At that moment another image appeared, but this one was not displayed upon the hololith, but hove into view directly above it. The walking machine could be seen through the huge panes of glass forming the far wall of the Martian exhibition hall, and at its appearance the audience gasped and burst into applause, for clearly they thought that this was another miraculous attribute of the singular viewing device.
‘Good Lord!’ said a man standing beside Sophia and de Chardin. ‘How the dickens do they manage that? Quite extraordinary!’
Alerted by the signal rocket and cannon fire and by their commander’s voice, the Templar Police began quickly to circulate through the crowd, ordering people towards the exits.
Her heart beating wildly in her chest, Sophia gazed up at the apparition through the windows. The cannons were hitting their mark, but the shells appeared to have no effect upon the fighting machine, exploding cacophonously against its armoured hull, but leaving barely a mark upon it. In response, the Heat Ray flashed out at varying angles, and Sophia assumed that it was aiming its fire at the gun emplacements.
Now aware that something quite obviously was not right, the crowd began to cry out and surged away from the hololith. Sophia heard the Templar Police shouting orders to remain calm and to follow them to the exits. A family nearby – husband, wife and three children – was caught in the rush; the woman stumbled and fell while her children began to cry in sudden terror. The man tried to bring his wife to her feet, but she appeared to have twisted her ankle and cried out in pain as the people buffeted her in their haste to get away.
Sophia sprang forward and joined the family, helping the man to get his wife up while simultaneously gathering the children to her.
‘Lady Sophia!’ shouted de Chardin.
‘You must do your best to coordinate the evacuation, Detective,’ she shot back. ‘And you must find Her Majesty and get her away from the park. I’ll do what I can here. Let’s fall to it, sir!’
De Chardin nodded and, with a certain reluctance to be leaving Sophia, headed off in search of the Queen’s entourage.
The fifty cannons which surrounded the New Crystal Palace roared again and again, and each time they were answered by the fearsome blast of the Heat Ray, and it seemed to Sophia, as she helped the family towards the nearest exit, that after each exchange, the number of cannon blasts diminished.
Oh dear God
, she thought.
They’re losing the fight
.
Finally, they reached the exit. The man thanked her profusely for her help, then gathered up his wife in his arms and took her outside, followed closely by their panic-stricken children. Sophia glanced back into the hall and saw the same drama being played out as the one in which she had just taken part: people were stumbling and falling everywhere, their arms raised up pathetically in an attempt to shield themselves from the tide of running legs and stamping feet.
It would have been easy to flee through the exit, out of the palace and away from the violence and chaos, but the thought of ensuring her own safety did not even occur to her. Without hesitating, she forced her way through the fleeing tide of humanity, back into the hall, struggling to the fallen, dragging them to their feet and pushing them into the river of bodies that was surging towards the exit.
She didn’t know how many times she did this; she only knew that she could not allow a single man, woman or child to fall and be trampled. But she was only one woman, and the constant buffeting and unintended blows she received eventually took their toll upon her. One final push sent Sophia sprawling to the floor, and so exhausted was she that she could no longer bring herself to stand.
Just as she thought she would be trampled to death, a man paused, reached down, dragged her to her feet and took her with him to the exit. She would have thanked him, but the man disappeared instantly into the throng that was spilling across the park, away from the New Crystal Palace.
Sophia looked up at the fighting machine that was rearing like a gigantic predatory insect above the building. The number of cannons firing at it had been reduced to a mere handful, and now the armoured hull swivelled around and tilted downwards towards the palace, and the Heat Ray flashed again, its beam ploughing through the roof of the exhibition hall, which erupted in an ear-shattering explosion of glass and steel.
The people still inside must have died instantly, seared into oblivion, and Sophia shut her eyes tightly against the thought and the horror and the carnage. The last of the cannons were still firing upon the marauding monster, but they might just as well have been firing rocks, for all the damage their explosive shells had done.
The fighting machine fired again, and more glass and twisted steel exploded into the air. Sophia sank to her knees, her body exhausted, he heart utterly lost. They had failed; the fighting machine would be triumphant. The New Crystal Palace lay defenceless beneath it, like an animal prepared for slaughter.
But then it appeared to hesitate, the Heat Ray momentarily extinguished, and as Sophia watched in breathless anguish, the armoured hull twisted around until it was directly facing her. Indrid Cold had seen and recognised her. She could dimly spy a figure in the observation blister, and the figure appeared to be staring back at her. On top of the hull, the dreadful weapon glowed red in preparation for firing.
I’m sorry, Thomas
, Sophia thought, and closed her eyes.
Blackwood was descending rapidly towards Hyde Park and the New Crystal Palace, and he saw that an entire section of the vast building had already been destroyed by the fighting machine. He noticed that the hull was at an odd angle and quickly realised that Indrid Cold’s attention had been drawn to a solitary figure kneeling upon the grass. He looked into the telescope’s eyepiece and cried out as he realised that it was Sophia.
The ruby-tipped Heat Ray projector was glowing a bright, livid red, and Blackwood knew that in the next few seconds, Sophia would be burned out of existence. He pushed forward on the joystick, pitching the Æther zeppelin into an even steeper dive and aiming the craft directly at the fighting machine. The armoured hull grew and grew until it filled the windows of the flight deck, and Blackwood, certain that he had arrived at his last moment of life, closed his eyes.
The collision was horrifying. With a tremendous, sickening crack and an ear-piercing shriek of metal against metal, the gondola smashed into the fighting machine’s hull, knocking it off balance, so that Indrid Cold had to fight his own controls to keep it upright. The machine staggered away from Sophia, with the zeppelin, which had been carried forward by its momentum, still above it.
Blackwood was at once relieved and horrified to discover that he was still alive and gripping the joystick, which was the only thing preventing him from falling through the gaping hole that had been torn in the gondola’s underside. All around him, the flight deck – or what was left of it – was a chaos of spitting electrical wiring and hissing gases erupting from broken conduits. The zeppelin was all but done for; the whine of the overheating Æther engines sounded loudly in Blackwood’s ears, and he knew that in the next few seconds, the craft would veer uncontrollably away and bury itself in the ground. If he stayed onboard, his reprieve would be short-lived indeed, and the fighting machine, having now steadied itself, would finish the job it had come here to do.
Blackwood looked down and saw that he was directly above the fighting machine’s dorsal surface. He judged the drop to be about twenty-five feet – a damnably long way to fall unprotected and with a shattered left forearm, but he knew he had no choice, and so, with a tremendous effort of will, he overrode his instinct for self-preservation and released his grip on the joystick.
He dropped through the hole in the gondola, and his fall seemed to stretch into an eternity whose illusory nature was brutally demonstrated when he struck the roof of the fighting machine’s hull. He knew that if he struck it feet first, he would break both his legs and slide off to his death, so he flattened his body out, presenting as much surface area as possible to distribute the force of the impact.
When he smacked into the hull, he felt several ribs crack with the impact, and his left arm was plunged into more agony than he would have thought possible. For an instant, he blacked out, but he regained his wits just in time to grab the edge of a cooling vent and prevent himself from falling to the ground a hundred feet below.
Providence smiled on him at that moment, for his wildly flailing legs came upon a series of indentations: hand- and foot-holds designed for external maintenance of the vehicle, and he managed to steady himself and gain a firm purchase.
The hull was already swivelling around, preparing to fire again, and Blackwood watched in horror as the ruby-red Heat Ray projector disgorged its lethal beam. The air around the weapon’s crystalline muzzle crackled with its awful power, and Blackwood felt the heat wash over him as another section of the palace burst apart.
Glancing to his right, he saw a large panel with a sign next to it, stencilled in English. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered why a Martian vehicle would have English markings, and then remembered that this machine was the first in a shipment intended for Great Britain.
The sign read, EMERGENCY RESCUE.
The panel was an escape hatch.
Forcing himself to use his left arm as well as his right, and crying aloud with the resultant pain, Blackwood edged towards the hatch, supporting himself by means of the indentations set into the hull. Tears of agony streaming down his face, he located the release lever and pulled it.
Instantly, the escape hatch popped open, and Blackwood crawled inside, his cracked ribs grinding against each other, his left arm a miniature world of torture.
He found himself in the fighting machine’s control room, a cramped space lined with flashing instruments and complex controls. Indrid Cold sat with his back to him before the observation blister, one hand gripping the vehicle’s control wheel, the other hovering above a trigger mechanism which clearly activated the Heat Ray.
Blackwood drew himself to his feet and lunged at Cold, grabbing him around the neck and yanking him out of his seat. With no one at the controls, the vehicle immediately began to stagger back and forth, causing the floor to pitch crazily. Blackwood slammed Cold’s head into a supporting brace, and the Venusian grunted loudly at the impact, a single crack appearing in the mask he wore. Nevertheless, his strength and reflexes allowed him to recover instantly, and he threw off his attacker with ease.
Even without his debilitating injuries, Blackwood would have found it difficult to best this creature, but now, he knew he stood no chance against him.
‘Cold,’ he panted. ‘It’s over. Give it up!’
‘You’re right, Blackwood. It
is
over… over for you, and the rest of humanity!’
He threw himself at Blackwood and floored him with a single blow. Blackwood felt blood filling his mouth as the floor of the control room continued to buck and heave beneath him. His broken ribs poured ceaseless waves of agony through his torso, and he drew his legs up to his chest in a convulsive movement.
Cold stepped forward and stood above him. ‘I want you to look at the true face of your destroyer, Blackwood,’ he said. ‘I want you to see the true face of Earth’s new owners.’ He reached up and took off the mask, and Blackwood gazed with horror at the red eyes burning in a face that was a mass of writhing tendrils. At the centre of the mass, a hole opened up, a circular, lipless mouth. Cold leaned forward, and from his mouth, a gout of blue flame erupted, making Blackwood cough and choke and momentarily blinding him.
He opened his eyes and gazed blearily up at his nemesis… and at the open hatch in front of which he was standing.
With a sudden movement, Blackwood thrust out with his legs, aiming for Cold’s knees. His feet struck their target, and he felt the crunch of breaking bone and snapping cartilage. Cold shrieked in pain and rage as Blackwood drew his legs back again, and again kicked out, this time at Cold’s chest.
The Venusian tumbled backwards through the escape hatch. Blackwood doubted that the fall would kill him, even with two broken knees. He dragged himself across the heaving deck to the pilot’s seat, crawled into it and took hold of the control wheel. He had no idea how to pilot the machine, but he didn’t need to, for he didn’t intend to pilot it anywhere.
He looked down through the observation blister and saw Cold hobbling away. How he could do so with the injuries he had sustained, Blackwood had no idea. His physical endurance was beyond belief.
Cold stopped, turned, and looked up at Blackwood with his burning, hate-filled eyes. He reached into a pocket and withdrew something that looked like a pistol: his energy weapon. He took careful aim at Blackwood, who doubted that the glass of the blister would be able to withstand the beam.
Taking a deep breath, Blackwood pushed forward on the control wheel, hoping that the action would have the desired effect. It did. The fighting machine pitched forward, the sudden manoeuvre making it finally lose its balance, and for the third time in the few minutes since he had returned to Earth, Blackwood stared death in the face. This time, however, he doubted that the Grim Reaper would back down.
The last thing he saw before his pain finally ceased was the figure of Indrid Cold, arm still outstretched, weapon still clutched in his hand, as the Martian fighting machine fell upon him, splashing him into eternity.