.Lord Fahrenheit
“For God’s sake, Britannic!”
I: The Envy of Mars
Mars was a dying world, and its civilization was dying with it. For thousands of years the Red Planet had been slowly but inexorably withering but its civilization, rich and majestic and proud, had long chosen to pay no heed to the tell-tale signs of decay. They were an arrogant people who had made their inhospitable home into a palace of wonders, and they long refused to acknowledge the fate of their planet.
But at the dawn of what on Earth was known as the 18th century, the Martians could no longer deny their once-magnificent civilization was atrophying. The great pyramids, once the launch site of great expeditions to the Jovian moons, were crumbling. The subterranean magnetic railway network was no longer maintained, and vast areas of tracks had fallen into disuse. And the library of light, containing the mysteries of the cosmos decoded, had gone dark centuries before.
And finally, the Martian aristocracy began to realize that their world was irreversibly doomed. Mars was drying up. The very planet had been drained of energy. The domes and the gardens, the canals and the cryopoli, and all the vast artificial caverns that had once been filled with light and music and science, were dimming and, one by one, growing dark and cold. As Mars faded, so did Martian civilization.
This, to many prideful Martians, was unbearable. Unusually hostile debates raged in the normally sedate League Planitia. Because some argued that the decline of Mars was Fate, and that it was useless to struggle against it. They identified themselves as the Moirai Conclave, and although they had the sympathy of Aelita, the Queen of Mars, they remained ever a minority.
The vast majority of the Seven Families, the upper tier of Mars’ aristocratic ruling class, was staunchly determined to find a way to avoid the decay of their civilization. Pooling their efforts in what became known as Faction Eschewal, they were diametrically opposed the pessimistically determinist Conclave - but they were also in turn internally divided. Some believed that Mars could still be somehow revitalized, whilst others thought salvation could only be found beyond Mars’ physical boundaries.
Like the ideals of Eschewal and Moirai had proven incompatible, the two sides within Eschewal proved unable to coexist, and soon tensions within Faction Eschewal came to a head. One camp was lead by Ronal Erythraeum, the XXIV Baron Elysium, who firmly believed it possible to reinvigorate the Red Planet, and spent most of his time studying in the now-gloomy halls of the library of light in the hope of finding the way to do just that. The other, by Dzígai, Viscount of Uzboi Vallis, who had his mind set on exoplanetary conquest.
For fifty long years the two sides jockeyed for supremacy inside and outside the venerable halls of the League Planitia. By most standards, but particularly those of the Martian aristocracy, the fight was a dirty one. Ordinarily the quarrels of the Seven Families were mediated by the Queen, but the natural position of authority of the Martian Crown had been eroded by Aelita’s open support for the Conclave. Noticing that her influence waned like the grandeur of Mars itself the disillusioned Queen sunk into a brooding depression and isolated herself from the public.
With the moderating influence of the Crown gone the conflict spun rapidly out of hand and in the Earth-year 1769, the year Napoleon Bonaparte was born, what had begun as a quarrel in the League Planitia finally culminated in a military coup by Dzígai and the murder of a number of prominent supporters of Erythraeum, who himself was imprisoned.
Now the undisputed ruler of Faction Eschewal, Dzígai styled himself Warlord of Mars, and turned his attention toward Earth. Mars’ immediate neighbour had been observed through Martian telescopes and listened to by Martian antennas for many centuries. Earth was rich in energy, but its inhabitants were considered primitive and barbaric. Indeed, many on the Red Planet at this stage had come to believe, like Dzígai himself, that the inhabitants of Earth were undeserving of their bountiful world, and even that they had somehow cheated the Martians out of what was rightfully theirs.
Ruled by such an unreasonable jealousy, the Martians began the one final Great Project of their civilization: the Invasion of Earth.
II: Escape from the Red Planet
It took the Red Planet a great deal of time to make ready for the war that it planned to unleash. Even under the best of circumstances interplanetary invasion is not an easy task, and on Mars the tangible lack of energy, of minerals and of manpower hampered the undertaking’s progress at every turn.
Still, by the Earth-year of 1810 what remained of the atrophied Martian economy had geared up fully for war. Factories which had lain dormant for centuries were lit once more, power surged through once-abandoned transmission cables, and for some time it seemed as if the Warlord was achieving through his military build-up the reinvigoration that had been the penultimate goal of his nemesis, Erythraeum.
But that was not truly the case. As parts of Mars appeared resurgent, other areas were darkening faster than ever before. In his quest to turn all of Mars toward the herculean task of invasion, Dzígai was in fact plundering his world’s precious last remaining resources, using up stores of minerals and energy that could never be replenished.
Still, even as entire areas of the underground caverns went dark never to be relit again the preparations for the war went on. From the manufactories emerged a seemingly endless stream of Fighting Machines and Flying Machines. Vast accumulator stations soaked up the power that would soon be needed to energize the interplanetary undertaking. And underneath the great Borealis Plain the engineers of the Warlord constructed the fantastic Guns of Mars, huge magnetic accelerators of unparalleled power. Once ready, these would fire great space-going artificial Cylinders, each one containing five Martian war machines, toward Earth.
Even with all of Mars dedicated to the task, the preparations for the invasion took a full century to complete. The brutal Warlord ruthlessly suppressed all discord, keeping the Red Planet in line through fear and intimidation. And yet, there was dissent. Not vocal, not powerful, but dissent all the same. Dzígai might have seized control of Faction Eschewal, but not all the League Planitia had been aligned with that bloc’s ideals, and not all of Erythraeum’s supporters had been rounded up.
A few years before the launch of the actual invasion, a few of the Warlord’s scarce remaining opponents hatched a daring plan. With surprise and what little weaponry they had managed to scavenge they managed to pierce the veil of isolation that had surrounded the royal palace for over a century, got through to the Queen and, with her help, managed to spring Ronal Erythraeum from his cavernous cell close to Mars’ molten iron core.
Knowing that Dzígai’s armed guards would be after them soon and that there would be no safe place to hide on the Red Planet herself, the conspirators and the Baron knew they had no other option than to escape off-world. Together they raided one of the Guns of Mars and, as the conspirators fought off the Warlord’s onrushing sentries, Erythraeum boarded a small test Cylinder. In a final act of defiance before being overcome by the guards, the few surviving dissidents used the great accelerator to launch Erythraeum into the black void of interplanetary space.
Of the conspirators, only Aelita, the Queen of Mars, managed to escape and survive. But Ronal Erythraeum, the XXIV Baron Elysium, was headed for Earth.
III: Earthfall
Planetary alignment was not in his favour: For no less than seven months the former Baron Elysium was locked in a tiny capsule as it soared through the interplanetary darkness on a bearing for Earth. There was preciously little to do but to wait, and to listen to the signals unwittingly broadcast into space by Earth’s first primitive radios. As a result of his eavesdropping, by the time of his landing, the highly intelligent Ronal Erythraeum fluently spoke French, English and Russian.
He made his eventual planetfall in a fortuitous location, although it would not appear so at first. His Cylinder crash-landed in Northern Transvaal, in British South Africa, where at that time a low-intensity conflict simmered between the two independent Boer republics, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, and the British Cape Colony. Both sides of the conflict saw the spacecraft fall from the heavens: British astronomers in Cape Town reported a shooting star, and the Boers noticed a great ball of fire on the horizon.
Both sides then set out to look for the remains. The British sent a scouting party because a few decades earlier the renowned astronomer Sir George Biddell Airy had formulated a famous theory on the 1844 Killeter Event, and the Empire was eager to weaponize any remaining fragments of the asteroid that might have survived re-entry. The Boers, meanwhile, simply believed the giant fireball to be a test-firing of some sort of new British super-weapon, and organized a commando raid to gather intelligence, and possibly destroy, it.
As the opposing parties, lead respectively by Boer commando George Bronkhorst and British army lieutenant Uther Armagh-Strathclyde, advanced further into the disputed Transvaal hinterland, they soon realized that something strange was going on. The local populace was afraid to come out of their homes at night and spoke of cattle mutilations and of strange creatures roaming the land at night. Sure enough, as the parties converged upon the crash site of the fallen Cylinder, they stumbled across horribly eviscerated animal corpses, as well as patches of a strange red weed that glowed purple at night, spreading virulently through the area.
In the end, it was the Boer commandos who first found the Cylinder*, but it was the British who stumbled across Erythraeum himself. By this time the Martian baron had been on Earthen soil for over a month, and he had fallen gravely ill from an infection by Earthly bacteria. Despite their horror at the sight of the bizarre and utterly unearthly creature the British soldiers made a passing form of communications with the baron, who managed to convince them –eventually- of not just his own sickly condition, but also of the peril of invasion about to befall the Earth.
As they begun to make their way back toward the Cape Colony with the ailing alien however the soldiers were set upon by the Boers, and a harrowing retreat ensued. The Boer commandos had the advantage of mobility, stealth, marksmanship and initiative, whilst Uther’s company of soldiers had to rely more on the traditional British military values of command, discipline, formation and synchronised firepower. The way back to the Cape was fraught with peril as the British were constantly faced with harrying flank-attacks and ambushes, and in the end only half of Uther’s men made it back alive, although to their credit the fallen managed to take quite a number of Boers with him. The traumatic return from Transvaal was one of the formative experiences for Uther, who would in due time become famous after World War One as Major Britannic.
By the time the remaining soldiers returned to Cape Town Ronal Erythraeum was on death’s doorstep. Fortunately for him (and, indeed, all the Empire) imperial governor George Macartney was a man of sharp wits, and though repulsed by the Martian’s appearance quickly realized that a being from beyond the stars surely would be in possession of knowledge that would interest Her Majesty’s Royal Society. Macartney therefore immediately requested the service one of the brightest minds of the time, the famed doctor Alphonse Moreau, who in the nick of time managed to conjure up a cure for Erythraeum’s condition (Moreau also made off with some of the Martian’s DNA, but that is another story altogether).
So it was that in April of 1895 HMS Gibraltar, a Royal Navy fast cruiser of the so-called ‘flying squadron’, left the harbour of Cape Town to make best speed for the imperial capital of London. Among those aboard were Doctor Moreau, lieutenant Armagh-Strathclyde, the baron Elysium Ronal Erythraeum, and of course the ship’s captain, Sir Harry Hughes-Hallett, a Diogenes Club member and agent of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. A series of coded telegraphs preceded their arrival, and thus it came to pass that in the summer of 1895 the war machine of Britannia secretly began to gear up, readying the Home Islands, and all the Empire, for the impending interplanetary invasion.
* The mostly intact remains of this Cylinder would be one of the causes for the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1901. The Martians under the command of the Warlord demolished most of their own Cylinders, meaning that the baron’s was perhaps the only remaining intact example of Martian interplanetary travel technology on Earth, and therefore invaluable.
IV: The War of the Worlds
The war began in August of 1900, and the first portent of its beginning came during that year's planetary alignment of Earth and Mars. From his Ottershaw observatory the well-known astronomer Ogilvy was the first to witness an explosion on the surface of the Red Planet, one of a series of such events that aroused much interest in the scientific community. Predictably, then, it did not take long for word of the occurrence to reach the upper circles of Her Majesty's Secret Service, whose agents had been waiting for exactly this sort of portent.
In the five years that separated the arrival of the Baron Elysium and the Invasion, the War Office had determined that the sheer expanse of the Empire could not possibly be defended in its entirety. Therefore, as was traditional, the War Office decided to concentrate on the defence of the Home Islands. Fortress Britain had repelled France early in the 19th century, and Britain's generals arrogantly assumed they could fend off the extraterrestrial threat with comparative ease. After all, many learned men of science at the time believed they had unravelled very nearly all of mother nature's secrets, and that the 'end of science' was therefore at hand. How much of an advantage, then, could the Martians have?
The Baron Elysium was quick to point out there was a significant difference between the men-of-war of La Royale and the Cylinders of Mars, and he knew just how committed his home world was to the impending invasion. But Britain’s generals and admirals waved away his concerns. Despite the knowledge that Martian civilization was real and that it had the technology to bridge the gulf between planets –Erythraeum was living proof of it– the notion of alien invasion was at this time still very much a foreign concept to the Empire’s strategists, who were ultimately still more preoccupied with the German emperor’s slowly but steadily expanding Hochseeflotte.
Preparations, then, were not so much slow as they were unspecific. The Home Office opted for the construction of coastal batteries, expansion of the airfleet and the navy, and called up reservists for extra training: all measures that Ronal Erythraeum warned would have preciously little use against Martian technology. Although some measure of preparation was being made, few people seemed to realize just how dire the situation was.
Few people perhaps, but not no-one. During the voyage of HMS Gibraltar from the Cape to London Erythraeum had many conversations with its captain, Sir Harry Hughes-Hallett. Upon arrival in London the captain proceeded to convince the Diogenes Club, of the seriousness of the situation Her Majesty’s most proud empire was in.
The Diogenes Club was a gentleman’s club, co-founded by the legendary Mycroft Holmes, but had over time evolved to become supreme and indispensable brain-trust behind the British government, existing to cope with matters beyond the purview of regular police and intelligence services. Among its members it counted many government agents and members of the Royal Society. In 1897 the Baron Elysium became its first alien member. It was the Club which would do much of the work that would prove crucial in fending off the invasion.
The invasion began early November 1900 with the arrival of the first Cylinder. This was Warlord Dzígai's personal craft, which crash-landed at Horsell Common close to London. A force of infantry and cannonry dispatched against it was almost instantly wiped out by the fearsome directed energy weapon that would go on to garner much notoriety as the Heat Ray. The Martians then went on to swiftly deployed their forces in a perimeter around the landing site. A second force of soldiers en route to Horsell Common unknowingly marched right into this perimeter, and was destroyed on the spot by Tripod war-machines.
The loss of two army units in the space of a single day forced the Empire’s tacticians to consider the possibility that they might have underestimated the Martian host. The army withdrew to reconsider its strategy. But the Martians were not sitting still, and more cylinders continued to land. Due to the specific planetary alignment at the time of the Cylinders’ firing the Invasion was limited to Europe, but Martian forces soon turned up in Spain, France and Italy. The largest single concentrations however were brought to bear against Britain and Germany, the two human states determined by Faction Eschewal to be the primary threats to Martian success.
The next three days were marked by short skirmishes as the Martians assembled their forces and the British carried out a series of stinging attacks in order to test the aliens’ strength. The only major engagement was the Battle of Swindon, where a squadron of Her Majesties Aerial Corps assaulted a Martian landing site. The long guns of the flagship of the Corps, the Cavorite-empowered air cruiser HMS St. George, managed to inflict damage on the Cylinder, but in return the Martians destroyed its conventionally powered escort HMS Venturer.
By the end of the fourth day and after a flurry of cross-country telegraph activity it had become apparent that a dozen Cylinders had landed in southern England. Each carried three assembled Tripods, meaning that a total of 36 of the Martian war machines were active in Britain at that time, with an indeterminate number under construction. The Martians ruled the countryside, where their superior mobility made organized resistance nearly impossible.
The Diogenes Club believed that it was only a matter of time before the Martians would fall prey to the Earthly bacteria, just like the Baron Elysium had after his arrival. But it could take several days for those diseases to begin to affect them, and Erythraeum warned that in that time the Martians would begin destroying any semblance of human civilization they encountered in southern England. The Club, acting as an informal advisory body, advised commanding general Gideon Aldershot to fall back to the cities. The general agreed, and British forces contracted around densely populated areas, hoping to lure the aliens into the scope of the heavy artillery guns and hastily repositioned coastal batteries. The majority of British forces began forming a cordon around London, the capital of the Empire.
On the seventh day the Martian assault began in earnest. British forces protecting Swindon, Salisbury and Guildford were overrun and, barring a few lucky individuals, completely annihilated. One tripod was destroyed near Shepperton by an artillery barrage. The Martians replied by firing canisters of Black Smoke for the first time. The army had no ready answer to this chemical weapon, and could do nothing but fall back. In the chaos of the retreat Aldershot and a number of his commanding officers, on a field trip to observe the front lines, were caught in a Martian attack and were killed. From this point on the war in England was effectively run by the Diogenes Club and, by extension, Ronal Erythraeum.
On the ninth day all communications from the German Empire ceased. No-one in London knew whether this was because the Empire had fallen or whether a crucial telegraph cable had been cut. Stragglers who managed to make it to London from Guildford talk of a 'red weed' that glowed purple at night and was overrunning the landscape and destroying native fauna.
On the tenth day the Martians first reached the outskirts of the capital city. The river Thames acted as a natural bulwark against the aliens however: two Tripods were brought down in Tillingham Bay by the torpedo ram HMS Thunderchild before the vessel was sunk. The town of Oxshott just south of London was the setting for a brief but vicious battle as the army unveiled its Land Ironclads, massive threaded behemoths protected by thick armoured plates and bristling with guns. Ten of these lumbering vehicles managed to take out two Tripods before being utterly destroyed. This day saw the largest number of Tripods destroyed in battle so far, but the Martian forces continued to press on, heedless of casualties.
The Martian advance still showed no signs of relenting come the fourteenth day, which began to worry the British leadership. According to the Royal Society the aliens should have begun to fall ill by this time, and yet they had not.
Come the sixteenth day the only major garrison left standing in southern England was that of London. The red weed ran riot across the landscape, and the Martian war-machines held sway over most of the south. Above the red weed-infested hills surrounding Oxford the St. George duelled a Flying Machine. Like the mythical dragon-slayer after which it is named the flagship emerged victoriously, striking its Martian opponent down with a direct hit of its 13-inch main guns. Soon after however Tripods arrived on the scene and the proud airship had no choice but to fall back to the capital.
On the eighteenth day a frenetic mass evacuation of London began. It was hoped that the Government and much of the surviving army could be vacated to British India, where the generals believed they could at least temporarily avoid the wrath of the Martian army. Commanded by Sir Harry the fast cruiser HMS Gibraltar lead a flotilla of medium British warships up the Thames to defend the capital during the evacuation, engaging in long-range gunnery duels with roving Tripods on the southern banks.
It was only on the nineteenth day the British fortunes changed. Returning from a gruelling behind-the-lines reconnaissance mission, lieutenant Uther Armagh-Strathclyde reported to the Diogenes Club of a giant machine the Martians had built near Horsell Common, where the first Cylinder fell. The Martians, the lieutenant reported, were hoarding captive humans into the facility in order to transfuse their blood. It was this facility, the Club soon recognized, that somehow was responsible for the survival of the Martians in Earth's hostile environment. For Earth to survive, it had to be destroyed.
