The Great Martian War: The Gathering Storm - Snippet #2
Nov 18, 2019 16:43:01 GMT
Quendil and mikedski like this
Post by scottwashburn on Nov 18, 2019 16:43:01 GMT
Okay, here is the second snippet. This is about half of Chapter 1. I'll post the second half next week.
Chapter One
May 1911, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
“Harry, come on! We’ve got to go! We’ve got to go right now!”
Lieutenant Harry Calloway gave one more futile tug on the body, lying half-buried in the rubble, and conceded that the man was dead. The face was smeared with blood and soot and in the gray light before dawn he couldn’t tell who it was. One of his men, almost certainly, someone from his platoon. His responsibility, but there was nothing more he could do for him.
A loud, shrill whistle filled the air and he instinctively crouched low as an artillery shell passed overhead and exploded only a hundred yards away. It had been a large shell, navy for sure. The covering barrage was getting close; yes, definitely time to go. They had to get back to the ships and get out of here.
He peered around the pile of rubble and looked west, where the Martians would be coming from and didn’t see anything but clouds of smoke, dark and ominous, not yet touched by the coming dawn. Looking back east, he saw Burford Sampson, the lieutenant commanding 11 Platoon, still waving to him from behind a building at the end of the block. They were in Camperdown, a suburb on Sydney’s outskirts. It had once been a fashionable place to live, but an earlier Martian attack had broken through almost to here before being thrown back and it wasn’t nearly so fashionable anymore. Crouching low, Harry ran along the sidewalk, past rows of shops, their shattered window glass making the footing treacherous, until he reached Sampson. The man looked angry.
“Dammit, boy! What the bloody ‘ell you think yer doin’?”
“Don’t call me boy,” he said automatically. Gasping for breath, he waved his arm back toward where he’d been. “One of my men, there. He’s dead, but I had to check. Not leavin’ anyone behind.”
Sampson’s expression softened until he merely looked annoyed. “Right, right, no one gets left behind—including you! Now come on, the rest of the company is already three blocks away and… oh, shit!”
Only one thing could have pull that from Sampson’s mouth. Harry twisted around and looked down the street. Emerging from the smoke was a large gray shape. Four stories tall, a bulbous head the size of an elephant with a glowing red eye in the center of it was perched atop a cylinder which sprouted arms and tentacles. The whole mass sat atop three long, thin legs which moved with a gait unlike that of any earthly creature.
It was a Martian tripod, an alien war machine which was the primary weapon the invaders from the Red Planet had used to conquer huge swaths of the Earth. And which they were using now to conquer the last bit of Australia still in human hands. Harry clenched his fists at that thought. Sydney was going to fall, his home was going to fall.
“Come on,” hissed Sampson, as if the Martians might overhear. He grabbed Harry by the arm and shoved him toward an alley which would take them east, toward the harbor. A loud shriek, like a buzz saw cutting wood, sounded behind him, but he didn’t look back. He was all too familiar with the sound. The Martians were firing their heat rays, beams of pure energy which could turn a man to ashes in an eye-blink. They were burning all the buildings, every man-made object, as they advanced. Harry didn’t know if that was to be sure they’d driven out any humans who might be hiding in the buildings, out of some alien hate, or just to create smoke to conceal them from artillery spotters. Perhaps some of each.
Harry and Sampson sprinted down the alley to the next street, passed across it and continued on until they caught up with some of their men. Twenty or thirty men of C Company, 15th New Castle Battalion, were waiting there, part of the rear guard. But there were also… who were those…?
“Oh bloody hell!” swore Sampson. “Where in Bleedin’ Christ did you find those?!”
Civilians. A dozen civilians; women, kids, a couple of old men. All of the civilians were supposed to have been evacuated by now. That’s what the troops had been holding the line for during the last two weeks. That was what a quarter of the battalion had died for yesterday. They should have all been gone by midnight the night before.
Sampson’s question had been directed at a sergeant, Dawkins, he thought it was, from 9 Platoon, the whole company was all jumbled together now. Harry didn’t see anyone from his own 12 Platoon, but they were around here somewhere, he was sure. He hoped.
Dawkins shrugged. “Came outta that shop as we was fallin’ back, sir. Says they was lookin’ for something to eat.”
“We haven’t had any food for two days!” said one of the women angrily.
“Well, if you don’t get the hell to the ships, you won’t ever need food again, you damn fools!” snarled Sampson.
“Are… are those devils coming?” asked one of the old men.
“Coming? They’re bloody well here! Not two blocks away. Now let’s move!”
One of the other women gasped, several of the children screamed in terror. As if in answer, one of the heat rays shrieked, from much too nearby. The tops of a block of buildings a hundred yards off burst into flames.
“Go! Go! Move!”
They pushed and shoved the civilians into motion. Harry glanced at the street sign, Grose Lane, he knew where he was now. Several of the soldiers scooped up the kids and carried them. They hurried down another street. Port Jackson, as Sydney’s harbor was called, was still nearly two miles away, but they had to get there. The last of the transport ships were waiting to take off the rear guard, but they couldn’t wait there forever. As they moved, another salvo of artillery roared overhear to explode behind them. Hopefully among the Martians. Even if none of the bastards was hit, it might slow them down; they were afraid of the navy’s big guns. An eighteen pound field gun might hurt a tripod with a lucky hit, and the twenty-five pounders mounted on the steam tanks had an even better chance, but a six or seven-point-five-inch shell from a cruiser would tear them apart. The Martians had learned to avoid the navy.
But they couldn’t avoid them today, not if they wanted Sydney—and they wanted Sydney. Apparently they wanted the whole world.
They had first come to take it in 1900. Harry had only been a kid then, but he remembered all the fuss, all the stories in the newspapers, his father and mother so upset. But the invasion had been far away in England and the Martians had all died in a very short time. Most people in Australia quickly forgot about it. There had been some preparations, Harry’s father, a prominent lawyer in Sydney, had helped raise a volunteer battalion, accepting a captain’s commission in the process, but most people felt the danger had passed. Then, in September of 1908, the cylinders had rained down again, all over the world—including Australia.
The noise of the heat rays was fainter now. Harry helped one of the old men to move faster, but they were both gasping for breath when they reached a large open space that surrounded the university, his alma mater—almost. It had once been a green park, but had become one of many tent cities during the worst of the refugee crisis and was now just a dreary patch of bare dirt, every tree cut down for firewood. There were many more troops gathered there and several of the precious steam tanks, but to his dismay, there were also more civilians, a hundred of them at least. He stopped, letting the old man slump to his knees, and saw Captain Berwick, the commander of C Company, jogging toward them.
“Well there you are!” he cried. “I was afraid I’d lost the lot of you.”
“What’s happening, sir?” asked Sampson. “Who are all they?” He gestured to the civilians.
Berwick shook his head. “Damn bunch of fools, is who. Idiots who refused to go when we announced the final evacuation.”
“Maybe… Maybe they didn’t get the word,” said Harry.
“Not bloody likely!” snapped Sampson. “We’ve been shouting it from the roof tops for the last week. Probably a bunch of damn looters if you ask me. Waitin’ ‘til near everyone’s gone and then go looking for valuables left behind.”
Berwick frowned. ”I’m afraid you’re probably right, Burford, quite a few have turned up with bags full of stuff that I rather doubt belongs to them.”
“And now that we’ve come to the last throw, they expect us to save their skins.”
“Yes, and we have no choice but to do it. The ones you see here are only a fraction of what are showing up, and a lot of them are women and kids. The colonel has ordered us to form a line and hold here long enough to get them all out.”
Sampson growled out an amazing obscenity, but immediately started rounding up his platoon. Harry left the old man and did the same. He was heartened by how many he found. B Company had been all but wiped out yesterday, but C Company was still nearly intact. Harry sighed in relief; C Company was really the only family he had left. His father had been its first captain, but died of a heart seizure the year before the Martians returned, and the men had elected Harry to be a lieutenant, even though he had been only nineteen years old. He’d still been in school and had only attended the drills when he could, but it had still been quite an honor, even though it felt more like a game than something real. His mother and two sisters had been proud of him.
Then the astronomers had seen the gas eruptions on Mars again, and it wasn’t a game anymore. The battalion had been mobilized and Harry, like many of the students, had gotten a leave of absence from school, confident he would soon be back there again once the alarm was over. That was two and a half years ago and he had not been back to his school in all that time—until now, and he wouldn’t be staying long.
Instead of studying law, he had studied tactics manuals, or more frequently, engineering manuals. There had been a frantic race to fortify Sydney before the Martians arrived. All the stories about what had happened to London were on everyone’s mind. They needed to be ready to defend the city against an attack. Fortunately, Sydney was built on a peninsula between Botany Bay on the south and a complex of smaller bays linked to the ocean on the north. The main defense line, between Botany Bay and Iron Cove, was only a little more than five miles long. A few defenses were built along the other shore lines, but those approaches were mostly left to the navy to defend.
The new volunteer battalions did most of the digging. Other troops, the better trained and equipped Territorials and a few regulars, made ready to swoop down on the enemy landing sites in hopes of wiping them out before they could assemble their fearsome war machines.
But the Martians refused to cooperate.
Instead of landing close to the large cities—and the waiting troops—they had landed far away, in Australia’s huge outback. The vast, nearly unpeopled, center of the country had provided the Martians with landing sites beyond quick reach of the defending forces. They came down in four groups and had their war machines unloaded and assembled before anyone could come to stop them. By the time the landing sites had been located and troops gathered, the enemy was too strong for any mobile force to overcome. Cavalry and infantry alone had no chance against the Martian machines. Artillery and tanks were needed and they were in short supply. Until recently, heavy equipment had to come all the way from England, a two month sea voyage, and the home country had been very stingy with such things, which they felt were needed for their own defense. The new Sydney arsenal was the only one in Australia which could produce the steel and the guns and the components for tanks. It worked around the clock for months to produce what was needed, but there simply hadn’t been enough time.
“Come on you buggers, get ready!” shouted Sergeant Milroy, Harry’s platoon sergeant. The battalion was taking up positions beyond the northwestern edge of the park. C Company was responsible for holding a city block and Harry’s platoon occupied several of the buildings on the north side, along Parramatta Road. This deep in the city, the damage to the buildings had been minimal, but his soldiers quickly began smashing out the windows to clear their fields of fire.
Not that their Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles could do much of anything against a Martian tripod. Harry had heard it said that a damaged tripod, one which had had some of its armor stripped away by something heavier, could be brought down by massed rifle fire. But he’d never seen it happen, nor met anyone who had.
They set up their sole remaining Maxim gun on one of the upper floors. He had seen a machine gun hurt a tripod once. Not destroy it, but do enough damage to drive it off. But in truth, the best hope of the infantry to hurt the tripods was with their bombs. They had been equipped with explosive bombs, first made from dynamite and later using gelignite. They were very easy to use; first ignite the fuse with a simple friction primer, and then attach the bomb to the tripod.
It was that second part that was so tricky.
It took a very brave or very lucky man to manage, but there were a lot of very brave men defending Sydney. A few lucky ones, too. The brave ones sometimes destroyed a tripod. The lucky ones destroyed them and lived to talk about it.
Harry checked on his men and made sure they were in the best positions possible. That meant a way to shoot at the Martians or throw bombs, but also a quick way to get out a back door or window, before the aliens turned the place into an inferno with their heat rays. Everything seemed to be in order. His men knew what they were doing. Once they had been green volunteers, now they were veterans.
After their landing, the Martians had lain quiescent for months, bothering no one except kangaroos and aborigines and the occasional rancher or prospector. Hope had grown among the Australians that they would be given the time they needed to prepare. Men had flocked to the new units being raised. They had been issued rifles, but they looked to the new arsenal to give them the weapons they had really need to fight.
They had also looked to England.
The home islands had not been invaded like last time. Not a single cylinder had fallen in England’s green valleys. Surely the new armies which had been massed there, surely at least some of them would be sent to Australia. Some help had come, a few brigades of infantry, a few battalions of tanks and artillery, but not enough, not nearly enough. The Empire had other responsibilities, they were told. Canada and South Africa, Egypt with the vital canal at Suez, and above all India had to be defended. The men and guns and tanks had flowed out of England, shepherded by the Royal Navy, but too few of the ships had come to Australia. Even months after the landing, Harry’s men still had only rifles, but they spent more time with shovels, digging trenches and building bunkers to protect Sydney.
They had dug some very impressive trenches and right now Harry wished that they were still defending them rather than trying to defend this makeshift position. The Martians had given them enough time to make the trenches truly formidable. Deep and secure with concealed firing positions, reinforced bunkers for the machine guns and revetments for artillery and steam tanks. And pit traps, lots and lots of pit traps. The Martians tripods walked about on long, spindly legs. The pointed feet would punch right through the covers of concealed pits and with luck immobilize the machine, leaving it an easy target for artillery—or brave infantry with their bombs. They’d dug thousands, tens of thousands of them all along Sydney’s defense line. Harry looked out on the street and wished they had time to dig a few of them here.
Prowling through the house, clearly the home of whoever owned the shop down on the first floor, Harry discovered the way up on to the flat roof of the building. Some of his men were already up there, checking the fuses on their bombs. He could see some men from A Company on the roofs of the buildings across the street.
“Hey, sir,” called one of them, Private Haskins, “From up here we can drop these right down on the bastards! Could never do that in the trenches!”
Harry smiled and nodded, but privately wondered if the Martians would be so obliging as to walk right past and let them do it. More likely they’d set the buildings afire before they got that close. “Good idea,” he said aloud. “But be ready to get out.”
“Oh, we will sir, you can be sure o’ that!” They laughed, but there was a strained tone to it. They all knew how slim their chances were.
He walked over to the parapet that ringed the edge of the roof and rested his hands on it and looked west. There was a nearly solid wall of smoke in that direction, changing color from gray to pink as the beams of the rising sun touched them. From time to time there would be a bright red glow through the clouds; Martian heat rays, but they were still a ways off; the enemy wasn’t advancing very fast. They’ve got all the time in the world.
The flash of exploding artillery lit up the clouds, too. Nearly all the heavy guns had already been evacuated, but the navy was still off shore, still firing. The wind was blowing from the southwest so most of the smoke was drifting more to the north rather than right toward him, but the smell of burning was strong in the air. Sydney was burning. His home was burning. The house he grew up in was about a mile to the northwest, in Balmain, behind those clouds. Was it still there?
Somehow he never thought it would really come to this. They’d read about the fighting in Africa and India, Asia and the Americas, but as the months passed, hope began to grow that somehow Australia might be spared. The hope died in June of ’09 when the Martians had come boiling out of the outback. A hundred or more of their tripod machines had struck Darwin on the north coast. The city’s defenses had been overrun in hours and most of the people and the defenders had been slaughtered. From there, the Martians had split into two groups sweeping down the coasts in both directions, smashing each city in turn. Cairns, Broome, Townsville, Brisbane, one after the other they’d fallen, the defenders scatters or killed, the cities burned to ashes, the people… there were terrible stories about what was happening to the people who couldn’t get away. Survivors had fled, by boat, by train, on horseback, or on foot, desperately trying to stay ahead of the invaders.
In September the situation was deemed hopeless and the order had come from the government: evacuate. The people would gather in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. Ships would carry them to New Zealand, Tasmania, and India. But Australia had four million people, evacuating all would be a colossal task. Ships were summoned or hired or hijacked from all over the Pacific, but the only way an evacuation could succeed was if the troops could hold off the Martians long enough. The defenders of Sydney had been told that they had to hold as long as necessary—no matter what.
All through the summer and fall a seemingly endless stream of people had flowed into the city; people fleeing from the Martians. Thousands, tens of thousands, ultimately hundreds of thousands of people. The ships could not begin to carry them away as quickly as they arrived and huge camps had sprung up inside the defense lines. Every building and home in the city took people in. At one point Harry’s mother and sisters had twenty-five people sharing the house. It had been a bad time. Sanitation was inadequate and food was short, despite the herds of cattle also driven into the city. A lot of people got sick and far too many of them died. Some people couldn’t stand it and fled further south along the coast, perhaps in hope they could find a ship at some smaller harbor.
But the Martians took their time and only advanced slowly along the coasts, harried every mile by the Royal Navy. It was November before they neared Sydney. The stream of refugees swelled to a flood—and then tailed off to nothing.
“Harry, you all right, boy?”
He looked around and saw that Sampson was on another roof just across an alley. He had an expression of concern on his face. Burford was an older man; he was from Tasmania and had fought the Boers in South Africa before the first invasion. He was a rough-spoken and sometimes downright callous fellow, but he’d seemed to take a liking to Harry and looked out for him and helped him learn how to command an infantry platoon—even though he kept calling him ‘boy’.
“I’m fine. Well, as fine as anyone can be, I guess. This is it, isn’t it?”
“What? Our last stand? Don’t you start thinking like that Mister Calloway! We’re going to hold here a while and then we are going to stroll down to the harbor and get aboard a big fat transport and sail away.”
Harry snorted. “As easy as that, is it? Well, why was I even worried?”
“Because you think too much. Stop it and do your job.” He stiffened and pointed. “Looks like they are coming. Get ready.”
Chapter One
May 1911, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
“Harry, come on! We’ve got to go! We’ve got to go right now!”
Lieutenant Harry Calloway gave one more futile tug on the body, lying half-buried in the rubble, and conceded that the man was dead. The face was smeared with blood and soot and in the gray light before dawn he couldn’t tell who it was. One of his men, almost certainly, someone from his platoon. His responsibility, but there was nothing more he could do for him.
A loud, shrill whistle filled the air and he instinctively crouched low as an artillery shell passed overhead and exploded only a hundred yards away. It had been a large shell, navy for sure. The covering barrage was getting close; yes, definitely time to go. They had to get back to the ships and get out of here.
He peered around the pile of rubble and looked west, where the Martians would be coming from and didn’t see anything but clouds of smoke, dark and ominous, not yet touched by the coming dawn. Looking back east, he saw Burford Sampson, the lieutenant commanding 11 Platoon, still waving to him from behind a building at the end of the block. They were in Camperdown, a suburb on Sydney’s outskirts. It had once been a fashionable place to live, but an earlier Martian attack had broken through almost to here before being thrown back and it wasn’t nearly so fashionable anymore. Crouching low, Harry ran along the sidewalk, past rows of shops, their shattered window glass making the footing treacherous, until he reached Sampson. The man looked angry.
“Dammit, boy! What the bloody ‘ell you think yer doin’?”
“Don’t call me boy,” he said automatically. Gasping for breath, he waved his arm back toward where he’d been. “One of my men, there. He’s dead, but I had to check. Not leavin’ anyone behind.”
Sampson’s expression softened until he merely looked annoyed. “Right, right, no one gets left behind—including you! Now come on, the rest of the company is already three blocks away and… oh, shit!”
Only one thing could have pull that from Sampson’s mouth. Harry twisted around and looked down the street. Emerging from the smoke was a large gray shape. Four stories tall, a bulbous head the size of an elephant with a glowing red eye in the center of it was perched atop a cylinder which sprouted arms and tentacles. The whole mass sat atop three long, thin legs which moved with a gait unlike that of any earthly creature.
It was a Martian tripod, an alien war machine which was the primary weapon the invaders from the Red Planet had used to conquer huge swaths of the Earth. And which they were using now to conquer the last bit of Australia still in human hands. Harry clenched his fists at that thought. Sydney was going to fall, his home was going to fall.
“Come on,” hissed Sampson, as if the Martians might overhear. He grabbed Harry by the arm and shoved him toward an alley which would take them east, toward the harbor. A loud shriek, like a buzz saw cutting wood, sounded behind him, but he didn’t look back. He was all too familiar with the sound. The Martians were firing their heat rays, beams of pure energy which could turn a man to ashes in an eye-blink. They were burning all the buildings, every man-made object, as they advanced. Harry didn’t know if that was to be sure they’d driven out any humans who might be hiding in the buildings, out of some alien hate, or just to create smoke to conceal them from artillery spotters. Perhaps some of each.
Harry and Sampson sprinted down the alley to the next street, passed across it and continued on until they caught up with some of their men. Twenty or thirty men of C Company, 15th New Castle Battalion, were waiting there, part of the rear guard. But there were also… who were those…?
“Oh bloody hell!” swore Sampson. “Where in Bleedin’ Christ did you find those?!”
Civilians. A dozen civilians; women, kids, a couple of old men. All of the civilians were supposed to have been evacuated by now. That’s what the troops had been holding the line for during the last two weeks. That was what a quarter of the battalion had died for yesterday. They should have all been gone by midnight the night before.
Sampson’s question had been directed at a sergeant, Dawkins, he thought it was, from 9 Platoon, the whole company was all jumbled together now. Harry didn’t see anyone from his own 12 Platoon, but they were around here somewhere, he was sure. He hoped.
Dawkins shrugged. “Came outta that shop as we was fallin’ back, sir. Says they was lookin’ for something to eat.”
“We haven’t had any food for two days!” said one of the women angrily.
“Well, if you don’t get the hell to the ships, you won’t ever need food again, you damn fools!” snarled Sampson.
“Are… are those devils coming?” asked one of the old men.
“Coming? They’re bloody well here! Not two blocks away. Now let’s move!”
One of the other women gasped, several of the children screamed in terror. As if in answer, one of the heat rays shrieked, from much too nearby. The tops of a block of buildings a hundred yards off burst into flames.
“Go! Go! Move!”
They pushed and shoved the civilians into motion. Harry glanced at the street sign, Grose Lane, he knew where he was now. Several of the soldiers scooped up the kids and carried them. They hurried down another street. Port Jackson, as Sydney’s harbor was called, was still nearly two miles away, but they had to get there. The last of the transport ships were waiting to take off the rear guard, but they couldn’t wait there forever. As they moved, another salvo of artillery roared overhear to explode behind them. Hopefully among the Martians. Even if none of the bastards was hit, it might slow them down; they were afraid of the navy’s big guns. An eighteen pound field gun might hurt a tripod with a lucky hit, and the twenty-five pounders mounted on the steam tanks had an even better chance, but a six or seven-point-five-inch shell from a cruiser would tear them apart. The Martians had learned to avoid the navy.
But they couldn’t avoid them today, not if they wanted Sydney—and they wanted Sydney. Apparently they wanted the whole world.
They had first come to take it in 1900. Harry had only been a kid then, but he remembered all the fuss, all the stories in the newspapers, his father and mother so upset. But the invasion had been far away in England and the Martians had all died in a very short time. Most people in Australia quickly forgot about it. There had been some preparations, Harry’s father, a prominent lawyer in Sydney, had helped raise a volunteer battalion, accepting a captain’s commission in the process, but most people felt the danger had passed. Then, in September of 1908, the cylinders had rained down again, all over the world—including Australia.
The noise of the heat rays was fainter now. Harry helped one of the old men to move faster, but they were both gasping for breath when they reached a large open space that surrounded the university, his alma mater—almost. It had once been a green park, but had become one of many tent cities during the worst of the refugee crisis and was now just a dreary patch of bare dirt, every tree cut down for firewood. There were many more troops gathered there and several of the precious steam tanks, but to his dismay, there were also more civilians, a hundred of them at least. He stopped, letting the old man slump to his knees, and saw Captain Berwick, the commander of C Company, jogging toward them.
“Well there you are!” he cried. “I was afraid I’d lost the lot of you.”
“What’s happening, sir?” asked Sampson. “Who are all they?” He gestured to the civilians.
Berwick shook his head. “Damn bunch of fools, is who. Idiots who refused to go when we announced the final evacuation.”
“Maybe… Maybe they didn’t get the word,” said Harry.
“Not bloody likely!” snapped Sampson. “We’ve been shouting it from the roof tops for the last week. Probably a bunch of damn looters if you ask me. Waitin’ ‘til near everyone’s gone and then go looking for valuables left behind.”
Berwick frowned. ”I’m afraid you’re probably right, Burford, quite a few have turned up with bags full of stuff that I rather doubt belongs to them.”
“And now that we’ve come to the last throw, they expect us to save their skins.”
“Yes, and we have no choice but to do it. The ones you see here are only a fraction of what are showing up, and a lot of them are women and kids. The colonel has ordered us to form a line and hold here long enough to get them all out.”
Sampson growled out an amazing obscenity, but immediately started rounding up his platoon. Harry left the old man and did the same. He was heartened by how many he found. B Company had been all but wiped out yesterday, but C Company was still nearly intact. Harry sighed in relief; C Company was really the only family he had left. His father had been its first captain, but died of a heart seizure the year before the Martians returned, and the men had elected Harry to be a lieutenant, even though he had been only nineteen years old. He’d still been in school and had only attended the drills when he could, but it had still been quite an honor, even though it felt more like a game than something real. His mother and two sisters had been proud of him.
Then the astronomers had seen the gas eruptions on Mars again, and it wasn’t a game anymore. The battalion had been mobilized and Harry, like many of the students, had gotten a leave of absence from school, confident he would soon be back there again once the alarm was over. That was two and a half years ago and he had not been back to his school in all that time—until now, and he wouldn’t be staying long.
Instead of studying law, he had studied tactics manuals, or more frequently, engineering manuals. There had been a frantic race to fortify Sydney before the Martians arrived. All the stories about what had happened to London were on everyone’s mind. They needed to be ready to defend the city against an attack. Fortunately, Sydney was built on a peninsula between Botany Bay on the south and a complex of smaller bays linked to the ocean on the north. The main defense line, between Botany Bay and Iron Cove, was only a little more than five miles long. A few defenses were built along the other shore lines, but those approaches were mostly left to the navy to defend.
The new volunteer battalions did most of the digging. Other troops, the better trained and equipped Territorials and a few regulars, made ready to swoop down on the enemy landing sites in hopes of wiping them out before they could assemble their fearsome war machines.
But the Martians refused to cooperate.
Instead of landing close to the large cities—and the waiting troops—they had landed far away, in Australia’s huge outback. The vast, nearly unpeopled, center of the country had provided the Martians with landing sites beyond quick reach of the defending forces. They came down in four groups and had their war machines unloaded and assembled before anyone could come to stop them. By the time the landing sites had been located and troops gathered, the enemy was too strong for any mobile force to overcome. Cavalry and infantry alone had no chance against the Martian machines. Artillery and tanks were needed and they were in short supply. Until recently, heavy equipment had to come all the way from England, a two month sea voyage, and the home country had been very stingy with such things, which they felt were needed for their own defense. The new Sydney arsenal was the only one in Australia which could produce the steel and the guns and the components for tanks. It worked around the clock for months to produce what was needed, but there simply hadn’t been enough time.
“Come on you buggers, get ready!” shouted Sergeant Milroy, Harry’s platoon sergeant. The battalion was taking up positions beyond the northwestern edge of the park. C Company was responsible for holding a city block and Harry’s platoon occupied several of the buildings on the north side, along Parramatta Road. This deep in the city, the damage to the buildings had been minimal, but his soldiers quickly began smashing out the windows to clear their fields of fire.
Not that their Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles could do much of anything against a Martian tripod. Harry had heard it said that a damaged tripod, one which had had some of its armor stripped away by something heavier, could be brought down by massed rifle fire. But he’d never seen it happen, nor met anyone who had.
They set up their sole remaining Maxim gun on one of the upper floors. He had seen a machine gun hurt a tripod once. Not destroy it, but do enough damage to drive it off. But in truth, the best hope of the infantry to hurt the tripods was with their bombs. They had been equipped with explosive bombs, first made from dynamite and later using gelignite. They were very easy to use; first ignite the fuse with a simple friction primer, and then attach the bomb to the tripod.
It was that second part that was so tricky.
It took a very brave or very lucky man to manage, but there were a lot of very brave men defending Sydney. A few lucky ones, too. The brave ones sometimes destroyed a tripod. The lucky ones destroyed them and lived to talk about it.
Harry checked on his men and made sure they were in the best positions possible. That meant a way to shoot at the Martians or throw bombs, but also a quick way to get out a back door or window, before the aliens turned the place into an inferno with their heat rays. Everything seemed to be in order. His men knew what they were doing. Once they had been green volunteers, now they were veterans.
After their landing, the Martians had lain quiescent for months, bothering no one except kangaroos and aborigines and the occasional rancher or prospector. Hope had grown among the Australians that they would be given the time they needed to prepare. Men had flocked to the new units being raised. They had been issued rifles, but they looked to the new arsenal to give them the weapons they had really need to fight.
They had also looked to England.
The home islands had not been invaded like last time. Not a single cylinder had fallen in England’s green valleys. Surely the new armies which had been massed there, surely at least some of them would be sent to Australia. Some help had come, a few brigades of infantry, a few battalions of tanks and artillery, but not enough, not nearly enough. The Empire had other responsibilities, they were told. Canada and South Africa, Egypt with the vital canal at Suez, and above all India had to be defended. The men and guns and tanks had flowed out of England, shepherded by the Royal Navy, but too few of the ships had come to Australia. Even months after the landing, Harry’s men still had only rifles, but they spent more time with shovels, digging trenches and building bunkers to protect Sydney.
They had dug some very impressive trenches and right now Harry wished that they were still defending them rather than trying to defend this makeshift position. The Martians had given them enough time to make the trenches truly formidable. Deep and secure with concealed firing positions, reinforced bunkers for the machine guns and revetments for artillery and steam tanks. And pit traps, lots and lots of pit traps. The Martians tripods walked about on long, spindly legs. The pointed feet would punch right through the covers of concealed pits and with luck immobilize the machine, leaving it an easy target for artillery—or brave infantry with their bombs. They’d dug thousands, tens of thousands of them all along Sydney’s defense line. Harry looked out on the street and wished they had time to dig a few of them here.
Prowling through the house, clearly the home of whoever owned the shop down on the first floor, Harry discovered the way up on to the flat roof of the building. Some of his men were already up there, checking the fuses on their bombs. He could see some men from A Company on the roofs of the buildings across the street.
“Hey, sir,” called one of them, Private Haskins, “From up here we can drop these right down on the bastards! Could never do that in the trenches!”
Harry smiled and nodded, but privately wondered if the Martians would be so obliging as to walk right past and let them do it. More likely they’d set the buildings afire before they got that close. “Good idea,” he said aloud. “But be ready to get out.”
“Oh, we will sir, you can be sure o’ that!” They laughed, but there was a strained tone to it. They all knew how slim their chances were.
He walked over to the parapet that ringed the edge of the roof and rested his hands on it and looked west. There was a nearly solid wall of smoke in that direction, changing color from gray to pink as the beams of the rising sun touched them. From time to time there would be a bright red glow through the clouds; Martian heat rays, but they were still a ways off; the enemy wasn’t advancing very fast. They’ve got all the time in the world.
The flash of exploding artillery lit up the clouds, too. Nearly all the heavy guns had already been evacuated, but the navy was still off shore, still firing. The wind was blowing from the southwest so most of the smoke was drifting more to the north rather than right toward him, but the smell of burning was strong in the air. Sydney was burning. His home was burning. The house he grew up in was about a mile to the northwest, in Balmain, behind those clouds. Was it still there?
Somehow he never thought it would really come to this. They’d read about the fighting in Africa and India, Asia and the Americas, but as the months passed, hope began to grow that somehow Australia might be spared. The hope died in June of ’09 when the Martians had come boiling out of the outback. A hundred or more of their tripod machines had struck Darwin on the north coast. The city’s defenses had been overrun in hours and most of the people and the defenders had been slaughtered. From there, the Martians had split into two groups sweeping down the coasts in both directions, smashing each city in turn. Cairns, Broome, Townsville, Brisbane, one after the other they’d fallen, the defenders scatters or killed, the cities burned to ashes, the people… there were terrible stories about what was happening to the people who couldn’t get away. Survivors had fled, by boat, by train, on horseback, or on foot, desperately trying to stay ahead of the invaders.
In September the situation was deemed hopeless and the order had come from the government: evacuate. The people would gather in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. Ships would carry them to New Zealand, Tasmania, and India. But Australia had four million people, evacuating all would be a colossal task. Ships were summoned or hired or hijacked from all over the Pacific, but the only way an evacuation could succeed was if the troops could hold off the Martians long enough. The defenders of Sydney had been told that they had to hold as long as necessary—no matter what.
All through the summer and fall a seemingly endless stream of people had flowed into the city; people fleeing from the Martians. Thousands, tens of thousands, ultimately hundreds of thousands of people. The ships could not begin to carry them away as quickly as they arrived and huge camps had sprung up inside the defense lines. Every building and home in the city took people in. At one point Harry’s mother and sisters had twenty-five people sharing the house. It had been a bad time. Sanitation was inadequate and food was short, despite the herds of cattle also driven into the city. A lot of people got sick and far too many of them died. Some people couldn’t stand it and fled further south along the coast, perhaps in hope they could find a ship at some smaller harbor.
But the Martians took their time and only advanced slowly along the coasts, harried every mile by the Royal Navy. It was November before they neared Sydney. The stream of refugees swelled to a flood—and then tailed off to nothing.
“Harry, you all right, boy?”
He looked around and saw that Sampson was on another roof just across an alley. He had an expression of concern on his face. Burford was an older man; he was from Tasmania and had fought the Boers in South Africa before the first invasion. He was a rough-spoken and sometimes downright callous fellow, but he’d seemed to take a liking to Harry and looked out for him and helped him learn how to command an infantry platoon—even though he kept calling him ‘boy’.
“I’m fine. Well, as fine as anyone can be, I guess. This is it, isn’t it?”
“What? Our last stand? Don’t you start thinking like that Mister Calloway! We’re going to hold here a while and then we are going to stroll down to the harbor and get aboard a big fat transport and sail away.”
Harry snorted. “As easy as that, is it? Well, why was I even worried?”
“Because you think too much. Stop it and do your job.” He stiffened and pointed. “Looks like they are coming. Get ready.”