yourself irreplaceable, went his mantra, and you could write your own ticket. That was how a boorish amoral lump like Spry had engineered his ascent through the ranks of the British political class, largely undetected and unseen by the world at large.

Wells, on the other hand, had fallen into Spry’s employ almost entirely by accident, having joined the world of government bureaucracy after the invasion hoping to fill the void left by his absent muse with some sense of public duty, even if it were in service of a system he found morally bankrupt. With no income from writing, no other trade to his name and few other skills to nurture, the rapid post-war expansion of the state had been a blessing, albeit a sour one. Life as a Home Office clerk was, if nothing else, preferable to life in the workhouse.

Upon learning of Wells’ dashed dreams of being a feted novelist, Spry had sought him out from among the many anxious young men filling the maze of Whitehall offices, ostensibly because he wanted “someone with imagination” but mostly, Wells suspected, because Spry wanted someone who could take his many secrets in their stride.

And Spry had so many secrets. He occupied the strata of power once filled by the likes of Thomas Cromwell and Francis Walshingham. A spymaster, a kingmaker, the power behind the throne, the man who could make problems disappear and miracles happen, the means of which his benefactors wisely chose to remain ignorant of. A gutter whore blackmailing a minor royal? What could mask her disappearance more effectively than a spree of sensational murders, one directed death hidden among random others. Let the public fall on tales of the Ripper like jackals, while the wheels of true English society hummed onwards, unimpeded. Spry had engineered all of this and so much more. He knew not only where the bodies were buried, but who put them there and why.

So it came to pass that Spry was also the first choice of a panicked and chaotic government when someone was needed to formulate a response to the Martian aggression, and to glean what insights could be taken from the alien wreckage strewn across the southern counties. Among them, His Majesty’s most remarkable prize, a secret among secrets: a living Martian specimen, trapped and helpless, and needing food...

“How are you faring, Herbert?” Spry asked, his voice as suffocating and slippery as an oil slick, shaking Wells from his grim reverie. He always called Wells by his first name, an informal affectation that applied only in one direction, purposefully designed to reinforce their state of hierarchical complicity. “Sir?” Wells replied, uncertain as to what response was required.

“The business in the laboratory,” Spry replied impatiently, not breaking his stride. “The detective and the soldier, and that ranting vagrant. All very unpleasant. And unfortunate. Yes, very unfortunate. We were lucky to escape with our lives, weren’t we?” Most conversations with Spry went like this, a staccato onslaught of sentence fragments, only some of which required a reply, and even those were quickly washed away by the next outpouring. Talking to Davenport Spry was much like walking with him—you struggled to keep up.

“Oh, I’m... I’m fine, sir,” Wells replied. “Thank you for asking.” That last part came unbidden, an instinctive act of genuflection that made Wells cringe as soon as it escaped his lips. “I didn’t really witness much of the ugliness. I was back above ground before the fire got really bad.”

“Quite a mess,” Spry continued, giving no indication that he had heard or even cared about Wells’ answer. “Yes, a mess indeed. Took some effort to keep that one out of the newspapers, though it seems that scurrilous Alarmist rag got wind of something again.” Had Spry bothered to look around, rather than stomping ahead, he would have seen Wells halt and grow pale at the mention of his covert publication. The dread moment passed, however, as Spry’s monologue bulldozed onwards. “No matter. Only drunks and lunatics read that thing anyway. The specimen certainly didn’t go quietly, did it? No, it did not. My condolences, by the way. I know you were close to the thing.”

Wells knew better than to offer a correction, but ‘close’ was not the word he would have chosen to describe his relationship with the bloated monstrosity that Spry had kept floating in a glass prison and fed on human blood. Fascinated, perhaps, but then who wouldn’t be, when confronted with an intelligence from millions of miles hence, even one that was brain damaged and shell-shocked? Wells had studied the creature up close whenever his courage allowed, staring into its gleaming eyes, unable to shake the unnerving accurate visions of invasion that had so troubled his dreams before the war. Maybe Wells was just unusually sensitive to the effect these creatures had. That was a thought that had occurred to him more than once, as he rested his hand on the cold glass and felt a voice, alien and incomprehensible, quietly scratching at the edges of his consciousness like a November branch against a window pane.

“It was certainly a great loss, sir,” Wells said, doubling his pace to keep pace with Spry as they approached the door to his office. Spry laughed, a wet and phlegmatic sound that contained no trace of joy.

“Loss?” he boomed. “Herbert, your inability to spot opportunity troubles and amuses me, as always. Truth be told, we had learned all we could from our specimen. Keeping it alive was, frankly, more trouble than it was worth. Major Autumn and his vagabond companions may have done us a rather great favour in ushering its demise.”

They had arrived in Spry’s office now, with the man himself dropping his bulk into a leather chair behind a large polished desk. The image caused Wells to recall his dream from earlier, and a chill of illogical panic coursed quickly through his veins. He pushed it aside. “How so, sir?” Wells did not really want to know the answer, but experience had taught him that the pause Spry had left hanging required an inquisitive retort in order to continue. No amount of experience could have prepared him for the reply he received, however.

“Sir John Cabal has been a fine Prime Minister,” Spry mused. “And he is a fine gentleman and a good friend.” Spry’s lips curled into something resembling a smile at this. “But a firm hand and a steady heart is needed as our rockets head for Mars. Oratory alone will not see us through the years ahead.” Wells nodded, still unsure as to what point was being made, nor how he was expected to respond. Spry tapped his fingertips together, once, twice, three times, until Wells felt the ominous pause would drive him insane.

“I intend to enter Parliament,” Spry announced calmly, with no emotion in his voice. He simply stated it, as surely as one states the coming of nightfall or daybreak. Despite long years of practice, Wells was unable to mask the disbelief and doubt in his response.

“To... to what end, sir?”

Spry heaved a sigh from deep within his prodigious belly, as if weary of trying to gain the attention of an ill-behaved puppy. “Power, Herbert. Power and control. That is always the means and the end. Always.”

Wells realised with mounting concern that Spry’s announcement was not couched in terms of probability. He was going to enter Parliament, with the implication that such things as selection, campaigning and general democratic process were trifles to be stepped over as one would step over a cracked pavement. Wells was uncomfortably aware that he had not yet responded to Spry’s announcement. His boss leaned forward in his chair, the casters creaking, as the sonorous ticking of his mantle clock counted the seconds that Wells was failing to fill with appropriate support.

Spray waved a hand dismissively, signalling that a response was no longer required. “It is a lot to take in, Herbert. I have sprung this upon you unfairly and you are a contemplative fellow who prefers time to digest important matters. It is one of the things I like about you. Suffice to say, it is time I stepped out of the shadows and showed England a vision of what it can truly become. And you, dear loyal Herbert, are going to help me.”

Spry smiled, a slow splitting of the lips more predatory than friendly. Wells’ guts performed somersaults at the sight. He had never been happier to have skipped breakfast.

“HE’S A DAMNED bloody arse!” If there was a method for calming George Bernard Shaw once indignation and alcohol had stirred him up, his friends had to yet to find it. Instead, they simply laughed along and drained their own glasses in the snug of The Bull and Bush public house. Agreeably rough around the edges and a favourite of the music hall crowd, it was one of the few places where disapproval of the state could still be voiced aloud. It was also, not coincidentally, where many copies of The Alarmist were sold and where Wells would meet to eat heartily and drink with like-minded contemporaries. Shaw and Stoker, ebullient and quick witted. Chesterton, quiet and troubled. Wilde had been one of their number—the “Squandered Scribes” as he had bitterly described their circle—until prosecution, then exile, then early death had snatched him away.

“Who... who are you ranting about now?” stammered Stoker, his rasping Irish brogue all but indecipherable unless you were accustomed to it.

“Bloody Doyle, that turncoat swine!” barked Shaw in response, his sonorous voice easier on the ear but no less venomous. “We’re turning death rays on the Boers, and he’s in the bloody Evening Standard declaring the slaughter to be a moral necessity.”

Wells added a mumble of displeasure to the rumble that passed around the table at this news. Chesterton, never a big drinker, interjected quietly. “I found his latest Holmes story to be rather disappointing. I still don’t understand why a London detective would even go to Mars...”

“Because Arthur was always happy to chase coin, Gilbert, old man,” retorted Shaw. “He brought Holmes back from the dead to keep the peace, so why not send the bugger to Mars? It’s what the public wants.”

“Well, at least Arthur is still writing stories that people wish to read,” Wells added, solemnly.

“Oh, sweet merciful Christ, are you in one of your moods again?” boomed Shaw.

Wells stiffened in his seat. He had rehearsed this moment several times on the way to the pub. “I am in a mood, as you say. And with good reason. Davenport Spry intends to enter Parliament,” he said, matter of factly. “He has designs on Downing Street, I am sure. And from there... who knows?”

At this, the table fell quiet. All had heard of Spry’s monstrous nature, both first hand from Wells and in the pages of The Alarmist, which each of them supported, either through clandestine recommendation or editorial assistance. Each, in their own way, was wrestling with the pain of having their life’s calling torn away by a world changed beyond recognition. A fifth man sat at their table tonight, however, and had yet to make himself known. “Is this why you asked me here, Mr Wells?” the man asked, uncertainly.

Wells nodded. “It is. Friends, this is Daniel Albone, an engineer and inventor by trade.”

The man squirmed a little at this. “Not much of a trade these days,” he muttered modestly.

“Indeed, indeed,” Wells replied. “We can all sympathise. Do you have the device you mentioned in your letters?”

Albone gave an almost imperceptible nod. His designs for light tractors and other mechanical agricultural equipment had been rendered obsolete by Martian machinery, just as Wells and friends had seen demand for their fictions dissolve into nothing. Albone had come across The Alarmist at his lowest ebb, warmed to its message of resistance against the new world order, and struck up a correspondence with its anonymous editor. Following months of cautious back-and-forth, their secrecy had been broken by an urgent telegram summoning him here, to drink and plot with some of the finest forgotten literary minds in Britain.

“Daniel here has... ideas of how we might use their technology in aid of our cause,” Wells explained. His companions bristled and became visibly agitated as Albone brought a small leather satchel from under his chair and placed in on the table. Whatever was inside was heavy and metallic. “If they will use Martian machines to ruin us,” Albone said, “I say we use Martian machines to ruin them in turn.”

“I say,” Chesteron stammered. “We’re none of us great friends of the status quo. You know that, Wells. But this is starting to look a lot like treason of the armed variety.” Shaw and Stoker, their vision swimming and minds fogged with gin, slurred in agreement. “What the devil are you mixed up in, Wells?”

Wells ignored the question and addressed Albone once more. “And it works?” he enquired.

“It does,” Albone replied. “Tested it myself. I’m rather proud of it, if I may say so.” Wells nodded. It seemed strange, having something that had been an intangible possibility at the back of his thoughts now an imminent reality. There was fear, certainly, but also relief. One way or another, this ghastly situation would be resolved and he could enjoy a night without that damned dream.

Wells drained his glass, grabbed the satchel and rose to leave.

“Damn it all to hell, Herbert,” boomed Shaw. “What the devil is in that bag?”

Wells took a breath, clutching the satchel to his chest. “The only weapon we have left,” he said. “The only weapon that will unseat a tyrant.”

He smiled to himself as he walked to the door and out into the slate grey London evening. “That was a rather lovely turn of phrase,” he thought to himself. “I should write that down.”

A FINE DRIZZLE had settled over the city the following morning, but Wells opted to make the two mile walk from his townhouse to Whitehall on foot. It was the sort of weather that was never quite wet enough to become rain, but instead covered everything in an unavoidable layer of damp. Wells found it quite invigorating, his senses awakened for the first time in years.

A peculiar combination of serene calm and intense anticipation had come over him that morning, a dormant sense of purpose brought suddenly back to life. He had cheerfully munched toast and marmalade, gulped down several cups of tea, and planted a buttery kiss on Amy’s cheek as he left. He considered that his long overdue acceptance that nothing would ever be normal again had, perhaps in an odd way, given him permission to enthusiastically embrace normality one last time.

He felt the weight of the bag swing in his arm like a pendulum as he skirted past Trafalgar Square. Nelson’s Column had, of course, fallen in the war and even all these years later, political bickering had still to resolve the question of whether it should be rebuilt or if a new monument marking the Martian invasion should be constructed. The problem was that the Martian war had no defining heroic figure around which to construct a suitable myth. The prospect of a statue celebrating the common cold germ, while amusing to Wells, was unlikely to break the bureaucratic deadlock.

Wells’ buoyant mood remained steadfast as each step brought him closer to a reckoning that could not be delayed any longer, but familiar darkness returned as he entered Whitehall itself and made his way up echoing marble steps towards Spry’s offices. The bag felt heavier still now. Pausing in a quiet alcove, he reached inside past cold brass clasps and allowed his fingers to find the switch that Albone had told him about. It took more pressure than Wells was expecting to flip, but when it did so, it clicked over with a satisfying finality. Wells could feel the device vibrate slightly as it hummed quietly to life. The bag seemed to somehow grow heavier as he walked the final few feet to Spry’s office door. He grasped the handle, paused, took a deep breath, and entered.

Spry was already deep in conversation with a group of men, some of whom Wells recognised vaguely, though they were in truth largely interchangeable in both appearance and demeanour, a taciturn wall of moustaches and pipe smoke. Spry did not look at Wells as he entered, but instead gave a dismissive wave of his hand towards a corner of the room. Wells dutifully positioned himself there and waited, the bag in his lap.

The topics being discussed were everything Wells had feared. The men reported back to Spry with news of which districts and boroughs were most pliable, which sitting members of Parliament most vulnerable to being shunted aside to make room for his ambitions. Spry, for his part, kept referring to a schedule that must be adhered to, which seemed to hinge on the arrival of British rockets on Mars, almost a year hence.

“Wheels must be in motion here in London,” he insisted, “so that I am in place and our advantage is not squandered once Mars is under British rule. Can it be done?” The assembled men murmured their agreement.

“With an appropriate catalyst, it is entirely possible,” insisted one of the men.

Spry smiled knowingly. “That is very much in hand, gentlemen. Very much in hand, indeed.” He steepled his fingers and leaned forward on his elbows. “What’s in the bag, Herbert?”

Another of Spry’s psychological tricks, a sudden change in the direction of a conversation that leaves everyone at a disadvantage. Wells blanched and stammered as all eyes turned towards him. “Nothing. Nothing of importance.” He was failing even to convince himself, which only made him flail more desperately, like a drowning man who has just swallowed his first lungful of dirty river water and gulps harder in shock. “Paperwork. Just paperwork.”

Spry chuckled, his jowls rippling. “Obvious and disappointing to the end, Herbert,” Spry replied, his voice low. “Shall I explain to our guests then?” At this, the assembled men squirmed awkwardly in their seats, unsure as to where Spry was leading this previously ordinary round of clandestine Westminster plotting. Spry reached into one of his desk drawers and pulled out a stack of newspapers. Wells didn’t have to look closely to know what was being revealed. Spry dropped the copies of The Alarmist on his desk with a flat thud.

“Herbert here once had dreams of being a novelist,” he crowed. “But he lost his nerve after the war. Now he fills his days being bullied by myself, and his free time jabbing retaliatory thorns in my side with this rather cheap insurrectionist newsletter.” Wells swallowed hard. “Oh yes, Herbert,” Spry continued in a voice like bitter burnt treacle. “I’ve known for quite some time. It’s rather touching that you assumed I didn’t. In all our years together, is there anything in this blighted kingdom that has escaped my notice?”

Wells felt his revulsion, his anger, bubbling up. “You are a stain upon English soil!” he blurted, impressing himself with his colourful phrasing even as his long-repressed emotions finally broke free. “You manipulate and lie! You murder in cold blood and call it patriotism! And now you plot to subvert our very democracy, all to entrench your vile vision of empire for generations to come!”

Spry rocked back his chair, an insufferable smirk on his face. “It seems you have me... what is the phrase you people use? Bang to rights?” The smirk vanished in the blink of an eye, and Spry’s face hardened. “So I will ask you again. What is in the bag, Herbert?”

Wells held Spry’s stare as he reached into the leather satchel and carefully removed the device. Two reels slowly revolved in their metal housing. “This is a device for recording sound,” Wells explained. “Every word you have spoken here today, every conspiracy and treason, is stored on these magnetic discs and can be...”

Spry slammed his hands flat on the desk, startling the civil servants who by now were very keen to remove themselves from this intrigue. “Yes, yes,” boomed Spry impatiently. “A recording device, invented by one Daniel Albone, yes? Who do you think ensured that the appropriate Martian science found its way into his hands?”

“But... but once word of this gets out, your plan will be...” Wells tried to regain his righteous composure, but could feel his confidence hissing out of him like a punctured tire.

“Word of this will not get out,” Spry said, coldly. “You have played your part perfectly, dearest Herbert, but it is time for you to leave the stage. By the time this reaches the newspapers—the real newspapers—tomorrow, your recording device will have become an improvised explosive and your role as the publisher of a traitor’s pamphlet will be all anyone needs to know. My lucky escape from the laboratory proved many things to me, Herbert, but most of all it showed me that to truly succeed you must prevail in conflict, even if that conflict is manufactured. And for conflict, one must have an adversary. What God-fearing Englishman wouldn’t vote for a Prime Minister who personally faced down a bomb-wielding madman in the very heart of His Majesty’s government?”

At this, Wells slumped. He had been a fool to think he could outwit a man like Spry, whose schemes were laid months, even years, ahead of time. He thought back to the creature in the jar, and the thoughts that had scratched at the edges of his mind. Had the creature tried to warn him? Or had it plotted with Spry to ensnare him deeper? Wells no longer trusted his own memories. He was dimly aware of the civil servants scrambling out of the room, and of policemen bustling in.

As he was cuffed and dragged away, the magnetic recorder fell to the floor. Its reels stopped moving. Wells looked back one last time and saw Spry, smiling and, for the first time, truly satisfied with Wells’ work. What had he really done to change the terrible course that lay ahead? All those words, all those ideas and warnings contained within The Alarmist, sent out into the streets and pubs, the workhouses and alleys of London, like germs injected into the veins and arteries of an imperial body, so confident in its future, so complacent. What had he done? Maybe nothing. Maybe just enough. “Neither do men live nor die in vain,” Wells called over his shoulder as he was led away. He allowed himself a smile as the door slammed closed behind him. That, he felt, was a good line to end on.

Last Shot
a tale of daring, by

CHRIS ROBERSON

“I’M TELLING YOU, Sam, I can feel it in my bones. Today’s going to be our lucky day.”

“Whatever you say, Eddie,” Private Samuel Howe answered with a shrug. He didn’t share the corporal’s confidence, not least of which because Corporal Edward Jenkins’s hunches so rarely turned out to be true. If Eddie’s bones were to be believed, then they would already be back home on Earth by now, but here they were still stuck on bloody Mars. Sam managed to suppress a sigh of exasperation, and then added, “But any day we’re out of the thick of it is a lucky one, I guess.”

The truth was, they were supposed to have returned to the front lines ages ago. The broken arm that had put Sam on medical leave in the first place had long since mended, and Eddie could only pull that ‘just a mild case of shellshock’ gaff so many times before he got himself sectioned for good. But then the orders had come down that the bulk of the expeditionary force was to pull out in an emergency withdrawal, and in the confusion that followed the transfer orders for a pair of lowly non-commissioned officers just sort of fell through the cracks.

So the two of them had spent a couple of extra days lounging around the medical ward, sleeping late in the mornings and whiling away their afternoons with a deck of cards. Sam was worried that Surgeon Major Reynolds would get sniffy about them slacking, but before that happened Eddie overheard the medico complaining to an orderly about the lack of regular supply runs since the rest of the forces had pulled out, and saw a golden opportunity.

“We can fetch and carry for you, sir,” Eddie had told the Surgeon Major. “We know the way to the depot, so it’s no trouble at all.”

If he hadn’t already been so overworked and harried, it’s likely that the Surgeon Major wouldn’t have fallen for it. But he was, and he did, and so instead of being sent back to the front lines to help fight the last holding action, the two of them were strolling down the corridors of the Martian city in their fatigues like they didn’t have a care in the world. Sure, it wasn’t quite so relaxing as playing cards in their dressing gowns, but it was a damned sight better than being out in the thick of it squeezed into their vacuum suits and in danger of being stomped on by an enemy tripod or vaporized by a Martian deathray.

“I thought the supply depot was down that way,” Sam said when they reached the junction at Piccadilly Circus and Eddie hooked a left down the Strand. When Eddie glanced back at him, Sam pointed down the corridor to the right, past a truck parked in the middle of the thoroughfare.

“Never said it wasn’t,” Eddie replied with a grin. “But I’m feeling a mite parched, and thought we might pop in for a pint.” Then he jerked his thumb towards ‘The Ritz,’ the NAAFI canteen further up the Strand in the direction he was heading. “Care to join me?”

As they headed towards the canteen Sam couldn’t help noticing how strangely deserted the whole place felt. Normally the corridors and thoroughfares of the ancient Martian city would be thronged with Army personnel and trucks at this time of day, but after the evacuation it seemed more like a ghost town, and the vast spaces beneath the high arched ceilings overhead felt even more cavernous than normal. Sam wondered if this is what it had felt like when the navvies first arrived to begin adapting the place for human occupation some forty years before.

“Well, this is bleak, innit?” Eddie said as they stepped in through the doorway of the canteen.

Sam nodded. The place was as deserted as the corridor outside, with half-eaten plates of food and dirty mugs scattered on all of the tables. From the looks of it more than a few breakfasts were left unfinished when the evacuation orders came down, and nobody had been left behind to bother with the washing up.

“Looks like we’re on our own, Sam,” Eddie said as he walked over to the bar, which was set up on the far side of the room below a lattice window that reached all the way up to the ceiling which towered high overhead. He slid onto a stool and gave Sam a wink. “Mind pulling us a couple of pints?”

As he stepped behind the bar, Sam couldn’t help glancing nervously around, for fear of being caught where he shouldn’t be. Eddie noticed the glance, and chuckled.

“Don’t worry,” Eddie said, “no one’s coming along, and if they do I’m sure they won’t mind. You can just serve them a pint, as well.”

Sam found a couple of clean glasses, but when he went to fill the first one at the tap, the works just gurgled and wheezed, and nothing but a pitiful spray came spitting out. He tried the other taps but didn’t have any better luck.

“Of all the...” Eddie hopped off his stool and came around the back of the bar. He yanked open the cabinet and then kicked the keg inside, and his boot against the metal sounded like a hollow drum. He slammed the cabinet shut, scowling. “Cheap bastards!”

While Eddie raged against the inefficiencies and ineptitudes of the NAAFI, Sam wandered closer to the window and looked out over the Valles Marineris. Way off in the distance he could just make out plumes of smoke and the occasional flash of green light, where the rear guard was holding the enemy at bay. Or so he hoped. The word was that the last chariots would be arriving at the dock soon to take the remainder of the ground forces back home, provided the whole place wasn’t overrun by the enemy in the meantime.

“Well, aren’t you going to say anything?”

It was only when Sam turned around and saw Eddie glaring at him that he realized that the corporal had been addressing him. They’d spent enough time together over the years that Sam had gotten pretty adept at tuning out Eddie’s regular rants, and he often had to scramble to catch back up on the flow of the—often admittedly one-sided—conversation.

“I... erm... maybe...” Sam began, floundering a bit.

“The officers’ mess,” Eddie said, apparently repeating himself. “Want to give it a go?”

It took Sam a moment to process that. “You mean, try to get a drink there, instead?”

“Yes.” Eddie rolled his eyes and sighed dramatically. “So, are you coming or not?”

Before Sam even had a chance to answer, Eddie was heading back towards the door. Sam cast a last glance out the window at the distance smoke and green flashes on the horizon, and then hurried to catch up.

“If it’s not one damned thing it’s another...” the corporal was muttering when Sam caught up, still in a snit. Then he turned to Sam and continued his tirade, as though he hadn’t temporarily lost his audience for a few paces there. “That’s the army in a nutshell, if you ask me. Spend god only knows how many millions of pounds every year to fight this bloody stupid war, and then cut corners where it really matters.”

Sam only grunted in vague agreement, though he was tempted to point out that free flowing beer taps, while obviously important, were hardly the most vital aspects of their ongoing defense.

“Not that the weak swill that they serve us lowly grunts isn’t making love in a canoe anyway,” Eddie went on. “Whatever they pour out for the officers is bound to be the good stuff, I’ll bet.”

Sam was questioning the wisdom of this plan. Nipping behind the bar in the noncommissioned officers’ canteen was one thing, but sneaking into the officers’ mess? That was another thing entirely. He wasn’t sure whether they could be court-martialed for it if they were caught, but then he wasn’t sure that they wouldn’t be court-martialed for it, either.

“You know, Eddie,” he ventured, “the Surgeon Major was in a right snit about those supplies of his. Maybe we ought to...?”

“He’ll get his precious bandages and whatnot, don’t you worry,” Eddie said, cutting him off. “But don’t we deserve a bit of r-and-r?”

Sam didn’t point out that the two of them had done nothing much but rest and relax for a good long while now, while others had carried on fighting. The corporal had built up a good head of steam, and Sam could see that there was no stopping him now.

He was still worrying about the possibility of a court-martial in his future when they reached the officers’ mess on the far side of Whitehall, just a short walking distance from the forward control and command centre itself. (As Eddie often said, “Just like the brass, to leave us to traipse all over creation just to get our daily bread, and they can just roll out the front door of the command post and right into their own mess hall.”) But as it happened, he worried needlessly. The officers’ mess was even more deserted than The Ritz had been.

“Bastards!” Eddie said as he kicked over an upholstered stool, sending it clattering across the floor.

The kegs beneath the taps in the officers’ mess weren’t empty. They weren’t even there, the hoses from the taps left dangling and unattached. And the bottle racks behind the bar were conspicuously empty, as well.

“Bastards!” Eddie said again, and spat on the floor.

Sam was looking around at the empty tables scattered around the room, and noticed another difference between the officers’ mess and noncommissioned officers’ canteen. There were no half-finished plates of breakfast here, no discarded mugs of tea. The tables were clean and spotless, their near-mirror finish reflecting the ruddy light shining in through the tall lattice window on the far wall.

“What?” Eddie said as he gestured to the empty bottle racks. “Did they take the blasted bottles with them?”

“Maybe they keep the good stuff locked up overnight, and the evacuation orders came down before they’ll restocked for the day?” When Eddie glared at him, Sam pointed out the empty tables, and added, “No unfinished breakfasts, either, so maybe they hadn’t started serving yet?”

Eddie rubbed his chin, a suspicious look in his eye.

“Yeah, could be,” he allowed, “or could be that they caught wind that something was coming down the pike before the rest of us. Knew well enough to get out while the getting was good.”

While Eddie spent a few more minutes rummaging around in cabinets in a fruitless search for libations, Sam drifted over to the window to look outside. He could see the fighting a little clearer from this vantage, the flyboys of the Air Corps dark specks against the grey sky as they buzzed over the enemy formations, the ground infantry swarming like ants as they met the onrushing enemy offensive.

“I hope they pull the rest of us out of here soon enough,” Sam muttered. “Not sure how much longer we can hold out, at this rate.”

Eddie laughed, a mirthless bark, and slammed a cabinet door shut. “You plonker,” he said as he straightened up, glancing over in Sam’s direction. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“What?” Sam was confused. “You mean, that we can’t hold out much longer?”

“No,” Eddie shot back with a scowl on his face, “that they’re pulling the rest of us out of here.”

Eddie was already heading back out into the corridor before Sam had time to process what he’d just heard.

“Wait, what...?”

Sam hurried out the door after Eddie, and was slightly out of breath when he caught up a few dozen paces down the corridor.

“What did you mean, Eddie?”

“Just what I said,” the corporal answered, his tone flat and matter-of-fact. “I don’t think they’ve got any intention of us pulling out of here. Not any time soon, at any rate.”

“Then...” Sam began, then trailed off as he chewed the thought over. “What? They’ve just left us here?”

Eddie shrugged.

“Just how long’s this rear guard action meant to go on, do you think?” Sam added, hearing the tone of desperation in his own voice.

“Haven’t a clue,” Eddie answered. “A good long while, I’m guessing. Because... well, look at it this way. All the yompers out there scrambling around on the battlefield, and with all that equipment? How quick do you reckon all of them can be rounded up and crammed into a boat out of here, eh? Even if they drop everything and run?”

Sam mulled it over. There were a good number of men still out on the front lines, it was true.

“And that’s assuming that the transport is already at the dock, right?” Eddie went on. “Which it isn’t. And there’s no sign of one on the way, either. You still with me?”

Sam nodded.

“So it only stands to reason, right, that they’re counting on us to hold the line for a good while.” Eddie shoved his hands deep in his pockets, shoulders slumped casually as if he were simply out on a stroll. “When the brass gives the order for those poor bastards out there on the front lines to start pulling back, then we can worry about packing up our kit and getting ready to ship out. But until then? We’ve got some time to kill.”

Sam had to admit that it made sense. But one thing that Eddie had said earlier didn’t anymore in light of all that.

“Then why’d you say that you think this’ll be our lucky day?”

“Because,” Eddie answered with a sly grin on his face, “with any luck we can keep dodging our transfer orders back to the front until then. And we’ve managed it just fine so far, haven’t we?”

Sam trailed behind Eddie as they continued down the corridor. It seemed as though discussing their chances of avoiding any more active combat was lifting the corporal’s spirits, as Eddie whistled a jaunty tune for a few paces before turning in Sam’s direction with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Mind you, it’s not as if I’m in any hurry to get back,” Eddie said.

“We’ll have to get those supplies back to the Surgeon Major sooner or later,” Sam cautioned.

“Not back to the medical bay,” Eddie answered, sounding slightly annoyed. “I mean to get back home.”

Sam turned and gave him a look.

“To Earth, you mean?”

Eddie nodded.

“Bloody Wolverhampton. It was alright when it was just me and Ethel in the flat, but after the in-laws moved in with us there was barely enough room to take a deep breath. The only peace I ever got was when I slipped out down to the pub for a couple of pints, and no matter how long or short a time I was away I’d always get an earful from the mother-in-law when I got home, banging on about something or other.”

Eddie shook his head, chuckling ruefully.

“When I got called up...” He paused, sighing. “Happiest day of my life.”

Sam remembered the day his own enlistment papers had arrived. The mix of thrill and dread he’d experienced when he imagined what lay in store for him on the red planet, and the slow dawning relief at realizing that it meant that he wouldn’t have to go back to his job on the assembly line.

And if going back home meant returning to the plant and the punishing grind of the assembly line? Well, Sam thought, then maybe he wasn’t in such a great hurry to get back, either.

Provided they could continue to avoid being in the line of fire, of course.

“Well?” Eddie’s voice cut through Sam’s mental haze, sounding annoyed, and Sam realized that he’d tuned the corporal out again.

“Sorry, Eddie, I was miles away.”

“I said, I guess we may as well get over to the supply depot and fetch those medical supplies, right? Seeing as we’ve failed spectacularly to procure any suitable libations, that is.”

Sam gave him a blank look.

“Since we haven’t been able to find a bloody drink,” Eddie translated.

“Right,” Sam replied with a nod.

They made their way back to the juncture at Piccadilly Circus and then headed down the corridor to the supply depot. Everything was as they’d left it the last time they passed by this way, the truck still left unattended in the middle of the thoroughfare, litter and debris scattered everywhere.

“Quiet as a tomb, eh?” Eddie said. When Sam grunted an assent, he added, “You know, we haven’t laid eyes on a single living soul since we left the medical bay.”

“Except for them that’s out fighting,” Sam countered. “You can see them from the windows, if you squint.”

“That’s close enough to the action for my liking,” Eddie answered.

They reached the entrance to the supply depot a short time later. The counter where the quartermaster’s clerk was normally stationed with requisition forms was untenanted, which didn’t come as much surprise, but the reinforced gate which led to the storerooms was standing open and unlocked, which somewhat did.

“I think those are the medical supplies we’re after,” Sam said, pointing out a crate with the Surgeon Major’s name printed on it sitting off to one side of the counter, on this side of the gate.

“No doubt,” Eddie said, and stepped around the counter heading towards the storeroom gate. “But maybe we should just check inside, make sure there isn’t anything else we need?”

Sam’s heart beat a little faster as he followed Eddie through the gate into the storeroom beyond. Getting caught pilfering supplies was a one way ticket to the brig.

“Eddie, I don’t know if we should...” he began, but the corporal was already inside and clear across the room, examining equipment racks on the far side of the room.

There was another lattice window inside, same as in the canteen and the officers’ mess, reaching from the floor to the ceiling towering high overhead. While Eddie rummaged around in supply crates, Sam walked over to the window and peered out through the latticework.

He could see the front lines even clearer from here. Had the battle moved closer to the city, or was it simply that he had a better vantage from the supply depot than from the other windows he’d tried? Either way, he could clearly make out the infantry and the mechanized divisions, going toe-to-toe with the ranks of the Martian tripods. Green flashes of deathray blasts were matched with rising clouds of dust wherever artillery shells hit home, and even though sound didn’t travel far through the thin Martian atmosphere Sam fancied that he could feel the vibrations of the explosions through the ground beneath his feet.

The flyboys of the Air Corps were nowhere to be seen in the ruddy skies overhead, but as Sam watched he saw lights glinting off little slivers that seemed to be falling towards the ground from somewhere high overhead. Some sort of aerial bombardment, maybe? Or perhaps even an orbital assault? But that didn’t make sense. How could they tell friend from foe at that altitude? Anything that struck the battlefield from that high up was as likely to hit their own forces as it was to hit the enemy.

“Well, would you look at that!” Eddie said from across the room.

But Sam was too occupied by what he was seeing out the window to turn around or answer. The little slivers that were falling from on high seemed to be opening up like flowers in bloom, and dark clouds were pouring out of each of them.

“We’ve hit the jackpot!” Eddie shouted.

As Sam watched, the dark clouds spread out into a hail of tiny black dots that rained down on the battlefield as far as the eye could see in either direction.

“What the devil...?” Sam muttered, and then he fell silent, eyes widening.

Everything that the black dots hit—the men and the machines, ally and enemy alike, even the rocks and soil itself—began falling up back into the sky.

Soldiers in vacuum suits flailed their arms and legs helplessly as they tried to grab hold of anything steady and solid, and failed. Martian tripods writhed and twisted their mechanical limbs as they rose up like spiders blown away by gale force winds. Rocks as big as icebergs careened into one another as they rose like lost balloons into the sky.

“I told you it was our lucky day!”

Sam wheeled around, bewildered, to see Eddie holding a bottle of brandy in either hand.

“It’s the good stuff, too,” Eddie added, a broad smile on his face, and tossed one of the bottles to Sam, who barely managed to catch it in a fumbling embrace. Then Eddie sat down with his back to the window and opened the other bottle.

“But... but...” Sam stammered, scarcely able to form a thought.

“Oh, stop worrying about getting caught and have a drink, Sam.” Eddie took a long pull straight from the bottle’s mouth, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’ll be a damned sight more enjoyable than anything you can see out that bloody window, that’s for sure. I’m already feeling a bit lightheaded, myself.”

Sam looked down at the bottle in his hands, his fingers numb. He could feel the ground trembling beneath his feet, and the light from beyond the window began to fade to darkness.

“I just knew today was going to be our lucky day,” Eddie repeated. “I could feel it in my bones.”

The Mechanical Marionette Mob
a diversion for all the family, by

MAURA MCHUGH

A HUSH FALLS as the crimson curtains rise.

At the front of the small stage a motorised rooster perches. Painted shiny black and metallic orange, its head tilted to a starry sky, it opens its beak with a whirr of gears and emits a realistic crowing call for dawn. Above, the firmament shifts: the stars click shut, the colour shifts from midnight blue to azure bright, and a blazing sun sails upwards, lighting the stage and revealing it as a lurid, seething red: the awful Martian tendril tide sweeping across a rolling English landscape.

In the cramped auditorium the audience shifts and issues a light hiss. The invasion is a scarred memory despite the gap of a generation.

There is one hopeful spot untouched by the blight: a pool, shimmering. From it a jointed silver arm emerges holding a polished sword. It glows in the sunlight. A collective surge of hope rushes through the crowd, an awe-struck response to a mythic symbol of justice.

A cunningly-made puppet knight, in full armour, clanks onto the stage—the cockerel, frightened, spins across the front and off-stage in an amusing flurry of wings. In the background choral music swells, piped in from a gramophone recording. The knight falls to its knees in a posture of prayer: the sword takes flight and glides towards the knight.

Oooo gasps the audience, enchanted, wondering how the wires are not visible. The magic of the story remains intact.

The knight stands, seizes the sword, and brandishes it three times in the air. The arm disappears into the pool, and the morass of bloody Martian infection recoils from the knight, who moves further into the stage, lit by glorious purpose; behind its metal feet green grass and flowers emerge.

But a hideous cry rises, ULLA!, and a tall Martian tripod stalks onto the stage, pea-coloured smoke issuing from its articulated joints, glittering tentacles waving, and its baleful red eye fixed upon the small knight. Strapped to its back is a basket containing little people, their arms waving in distress.

Get the bastard! shouts one agitated man in a cracked, hate-filled voice.

A flare flickers in the Martian eye but the knight raises its sword in a defensive movement. A sizzle and the sword’s blade glares as bright as the sun. The tripod staggers and one of its knees buckles, forcing its brazen hood closer to the earth.

The knight makes a supernatural leap atop the Martian’s helmet. The tentacles whip at the champion but it swings its sword, and snap, the tentacles separate from the machine, to fall and flip on the ground like beheaded snakes. The knight plunges its sword into the head of the invader—it drops onto the ground and the red writhing carpet retreats completely. The basket snaps open and a man, woman, and child tumble out and stagger to their feet. They raise their arms to the sky in jubilation.

The knight jumps lightly from the defeated machine and lands in centre stage.

Its armour splits and falls off, revealing a beautiful woman with shining golden tresses—it is Britannia. The land itself has repelled the invader. An oak tree grows up behind her and blossoms into leaf.

She lifts her sword and the music piped in changes to blast a familiar tune:

Still more maje-e-estic shalt thou rise,

More dre-e-e-e-eadful from each foreign stroke,

More dreadful, dreadful from each foreign stroke,

Loud blast above us, loud blast that tears the skies

Serves but to ro-o-o-ot thy native oak.

The audience leaps to its feet and join in at the chorus with fervent pride so the song booms throughout the space.

Rule, Britannia!

Britannia, rule the waves.

Britons never, never, never will be slaves.

Rule, Britannia!

Britannia, rule the waves.

Britons never, never, never will be slaves.

Moments later the pleased crowd presses onto Soho’s bustling streets, past the illuminated sign stating: “The Mechanical Marionette Mob present: Britain Repels the Martian Invasion.”

They chatter and laugh, buoyed by the singing, and disperse into the city lit by Martian technology by hopping into Black Crabs, nipping down to catch a bullet tube, or ascending for the Overground Monorail. Above them the shining towers of London stretch toward the stars.

It’s as if Camelot has been erected anew.

BACKSTAGE, BELSA WALKS carefully along the panels, wires and controls of the puppet show, finishing her tech check against a list on a clipboard. Her meticulous audit of the systems and the individual models adds thirty minutes to the reset period between each performance, but it has prevented any major failure during one of the Mob’s shows.

Waldo waits by the entry to the narrow space behind the backdrop for Belsa to emerge. He’s wiping his hands with a cloth stained with grease. Since there’s no one about he’s using his unskinned prosthetic arm, with its joints and cogs clearly visible. His metal left hand moves deftly, cleaning the dirt off his warm right hand.

“The smoke duct in Quilp’s back leg is blocked,” he says. Waldo has named all the Martian models after villains in Dickens’ novels.

Belsa looks up and the light hits the livid scars on her jawline and long neck. Scars from being captured by a Martian vessel and thrown into one of their wire baskets, or so she told Waldo one time when she was working on an upgrade to his arm. She has similar lesions on her wrists, and perhaps elsewhere, but she always wears wide trousers, a waistcoat and shirt, and her trademark white lab coat. After all she is a doctor, but of what Waldo is unsure. She seems expert in many fields of science. He has worked with Dr Belsa Sullivan for ten years but she remains an enigma to him.

“Swap him out for Heep,” she says. “I overhauled him completely last night.”

He nods, pauses before adding, “The lights were burning in the workshop at five this morning. You getting enough kip?”

Her lips tweak into a sardonic slant, “And why were you ambling by so early? Returning from a tryst?”

He chuckles and looks away from her. “I might’ve been visiting a friend.”

She passes by Waldo and lays a hand on his shoulder in a kindly manner. “We all need friends.”

After the first year of working as Belsa’s assistant he put aside his first foolish crush on her. He had never seen her exhibit any interest in romance. For her there was only engineering experiments and constructing her shows.

“Coo-ee,” a voice calls from the auditorium. The woman’s nasal tone and Austrian accent gives her identity away instantly.

“Coming, Hedwig,” yells Belsa, whose face lights up.

Bustling up the aisle the young woman with a mackintosh belted tightly at her waist exudes her usual magnetic energy. Her black framed glasses are beaded with rain. She pulls a Hermès headscarf off her neat black bob and snaps it so the water strafes off.

“Liebling,” she declares, arms wide to greet Belsa, “entschuldige, bitte I missed the show. Is Britannia better today?”

“She’s much improved,” Belsa says, and the two women kiss each other on the cheeks, European-style. Waldo thinks Belsa’s accent deepens with a Germanic tinge around Hedwig, but they often speak to each other in German so it may be by association. But London has become a gilded Babel, the centre of immigration for the world, as artists, creators, scientists and engineers rushed to be part of the massive rebuilding and unpicking of Martian secrets. The Empire has never been as strong as it is in 1937.

Hedwig perches on the padded arm of an aisle seat, produces a silver case, and taps out a Sulima cigarette. She waves the case at them with a raised elegant eyebrow. Waldo takes one eagerly; the Turkish brand is a novelty, and Hedwig occasionally bribes him with them when she wants access to Belsa in her workshop. Normally, no one is allowed in, but Hedwig had a way of bending the world to her desires.

“Waldo,” she said one day as they shared a cigarette over a cup of tea at the workshop. “I escaped a desperate cage once so now I refuse restrictions.” She crushed her cigarette into the cracked china saucer they used as an ashtray. “If I want something l get it.”

Belsa dismisses the offered cigarette with a frown.

“Oh bella Belsa,” Hedwig croons, “don’t be so self-righteous.”

“They’re poison,” Belsa says flatly.

“Ja, of course,” and she blows a stream of smoke through her nostrils, “but so is beer, and you drink that sometimes.”

Belsa shakes her head, and her unruly crop of curls bounce. “I should know better.”

“Indeed, you should.” Hedwig laughs, a rich throaty sound, and jumps up and hooks her arm into Belsa’s elbow crook. “Come, let us talk signal frequencies. So much safer! Have I told you my latest ideas?”

At this they drop down seats at the front of the theatre, sit together, and lapse into German. Waldo likes to think they do so because it’s Hedwig’s native tongue, and not to ensure he cannot know their secrets.

Waldo leaves the women and returns to his tasks, including collecting the cash from the front desk and tallying up the take. Despite the popularity of the picture houses, their shows continue to do well. Belsa believes that people still yearn for a visceral experience.

“Theatre is the oldest form, Waldo,” she said to him once as they laboured over installing a new backdrop. “Everything else is flat. You can smell the smoke and see the mirrors in our magic. Despite all the marvels we have gleaned from the Martians people will always want to experience something tangible. Of the flesh.”

He’d wondered at her contradiction. Someone so focused on understanding science and yet believing it has limits.

“Not limits, Waldo,” she’d replied, when he said this to her. “Its purpose.” She rubbed her wrists in an unconscious movement she did sometimes. Feeling old scars. “We are building upon the technology of invaders. Will we enslave ourselves or be freed by the future we are rushing toward? I hope we aim for liberty, not tyranny.”

Waldo grunted at that. “Don’t say that too loud. The Empire’s run on the sweat of the oppressed.” His grandfather served in the Gurkha Rifles regiment and retired in London, his mother an Irish seamstress, and he was at heart a socialist, if a cynical one. “We just bow our heads to new masters.”

She’d stopped and looked at him, and she seemed so sad. “Then we must raise them up, Waldo.”

WHEN WALDO RETURNS an hour later the two women are standing, at the end of one of their famous long goodbyes.

“Television is the future, Belsa. The BBC is snapping up smart people.”

“Well they hired you!”

Hedwig snaps a little bow. “Someone must improve their hotchpot technology, and they hire women.”

Belsa laughs. “I noticed the spectacles.”

Hedwig rolls her eyes in an exaggerated fashion. “Myopia makes you smarter.”

She fishes a card from her pocket.

“Please take the producer’s card. She asked for you expressly. They want a puppet show set in space. You are top of their list.”

Belsa reads the card out loud. “Gisela Domin.”

“You are too talented to scrape a living in this pokey hall.”

Belsa places both hands in her coat pockets and sets her shoulders in a stubborn line. “I like my pokey hall.”

Hedwig kisses her on both cheeks. “You were made for better.” She waves at them as she departs.

As Waldo approaches he thinks he hears Belsa mutter, “I was made for far worse.” She stares at Hedwig’s retreating back with a strange expression of wariness.

“Takings are up.”

She nods in an absentminded way, and he notices she’s turning the card over in her pocket.

“My Mam thinks the Martians spy on us through the telly. But she has some strange notions.”

“I’ve met her before.”

“Mam? Sure you have. At my baby brother Frankie’s wedding. She was the one in mourning.”

“No, Gisela. It was before we began our partnership.”

Waldo does not react, but his heart lightens at that word. Partnership.

“It was in the aftermath of the invasion, when I turned to working on prosthetics. To help people like you.”

Waldo freezes, bad memories rising in him. Of the searing pain of the Martian Heat Ray. The stump of his arm pulses. For a moment he is a boy again, lying among the rubble of his home, dust in the air, screams shaking the earth in tandem with the awful tread of the Martian war machines...

His voice sounds to his ears as if it echoes from a faraway place. “What did she want?”

“She wanted me to design a new race.”

THE OFFICE HAS glass walls offering a supreme view of the snaking River Thames and its array of coruscant columns.

“London is the jewel of the world,” Gisela is saying, her accent alluringly exotic but she speaks with received pronunciation. She sits behind a modern Italian desk with flowing lines, and is immaculately dressed in relaxed, but exquisite tailoring. Waldo has never been in the presence of a woman so perfect before. Her face is a serene oval, her blond hair a coiffed halo, and her eyes are bewitching—direct and suggesting dark passions.

Her desk is bare except for a top-of-the-range Screen Phone and a tiny china cup of espresso.

Belsa wears a trouser suit with an overcoat he’s never seen before. A wide-brimmed stylish hat completes her outfit. He is used to her practical work-wear and this change throws him. Despite their long association it hints that there are aspects she keeps hidden from him. His one frayed unfashionable suit does not fit and he wants to fidget constantly. He wears his fake-skin arm which never feels right.

They sit in sculpted oak chairs that are not comfortable.

“From here,” Gisela continues, “one can influence the future.”

As usual Belsa has not tried to hide her scars. In the bright office, with marble tiled floors, the light is unforgiving. Waldo realises that he rarely sees Belsa outside during the day. Her skin has a blueish-white hue, and the scars are a bruised purple. With a start he realises she is the same as that first day she began building his arm, a year before he became her assistant.

The years have worn on for him, but she is fixed in time.

“I read about your marriage in the papers,” Belsa says, noting the large diamond engagement ring and wedding band, “and your husband’s passing, my condolences.”

Gisela smiles with the expression of a cat who has licked up all the cream. “Poor Harry. He was carried away by a lethal fever native to that little island of his. I reluctantly took over the firm.”

“Robots are all the rage in Europe.”

“Our models lead the market, despite not having access to Martian technology. You British horde it so.”

Belsa shrugs. “Our country alone endured invasion. Vae victis.”

She nods slowly. “Of course, but there are older methods and previous experiments for ambitious innovators to develop.”

“I’ve seen your slogans. Designed by Humans for Humans. I notice you don’t add ‘replacing human jobs.’”

“But isn’t this what people yearn for: freedom from base labour? To have more time to garden, or watch cricket? We’re moving from the industrial market and into the home now. Eventually people will be able to live with a helpful, obedient companion, modelled anyway they please.”

Belsa’s posture stiffens. Waldo warily observes both women. There is an odd charge between them. As if they are speaking in code.

“Our domestic robots are very expensive, but very popular among a particular market.”

“They are animated shells repeating recorded words, from that I’ve read. Pretty toys for wealthy controlling men. Hardly a good use for technology, Mrs Domin. Surely experience has taught you that?”

Gisela’s eyes glitter, but she exudes amusement.

“I’m flattered you’ve kept up with my work, Dr Sullivan. But we have acquired new talent, and we have exciting plans to meld robotics with organics. Eventually they will be indistinguishable from their masters.”

She points to Waldo’s arm. “Prosthetics such as Mr Rana’s will be seamless, and very powerful.”

Waldo flushes with embarrassment and places his fake hand under his warm one.

“This one serves me well,” he says a little hotly. “Belsa’s a skilled artificer. I know no better in London.”

Belsa shoots Waldo a smile, and leans forward in her chair. “I was led to believe this meeting was about a proposed television show, Mrs Domin.”

“Would you have come if I had contacted you directly?”

“Probably not.”

“In fact, I own many companies, including a film studio in Ealing. We are well acquainted with the BBC. The production is feasible, but primarily I want access to the records you inherited. Of course, I will compensate you handsomely.”

Belsa says nothing, and Gisela glances at Waldo.

“Is he aware—”

Belsa stands. Waldo scrambles up, unsure of what to do.

“I will re-iterate that I do not have the papers. They were burned.”

Gisela stares directly at Belsa and allows a long pause to drag on with the weight of her disbelief.

“Come, Dr Sullivan. Let us not pretend.”

“You have wasted enough of my time.”

“I have a keen researcher. He would only take notes, and you may keep the originals. My fee will keep your theatre,” her tone is scornful, “running for decades. Or you could retire. You’re old enough.”

Belsa turns and walks to the doorway, with Waldo following.

The door swings open and a tall heavy-set man in a flashy suit stands in the doorway. A long scar traverses his right cheek.

“Hello Belsa,” he says, and smiles—his face crumples in an odd way at that. It seems like he is also sneering.

Belsa is fixed to the spot.

Behind them, Gisela says, “Ah, Eldon, thank you for joining us.”

He saunters into the room and walks to Gisela’s desk, casually leans against the glass window, takes a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket, and taps one out.

Belsa pivots to observe them but does not move closer.

Gisela waves at the man. “You’re familiar with Dr Eldon Moreau, I take it.”

“Unfortunately so.”

“I discovered him at a lab in Prague, wasting his talents. I offered him the resources to delve as deeply as he wants into all of life’s secrets. He’s determined to develop his uncle’s work in a new direction.” She picks up her cup and takes a small sip. “All he needed was someone to nurture him properly.”

Belsa’s voice is stony. “He will disappoint you.”

Gisela replaces her cup on the table. “He has performed well so far.”

Belsa swivels smartly and strides from the room.

“Looking forward to working with you again,” Eldon calls after her. He gives Waldo a cheeky salute. “You’d better run, old boy. She’s hard to keep up with. But I enjoyed the chase.”

Gisela makes a shoo-ing gesture at Waldo. “Trail after your mistress. Perhaps she has some scraps for you.”

He leaves the room, metal and flesh hands knotted in anger.

SHE STANDS AT London Bridge, gulls sweeping overhead and a throng of people passing at her back, gazing along the Thames and its constant stream of river traffic.

Waldo fumes at her side, huddled into his thin suit, waiting for her direction and simultaneously hating his deference. In the space of a few minutes in Gisela’s office his sense of their relationship had been shredded.

Below them tourists from all over the Empire wave from a sightseeing cruise boat, the wind pulling on their hats and scarves. They beam, excited at being in the heart of the Empire, full of happiness and cheer. He wants to shout at them about the truth of the illusion: it is a light show to distract the population. This bright world is not for the likes of them.

Belsa doesn’t turn to him when she says, “I have to leave London.”

“What, why?”

“You’ll be in charge of the Mob. I’ll increase your pay, of course. You deserve another raise. You should hire an assistant too.” She turns and lays a hand on his arm. “I trust you, Waldo.”

He shakes her off, and his hurt boils up. “You trust no one!” he shouts. A couple of pedestrians look at him askance. “You know what I am to you? A pleb. Not a friend.” He sees the pain on her face but he can’t stop. “Go on, get off. I’ll manage. I’m staff.”

She bobs her head, waves for a Black Crab, and she’s gone.

THE NIGHT IS a blur of sullen humour fed by beer. He hunches in a corner of his local, never lifting his head from his glass except to order a refill. He replays the scene at the bridge, and every grudge and slight from their working life. His regular barman, Jack, guides other customers away from him and keeps him topped up until closing.

As he staggers out Jack holds the door, and gently steers him in the right direction. “Hope can see through that black cloud.”

“Fuckyou,” Waldo mumbles, dimly aware of the cold. A light mist haloes the street lights. His anger is morphing into morose regret. He’s never had a better job. Belsa may not have confided in him but she always respected him.

He stumbles over an uneven footpath, and bumps into a pillar box. She had been promoting him to manager.

“Damn and blast it,” he says out loud, and raises his face to the wet, needing its clarity. Through the watery haze he recalls Eldon’s comments and Gisela’s expression of smug condescension as she dismissed him.

“Capitalist swine.”

He walks without direction and arrives at the workshop with only a vague memory of his journey. His mind switches into shocking sobriety so suddenly he stands blinking in the chill pre-dawn unsure what has prompted the change. A light: bobbing in the window tucked at the apex of the roof, in the wee office that Belsa uses for totting up the accounts and sketching new designs.

Waldo crouches instinctively by the railing, settling into the deepest shadow cast by the redbrick warehouse. Slowly, aware of the stiffness and unsteadiness wrought upon him by his boozing, he creeps toward the back of the building. The door is ajar, the lock jimmied open. Uncertain of what he should do—what he can do in his impaired state—he watches the doorway, hoping to catch sight of the thief. Two figures slip through the door. Both wear black clothing. One is a big fellow but nimble, but something is off with his companion’s proportions and movements. To develop as a puppeteer Waldo has had to study autonomy and how the joints move. This person is a bad puppet master of his own limbs. Nothing flows naturally but there is a fixed purpose to his stride.

Waldo follows at a distance, skirting the pools of street lights, and glad of his familiarity with the local area. There is no one about at this hour. Even the milkman has not made his rounds.

The big man motions his accomplice to a Jaguar Royale Drophead waiting under the overhanging branches of a dogwood. Its motor claws vibrate slightly to indicate the engine is running, even if the headlights are off and the interior dark.

They stop at the back window, which unwinds revealing only darkness. He leans in and Waldo drops down onto his haunches and hands, stretching as close as possible to eavesdrop without being seen. The man speaks in German, but he recognises the smooth, snide tones of Eldon, and the melodious response of Gisela.

The awkward fellow lumbers around to get into the front passenger seat, and the headlights turn on. Waldo starts, as the poor proximity for a man is visible in the light. He must be one of Gisela’s robots. Eldon walks around the back to climb into the vehicle via the other door, and the car begins to manoeuvre out of its parking spot. Waldo scuttles back quickly and dodges into an alley between a pawn broker and a pharmacy, startling a cat. It hisses at him as the car zips past, and as a result he doesn’t notice the person appear behind him.

“Waldo,” Belsa says, “are you sober enough to play the sleuth?”

He issues a small yelp of surprise, his nerves taut.

As he turns the final words he said to her on the bridge rush back into his mind, and he speaks angrily.

“Bloody Nora! What are you doing here?”

“Following the thieves who broke into the warehouse.”

He notices her dark, sensible clothing.

“You expected this.”

“Gisela believes if you close a door she’s allowed to break in through a window.” She holds up a thermos flask. “Thank goodness I brought cocoa.”

“Look Belsa, if we are to remind mates you need to come clean. I can help. I’m not some useless cripple...”

She steps close and grabs his left arm.

“You are the most capable person I know, Waldo.”

His eyes scald with sudden emotion. He hates that booze makes him emotional.

She releases him and politely regards the street. “Let us return to the warehouse and fix the lock. And I’ll fill you in over a feast at Pellicci’s.”

He coughs and blinks rapidly. “A fry-up would hit the spot.”

“Good, because we have a journey ahead of us.”

DESPITE THE EARLY hour the caff is busy with a variety of patrons, from tradespeople to office workers. The everyday clatter and hubbub is soothing—a welcome reminder of normality. Waldo has a couple of queasy moments when the Full English lands on the table in front of him and he gets a whiff of the fried eggs, but he steadies himself with several draughts of strong, milky tea.

Belsa eats porridge and drinks a coffee so black Waldo reckons it could bend time.

His appetite improves once he eats a few forkfuls of baked beans.

“So where are we heading?”

“Scotland,” she replies. “Specifically, a small island in the Orkneys.”

He nearly chokes. “Christ, do we have to? I hear the country’s a wasteland. And isn’t one of the Rocket Bases up there? It’s polluted the entire area.” He shakes his head. “Bye bye seals and puffins. The Empire needs to shoot ships full of innocent boys into space.”

She settles back in the booth, but gazes fixedly at her spoon which she keeps flipping over in a distracted fashion.

“It’s where I was born,” she says.

Waldo puts down his knife and fork and gives her his full attention.

She glances at him, almost furtively, and returns to turning her spoon over on the table.

“I have an... unusual pedigree,” she begins, but stops. There is a long pause, during which a series of emotions chase across her face.

Waldo drinks his tea and waits.

“I can’t explain it in way that makes sense. Let’s just say my father was a medical prodigy and pioneer. His experiments were radical and controversial, and he regretted his work, eventually.”

She raised her gaze and locked it on Waldo. She gestured to herself. “He regretted me most of all.”

“He can’t have been that clever then.”

Her small smile is heart-breaking. “He abandoned me... left me to die.”

Waldo’s breath catches in his throat. His home life had been chaotic in the aftermath of the war, but his mother and his grandparents had loved him deeply. If anything they’d been too over-protective after he lost his arm.

“And your Mam...?”

She shakes her head curtly. “Non-existent.” She inhales a shaky breath. “But I was found and taken in by an order of Sisters.”

“Nuns?”

She laughs. “Not really. They nurtured me, educated me, and eventually I ran away to see the world. I travelled and studied in many countries. I met Eldon in Italy before the invasion. We had much in common. His uncle was also a doctor who had pushed the boundaries of respectable science. We both had something to prove, so we worked together for a year. And then he stole information from me and absconded.”

“What happened?”

She laughs sharply. “I cried. Then I pursued him. And I regained my materials before he disseminated it to anyone else.” She points her spoon now as if it was a sword, and her voice shifts to deathly serious. “I reminded him I am not to be trifled with and warned him never to cross my path again. Or speak of what he learned. Clearly I need to remind him of our arrangement.”

In that moment as Waldo looks into Belsa’s dark eyes he glimpses a ruthless will that could inflict harm without qualm. Gooseflesh sprung up along his right hand and arm, and a shudder passed through him. It was like observing an alien... not a Martian, but something equally otherworldly.

“I’m not sure I understand...”

“Gisela has tracked me down before, when she first appeared. She had nothing back then—she had escaped a conflagration—but she had an ideology. She believes humanity is finished. That we’re primates playing with a superior technology we’re ill-equipped to understand. She thinks the future lies with evolving robots to the highest level. She wanted both of us to combine our fields of knowledge to create something new, something better than humans, but I demurred.”

Waldo frowns, trying to keep up with the outrageous notions she is describing. “But, if she creates a robot race won’t they overthrow her?”

“Oh, she’s an android.”

“Excuse me?”

“One of a kind. They literally broke the mould with her. She was designed to overthrow the world and watch it burn. I suspect she plans to create a robot race, become their Empress, and take them to the stars.”

“Crikey,” he says, unable to believe a word she’s said.

“Which is why we need to keep my father’s research out of their hands. This is not the threat of invasion, but the threat of being supplanted by our own inventions.”

For several minutes they sit in silence and life continues around them at a perfectly ordinary pace. Bacon butties are consumed, gossip is shared, and a customer breaks into song for a few minutes, followed by a round of applause.

Eventually a waitress sails over bearing a mammoth teapot.

“Fancy a top-up, love?” she asks Waldo.

He looks up into her friendly face and can only think to say, “I need something stronger.”

Her laugh is cheerful. “Don’t you worry, my darling, your spoon will stand up in this brew.”

He lifts his cup. “Alright then. Stiffen my spine. I need it.”

As she pours Waldo looks directly at Belsa and adds, “We’ve a trip to plan.”

IT TOOK THEM weeks before they set foot on the island of Belsa’s birth. They shuttered the theatre (the ‘Under Renovation’ sign forestalled all questions), and settled personal matters. For Waldo that meant meeting his mother and concocting a story about a research trip to Scotland for a new puppet show. She pressed a woollen jumper on him, to keep his chest warm, and a St Christopher’s medal to protect their travels. He considered himself lucky that she didn’t insist on packing a bag and accompanying them. As far as his mother was concerned Belsa might be a business woman and an unconventional spinster, but she might still be capable of corrupting her son...

Belsa hired a couple of local labouring men to provide security for the warehouse, and make the building appear as if it was occupied.

She insisted they plot a meandering route up through England, taking busses and trains in a haphazard fashion. They often bought tickets for later destinations and skipped out of their carriage at an earlier station just before it departed. Belsa wore a long overcoat over her suit, tucked her hair under a trilby, spoke in a deeper timbre, and moved in an assured manner. She was often taken to be a man, which meant they were ignored as travelling business companions to casual observers. A well-deployed newspaper or book ensured only the most obtuse of passengers bothered them.

When they stopped by Glastonbury they stayed the night at a two-storied Guest House run by a plump and chatty widow. After midnight he heard Belsa leave her room next door. He looked out the window to observe her quick steps in the direction of the Tor, which cast a shadow over their building thanks to an almost full moon. He considered following her, but instead tackled her about it over kippers and tea in the dining room the next morning.

“I was paying my respects,” she said, and left it at that.

On their departure their landlady gifted them with small vials containing the red-tinged Chalice Well waters, guaranteeing it could cure gout or arthritis.

“The Martians never landed here,” she added enigmatically.

Waldo withheld his sarcastic comment about Martian indifference to English landmarks, and accepted her present with solemn silence.

Not only did the weather worsen the further north they travelled, but Waldo noticed Belsa became distant and colder. Once they entered Scotland they travelled more carefully, but their accents and clothing made them distinctly obvious. Everywhere they saw grim countenances and gaunt children, and a visible presence of police forces, even in villages. The locals were wary of people from Down South, and it was hard to win their trust—although Belsa’s generosity with funds tended to soften their defensiveness.

During one tense moment as they travelled to their lodgings in Wick, Belsa revealed that she carried a revolver. The would-be muggers backed away when they saw the glint of it in the street light, and the cool tone when she said, “I suggest you move on.”

They engaged a local fisherman to transport them to the island of Hoy under cover of a tempestuous night. Their small vessel chugged along the island’s westerly coastline, avoiding the massive military base at Lyness. Waldo was sick repeatedly as the ship dipped and rose over the gigantic waves of the North Atlantic Sea. The frigid gusts and salt water spray left his face raw as he leaned over the railing. The terrifying reality took hold in his head that they were a tiny spark rolling upon Stygian waters, and likely to sink into its indifferent depths if the storm intensified.

The captain shook his head at Waldo’s weakness and offered no succour.

Belsa stood at the prow of the ship and faced the wild, white-capped ocean as if challenging its dominion. The brutal power seemed to energise her.

In between vomiting he staggered to her side and noticed her relaxed posture and how she and the ship moved in concert.

“How do you do it?” he shouted into the roar of the Atlantic’s might.

“The ocean recognises its own,” she yelled.

She raised her arms. A silver light limed the clouds above, and Waldo though it was the moon slicing through the roiling clouds, but the mast of their ship lit up with an eerie violet flame which buzzed and crackled.

She threw back her head and laughed.

Waldo shrank into his oilskins, gripped the St. Christopher’s medal around his neck, and whispered a childhood prayer. His stomach cramped again, and he wished he’d never agreed to this folly.

AFTER TWO MORE surreptitious nocturnal boat trips by local Orkney fisherman they land at a tiny, abandoned island. The dock is crumbling, but the captain ties a line onto it and warns them he will be gone by dawn.

Belsa hands the seaman a roll of notes as they disembark, and whispers something. He doesn’t reply but in the low light Waldo thinks he seems shifty.

The dock’s stone steps are slippery from a mat of seaweed but their rubber boots keep them steady. Their flashlights pick their way along the neglected path to the island’s few buildings. Belsa moves with the confidence of someone who knows the terrain. The previous day Waldo had picked up a small shucking knife from one of the boats they travelled on, and he’d hidden it inside his prosthetic arm. That morning as he rolled the fake skin over the metal joints and skeleton and he didn’t begrudge the falsehood.

The hamlet comprises miserable cottages whose thatched roofs have collapsed. During their travels among the islands they were informed that after the base was established in Lyness the underpopulated islands were emptied as labour emigrated to Hoy and Mainland, and the pollution affected the fishing. Smuggling has become one of the best, if risky, trades for the remaining locals.

Before they departed that night they’d witnessed the distant lightshow as a rocket blasted off from Hoy and a plume of flame pushed it upward through the atmosphere. Many Scottish mariners had joined up to journey in those space-faring vessels—viewing them as a new adventure on different seas.

They stood for a long time and watched the light diminish until it became another pinprick among the stars.

“God bless them,” Waldo said quietly, and meant it.

Belsa’s light bobs along a narrow, overgrown track.

“This way,” Belsa says, a frisson of excitement in her voice.

They move through utter darkness since the clouds obscure the moon and stars, and the only sound is the artic wind rushing through the grasses.

A bone-deep loneliness settles on Waldo’s chest, stirring panic. They are at the very edge of the world, surrounded by nothing. He longs for the familiar noise and lights of London. This is as unnatural to him as the planet’s atmosphere is to the Martians.

A filthy whitewashed cottage emerges from the darkness. It’s burned out, and the door and windows are blacked holes. Shattered stumps of rafters are like ribs of a broken beast.

“The islanders burned it after my father left,” Belsa says. “They believed he was doing the Devil’s work.”

She enters the dark doorway. Inside, new life has taken root—a crab apple tree has grown inside the front room.

Belsa stands by the scrappy tree whose branches have spread out to create a living roof, and lays her hand on its trunk. She smiles, and it is wondering and beautiful.

“It would have been sheltered from the elements. Perhaps an apple fell here, and it grew from its seeds. Maybe the villagers planted it to redeem the space.”

“That tree must be over a hundred years old...”

She strokes one of its branches. “At least,” she agrees.

The world has gone awry. Aliens with advanced technology invading Earth through the vastness of space: he accepted that—he’d experienced it. A nineteenth century scientist creating an immortal person in some twisted experiment... that seemed more extraordinary.

The quiet, the darkness, the strangeness pours over him in a torrent. He reaches for the wall to brace himself and an urge to sprint outside rises, but the terror of getting lost on that lonely island, surrounded by the icy black ocean and blind night freezes his legs.

Belsa is by his side, her cool hand on his face, and her voice telling him, “Breathe, Waldo.”

He fills his lungs with the sea air and exhales it slowly.

“Sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“This island is like somewhere out of time and place,” she says. “No wonder he came here to produce something so unnatural.”

“You’re not—”

“I know who I am and why I was created. I have spent my long life trying to be more than that.”

She moves away from him, ducks under the low branches, and enters the other room. He hears her moving in there for a few minutes, shifting some rocks, before he follows her.

This room is longer, with a large fireplace. She squats before a moss-encrusted flagstone, wiggling it back and forth.

“Let me,” Waldo says.

He peels back the skin on his left hand and retrieves the shucker. Holding it with his metal fingers he slices through the plant fibres and moss that seals it. He begins to lever the stone slowly out of place while Belsa keeps the flashlight trained on it.

“Easy does it,” he says to himself as the stone gradually lifts out of its old resting place. He slips his fingers underneath and his arm and shoulder work together to flip it out.

The torch’s spotlight shows something square and black. As Belsa reaches in, a congregation of millipedes rush away from the light, legs vibrating like the motor claws on a car.

She lifts it out and unwraps a thick oilskin cloth from a weighty red leather book. Embossed on the front are the gold letters “V. F.”

The sound of a rock skittering across the floor alerts them. They look up and Eldon stands by the stone lintel, wearing a green army greatcoat with a Martian ray gun pointed at them.

“Thanks for doing the hard work,” he says. His expression is a mixture of jubilation and spite.

Belsa stands and holds the book in front of her chest with both hands, drawing his attention.

“You were always a lazy researcher.”

“They’re going to dissect you,” he says coldly. “And I’ll get to watch.”

In the distance is the sound of an aircraft. A disc of light in the sky heralds its arrival.

Belsa looks up and Eldon follows her gaze.

“Gisela, I suppose?”

“She’s forged many alliances in British industry. Soon a robot will replace every last worker in British mines and factories. Productivity will soar. Prices will fall.”

“You’re such an idiot, Eldon. You’re replaceable too! Or has she told you that she loves you? Do you know what happened to her old master?”

His eyes deaden and his face settles into an implacable expression.

“Stupid bitches are easy to fool,” he says.

Belsa flings the book at his face and it hits him with such force that he is knocked through the doorway and into the next room. He roars in pain. In a blurred movement she is through the door.

Waldo picks up his knife and darts after them.

A searing beam of light flashes from a corner.

Briefly the room is illuminated: Eldon down on a knee, blood in his eyes, pointing and firing the gun in front of him. And Belsa, up in the branch of the tree, swinging around to kick him in the back of his head.

Waldo throws his knife. It lands with a wet thump in the base of Eldon’s throat.

The beam vanishes, but above a light is tracking toward the house. The sound of the aircraft vibrates the old stones.

“Are you all right?” Waldo yells over the noise.

“Get a flashlight,” she answers.

He stumbles back into the other room, and gropes for where he left it. But when he returns, the light is above the room. The tree branches are thrashing in the artificial wind.

She kneels with Eldon in her arms. Blood pours out of his throat and he gurgles. His wide, straining eyes are fixed on Waldo.

Waldo stands in the doorway until Eldon’s features relax and his animating force slips away.

A breath later Belsa is holding a corpse.

Waldo cannot believe he has killed a man.

She eases Eldon’s body onto the floor. Her hands are coated with his blood.

She looks up at the aircraft descending, and then down at Eldon’s weapon. She reaches for it.

An amplified voice above booms. “Drop the weapon!”

Belsa looks about and shouts at Waldo.

“Kick the book to me.”

He sees it, and punts it to her.

She points the weapon at the book.

There is a terrible rattling noise and a series of bullets punch through Belsa’s chest. A black substance oozes out.

She jitters and stumbles, but she doesn’t drop the gun.

Belsa fires and the book erupts into flame instantly.

She does not stop until it is reduced to ash.

Waldo runs to her and she collapses into his arms.

He holds her to his chest and rocks her. The pain in his heart is far worse than when he lost his arm.

Her mouth is by his ear.

“Take me to the water,” she gasps. “There’s a pier. Smugglers.” She lets out a cry of pain that chills his blood. “Behind the house. Follow the track.”

And she is dead weight.

Above him is clamour and shouted commands but he cannot think of anything but escape.

Waldo’s metal arm gathers her up. He stands, and runs into the darkness.

After a short panicked flight he stumbles and falls into a ditch, and it saves their lives. A barrage of gunfire and puffs of air slice the ground nearby.

They roll into brackish water, and an over-cropping boulder shadows them. Above, the light searches, but it tracks around the houses and back to the harbour.

When it is far enough away he picks up Belsa again and staggers in the direction she sent him. He wanders for what seems like hours, unsure if she is dead, but grateful for his prosthetic and the enhancements that Belsa has made to it. After a time a lightening at the horizon allows him to see the old track.

He speaks to Belsa constantly, about their work, about the Mob, about plans for a new play for telly involving a special international league of heroes who fight off a variety of aliens invading the Earth.

“And they are led by a daring commander, and it turns out she’s an alien, who has fallen in love with the Earth, and wants to ensure its people survive.”

He finds a stony beach and a short pier which is well maintained. His legs are shaky from exhaustion, and he lays her down on the pebbles.

A peach glow lines the horizon. Soon, they will be visible to anyone searching from the air.

The boat they’d hired appears and slides next to the pier. Waldo can just make out the captain in the gloom. He waves at them urgently.

Waldo places his warm hand against Belsa’s cheek. It is cool, and her eyes are glassy and wide open.

The pupils contract briefly.

“Waldo,” she breathes, so quietly he leans in close. “I like your idea.”

He reaches to lift her up.

“No!” Strangely loud.

“But you’ll die,” Waldo says. Uttering that terrible truth hits his heart with a hammer blow. His eyes well up.

“They are coming for me.”

The glow is not the sun, but a new ship. It glides into view with a square white sail, moving at unnatural pace.

It slides far up onto the beach, and in his stunned state Waldo notices that it is flat bottomed but seems to hover above the ground on a bed of light.

Four women wearing robes of glistening white step lightly off the vessel and onto the beach. Behind them another woman, clad in silver raiment and bright like a star, approaches him.

“Goodman,” she says, “we will take care of her now.” The sound is both in his head and all around him.

The four women lean down and easily pick up Belsa.

He cannot move and he cannot protest.

“She will return,” the beautiful lady says. “When you need her most.”

They bear her to the boat, and settle her within it. The five women climb in.

He cannot bear this leave-taking. Tears slide down his cheek.

The ship eases back into the water.

The radiant woman raises her hand in the air, shimmering.

To Waldo it is a farewell, and a promise.

Wonderful Things
a tale of discovery, by

JONATHAN GREEN

“BY JOVE, CARTER, do you realise precisely the significance of this find?” Lord Carnarvon said as the two men sat in the shade of the awning, watching the Egyptian diggers traipsing in and out of the tomb in the valley below.

“Better than anyone,” Howard Carter said. “For one thing, you haven’t wasted your money after all.”

“And you haven’t wasted your life,” Lord Carnarvon laughed, raising his gin-and-tonic in a toast. “Here’s to King Tut!”

“King Tutankhamun!” The pair chinked glasses. “May the sun never set on his bounteous beneficence.”

They were silent for a moment as they sipped their drinks in the shadow of the pyramidal mountain that stood like a guardian sentinel over the Valley of the Kings.

The landscape was bleached almost white by the desert sun, and even in the shade of the awning the two men still had to take out their handkerchiefs now and again to wipe the sweat from their brows.

“Isn’t it wonderful that in this modern age, with all the wonders that the Martian invasion gave us, a dead desert king who reigned more than three thousand years ago can still surprise us by offering up such wonderful things.”

Announced by purr of an engine and the clatter of multiple mechanical legs moving in a wave-like undulation, a car appeared at the entrance to the valley and scuttled along the road towards the dig-site. Its drumming claw-feet raised a cloud of dust behind it. Wisps of noxious green mist—a by-product of the normal functioning of its Martian science-powered engine—mingled with the ochre dust cloud, giving it a sickly cast.

“Hello, hello, hello,” said Lord Carnarvon, leaning forward in his canvas chair, “what have we here?”

The car stopped at the foot of the hill upon which they were camped, half way up. Its undulating legs became still, and two men in dark woollen suits—completely unsuitable, given the climate—got out. Having briefly exchanged words with a gaggle of the locals working in the valley, they set off up the hill, over the scree and rubble of broken statuary.

Upon reaching the tent and the two men sitting in front of it, the first of the men took off his Homburg and said, “Mr Carter, I presume?”

THE ROCKET SHIP descended amidst billowing clouds of smoke and, with a great roaring of thrusters, landed at the Olympus Mons spaceport. The extinct volcano, the largest mountain in the Solar System—or so Carter had been told—towered some fifteen miles above the Tharsis region in the northern hemisphere of the red planet, as impossible as that seemed. Gazing up at its distant, snow-clad peak, Carter felt that it was not unlike the pyramidal peak that overlooked the Valley of the Kings back on Earth.

Indeed, there was something eerily familiar about the barren hinterlands of Mars. This place was not unlike the west bank of the Nile, Carter considered as he viewed the Martian landscape through the grubby windows of the military half-track taking them to the headquarters of the Stellar Expeditionary Force at Marineris City. Apart from the fact that where the sands of the Sahara were bleached almost bone-white, the waterless deserts of Mars were rust-red—like everything else on the planet, including any vehicle that had spent any time moving about on its surface.

The transport chugged along a rough road, its front caterpillar tracks churning up the Martian dust while its rear articulated legs scuttled along, enveloped in their thick green exhaust-mist.

Lord Carnarvon seemed more interested in reading the paper than taking in the otherworldly scenery, but Carter continued to gaze out of the window in wonder. Here, far from the frontlines, it was easy to forget that Mars was currently a war zone. That was until they passed the burnt-out shells of a squadron of tanks and the tri-limbed skeletons of Martian war machines. There couldn’t have been many places left on the planet that hadn’t felt the unkind touch of war.

They entered a valley, the rock face visible from Carter’s window looming high above them. He could see towering pillars of rock and myriad recessed cave mouths. And yet there was something strangely uniform about the positioning of the caves, as well as the rising columns of stone and protruding bedrock buttresses.

It took Carter a moment to realise that he wasn’t looking at some natural, erosion-formed feature, but something, if not man-made, then made by other hands millennia—if not millions of years—before. They had arrived at Marineris City at last, and their arrival marked the end of a journey that had taken them a whole month.

From Luxor—having barely had time to pack, and only being told that they were needed urgently on Mars following the disappearance of another archaeological team working there—Carter and Carnarvon had been flown to Heathrow, along with their select team, and from there to RAM Rendlesham to commence the first leg of their flight to the battlefront in this war of the worlds. After leaving Earth, they had stopped at Copernicus Sound on the Moon, where the lunar colony’s electromagnetic accelerator had given their rocket the impetus it needed to travel the two hundred million miles or more to Mars. Twenty-eight days later, they had reached Martian orbit and from there descended to the Tharsis spaceport.

The ancient alien ruins, named Marineris City by the planet’s new occupying forces, housed the headquarters of the British Stellar Expeditionary Force, just as it had done ever since the first rockets made planetfall fifteen years ago.

The truck crossed a protruding causeway, the valley floor dropping away another thousand feet below them, passed through a pair of doors tall as a Martian war machine, and then through another set that closed behind them before it pulled up at the entrance to a vast chamber.

Exiting the transport, they were able to remove their oppressive environmental suits at last, although Carter felt like the smell of hot rubber would remain with him for some time. His vision freed from the limits of what he could see through his helmet’s visor, he took in the impressive, oppressive scale of the place.

The chamber appeared to be some kind of spinal passageway that, as far as Carter could tell, might well connect one end of the impossibly vast city to the other. Its supporting arches rose above them like the ribs of some ancient beached leviathan. Doorways and other access points that had clearly been designed for a race of beings far taller than humankind dwarfed the personnel that busily milled about the place, going about their military business.

Metal staircases and spanning girder walkways had been fixed to the existing structures, enabling the soldiers and non-combatants alike to access the different levels, while miles of vulcanised-rubber-coated cabling trailed from junction boxes, great arc lights and the tatty speakers of a public address system. Bold white arrows had been painted on the ground; traffic markings for the military vehicles that moved about the place.

A smartly dressed officer as stiff and straight as a pole, whose uniform bore the rank insignia of major, emerged from one of the gaping portals and greeted them with a particularly firm handshake each.

“Lord Carnarvon. Mr Carter. I am Major Gordon,” he introduced himself. “I am to be your guide while you are here on Mars.”

“Is this where we’re to be billeted?” Carnarvon asked, taking in the vast spinal corridor with a sweep of his hand.

“Oh no, my lord,” the major was quick to correct him. “Marineris City is only the first stop on your Grand Tour, as it were.”

“So where are we headed?” Carter asked. “It looks like we could spend a lifetime examining and cataloguing the secrets of this site alone.”

“I’m sure you could, sir,” Major Gordon replied, “but before we travel to your final destination, there is something you must see here.”

Carnarvon barked at the crew of Egyptian diggers not to unload their equipment but remain with the truck, as the Major led them up a ramp and through a circular doorway, above which the words ‘Whitehall Forward Command & Control’ had been stencilled in big black letters.

They passed through rooms where all manner of military personnel worked at green-glowing terminals and map projection screens, monitoring the progress of the war across half a dozen battlefronts right across the planet.

Carter’s head was in a spin. It was still less than twelve hours since they had set down on Mars and been roused from their month-long sojourn aboard the rocket ship Scott. Since then he had barely had more than a cup of tea to drink and a round of fish paste sandwiches to eat and he was both hungry and disoriented. Every turn they made revealed new marvels, which only added to his sense of dislocation.

They eventually entered a cramped corridor which led to a solid steel door surrounded by more stencilled signs that read ‘No Unauthorised Admittance’ and ‘Red Book Only’. Ignoring the signs, Major Gordon turned the wheel-lock, opened the door and stepped through. Carter stepped through after him, and found himself in a chamber that appeared to have been turned into some sort of lab. And then he saw what was spread across the domed roof above him.

He gawped, like some idiot schoolboy seeing his first pair of breasts.

It was a frieze. In places the plaster had been lost, exposing the hexagonal blocks from which the dome had been constructed. But what remained was more than enough to leave Howard Carter staring open-mouthed at the alien fresco, and the deeper truths than one simple find contained.

It was clearly a map of the solar system, although not the solar system as it was currently known to man. At the apex of the dome had been painted the fiery orb of the sun. Heading outwards from the centre, the planets had been painted and their elliptical orbits demarcated too. Not only that, but strange beings, the likes of which Carter had never seen, had been painted next to the different planets, which Carter could only surmise were supposed to be representations of the species that lived on each of the worlds.

Third from the Sun was a blue-green sphere that Carter was certain had to be the Earth, polar icecaps included, although the continents were all bunched together in one vast primordial landmass. And it wasn’t only the arrangement of the continents that was wrong; rather than representations of Mankind being painted beside it, the inhabitants of the Earth were shown as ungodly reptilian monsters, more akin to dinosaurs than men.

The Moon was also shown in its orbit around the Earth and was home to yet more unearthly creatures.

Next came Mars itself, but despite there being four different races depicted around the red planet, none of them looked like the Martians Carter knew of. Instead, the creatures that had attempted to invade Earth not twenty-five years before were shown next to a small white-grey sphere, which circled the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

“Where’s the asteroid belt?” Carnarvon said at Carter’s shoulder.

“There.” He pointed at the ‘Martian’ origin-world. “Some catastrophe must have befallen it, destroying the planet and creating the asteroid belt, while its denizens were forced to find somewhere else to live. Clearly they chose Mars.”

“It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?” said Major Gordon.

“It certainly changes our understanding of the solar system.”

Staring at the ancient map, Carter felt like he was gazing upon the wall paintings of Tutankhamun’s tomb again for the first time.

“This, I take it, is the reason you brought us to Mars.”

“Oh no,” said Major Gordon with a smile. “This is just to give you some context. You might say this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

THEY BARELY HAD time to freshen up, after a month locked inside a rocket ship, and have something to eat at the nearby mess hall before they had to don their environmental suits again and re-join the diggers aboard the transport. And so they set off once more, but with Major Gordon in tow this time.

They were three hours into their transfer flight from Marineris City, their stratocraft chasing the solar terminator over mountains the colour of iron oxide, when Carter asked Major Gordon, “Where precisely are you taking us, Major?”

“There,” the officer said and pointed through a porthole. He didn’t need to say anything else.

The Head dominated the landscape. Over a mile in length, the mesa rose from the near featureless plain that surrounded it to a height of almost half a mile. This close to the structure, there could be no doubting that, in millennia long past, some ancient race had—by means as yet unknown—reordered the mountainous peak to resemble a colossal face.

“Good God!” Carnarvon exclaimed as he too set eyes on the astonishing edifice.

“Until only recently, it was one of the Martian hives,” Gordon said.

“Why, what happened recently?” asked Carter.

“It was cleared out following a push by our own forces.”

Carter considered once more the frieze they had been shown at Marineris City. “But you don’t believe it was created by them. The invaders, I mean.”

“No, we don’t,” Gordon confirmed. “And that is why you are here.”

UPON THEIR ARRIVAL at Cydonia, Carter and Carnarvon—along with their limited team of excavators—disembarked from the stratocraft, the Egyptians quickly unloading what little equipment that had been able to bring with them from the Valley of the Kings dig-site.

Carter stared up at the near sheer sides of the mesa before them. Despite clearly having been created from a pre-existing topographical feature on the planet’s surface, a great doorway had been cut into its southern side, flanked by inhuman colossi that reminded Carter of the temples of Ramses the Second and Nefertari at Abu Simbel. In other places, the Martian bedrock had been sculpted into immense, awe-inspiring, geometric forms.

Major Gordon led them along what looked like the remains of a processional avenue and through an airlock that had clearly been placed there by the British Army so that an atmosphere breathable to humans might be maintained inside the Head, just as at Marineris City.

On the other side, they found themselves in a vast, high-ceilinged gallery where they were able to remove their hazard suits once more. A group of temporary huts had been put together against one wall, and so vast was the space that they were dwarfed by the soaring walls.

This, they learned, was to be their base for the duration of their stay. Having had a chance to choose their bunks, wash, and change, the two adventurers enjoyed a sit down meal in the mess tent next door. But they weren’t permitted to rest for long.

“Gentlemen,” Major Gordon said, a nervous tic having taken hold of one eyebrow as he watched Carter and Carnarvon polish off a plate of corned beef hash, “time is pressing. Every minute we delay here might prolong the war by another day. There is work to be done.”

“So you keep telling us,” Lord Carnarvon said, mopping up the last of the grease congealing on his salver with a hunk of bread, “but you still haven’t told us precisely why the powers that be have seen fit to drag our arses to Mars.”

“If you come with me, I will show you,” the officer said, with just the slightest hint of impatient irritation in his voice.

“Very well then,” Lord Carnarvon huffed. “Come on, Carter, it’s time we were up and at it.”

“At last,” muttered Carter, rising from the bench and wiping the gravy from his moustache with a napkin.

Emerging from the mess tent, he became aware of a figure bumbling towards them from further along the gallery.

It was a portly gentleman, with thinning brown hair, and a neatly trimmed goatee upon his wobbling chins, wearing a Harris Tweed three-piece suit and a garish, mustard-coloured bowtie.

Beaming from ear to ear, the man marched up to Carter, hand outstretched.

“Allow me to introduce Professor Stephen Langford,” Major Gordon said.

“A pleasure, Mr Carter, an absolute pleasure,” the academic gushed, pumping his hand furiously. “Your work in Egypt? Quite incredible!”

“Thank you, Professor.”

“But I would hazard to say that what we have to show you here will rival even those wonderful things you found in Tutankhamun’s tomb,” the other man said, suppressing a giggle. He glanced at Major Gordon. “I take it you’ve seen the Marineris mural?”

“Indeed we have,” chipped in Lord Carnarvon. “Quite astonishing.”

“And yet, only the tip of the iceberg, or so we’re told,” Carter added.

“Quite. Quite!” chuckled Langford.

“We tried to get Professor Henry Jones from Princeton University to join us, but the Powers That Be wouldn’t hear of it,” Carter went on. “And besides, he would probably have said he was too busy looking for the Holy Grail to get involved.”

“But the Holy Grail is here!” laughed Langford. “Come with me. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

PROFESSOR LANGFORD LED the way along the length of the arterial hallway. They passed archway after archway, and while Carter tried to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond each one, Major Gordon made sure he and Carnarvon stayed on track.

Reaching an archway ten times the height of a man, Langford led them through into a chamber lit by arc lights. The artificial light reflected from myriad tiles that seemed to have a finish similar to mother-of-pearl. Passing through this angular chamber, bathed in opalescent light, they entered another vaulted space, this one almost organic in shape. The undulating floor was dotted with a host of other organic forms, and yet each one—from those that looked like tree-tall mushrooms to others that looked like branching undersea corals—appeared to make been cast in some sort of ceramic.

Langford led them deeper still, into a dark connecting passageway littered with shattered pots, and from there into the grandest chamber yet. Its towering walls curved towards the apex of the roof. The floor was covered with mounds of rubble and other things that reminded Carter of the rubbish-strewn abandoned battlefields they had passed on the way to this place, as well as some of the things he had seen in the newsreels reporting on the Martian war effort. But what was most astonishing of all, the thing that took his breath away merely to gaze upon it, was the vast mural that appeared to cover every inch of wall space.

Gordon and Langford had been right—the mural map of the solar system he had seen in the Red Book room was nothing compared to this breath-taking work of art. Just to look upon it caused him to burst into unmanly tears, and that was without yet fully understanding what it showed. Outlandish figures, some in profile like the kings and gods of Ancient Egyptian wall paintings, stood amidst shell-like structures that could have been either natural forms or examples of alien architecture. Stylised streamers tumbled from coral-pink skies while a distant horizon burned with frozen flames and the impossibly perfect waves of a long-gone ocean rippled across one entire wall.

And everywhere Carter looked, he saw golden curls and spirals arranged in regimented columns and isolated roundels.

“Hieroglyphs!” he gasped, blinking back the tears. “Well, some form of writing, at least.”

“Quite, Mr Carter,” Langford chuckled. “Quite.”

“If only we had some kind of key to help us decode their meaning,” Carter mused, gazing at the columns of curving script. “Our own Rosetta st—”

“Miss Stone,” Langford suddenly said, interposing upon his ponderings.

Hearing trotting footsteps behind him, Carter turned.

She was svelte, with pale skin and auburn hair tumbling about her shoulders. She was wearing a light cotton blouse and a pair of highly fashionable—not to say practical—cream linen trousers. In fact, she was everything Howard Carter would have looked for in a woman, had he been looking. And there was something about the glint in her sapphire eyes that suggested she had the wits to rival her beauty.

Miss Stone stepped forward, right hand outstretched confidently. “Mr Carter, I presume,” she said.

He accepted the proffered hand, losing himself in those limpid blue eyes for a moment. “The pleasure’s all mine.”

“Miss Stone is my assistant,” Professor Langford said, breaking the moment between them. “She has been studying the Martians’ language with me for some time and has made some significant breakthroughs in translating aspects of it.”

“Really? You must tell me more, Miss Stone,” Carter said.

“Gladly,” she replied coyly.

UNSURPRISINGLY, IT WAS the images locked within the ancient murals that were the key. While the symbols employed by the alien alphabet were not hieroglyphs, such as those of Pharaonic Egypt, they had been used to repeatedly annotate the paintings in what Professor Langford referred to as the Cydonian Tapestry—not that it was a tapestry, of course, but then neither was its namesake in Bayeux. But what it did have in common with the Norman embroidery, commemorating the Battle of Hastings, was that it told a story through the pictures that had been meticulously painted upon it countless aeons before.

By trial and error, Miss Stone had managed to link certain combinations of symbols—he hesitated to call them letters—with images repeated throughout the massive frieze.

Carter imagined the original inhabitants of this world slaving to create this secret masterpiece, just as the kings of Upper and Lower Egypt had set their people to decorating their magnificent tombs with their notable achievements in life as well as their as yet un-travelled journeys into the afterlife.

What Miss Stone lacked was an understanding of the detail, but with another agile mind to bounce ideas off, and sometimes to provide alternative suggestions, between them they were able to unlock the meaning behind other sections of the frieze and the blocks of bordered text that Carter liked to refer to as cartouches, for want of a better word.

At times, in order to make any progress at all, they were forced to take wild flights of fancy, which more often than not led to dead-ends. But every once in a while they would result in the cryptographers tapping into seams of hieroglyphic gold. And as their understanding of the alien language grew so did their deeper mutual understanding of each other.

So they continued to work together to decode the secrets of the aeons-old Martian tongue, while Lord Carnarvon supervised their team of diggers as they continued to clear the detritus left by the invaders when this place had been one of their hives, revealing yet more of the astonishing frieze in the process. But there were still gaps in their knowledge of the alien language, and not so much gaps as great gaping holes.

But then, one day, when the Egyptians were busy clearing rubble and other rubbish from one of the other chambers within the Head, Lord Carnarvon, accompanied by Professor Langford, joined Howard Carter and Miss Stone in the Cydonian Tapestry chamber and said, “So what wonderful things have you uncovered this time?”

Carter stepped back from the lamp-lit section of the great curving wall they had been concentrating on for the last two days, surveyed the great work of the alien ancients, and saw their story as clearly as he had seen the truths hidden within the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

“This was once a vibrant, fertile world,” he began, losing himself in the tale, becoming the narrator of a story set down millions of years before, “until the invaders came, bringing with them war on a planetary scale. The cataclysm followed fast on their heels. The invaders’ home was destroyed and the resulting planetary shift robbed Mars of its atmosphere.”

“That cosmic consequence of the birth-world’s destruction wiped out the indigenous species before they could be assimilated,” said Miss Stone, taking up the tale. “Our plan remained incomplete and we were trapped here. All we could do was watch and wait, until your kind had evolved into something we could use.”

Carter looked at her, consternation write large upon his face. There was a distant look in her eyes, as she waxed lyrical about the Mars that once was, rather than Mars as it was now, in 1923. The way she spoke about that former age, it was as if she were recalling her own memories of that time, almost as if she had been there to witness what was laid out in the mural first-hand.

As she continued to reminisce about the end of days, the archaeologist’s assistant began to advance towards him.

“Miss Stone?” he managed, perturbed by this unexpected turn of events.

“It was so beautiful,” she said, her glittering sapphire eyes glazing over, “the comet-tails of the meteorites turning pink in the planet’s atmosphere as pieces of our broken world fell upon this one.”

She continued to move towards him, and began to unbutton her blouse as she did so.

“What are you doing?” Carter yelled at her. “Keep your clothes on, please, Miss Stone!”

But then his protests died in his throat as, backed up against the bowl of the mural wall, unable to take his eyes from her chemise, he noticed something moving beneath the cotton, independent of the action of her fingers. And as she pulled open her blouse the full horror of her true form was revealed.

Her torso was little more than a hideous alien face. What he had taken to be the bulge of her breasts beneath the fabric were in fact the protruding orbits of the face’s sunken eye-sockets. Eyes, as black as obsidian pearls, blinked at him, as if just coming to full wakefulness. Below the eyes, a beaked mouth champed, without making a sound, while emerging from her ribcage on either side were myriad stunted pseudopods, the very same that had helped push open the blouse.

In his panic, as the thing—he could no longer think of it as Miss Stone—reached for him with half-formed tentacles, he shouted to Lord Carnarvon for help. But his sponsor had problems of his own. Out of the corner of his eye, Carter saw the lord wrestling with Professor Langford. The archaeologist had Carnarvon’s hands gripped tightly in his, and was pressing himself upon the old man, a nest of tentacles rippling from between the popping buttons of his waistcoat.

It was all too much for Carter. At least when he had opened the tomb of Tutankhamun, despite all the talk of curses, the Pharaoh’s mummy hadn’t tried to kill him! As the thing that had been Miss Stone came for him, seizing the initiative, he went for her instead. Before she could lay her hands upon him, he grabbed her wrists, hooked a leg behind hers, and forcibly pushed her backwards, sending her tumbling to the ground.

Leaving her sprawled on the ground, the alien face in her chest mewling pathetically with its tentacles clutching ineffectually at the empty air, Carter sprinted between the piles of debris, heading towards the grappling Carnarvon and Langford and the way out of the Cydonian Tapestry chamber.

Reaching the wrestling pair, he delivered a violent chopping blow to the back of Langford’s neck. The Professor immediately went limp, his legs buckling beneath him and his hold on Carnarvon’s hands going slack. Carnarvon kicked himself free of his attacker and, without a word, followed Carter as he made for the exit.

As the things that had been masquerading as Miss Stone and Professor Langford struggled to their feet, Carter sprinted out of great vaulted chamber and ran slap-bang into Major Gordon.

“Ah, Major!” he gasped, his heart racing. “You have to help us! Miss Stone and Professor Langford are not human.”

The Major smiled. “Not entirely, anyway.”

“What are you talking about, man?” Lard Carnarvon exclaimed, joining them.

“You could call them prototypes, I suppose. Martian-human hybrids. The next stage in our evolution,” the officer explained calmly.

“Our evolution?” Carter repeated. “Then you’re...”

“One of them? Yes.” The two men stared at this officer of the British Army. “Try not to take offence, gentlemen, but you were merely test subjects in an experiment.”

“To see if you could pass for human,” Carter said grimly.

“That is correct. If we are to conquer Earth, we must become more like you. Our early failures taught us that.”

“Then my suspicions were correct.”

“Your suspicions?” A look of pure human bewilderment passed across Major Gordon’s face.

“Yes. When we were ‘recruited’ back on Earth, we were told the original archaeological team had gone missing.”

“By Jove!” Carnarvon gasped. “So we were.”

“As soon as we were greeted by Professor Langford I wondered if something was wrong. And when nobody even remarked upon the disappearance, or offered a reason as to why the Professor and Miss Stone were no longer missing, I realised something was definitely amiss. I just wasn’t sure what.”

Both Major Gordon and Lord Carnarvon were staring at him now, dumbfounded.

“So I continued to play along with your little charade to see how much I could find out about what was really going on.”

“Charade?” protested Major Gordon.

“You almost had me fooled, too. I was ready to believe I had been mistaken and that the Professor and Miss Stone had come through whatever ordeal had befallen them and returned unscathed. Until just now, in fact, when Miss Stone could contain herself no longer.” And when their contact in the British Army also said nothing of Langford and Stone’s disappearance or otherwise, Carter knew he must be part of the mystery too.

“What good are your suspicions to you now?”

Carter started as Professor Langford and Miss Stone joined them in the shadowy passageway, waistcoat and blouse pulled closed again to hide their hybridised deformities.

“They are suspicions no longer,” Carter corrected the Professor. “Now we have evidence, I intend to tell our masters in the British Government all that we have learned here.”

“You really think we’ll just let you walk out of here?” Miss Stone laughed, a cruel smile playing about her artfully rouged lips.

“Yes.”

The hum of a blaster powering up had them all looking at Carter’s hand, the same hand that was holding the weapon, the weapon that he had snatched from Major Gordon’s holster when the two had collided in the corridor.

“You can’t escape,” Major Gordon said, taking a step forward.

“Run, George!” Carter hissed at Carnarvon.

The aging lord didn’t need to be told twice. As he took off at a breathless dash, back through the chambers of marvels, Major Gordon made his move and sprang at Carter.

The blaster fired and the beam of brilliant emerald energy hit the Major in the stomach. He gave a weak cry as he fell but the shriek of pain that came from the vicinity of his ribcage was much louder and more protracted.

Screaming like a banshee, Miss Stone came for him again, the Professor lumbering after his more agile assistant.

Carter picked his target and fired, but he had been too eager to take down the Major and, not being used to how such weapons worked, had kept his finger on the trigger for too long, draining the charge in one shot. It would be some moments before the blaster would be charged enough to fire again.

He turned and ran instead. He could hear the echoing footfalls and the inhuman hissing of his pursuers as he headed back through the magnificent halls of the Head. He didn’t once look back, pushing over the tripod stands of arc-lights as he passed them, creating obstacles at every arched entrance, anything to slow the creatures’ pursuit. Catching up with Lord Carnarvon, he supported the old man as they passed through one alien-formed gallery after another.

Ahmed, leader of the excavator gang, looked up in surprise as they entered the grand hallway at a stumbling run. The Egyptian was wearing a galabeya and had a threadbare fez on his head. “Mr Carter?” he said.

“It’s time, Ahmed,” Carter gasped as he and the panting Lord Carnarvon stumbled to a halt, hands on knees as they desperately tried to recover their breath.

Ahmed didn’t ask what it was time for; he simply started shouting loudly and rapidly in Arabic. In response, his ten-strong team hurriedly donned their environmental suits and grabbed what tools and other possessions they could, as Carter pulled on his own suit while also helping a sweating Carnarvon into his.

Carter ushered Ahmed and his crew into the pressurisation chamber, two of the Egyptians taking Lord Carnarvon by the arms and almost carrying him into the airlock.

The Professor and his assistant—whatever they were now—had caught up with them again.

He wondered what had become of the real Professor Langford and Miss Stone. Had their bodies been invaded by their alien hosts? Or were these forms merely duplicates, created by who knew what unholy science; able to mimic the originals in every way, down to the slightest gesture or subtlest inflection of the voice?

But at the end of the day, the details did not matter. What he was about to do would avenge them both—the people they had been, if not the false Martian-hybrids they had become.

Stood at the entrance to the airlock, he picked up the wooden box with the wires trailing from it and pressed down hard on the plunger, sticking out of it.

As the crump of a distant detonation reached him from the far sides of the great entrance hall, with the two hybrids charging towards him, still hissing, he turned and entered the airlock himself, slamming the door shut behind him and spinning the wheel before fleeing the Head altogether.

Ahmed and the Egyptians were already fleeing across the flat plain before the ancient edifice, carrying Lord Carnarvon with them. Carter kept running, his own panting breath loud inside the hood of his environment suit, but not so loud that he couldn’t hear the boom of the explosives going off, one after another.

Before long he felt them too: the trembling of the ground beneath his feet; the gust of sudden dust-storm suddenly beating at his back; the intense pressure of the concussive waves agonisingly painful inside his ears.

Only when Ahmed and the others stopped running did he turn and survey the consequences of his actions.

Dust hung in great ochre clouds above the mesa. Where the grand processional avenue had once stood, now there was nothing but a colossal pile of collapsed rock, half a mile high, where the walls of the gully had subsided as the explosions inside the Head caused the roof to cave in. He could only imagine the damage that had been done to the priceless treasures they had been forced to leave behind.

Major Gordon, Professor Langford and Miss Stone might not have let Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon out of their sight while they worked within the Cydonian Head, but they had been less careful when it came to Ahmed and his team of Egyptian excavators.

The setting of the explosives had been a precautionary measure. Carter had genuinely hoped they wouldn’t prove necessary. But when his worst fears were confirmed, no matter the cost, he knew what had to be done. After all, there was a war on.

And so he watched the dust cloud drift over the plain, carried by the Martian breeze, as the ancient chambers of the Cydonian Head were buried beneath millions of tons of rock, the tears running down his cheeks and into his moustache.

IT HAD BEEN Lord Carnarvon who pointed out that they didn’t know who else within the Stellar Expeditionary Force had already been replaced by replicants.

As far as anyone on Mars was concerned, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had died along with Professor Langford, Miss Stone and Major Gordon. Not knowing who they could trust on Mars, and with no one searching for them—there was a war on, after all—they were able to smuggle themselves off planet thanks to liberal applications of Lord Carnarvon’s great wealth, and return to Earth before anyone knew they had actually survived the destruction of the Cydonian Head.

It was only once they were back home that the two men felt confident enough to report their findings to the authorities without also having to fear for their safety.

But it turned out that what they had learned on Mars was a curse more real than that associated with any pharaoh’s resting place.

Not long after they had returned to Earth and made their report, Carter read in the paper over breakfast, one April morning, that Lord Carnarvon had died suddenly, as a result of a mosquito bite he had acquired in Egypt—or so The Interceptor had it—and in the very same article the two-bit hack who must have written it wondered if he had been a victim of the Curse of Tutankhamun.

Their trip to Mars had never made public, and Carter realised then that it never would be. If all Lord Carnarvon’s wealth and status hadn’t been able to protect him, then Carter knew it could only be a matter of time before a mosquito—or a runaway taxi cab—did for him too. He resolved to get as far away from the British authorities as possible. He would escape to America.

And so it was that, a fortnight after he and Lord Carnarvon had passed on all that he had learnt during their brief sojourn on the red planet to their masters in Whitehall, Howard Carter arrived at the Crystal Palace Aerodrome in London and joined the queue to board the next flight to New York.

All manner of other people—men and women of all ages and different backgrounds, not to mention skin tones—continued to join the queue behind him, fumbling with their papers and boarding passes. As he shuffled along, keeping his place in the line, his racing pulse began to slow and a smile spread across his face. He had almost made it. As soon as he was on board he would be able to relax properly for the first time in weeks.

As he made his way closer and closer to the boarding gate, two men—dressed in dark suits, unsuited to warmer climes, and one of them wearing a Homburg—watched from the shadows beneath the departures board until there were a dozen or more people behind Carter, before taking their place in line.

Red Frame, White Heat
a remarkable case, by

ANDREW LANE

STANDING ON THE observation deck of the passenger submersible HMS Iolanthe, in front of the thick glass windows that had protected us from the ocean’s perils for so long, I stared out at the bustling New York harbour. The contrast between the Martian-provided technology of the British Empire and the dowdy self-produced machinery of the American democracy was clear. On the one hand I could see several sleek British flying machines gracefully approaching or leaving the city in the cloudless blue skies, while our passenger submersible cleaved cleanly through the waves below them, its multiple articulated metal oars—which had powered us tirelessly through the passage from Southampton—now held upright as sails, catching the wind and pushing us gently towards landfall. The American vessels, by contrast, were dirty, steam-driven things with massive, clumsy wheels on their sides or at their sterns, looking like something a giant hamster might have used for recreation. The few local aircraft I could see seemed like they were held together by wires, spit and sawdust. They had several wings, teetering above each other in a stack and separated by fragile spars, whereas the British aircraft had just one triangular wing each, perfectly formed for its function. It was like comparing swans with ducks, or cheetahs with tabby cats.

As soon at the Iolanthe docked, I pushed my way through the passengers to the disembarkation ramp. We had been underwater for over a week, with only two surfacings in order to replenish our air and take our bearings from the stars, and I was in need of space, light and a stiff gin-and-tonic. And some peace and quiet—the constant deep thrumm of the machinery powering the oars had given me an almost-constant headache.

First, however, I had to get through the American customs system.

“Name?”

“Monkton Wylde,” I said.

The uniformed official didn’t bother to glance up from my passport. “Purpose of visit?”

“Entertainment, respite and recreation.”

“You intending to conduct any business while you’re here, sir?”

“Absolutely not,” I lied. Or, at least, I stretched the truth somewhat. In point of fact, I considered my work to be both entertaining and relaxing. It was, however, not the kind of thing one admitted to in public.

“Address while in the USA?”

I gave him the address of a fictional hotel in the downtown area. He needed something for his records, while I needed a modicum of secrecy, and so we were both satisfied. Or so I thought.

He looked up, and his shrewd gaze met mine. “You look like a professional to me, Mr Wylde. You sure you’re not going to conduct any business here?”

“Very sure.”

“You got a job, back in England?”

“I’m a man of leisure,” I replied. “Independent means.”

“Not an agent of your Government, then?”

“Heaven forfend.”

“And what was the name of that hotel again.”

I recited it back to him. His belief that he might trip me up over something so trivial as the name of a non-existent hotel was touching. I had my cover story memorised forwards, backwards and upside down.

“Only I’ve never heard of that hotel. You sure you got it right?”

“There must be thousands of hotels in New York,” I pointed out reasonably, “with more springing up every day. You seem like a competent sort of cove, but I would be amazed if you’d memorised every single one.”

“And you’ve only got the one bag. You sure you ain’t going to stay on here and try to make a fast buck?”

“I never travel with much luggage,” I said truthfully. “I always buy fresh clothes when I arrive.” I smiled. “It keeps the local economy going, at least. Puts some hard currency into this fine country of yours.”

I’d expected this, of course. It wasn’t that he had any doubts about me personally, or my requirement to enter New York; it was entirely to do with the jealousy that all Americans had for us Brits. We had the technology from the Martians and they didn’t. We weren’t going to give it to them—not without a quid pro quo that they just didn’t have, at any rate. We had taken all the casualties from the Martian invasion, and it was our British bacteria that had finally defeated the callous creatures, so we had a right to keep and exploit whatever they had left behind. To the victor, the spoils. Or finders-keepers. Something like that.

I paused, waiting, and let my fingers tap on the sheet of paper that constituted my passport, roughly where the words were that said: Her Britannic Majesty requires and commands all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary. Eventually he grimaced, and let me through. Small irritations; that’s all they could deliver to us. We just had to grin and bear it, secure in the knowledge that we could travel back and forth to America five times in the time it took them to make one tedious and cramped journey across the Atlantic.

I secured a carriage quickly and directed it to Times Square, where I swapped to a different carriage, making sure that nobody was following me. I had forgotten how debilitating the grinding of the wheels on the hard streets could be: I could feel a dull ache in my lower back where the vibrations had been transmitted. The multiple mechanical legs of British hansoms and growlers were far more relaxing, and far more practical over uneven ground.

I directed a second cab to my preferred hotel—a brownstone overlooking Central Park—and took a suite of rooms. Despite the presence of a personal valet, a trouser press and a collar-starching machine on the Iolanthe I felt distinctly dishevelled—or, at least, some distance from being fully shevelled—so I spent a few hours on Fifth Avenue, purchasing clothes and toiletries. Having changed my clothes and sent the remaining purchases back to my hotel I ate a decent steak and headed off to Barnum’s American Museum at the junction of Broadway and Anne Street—not for entertainment, respite and relaxation, as I had told the customs official, but because that was where I was to meet my contact.

The place was crowded, and stank of body odour and burning gas lamps. I drifted with the crowd, expressing feigned amazement at the two beluga whales and the FeeJee Mermaid, but like everyone else I was heading for the Martian enclosure.

The creature sat in the centre of a fenced podium, with armed guards posted every ten feet around the circumference. They were armed with projectile weapons, of course, which probably wouldn’t have been much use if it had tried to escape and if it had been a real Martian. Fire-throwing weapons such as were used by the British Army would have been far more effective, but we certainly weren’t going to give the Americans any of those. We might want to take the country back one day, and we needed to preserve an advantage in weaponry, as well as in morals.

The Martian didn’t look well—its tentacles lay flaccidly around its leathery body and its eyes were glassy. Every now and then it gave a kind-of shudder, then subsided again. The crowd “ooh”ed and “aah”ed every time it twitched, but I was not impressed.

I felt someone move up behind me. The perfume immediately told me it was a woman of some breeding and refinement. As did her bustle, which pressed against my hip.

“I’m guessing there’s a cow inside,” I said, without turning my head. “Or perhaps an elderly horse. I can see some stitching around the underneath, and the skin has been patchily tanned.”

“Two monkeys,” her rich, contralto voice answered. “Apparently Barnum tried a cow, but it just sat there. At least the monkeys try to get out every now and then, which results in flailing tentacles and a general feel that the thing might leap up and attack the audience. They love that. Everyone loves to be scared.”

“They should try it for real sometime. Maybe they might change their minds.”

Her voice contained the trace of a smile. “You sound as if you are talking from experience. Have you ever really been scared, Mr Wylde? I mean, truly scared.”

I remembered my recent work, tracking down the source of strange transmissions received via the transatlantic cable at Foilhommerum Bay in Ireland, and shuddered. “Miss Bridges, I presume,” I said, turning my head.

She was tall, with coppery-red hair and violet eyes. “It’s ‘Mrs’,” she said, extending her hand to be kissed, “and please, call me ‘Fenny’.”

I took her hand and obliged with the kiss. “I couldn’t possibly do that, Mrs Bridges.”

“You’re in America now. We both are. Unstarch that collar. Unstiffen that upper lip.”

“If I do that,” I pointed out, “nobody will be able to tell that I am British.”

“Well, we are supposed to be undercover, surely?” She smiled. “Oh, I suppose we should go through the tedious identification ritual. ‘We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future’.”

It was the required line from George Bernard Shaw, and I responded with the appropriate, “’Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance’.”

She nodded, suddenly practical. “Where do you want to start?”

“I presume you have the confiscated items in storage somewhere. Are they nearby?”

“Indeed. I will take you there. Have you eaten?”

“I have.”

“Well, I have a hip flask of whisky for the journey.”

“You’ve been researching me. Well done.” I looked at the bustle covering her hips. “I’m expecting quite a large flask, if that’s where you are hiding it.”

She smiled. “And I was expecting you to expect that. I have done my research.”

The items were in a warehouse on the docks, perhaps half an hour’s drive away. I saw no guards, but I thought I saw movement in the tall weeds that surrounded it, and along the guttering that lined its roof, and the glint of metal in the late afternoon sunlight. Some tiny British mechanical devices, scuttling along on eight metal legs, or just pigeons or rats? If the former then I considered it risky, bringing Martian technology to America and risking it being stolen and exploited, but perhaps a decision had been taken at a higher level than mine. And perhaps they would explode in the hands of anyone who stole them, which would simultaneously solve the immediate problem and also discourager les autres.

Mrs Bridges unlocked the padlock which secured the door and gestured to me to enter. Politely, I waved her through first. Well, politely, and in the unlikely event that the place was booby-trapped.

The space inside was buttressed by beams of orange light shining through windows in the roof. Every now and then one of the scuttling guards—or pigeons, or rats—blocked the light as it moved past. I could hear the clicking of claws on the metal cladding high above me.

Several trestle tables had been put up in the centre of the warehouse. I approached them curiously. Mrs Bridges followed.

The first table contained several brick-sized objects with two mushroom-shaped metal projections on top.

“Voltaic cells?” I ventured tentatively.

Mrs Bridges nodded. “Similar, but rather than using a liquid, they are completely solid. We have taken one apart, and discovered that it comprises a number of thin sheets of metal of two different types, both unknown, interleaved. We do not know what the metals are or how they work together.”

“And the power output?”

“High—many times that which a Voltaic cell could achieve, even if one could build such a cell at this small size. I am not saying it is comparable with the Martian energy storage devices we use back in England, but they are not too far short.”

“And there is no hint of Martian technology inside?”

“No—these are entirely home-grown. American-built.”

“I see.” I moved on to the next table. The object there baffled me for a moment, and I had to step back and try to work out its form and function. I realised after a while that it consisted of a pair of Army boots, but so surrounded by articulated mechanical skeletons that had been strapped to them, they almost looked as if they were imprisoned. The skeletons were connected via gears, pistons and levers to two flat paddles lying flat on the table. These looked like they were meant to operate as surrogate feet, powered by two of the energy storage devices on the previous table.

“It’s a pantograph,” I said eventually. “Or, rather, two pantographs. Mechanical linkages connected in a manner based on the principle of parallelograms so that a small movement can be exaggerated into a larger one. But what is the point?”

“Imagine infantry wearing these devices in battle,” she said darkly. “They could move faster and further than the equivalent British soldiers. And imagine it then extended to a harness around the shoulders and arms, allowing for heavier loads to be picked up and moved around. Imagine, if you will, a troop of soldiers each of whom could individually carry and fire a Gatling gun, or a Maxim gun.”

“A frightening thought,” I said. “The technological gap between England and the United States is necessary for world peace. If they look like they are seeking to bridge it then a war might result, before they become too much of a threat to us.”

“Which is, I presume, why you are here,” she said. “To find the source of this technology, and quash it.” She frowned—a sweet expression on her perfectly formed face. “Or quell it. Quash or quell? Which is correct?”

“If these items come from some furnace burning with the white heat of American technological knowhow,” I said, “then I shall quench its fire with all the vigour I have. So—quench, I think.” I moved to the next table. “And what is this monstrosity?”

It was an object the size of a barrel, made I believe from teak or mahogany, surrounded top and bottom by a circular arrangement similar to the metal oars on the Iolanthe but much smaller. They were obviously designed to spin around a central axis instead of beating against the water in a regular rhythm.

“We believe it to be a flying device, powered again by the energy storage devices. There is space inside for a considerable amount of explosive, but what we actually found inside was this.” She gestured to the next table, where a mechanism like the interior of a clock sat: all gleaming brass, cogs, gears and springs. Several tubes ended in glass lenses, and right in the centre I thought I saw a wax cylinder.

“A recording device,” I ventured, “but one which records light rather than sound, encapsulating it in wax. How incredibly clever.”

“These things might fly above our troops, observing their formations and their movements, and take that information back to the Generals who ordered their use,” Mrs Bridges murmured. “And then they might fly back filled with explosives.”

“Horrifying,” I said, and I meant it.

I retrieved a magnifying glass from my coat and examined the brasswork carefully, my gaze moving from rod to strut and gear to cog as slowly as an ant would walk. “The components have been machined well,” I murmured. I reached out and touched one of the gears with my little finger, then put the finger in my mouth to taste it. “And the lubricant used is not the superior substance we use in England, derived from the Martian red weed, but having said that it’s not a type of oil with which I am familiar. Have you had it tested?”

“No,” Mrs Bridges said, and I thought I detected a hint of chagrin in her voice.

“You should. I venture it will be a previously unknown substance with a high thermal tolerance and low leakage.” I returned to my observations. “No screws, I notice. All of the junctions where two bits of brass have been fastened together appear to use glue. I can see where some small beads of the chemical have been squeezed out under pressure, and have hardened.”

“Glue?” Mrs Bridges pushed me out of the way and leaned in to take a closer look. “How could an adhesive possibly take the strain of this device operating? The vibrations should break the connections straight away.”

“A normal glue would not take the strain, I agree, but there may well be glues which we have not yet discovered. Or, at least, which one person appears to have discovered but kept the information to himself.”

She straightened up and rearranged her bustle, then turned to me with her perfectly formed lips compressed in frustration. “A new form of battery, a new lubricant, a new adhesive, and mechanisms designed to take full advantage of this new chemistry—and none of it Martian in origin. What are we dealing with here?”

Instead of answering, I moved back to the teak—or possibly mahogany—barrel. I had seen a small brass plate fastened to one of the staves—glued, rather than screwed, of course. There was something about it that had registered in my brain previously, but I had filed it away for later while I continued my investigations. “There is a design of some sort engraved on this plate, along with some numbers.”

“I had noticed them, but I didn’t recognise them. An item identifier, perhaps, and a maker’s mark?” She shrugged. “If we have no reference material to compare them with then they are of no help, surely?”

“Perhaps we need to expand our references.” I examined it closer. “The design appears to be the Greek letter omega.”

“A Greek letter? What does it mean?”

“In electrical theory, it is called the ohm and it represents “resistance’. Here I think it represents the same thing, but in a more general sense. ‘Resistance against the English domination of technology’, perhaps.” I thought for a moment, marshalling my thoughts. “I shall need several children, aged between ten and twelve, of the kind that in England we would call ‘street Arabs’ or ‘urchins’.”

She stared at me with a mixture of curiosity and concern. “For what reason, may I ask?”

“Nothing nefarious. Bring them to my hotel.” I smiled at her raised eyebrow. “You may attend as a chaperone, if you are worried about my motives.”

We returned to the Central Park area, leaving the warehouse secured, and, while Mrs Bridges set about rounding up the children I needed, I sated my hunger with a lobster thermidor and a bottle of Montrachet in the hotel’s restaurant. By the time I was availing myself of a cigar and a glass of port, she returned. She was not looking happy.

“I have them outside,” she said. Her hands unconsciously brushed at her sleeves. “An unwashed, underfed and uncouth rabble they are too. I have no idea what you want with them, but I suggest that you do not touch them without gloves if you wish to remain free of disease and lice.”

Smiling, I quitted the restaurant and accompanied her around the corner to an alleyway where eight ragged children with faces older than their bodies waited.

“She promised us a dime,” one of them said. He wasn’t the tallest or the oldest, but he seemed to be the most belligerent. I liked him immediately. “A dime each, she said.”

“And I will honour that arrangement,” I said. I produced from my pocket the napkin from the restaurant, on which during my meal I had drawn several copies of the omega symbol. I tore it up, so that each piece of cloth had a symbol on it. I handed them out. “I wish for you to search the city for anything with this design on it. Go anywhere and everywhere. Go into restaurants, hotels, shops, factories and art galleries. Look inside cabs and carriages and people’s windows. Look at big things and small things. Look at everything.” I held up the hand that had been holding the napkin, closed it into a fist and then opened it up again, fingers and thumbs close together. The urchins gaped at the eight coins now being held between them. “These are for you now, and there will be another eight when you return. Be back here at sunrise. Now go!”

I threw the coins towards them. They snatched them out of the air and scattered.

“Are you sure they’ll come back?” Mrs Bridges asked.

“If they want another dime each they will. Those were dimes I gave them, I hope. What is a dime, exactly?”

“They might just take this money and run. Or they might return with sad faces and no information.”

“They have sad faces anyway, and I trust them to do a good job.” I turned and looked at her. She was gazing after the kids with a wistful expression on her face. “I have found, in life and in my profession,” I said, “that if you extend trust then it is usually returned with interest. And if not, then all I have lost is sixteen dimes and twelve hours.”

She tore her gaze away from the depths of the alley, looked at me, and smiled. “One dollar and sixty cents.”

“Sorry?”

“Sixteen dimes is more commonly known as one dollar and sixty cents.”

“Ah.” I nodded. “Twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound is a far better system than the rather anodyne ‘decimal’ alternative here in America.”

We stared at each other for what seemed like a very long moment, and it was as if an entire unspoken conversation flashed between us—an invitation, a polite refusal, an embarrassed apology, a reassuring comment—but now, looking back on that adventure, I am not sure which of us was on which side of the conversation.

“Mr Bridges will be waiting,” I said eventually.

“And you must be fatigued after your journey,” she responded. “Might I join you for breakfast?”

“Please do.”

After dining on a decent Dover sole and finishing most of a bottle of absinthe I retreated to my room. I slept heavily in a cloud of white sheets and pillows stuffed with goose down, awoke early, conducted my usual ablutions, and was outside in the alley just as the sun’s early light was tinting the tops of the building with gold. Seven of the eight feral kids were already there. The eight arrived a few moments after I did.

“What have you found?” I asked.

The answer, it transpired, was a lot, but very little of it was useful. Apparently there are more Greek taverns and shops in New York than I would have anticipated, had you asked me, and most of them had an omega letter somewhere on their frontage. The six new electrical generators installed at Edison’s Pearl Street Station also had many examples of the ohm symbol prominently displayed. I did not ask how the child responsible for getting in there actually managed, but I did marvel inwardly at his ingenuity and bravado. One street Arab had, however, taken me at my rather facetious word and inveigled her way into as many art galleries as she could manage. My initial concern that she had wasted her time was washed away when she told me of an exhibition of artwork in the Greenwich Village area, each of which was signed with that same symbol. When I asked what kind of paintings they were, she grimaced. “Strange, they was,” she said. “Some of ’em, at least. Never seen anything like ’em in all my life. Oh, make an ’orse sick, they would.”

I thanked them, distributed their wages, and went back into the hotel for breakfast.

Mrs Bridges joined me just as I was finishing off my plate of potted fish, ham, tongue, devilled-chicken, kidneys, eggs and bacon. I had decide to avoid the questionable flakes of what appeared to be dried and processed corn or somesuch that were also provided. One can go too far when abroad and under cover. I quickly updated her on everything that the street Arabs had found, and suggested we repaired to the art gallery.

It was closed when we arrived, but the presence of a well-dressed potential customer outside the front door soon magicked-up a lackey who ushered us in and plied us with sherry while we were shown the pieces. Not very good sherry, I had to admit, but we were in America.

All of the artworks were, we were told, by the same artist, but I was surprised by the several styles at work. Some were landscapes in bold sweeps of colour, some depictions of historical scenes, but others were more... impressionistic. I am no art critic—although I know what I like—but I would hate to be present at some of the scenes of which impressions were being conveyed. Swipes and swirls of oil paint in various hues of blue, green, indigo and grey gave the impression of vast, spined creatures mostly hidden by a peculiarly noxious and corrupt smoke—creatures so vast that what might have been the emaciated forms of men and women crawling over them were no larger than fleas would be on me. The whole enterprise caused my gorge to rise unpleasantly. I noticed that Mrs Bridges had gone pale. Well, paler than usual.

“They are exquisite, are they not?” the lackey murmured.

“They are certainly something,” I agreed.

Each painting was signed in the bottom right-hand corner with a scrawled omega symbol—like an ‘O’, but with a gap at the bottom and two serif ‘feet’. And each painting had been hung in a frame that had been painted bright scarlet. The frames did nothing to set the paintings off; in point of fact, they clashed nastily.

I pointed to one at random. “I will take that one,” I said.

The lackey smiled obsequiously. “Of course, sir. That will be—”

“At half whatever price you are about to mention.”

His face twisted. “I doubt that will be acceptable to the artist.”

“You don’t know until you ask. Send a message. I will come by later to see what the response is.” I pointed at another two paintings. “Perhaps I will take both of those as well, on the same terms.”

Two different kinds of greed fought each other on the lackey’s face: the greed of a potential sale to some other collector for a lot of money pitted against the greed over the actuality of a real sale to me for less money. I suspect, given the nature of the paintings, that the gallery had seen precious few customers since the exhibition had started, which made the fight rather one-sided. Eventually the lackey capitulated.

Rather than head off for lunch, Mrs Bridges and I followed the messenger sent from the gallery moments after we left with my offer.

The man didn’t bother looking behind him—shocking tradecraft, I have to say—and we were soon at a residence in an area Mrs Bridges informed me was known as ‘Greenwich Village’. It was, I have to say, in no way reminiscent of the historic area Greenwich in London, near where I live in Blackheath.

While the messenger rang the front doorbell, we nipped around the back.

“Stay here,” I said to Mrs Bridges. “Keep watch. If anybody turns up, whistle My Old Man Said, ‘Follow the Van’.”

“Do I have to?” she asked. “I despise Marie Lloyd. So much innuendo.”

The back door was secured, but a deftly placed elbow broke the glass and gave me access to the lock. I quietly moved down a long, dark corridor. At the far end I discovered a hall tiled in black and white; shadowy and containing hints of a strange smell. A figure in a hooded robe was closing the front door, presumably after having given an answer to the messenger from the art gallery. He—I assumed it was a ‘he’, because the figure moved like a man, but hesitantly somehow, as if he found mobility a problem—turned around, and I ducked back into the shadows as he moved across the hall to a doorway.

Once he had disappeared inside the room beyond, I moved cautiously to the doorway and edged my head around the jamb, curious to see what was inside.

A treasure-trove was the answer. Or an engineering junk shop. The room was large, going up perhaps three storeys and lit by rich, buttery sunlight shining in through massive floor-to-ceiling windows. The floor space was filled with tables on which an eclectic mixture of partially-built devices sat, but they were interspersed with easels containing more of the nightmarish paintings and plinths on which sat half-carved statues of distorted, grotesquely twisted human forms, looking something like the Venus de Milo might have done if she were being tortured. Well, tortured more than the fact that her arms were missing when the statue was rediscovered, anyway. The smell from the hall—a strange, rather rancid smell, like old, soiled bandages—was more intense there, and beneath it—or above it, or side by side with it—I could also smell something reminiscent of the lubricating oil I had tasted in Mrs Bridges’s warehouse the night before.

There was music, as well. I say ‘music’, but it was on the edge of what I considered musical in the same way that the paintings were on the edge of what I considered art. There were pipes of some kind—bagpipes perhaps—but they skirled wildly, fighting against tom-toms pounding out a shifting time signature. The effect was tribal, primal even, and I felt my heart rate accelerate in response.

I shifted position, trying to get a better view of the room, but a tile suddenly shifted beneath my foot, grating against the dry mortar beneath.

“Come in, my friend,” a voice growled. “We so rarely receive visitors. The opportunity to talk—well, that would be champion.”

I moved into the room, feeling a degree of chagrinat having been detected so easily. My feelings of embarrassment were compounded moments later when Mrs Bridges started whistling outside, and then abruptly stopped.

The hooded man I had seen earlier stood in a cleared space in the middle of the room, flanked by something that looked like a prototype Martian heat gun the size of a cannon and what might have been a suit of armour but meant for a modern-day soldier rather than a knight of old.

“Proof against bullets, I presume?” I said as breezily as I could muster, nodding towards a suit.

“And Martian fire, and acid,” the man said proudly. “Made from a material of our own invention.” He reached up with large, calloused hands to push the hood back, and the words I was about to utter caught in my throat.

He was stocky but relatively elderly, with black eyebrows and a fringe of wispy white hair around an otherwise bald and freckled head, but none of that was what had made me catch my breath. His scalp was covered in wounds—no, not wounds but holes with inflamed edges, punched through the skin and presumably through the bone beneath. From each hole a transparent tube issued, like the snakes on the head of the mythical gorgon. These tubes curled down and vanished into his robes.

“Edison, did I hear you say ve haff a visitor?” another voice said: tinted with a middle-European accent. I turned, to see Mrs Bridges being pushed into the room by another robed man. He was younger, thinner, with a bushy black moustache, but his scalp was just as denuded as his companion’s, and just as covered in wounds and worm-like tubes. There were wires as well, thin wires winding around the transparent tubes. I was so engrossed in tracing their paths that I almost missed the fact that he held a gun of unusual design.

“A Brit,” the man named Edison said.

“Ah.” The newcomer nodded. “I suppose it vas only a matter of time.”

“Before what?” I asked, with as much insouciance as I could muster. “Before the authorities discovered your bizarre little parlour of inventions?”

“Not at all,” the man named Edison said, smiling benignly. “The authorities—both here in New York and in Washington—are perfectly aware of what we do here. Who do you think is funding our design work?”

“I meant,” the younger man said, walking over to stand next to the older one, “before someone from your homeland came to stop us. My name, by the vay, is Nikolai Tesla.” His mouth twisted. “Perhaps, if zings had turned out differently, both Edison and I could haff justifiably said, ‘You may haff heard of us’, but not here. Not now. Not in a world twisted and warped by stolen Martian technology.”

“You’re inventors, yes? The objects Mrs Bridges discovered, the things here—all your own work?”

“For the good folk of America,” Edison said proudly. “For the President. After all, you Brits weren’t going to give us any of your precious Martian technology, were you? And when our agents tried to steal it, well...” He shrugged. “They never came back.”

I could sense Mrs Bridges’s revulsion at the sight of the tubes emerging from the red-rimmed holes on their scalps. “You seem,” I said, “to have been experimenting on yourselves as well. How is that going?”

“The Martian!” Mrs Bridges breathed. What I had sensed wasn’t revulsion; it was curiosity.

Edison nodded. “Exactly, my dear. The Martian.”

I glanced from them to her and back again. “Am I the only person here who doesn’t know what you are talking about?”

Mrs Bridges moved up to a position by my side. “I read some classified papers,” she said, “back in England. Reports from autopsies carried out on the Martian invaders. More particularly, on their brains. There was evidence of lesions, tumours and swellings, but also there was evidence of a series of biological tubes that could shunt liquid back and forth within the brain, causing areas of high pressure. Those lesions and tumours were deliberate.”

“Exactly!” Edison said animatedly. “When we managed to obtain a Martian body, on this side of the Atlantic, we found the same thing: a biological system designed to cause specific areas of the Martian brain to be deliberately squeezed.”

“That must be the one whose skin was obtained by P. T. Barnum for his American Museum,” Mrs Bridges pointed out.

“You are wondering vy,” Tesla said. “Vy vould a creature choose to inflict insult and injury on its own brain?”

“Actually,” I said, only half in jest, “I was wondering if this is all a hallucinatory dream caused by too much absinthe last night.”

“They say that absinthe makes the heart grow fonder,” Mrs Bridges said, moving closer to me. I could smell her distinct perfume. Her bustle pressed rather distractingly against my hip. “But then, I’ve normally found that whisky has the same effect.” She pressed harder as she said the word “whisky”, and I suddenly remembered the hip-flask that she had said she kept in her bustle. That, I thought, could prove useful—and not just for helping me cope with the stress of immediate events.

“You should look at ze work of Jean-Martin Charcot, in France,” Tesla went on. “He has found that ze presence of swellings, scar tissue or injury in particular areas of the cerebellum can be linked to unusual creativity: sometimes artistic unt sometimes to do vith being able to come up with completely new mathematical formulations, unt innovative engineering solutions to problems.”

“According to the report,” Mrs Bridges said thoughtfully, “it is believed that the Martians, either naturally or through experimentation, could take advantage of this. They could actually induce genius in themselves by shifting fluids around in their brains.”

Edison raised a hand towards his head. “And if you Brits weren’t going to give us any of your precious Martian technology, well, we had to come up with a way of kickstarting our own genius.” He moved his hand down again, pulling at his robes so that they gaped open. On his chest was fastened a device like a small accordion, with keys and buttons and a set of bellows. The tubes all ended up there, like train lines converging on their terminus. “We can literally make ourselves more creative, more innovative, more—”

“Insane,” I said flatly.

My gaze met that of Tesla. He smiled sadly. “Unt vhat choice did you leaf us?” he asked.

“If we didn’t want to become a second class nation in thrall to the English Empire,” Edison queried, “then we had to take matters into our own hands. Or brains.”

I looked around. “And the paintings? The music?”

Edison shrugged. “Sometimes the pressure inside our skulls pushes in more than one direction. With me, it comes out in the form of musical compositions. With Tesla here it’s paintings and sculptures. We’ve been—” he waved a hand, “—quite prolific, to the point where we’re having to ship some of his artworks out to galleries in New York. I’m organising a concert of my works.”

“Zey are a touch too unusual for contemporary tastes,” Tesla said, waving his gun slightly, “but I am sure zey vill be accepted eventually.”

Mrs Bridges stepped forward and, as if accidentally, slightly towards me, so that my left hand was hidden behind the bustle of her dress. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

“You cannot imagine,” Edison said, his face suddenly taking on a haunted look, “but it’s worth it. My friend, we’re pioneers for the American dream.”

“Unt you,” Tesla said, raising his weapon and pointing it at us, “are standing in ze vay of zat dream. You cannot be allowed to leave zis room.”

Edison shook his large head sadly. The tubes waved in a bizarre manner, like undersea plants. “Not alive, at any rate.”

It was time for action. I grabbed a handful of the silk covering Mrs Bridges’s bustle in my left hand and pulled. The material ripped. Before either scientist could react I reached inside the framework of whalebone. My fingers touched the metal of the promised hip-flask, hanging there in a pocket of silk. As I yanked it out and sent it spinning towards Edison I felt her twisting away from me, feeling for something on her other side.

The hip-flask hit the stunned Edison directly in the centre of the accordion-like device strapped to his chest. Sparks flew out, and he jerked backwards, arms spasming. Lights flickered all over the device, and suddenly I could hear a hissing, rushing sound like one of those pneumatic tubes they have in department stores to move money and receipts around. The tubes plugged into Edison’s scalp all flexed in unison, as they filled with air. All of them, at the same time.

Edison screamed.

Something flew from Mrs Bridges’s hand towards Tesla, catching him in exactly the same place on his chest, and with the same result. His eyes bulged, he dropped his weapon, and I swear—I actually swear—that I saw his head start to expand.

Edison’s eyes were red-rimmed and weeping now. His hands, which had been clutching at the device, seeking to switch it off, reached up to take hold of his head. He almost seemed to be holding it desperately together.

Tesla felt to his knees, crying out in agony. Edison staggered backwards, mouth gaping in an ‘o’ of incredulity.

“Two whisky hip-flasks?” I asked Mrs Bridges. “That seems a little excessive.”

“I hate to drink alone,” she said.

“Get out of here.” I turned and nodded towards the doorway. “Send a message to the British Embassy. Get a clean-up crew here.”

“Of course.” Three decisive steps towards the door she turned to look at me. “What about you?”

I indicated the cannon-sized heat ray and the armoured suit, off to one side. “I think it would be poetic justice to use their inventions against them, don’t you?”

She gazed at the two men, who were writhing in indescribable agony. “I think it would be a blessing,” she said. “Try to retrieve the flasks, if you can. It’s very good whisky, and I think we may be needing it.” She glanced back at me, and I could see the same expression on her face that I thought I had on mine. “The things we do for England,” she said, and left.

I turned back to the room. Both Tesla and Edison were screaming now—high-pitched sounds, more like animals than humans. I moved over to the suit and tried to work out how to get into it.

I had some clearing up to do. For England. For the Queen.

About the Authors

Stephen Baxter published his first science fiction novel in 1991. His The Massacre of Mankind (2017) is a sequel to HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

Based in Scotland, Emma Beeby is best known as the first woman to write Judge Dredd comics in its almost 40-year history. Emma has also written titles such as Doctor Who; Judge Anderson, and a team up of Wonder Woman & Catwoman for DC Comics. Her first creator-owned comic series, the biographical story of notorious World War One double agent and exotic dancer, Mata Hari, was published earlier this year by Dark Horse Comics. Her writing has been nominated for awards by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, the British Comics Awards, and Emma won Best Writer and Best Newcomer in the 2015 Scottish Independent Comic Book Awards.

I. N. J. Culbard is an award-winning graphic novelist and has adapted Conan Doyle, Burroughs, Wilde, Chambers, and Lovecraft. He is an artist on original series such as The New Deadwardians (Vertigo), Dark Ages (Dark Horse Comics), Wild’s End (Boom Studios), Brink (2000 AD), and Brass Sun (2000 AD).

Nathan Duck has been teaching English and media to the youth of the West Midlands for over 25 years. A life-long science fiction enthusiast, he likes nothing more than to walk his dog, Luna.

Ian Edginton is a New York Times bestselling author and multiple Eisner Award nominee. His recent titles include the green apocalypse saga The Hinterkind for DC/Vertigo; Steed and Mrs Peel for BOOM, the steam- and clock-punk series Stickleback, Ampney Crucis Investigates and Brass Sun for the legendary UK science fiction weekly, 2000 AD; game properties Dead Space: Liberation and The Evil Within for Titan Books and the audio adventure Torchwood: Army of One for the BBC. He has adapted the complete canon of Sherlock Holmes novels into a series of graphic novels for Self Made Hero, as well writing several volumes of Holmes apocrypha entitled The Victorian Undead. He has also adapted H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds as well as several highly acclaimed sequels, Scarlet Traces and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game. He lives and works in England. He keeps a Bee.

Jonathan Green is a writer of speculative fiction, with more than seventy books to his name. He has written everything from Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to Doctor Who novels, by way of Sonic the Hedgehog, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Judge Dredd, Robin of Sherwood, and Frostgrave. He is the creator of the Pax Britannia steampunk series for Abaddon Books, and the author of the award-winning, and critically-acclaimed, YOU ARE THE HERO—A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. He also edits and compiles short story anthologies. To find out more about his current projects visit www.JonathanGreenAuthor.com and follow him on Twitter @jonathangreen.

Andrew Lane has written thirty-eight previous books, including eight books in the Young Sherlock Holmes series, two in the Lost Worlds series, three in the Crusoe series and four in the AWOL series. He has also worked extensively in the extended universe of BBC TV’s Doctor Who, and he is currently developing a new series (Secret Protector) directly for a German publisher.

James Lovegrove was born on Christmas Eve 1965 and has published around sixty books, among them Days, Untied Kingdom, Provender Gleed, Redlaw, and the Pantheon series, including New York Times bestseller The Age of Odin. His acclaimed Sherlock Holmes pastiches include The Stuff of Nightmares and Gods of War and a Holmes/Lovecraft mash-up trilogy The Cthulhu Casebooks, and his Firefly tie-in novels include Big Damn Hero and The Magnificent Nine. He reviews fiction for the Financial Times and lives with his family in Eastbourne on the south coast of England.

Maura McHugh lives is Galway, Ireland and has written three collections: Twisted Fairy Tales and Twisted Myths—published in the USA—and The Boughs Withered (When I Told Them My Dreams) from NewCon Press, UK. She’s written comic books for Dark Horse, IDW, and 2000 AD, and is also a playwright, screenwriter, and critic, and has served on the juries of international literary, comic book, and film awards. Her monograph on David Lynch’s film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was nominated for a British Fantasy Award for Best Non Fiction. Her web site is http://splinister.com and she tweets as @splinister.

Mark Morris has written and edited almost forty novels, novellas, short story collections and anthologies. His script work includes audio dramas for Doctor Who, Jago & Litefoot and the Hammer Chillers series. His recent work includes the official movie tie-in novelizations of The Great Wall and (co-written with Christopher Golden) The Predator, the Obsidian Heart trilogy (The Wolves of London, The Society of Blood and The Wraiths of War), the anthologies New Fears (winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology) and New Fears 2 as editor, and a new audio adaptation of the classic 1971 horror movie Blood on Satan’s Claw, for which he won the New York Radio Award for Best Drama Special.

Chris Roberson is the co-creator with artist Michael Allred of iZombie, the basis of the hit CW television series, and the writer of several New York Times best-selling Cinderella miniseries set in the world of Bill Willingham’s Fables. He is also the co-creator of Edison Rex with artist Dennis Culver, and the co-writer of Hellboy and the B. P. R. D., Witchfinder, Rise of the Black Flame, and other titles set in the world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. In addition to his numerous comics projects, Roberson has written more than a dozen novels and three dozen short stories.

Adam Roberts is the author of twenty novels, many short stories and various other kinds of writing. He is Professor of Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and his literary biography of H. G. Wells is forthcoming from Palgrave. He was inducted into the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, at which event he was given the choice of signing the membership book with either: Byron’s quill, George Eliot’s nib or T. S. Eliot’s fountain pen. That he chose without hesitation to use the latter has much to say about the form of his story for this anthology.

Dan Whitehead is a writer of comics, prose and the story bits in video games whose past credits include Frankenstein Texas, Wulverblade, Hex Loader and the children’s historical time travel novel Atlanta meets the Cotton Slaves. He once smuggled a joke about crisps into an official Star Wars book and is exactly as tall as he appears.