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ffuturesThis is the first chapter of a story which I think is a fanfic first - a Worm / War of the Worlds crossover. It is, needless to say, fairly AU for both sources...
The Martian
This story is fanfic based on the web novel Worm by John C. McCrae and on The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, with some ideas borrowed from other sources which will be listed as they become relevant. These sources are used purely for entertainment purposes, and with no intention to impinge on copyright. Updates will probably not be fast.
I: We Used To Be Friends
The day my life changed my alarm clock woke me at seven, and it took me a couple of minutes to remember that it was Saturday and I didn't need to get ready quite as fast as usual; no school, just my Saturday job, and I wasn't due in until ten. I got up and spent a few minutes checking PHO and my email. No real news and nothing abusive for a change, but there was a notification that one of the fanfic stories I follow had been updated: another chapter of Aleph Invaders by Wony_Salkman, with Sir Charles Croker, one of the evil Secret Lizard Rulers of Earth Aleph's Britain, trying to rescue Bonny Prince Barney, captured during one of their fiendish plots to take over our world and last seen in the hands of the PRT ENE. It's silly but a lot of fun.
They watched as the van rolled onto the platform and the force field bridge disappeared, and Charlie used his binoculars to try to see where Barney was taken. "Okay, something went wrong with the explosives, we can't rescue him now. Maybe we can get a boat..." There was a blinding flash, and Charlie dropped the binoculars, covering his eyes as his vision recovered. A rumble like thunder shook the car, and car alarms started to beep.
"What the hell..." Out in the bay the Rig was starting to list, all of the buildings burning. There was no sign of Barney, and the whole vehicle area was a mass of flame. "Arthur... you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"
"Oops..."
Charlie was glad his prosthetics concealed his real mouth, it meant that he could smirk without anyone noticing. With Barney gone he was a step closer to the throne, and Arthur was going to be the one carrying the can.
Of course Barney would probably turn out to have miraculously escaped, with Charlie destined to become Kentucky Fried Lizard Gizzards when the Evil Queen found out about his treachery, but given the length of the story it would probably take a while to get there. And it was nearly eight, so I dashed downstairs to make breakfast for myself and Dad then ran out of the house and caught the bus to Brockton Bay Maritime Museum, on the waterfront not far from the Dockworker's Union. The driver gave me a dirty look, but I wasn't the only person waiting so he couldn't just ignore me and drive by, which has happened a few times in the past. Probably an E88 supporter or some other flavour of racist.
Let's begin at the beginning - my name is Taylor Hebert and I hatched in Brockton Bay in June 1995. If I have to describe myself... well, like all Martian-Americans I have mottled grey-green leathery skin, and a body that's a combined head and thorax, held horizontally about four feet above the ground, with two bulbous eyes the size of grapefruit and a sharp beak and mouth at the wider end. And tentacles of course, sixteen of them in two groups of eight to either side under my body, with about half used as "legs" when I'm moving, and the rest as my "hands". A human probably wouldn't be able to distinguish me from any other Martian they met in the street, unless they knew me well. I'm pretty nondescript - I'm not even the best-looking Martian girl at Winslow High, that's probably Emma Vt'kso'zubb, a former friend and now leading candidate for abusive email sender.
Emma's descended from High Martians, the guys who actually led the 1901 invasion, and her ancestors were so obsessed with their lineage that they never even switched to a surname humans could actually pronounce. She's a stuck-up bitch anyway, and failed the entrance exam for Arcadia High because she thought she'd get in on her looks and family connections alone, but that's not really relevant to my story. We used to be friends, which is why I ended up going to Winslow when I could have probably got into Arcadia, but I'll get to that later.
My ancestors were more the blue collar side of things - slaves, to put it bluntly, the workers who kept the fighting machines and heat rays running. Naturally they weren't trusted to use them, or fed anything but the usual synthetic gruel and Red Weed paste our species lived on back on Mars. Which meant that they mostly missed out on the blood-borne diseases that killed most of the High Martians. Fortunately the epidemics did take out the Supreme Leader, the last of a line of tyrants who ruled Mars for nearly a thousand Earth years, and most of the high command. The rest of our ancestors eventually figured out how to surrender, as did a few outlier High Martians who were immune or only got a mild dose, like Emma's great-grandparents. But I digress.
Cue the Martian survivors becoming the lowest-paid and most poorly treated workers on Earth. Fortunately they were hard-working and could put up with horrible working conditions - Mars was a high-tech dystopia under the Leader dynasty, and we were literally engineered to take whatever hellish conditions they wanted to throw at us. This made them the perfect work-force for mines, foundries, shipbuilding, sweat shops and anywhere else that could use workers who were only mildly affected by toxic waste, fumes, and sub zero temperatures. And expendable, of course, mustn't forget that. For a long time they weren't trusted anywhere near Martian technology, which led to humans trying to dismantle it and usually blowing up themselves and a large chunk of their surroundings - London lost an entire college that way. This distrust meant that there were no Martian weapons used for most of the First World War, with the exception of some old Black Smoke cylinders that the Germans used at Ypres in 1915. Without maintenance the remaining heat-rays were useless by the time the war ended, with none of the surviving Martians willing to admit that they knew how to repair them.
Slowly, very slowly, we started to become an accepted part of human society - well, as accepted as any other loathed and highly visible minority - mostly concentrated near the ruins of the main invasion sites, and the survivors began to have children and adapt to human society. This was a big surprise to the humans, who'd assumed that an invading army would be all male, but Martians aren't actually biologically male or female, we're hermaphrodites. Since human society puts such a huge emphasis on gender most of us go along with it and adopt whichever gender role seems to suit our personalities best. Sometimes for life, sometimes until a relationship goes the other way. Emma is as girly as a Martian can possibly be, she even wears sparkly makeup; I'm more on the tomboy end of the scale but still prefer female pronouns. My dad has always identified as male, so far as I know, but my mom experimented quite a bit in college before settling down as exclusively female. I know that for a while she dated Lustrum, a Martian Trump and Master who somehow became a leader in the human radical feminism movement, fortunately they'd broken up before Lustrum was caught and sent to the Birdcage.
In the 1930s Hitler got a little blatant about his plans for the Martians in Germany, and our people in Britain and the USA believed he meant what he was saying, scraped together some money, and set up some escape routes. My great-grandparents on my mom's side got out by spending a couple of weeks behind a dummy bulkhead in the hold of a barge as it made its way down the Rhine to Holland, then the fund paid for their steerage passage to the USA. The US government was also involved in the escape routes, they wanted to ensure that Germany and Russia didn't build any new heat rays. And, of course, they wanted their own. By the time the war in Europe began most Martians had escaped to Britain or the USA. This was very handy for the Allies, because they wanted to take a lot of people out of the work force for their armies and navies and could use Martians as cheap replacements. That incidentally gave the KKK and other canal-scum an instantly-recognizable minority to hate. Meanwhile Martians working for the Chicago Project eventually succeeded in developing low-power man-portable heat rays and powered armour, which would have made an eventual invasion of Japan a lot shorter if the Manhattan Project hadn't got results first.
As the war ended returning soldiers wanted their jobs back, and in a lot of places Martians ended up out of work. One of the exceptions was Brockton Bay, where some of the brighter Martians had managed to persuade the Brockton Bay Dockworker's Association and other unions that if they let us join we'd work for scale and wouldn't be cheap scab labour for the management. My grandfather David, on Dad's side of the family, eventually became one of the union organizers, and gradually built up a political machine that improved things for all of the union members, while keeping organized crime out. That wasn't difficult since the mobs recruited on ethnic grounds, and remarkably few Martians come from Italy, Sicily, or Ireland. Today the unions are still around, and still have quite a few Martian members, including my dad Danny who now runs the BBDWA, and Brockton Bay has the second highest Martian population of any area in the USA - only Alaska has more, largely because cold doesn't bother us. They're mostly workers in the gas and oil industries, but they're spread all over the state and there's no real Martian community there the way there is here.
In the sixties and seventies Russia and the USA sent probes to Mars, concentrating on the areas the invasion had launched from in 1900. As expected they found devastation - the Supreme Leader hadn't cared what happened after he left, and the launch process had released immense quantities of toxic gas into the atmosphere. You could tell how bad it was by the fact that the canals were mostly choked with sand and the Red Weed, our main food crop, was nowhere to be seen. The Viking probes of 1975 and 1976 landed where our largest cities had been and had loudspeakers that played messages from Martians on Earth - there was no response.
Then in August 1982, three months after the first sighting of Scion, astronomers detected five very large nuclear explosions on Mars, three on the South pole and two on the North, which between them wrecked the ice caps. Nobody has ever admitted responsibility, but the estimated yield was over 100 megatons per explosion, and Russia was the only nation that had tested nukes that size, their Tsar Bomba weapons. There are unconfirmed claims that the Russians launched two very heavy boosters in November the previous year, one of the launch windows for a flight to Mars. I'm iffy on that one - if it really was the Russians working alone I think that Kruschev would have announced it as a triumph for Russian technology in defence of all mankind. Conspiracy theorists claim that the USA and possibly other nations were involved too, and got the Russians to agree to run it as a black project. It really doesn't matter much - either way, nobody bothered to send more probes to Mars after that, there wasn't much chance of finding anyone or anything alive there.
A couple of years later Professor Haywire opened the portal to Earth Aleph, and their media showed that the invasion was more or less the same there - minor differences in landing sites and casualties, but a century later the results looked much the same. One thing was different though; there was never a nuclear strike against Mars, and they have sporadic radio contact with a tiny remnant Martian population there. I'm not sure what that implies - maybe on Bet there was some tinker-tech involved in the bomb project, or maybe the Earth Aleph scientists were just a little luckier with their landing sites. The conspiracy theory says that there were survivors in our universe too, but NASA and the Russians concealed the information until they could nuke the ice caps and eliminate the problem.
Around that time Parahumans were the new Big Thing. The term "Parahuman" is a misnomer in one important respect; Martians can have powers too. In fact more Martians trigger than humans, as a percentage of our population - roughly one human in 8000, one Martian in approximately 5000. The "approximately" is there because there simply aren't that many Martians, so the data is inexact. We tend to produce more Thinkers and Tinkers than anything else, and we're naturally low-level Brutes. The only publicly acknowledged Martian capes in Brockton Bay are Miss Militia, a hero whose ancestors are rumoured to be survivors of the Martian force that landed in the Middle East, and Über, a sidekick of the human villain Leete, who was allegedly born here and so far as I know is the only Martian who has ever streamed video of himself having public tentacle sex with a human prostitute while simulating a scene from Grand Theft Auto. About which I can only say "Ewwwwwww!" Given the size of the Martian community in Brockton there's a good chance I've met the creep, which does not make me feel warm and fuzzy. Not that Martians are, of course!
By now you're probably wondering why I'm telling you all this. After all, everyone knows about Martians, the invasion, the whole enchilada. There are Martians on TV, typically comedy relief or hostile aliens in rubber body suits, although very few have leading roles except as villains. There are reasons, and I'll get to them eventually.
Part of it started at Winslow, the wretched hive of scum and villainy which has been my daytime prison for much of the last couple of years. It's a cesspit of a school, with rival gangs using it as their recruiting grounds, and the poor bastards the gangs don't want usually treated as their victims. None of the current major gangs want Martians, or seem to know quite how to handle us; the ABB and E88 are different variations on racist, Asian and Nazi respectively, and see us as despised outsiders, while the Merchants have yet to find any drugs that they can sell to us, and don't trust anyone they can't hook on their poison. Nobody really knows what the hell Coil's gang is up to, but whatever it is, it doesn't appear to include recruiting Martians. About the only thing protecting us is that the gangs are pretty wary of the unions and really don't want to stir up trouble with them. Last time that happened our pickets started to turn up at sites linked to E88, including several that they really didn't want the police or PRT to know about, protesting their use of scabs and disregard of equal opportunities laws, and Hookwolf somehow ended up with one of our picket signs up his ass, with pictures on PHO.
Some time between Junior High and Winslow my former friend Emma seems to have decided that she was going to ditch her best friend and become besties with a human girl called Sophia Hess, who started at Winslow at the same time as we did. Since Sophia is apparently some sort of psychopath the way that Emma cemented her friendship was to join Sophia and a few of her human cronies, most notably Madison Clements, in bullying me. This started in Autumn of 2009 and went on through 2010 and into this year. For some reason nobody in the school management was doing anything to stop this; this may possibly be related to the fact that Winslow doesn't have a single Martian teacher or support staff member, which I would have thought bends most of the affirmative action laws. I'd given serious thought to the idea that Sophia might be some sort of Master, but she's a jock, probably the school's best track star, and I think most of it can be explained by Principal Blackwell wanting to keep those trophies coming in. If that meant that I had to be treated like hgkpol then hey, what's one Martian kid with her possessions ruined compared to a shiny faux-silver plastic trophy? That was an ongoing thing, and I was still brooding about it when I got to the museum, dumped my umbrella, bag, and wet boots (they look like long thick condoms, one per walking tentacle) in my locker, put on my tour guide sash, and went out to meet my first group of the day.
I was starting with twenty or so kids from Immaculata Junior High, with a couple of nuns running crowd control. That was a good start, it probably meant I wasn't going to have to spend all my time making sure that nobody got lost.
"Hello. My name's Taylor, and I'd like to welcome you to Brockton Bay Maritime Museum. Ten years ago the city marked the centenary of the 1901 Martian Invasion by funding exhibits here and at the Christner Museum near City Hall; both cover different aspects of its effects on Brockton Bay. You may have noticed that I'm a Martian-American..." a couple of the kids giggled, others just looked bored "...so I have a stake in explaining what really happened, rather than the versions that you might have seen on TV. There's quite a lot of ground for us to cover, so if you'd like to come with me we'll go into hall one, and I'll show you where it all began." For once all of them followed without anyone goofing off.
The exhibits I took them to were two 1/5th scale models of a steam warship; one intact and floating low in water simulated by a sheet of plate glass, the other a rusted wreck lying on its side on simulated sea bed, with gaping slashes in its hull. The upper works were almost gone, what was left was incomplete, the steel warped and rounded, half-melted. "Sisters, kids, these are replicas of the vessel that won one of the most significant victories of the war. They were donated to museums around the world by Britain's Royal Navy for the centenary of the invasion. One shows her as she was built, the other her condition when they salvaged her. This is His Majesty's Ship Thunder Child, an ironclad torpedo ram built in 1881. Twenty years later, when she was already considered obsolete, she engaged three Martian tripods off the British coast and destroyed at least two of them before she was sunk, with the loss of all hands. In doing that her crew saved the lives of several thousand evacuees who were fleeing the invasion in a flotilla of small ships. The battle triggered a huge change in naval thinking. One of the consequences was development of Brockton Bay as a naval dockyard, and several generations of ships inspired by the Thunder Child were built here and in other ports around the USA. Any questions so far?"
"What was a torpedo ram?"
"I'm glad you asked me that..." Someone always does. "...At the end of the nineteenth century naval design emphasized big ships with big guns and heavy armour that could shrug off attacks from smaller ships. That was when the first battleships were built, and started an arms race that ended with the First World War. Torpedo rams were an early attempt to come up with a defence against battleships; they were designed for speed and maneuverability, and were armed with light guns and torpedoes. The name pretty much says what they were supposed to do - get in close, until the battleship guns couldn't depress enough to fire at them, ram the battleship if possible, and fire torpedoes into it at point-blank range. You can see that she floated really low in the water, to make her a smaller target, and had a sharp beak underwater for ramming, there's actually a torpedo tube that fires through the beak. The trouble was that naval gun technology and torpedo defenses improved dramatically; in 1880 a fast-moving ship like this had a good chance of avoiding fire, by the 1890s the attack she was designed for would have been suicide. It might have stayed like that, but after the Invasion everyone tried to come up with ways to fight any future Martian attacks, and the Thunder Child suggested that the Martian tripods were unusually vulnerable in the sea. It's likely that battleships would have been effective too, but in this particular case they didn't reach the fight in time to help. That suggested a need for very fast, heavily armed ships, preferably designed to minimize vulnerability to Martian weapons, and able to engage the tripods in coastal waters; it had to be coastal waters because the tripods were limited to a maximum sea depth of around ninety feet, any deeper than that and the crew compartment would have been submerged. Now, that all sounds good, but you can't just build dozens of specialized ships to fight an enemy that you might never have to face again; it uses resources that you might need to fight more credible threats. Anyone want to guess what they did?" There were a lot of blank looks, but eventually one of the nuns raised a hand. "Sister?"
"I think I recall reading that they were used to attack coastal shipping."
"Thank you, that's exactly right. They improved the guns and torpedoes, put in steam turbines which nearly doubled their speed, and used them for what's now called littoral warfare - that's spelled with two T's and an O if you're taking notes, it means fighting in coastal waters, where big ships have lots of problems maneuvering, and attacking coastal shipping and installations. The first world war began with attacks on British, French and German shipping, which continued throughout the war, eventually spreading to the coastal waters of most of the belligerents including the USA and Canada. It's one of the reasons why the British were slow to ramp up their forces in France, they lost a huge percentage of the shipping they needed for it in the early weeks of the war, while the Germans could move their forces across Europe by rail."
"By then Brockton Bay already had major military shipyards. There are several reasons for that. The main one is that one of the Martian cylinders landed near Boston and its occupants destroyed the shipyards there. We took up some of the slack, and we were close enough to Boston to attract a lot of their skilled work force. Once humans started talking to Martian prisoners the government learned that six cylinders were aimed at the East Coast. Three landed successfully near Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and their crews and weapons are accounted for. A fourth broke up on impact in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with no survivors. The fifth has never been found, but there were numerous sightings of a green meteor trail impacting somewhere out at sea at about the right time, and when you put them all together the most likely location for that is somewhere due East of Brockton Bay, probably in deep water off the continental shelf. The crew probably wouldn't be able to get out with that much pressure on the hull, but the government wanted a strong naval presence here in case that was wrong. Nobody's ever found any wreckage, and it's possible that it's still down there somewhere. There have been a lot of attempts to find it over the years, so far nobody has."
"What happened to the sixth cylinder?" asked one of the kids.
I shrugged a few tentacles. "Best bets are it broke up on launch, or went off course and never reached the Earth. It was the last one launched to this region, so we'll probably never know."
"You don't sound too upset about it," said a familiar voice; Emma. She and Sophia had come in while I was talking, and were standing behind the tour group. I guessed that they were about to try to make a scene.
"Since you ask, I'm upset by the waste of any life. Most of the survivors claim that they were forced to take part in the invasion, but for all I know they were gung-ho patriots determined to invade Earth and enslave humanity for the glory of the Martian race. If they were they probably got what they deserved. If the survivors are telling the truth, they probably died cursing the Supreme Leader and the High Martians. Either way, there's really not much I can do to change things more than a century later."
"That's dissing your ancestors," said Sophia.
"My ancestors had the good sense to surrender the second the High Martians were gone. I'd imagine that that's true for your friend too, and any other Martians you know. Okay, kids, sorry for the interruption. Any other questions about the Thunder Child before we move on?"
By then the nuns had their eye on the dynamic duo, and they glowered a little then left. It was really low key compared to the usual bullying I got at Winslow, and it wasn't hard to guess that they'd be on my case at school on Monday. But I carried on with the tour, and hopefully kept the kids interested. Eventually I reached the conclusion of the talk, which is best summed up as "Yay for military spending that made Brockton Bay great for a few decades, shame it's pretty much gone away again," suggested some books and DVDs that have information on the topics we'd discussed (all available, by some strange chance, from the museum bookshop), answered some final questions and pointed out the way back to the cloakrooms and washrooms, and went to take a break.
There was an oddly appetizing smell in the locker room, and when I opened my locker I recognized the source. Blood, and the body it was coming from. I hit the emergency alarm button, the one we're supposed to use if there's a major incident, hoped that the guards were on the ball in locking the place down, checked for a pulse, then used the emergency phone to call 911. I was still trying to speak to someone human when the first guards arrived, led by Stefan something, the human guy who was in charge of security. He took a look around, and saw me standing by the locker, trying to keep wounds closed with some of my tentacles while I made the call.
"What the hell's going on?"
"Found her in my locker when I came for my break. I'm trying to get an ambulance, I think she's still alive."
"Any idea who she is?"
"Yes. Her name's Hess, Sophia Hess. She's in my class at Winslow."
TBC
Notes: The main sources for this story are Worm and The War of the Worlds. Secondary sources are Kim Newman's story Famous Monsters (1988), and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume II (2002-3). The title of each chapter has some connection with Mars, but it may not always be obvious. See Wikipedia for more on torpedo rams and littoral warfare. Before anyone asks, this will NOT be a "ship girl" story. I don't think that genre really works for non-humans like Taylor...
There's a bit of an info dump in this chapter but it's a very AU setting and need to get some information (and a few red herrings) into the story early. Hopefully it still works.
Comments please before I post to archives.
The Martian
This story is fanfic based on the web novel Worm by John C. McCrae and on The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, with some ideas borrowed from other sources which will be listed as they become relevant. These sources are used purely for entertainment purposes, and with no intention to impinge on copyright. Updates will probably not be fast.
I: We Used To Be Friends
The day my life changed my alarm clock woke me at seven, and it took me a couple of minutes to remember that it was Saturday and I didn't need to get ready quite as fast as usual; no school, just my Saturday job, and I wasn't due in until ten. I got up and spent a few minutes checking PHO and my email. No real news and nothing abusive for a change, but there was a notification that one of the fanfic stories I follow had been updated: another chapter of Aleph Invaders by Wony_Salkman, with Sir Charles Croker, one of the evil Secret Lizard Rulers of Earth Aleph's Britain, trying to rescue Bonny Prince Barney, captured during one of their fiendish plots to take over our world and last seen in the hands of the PRT ENE. It's silly but a lot of fun.
They watched as the van rolled onto the platform and the force field bridge disappeared, and Charlie used his binoculars to try to see where Barney was taken. "Okay, something went wrong with the explosives, we can't rescue him now. Maybe we can get a boat..." There was a blinding flash, and Charlie dropped the binoculars, covering his eyes as his vision recovered. A rumble like thunder shook the car, and car alarms started to beep.
"What the hell..." Out in the bay the Rig was starting to list, all of the buildings burning. There was no sign of Barney, and the whole vehicle area was a mass of flame. "Arthur... you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"
"Oops..."
Charlie was glad his prosthetics concealed his real mouth, it meant that he could smirk without anyone noticing. With Barney gone he was a step closer to the throne, and Arthur was going to be the one carrying the can.
Of course Barney would probably turn out to have miraculously escaped, with Charlie destined to become Kentucky Fried Lizard Gizzards when the Evil Queen found out about his treachery, but given the length of the story it would probably take a while to get there. And it was nearly eight, so I dashed downstairs to make breakfast for myself and Dad then ran out of the house and caught the bus to Brockton Bay Maritime Museum, on the waterfront not far from the Dockworker's Union. The driver gave me a dirty look, but I wasn't the only person waiting so he couldn't just ignore me and drive by, which has happened a few times in the past. Probably an E88 supporter or some other flavour of racist.
Let's begin at the beginning - my name is Taylor Hebert and I hatched in Brockton Bay in June 1995. If I have to describe myself... well, like all Martian-Americans I have mottled grey-green leathery skin, and a body that's a combined head and thorax, held horizontally about four feet above the ground, with two bulbous eyes the size of grapefruit and a sharp beak and mouth at the wider end. And tentacles of course, sixteen of them in two groups of eight to either side under my body, with about half used as "legs" when I'm moving, and the rest as my "hands". A human probably wouldn't be able to distinguish me from any other Martian they met in the street, unless they knew me well. I'm pretty nondescript - I'm not even the best-looking Martian girl at Winslow High, that's probably Emma Vt'kso'zubb, a former friend and now leading candidate for abusive email sender.
Emma's descended from High Martians, the guys who actually led the 1901 invasion, and her ancestors were so obsessed with their lineage that they never even switched to a surname humans could actually pronounce. She's a stuck-up bitch anyway, and failed the entrance exam for Arcadia High because she thought she'd get in on her looks and family connections alone, but that's not really relevant to my story. We used to be friends, which is why I ended up going to Winslow when I could have probably got into Arcadia, but I'll get to that later.
My ancestors were more the blue collar side of things - slaves, to put it bluntly, the workers who kept the fighting machines and heat rays running. Naturally they weren't trusted to use them, or fed anything but the usual synthetic gruel and Red Weed paste our species lived on back on Mars. Which meant that they mostly missed out on the blood-borne diseases that killed most of the High Martians. Fortunately the epidemics did take out the Supreme Leader, the last of a line of tyrants who ruled Mars for nearly a thousand Earth years, and most of the high command. The rest of our ancestors eventually figured out how to surrender, as did a few outlier High Martians who were immune or only got a mild dose, like Emma's great-grandparents. But I digress.
Cue the Martian survivors becoming the lowest-paid and most poorly treated workers on Earth. Fortunately they were hard-working and could put up with horrible working conditions - Mars was a high-tech dystopia under the Leader dynasty, and we were literally engineered to take whatever hellish conditions they wanted to throw at us. This made them the perfect work-force for mines, foundries, shipbuilding, sweat shops and anywhere else that could use workers who were only mildly affected by toxic waste, fumes, and sub zero temperatures. And expendable, of course, mustn't forget that. For a long time they weren't trusted anywhere near Martian technology, which led to humans trying to dismantle it and usually blowing up themselves and a large chunk of their surroundings - London lost an entire college that way. This distrust meant that there were no Martian weapons used for most of the First World War, with the exception of some old Black Smoke cylinders that the Germans used at Ypres in 1915. Without maintenance the remaining heat-rays were useless by the time the war ended, with none of the surviving Martians willing to admit that they knew how to repair them.
Slowly, very slowly, we started to become an accepted part of human society - well, as accepted as any other loathed and highly visible minority - mostly concentrated near the ruins of the main invasion sites, and the survivors began to have children and adapt to human society. This was a big surprise to the humans, who'd assumed that an invading army would be all male, but Martians aren't actually biologically male or female, we're hermaphrodites. Since human society puts such a huge emphasis on gender most of us go along with it and adopt whichever gender role seems to suit our personalities best. Sometimes for life, sometimes until a relationship goes the other way. Emma is as girly as a Martian can possibly be, she even wears sparkly makeup; I'm more on the tomboy end of the scale but still prefer female pronouns. My dad has always identified as male, so far as I know, but my mom experimented quite a bit in college before settling down as exclusively female. I know that for a while she dated Lustrum, a Martian Trump and Master who somehow became a leader in the human radical feminism movement, fortunately they'd broken up before Lustrum was caught and sent to the Birdcage.
In the 1930s Hitler got a little blatant about his plans for the Martians in Germany, and our people in Britain and the USA believed he meant what he was saying, scraped together some money, and set up some escape routes. My great-grandparents on my mom's side got out by spending a couple of weeks behind a dummy bulkhead in the hold of a barge as it made its way down the Rhine to Holland, then the fund paid for their steerage passage to the USA. The US government was also involved in the escape routes, they wanted to ensure that Germany and Russia didn't build any new heat rays. And, of course, they wanted their own. By the time the war in Europe began most Martians had escaped to Britain or the USA. This was very handy for the Allies, because they wanted to take a lot of people out of the work force for their armies and navies and could use Martians as cheap replacements. That incidentally gave the KKK and other canal-scum an instantly-recognizable minority to hate. Meanwhile Martians working for the Chicago Project eventually succeeded in developing low-power man-portable heat rays and powered armour, which would have made an eventual invasion of Japan a lot shorter if the Manhattan Project hadn't got results first.
As the war ended returning soldiers wanted their jobs back, and in a lot of places Martians ended up out of work. One of the exceptions was Brockton Bay, where some of the brighter Martians had managed to persuade the Brockton Bay Dockworker's Association and other unions that if they let us join we'd work for scale and wouldn't be cheap scab labour for the management. My grandfather David, on Dad's side of the family, eventually became one of the union organizers, and gradually built up a political machine that improved things for all of the union members, while keeping organized crime out. That wasn't difficult since the mobs recruited on ethnic grounds, and remarkably few Martians come from Italy, Sicily, or Ireland. Today the unions are still around, and still have quite a few Martian members, including my dad Danny who now runs the BBDWA, and Brockton Bay has the second highest Martian population of any area in the USA - only Alaska has more, largely because cold doesn't bother us. They're mostly workers in the gas and oil industries, but they're spread all over the state and there's no real Martian community there the way there is here.
In the sixties and seventies Russia and the USA sent probes to Mars, concentrating on the areas the invasion had launched from in 1900. As expected they found devastation - the Supreme Leader hadn't cared what happened after he left, and the launch process had released immense quantities of toxic gas into the atmosphere. You could tell how bad it was by the fact that the canals were mostly choked with sand and the Red Weed, our main food crop, was nowhere to be seen. The Viking probes of 1975 and 1976 landed where our largest cities had been and had loudspeakers that played messages from Martians on Earth - there was no response.
Then in August 1982, three months after the first sighting of Scion, astronomers detected five very large nuclear explosions on Mars, three on the South pole and two on the North, which between them wrecked the ice caps. Nobody has ever admitted responsibility, but the estimated yield was over 100 megatons per explosion, and Russia was the only nation that had tested nukes that size, their Tsar Bomba weapons. There are unconfirmed claims that the Russians launched two very heavy boosters in November the previous year, one of the launch windows for a flight to Mars. I'm iffy on that one - if it really was the Russians working alone I think that Kruschev would have announced it as a triumph for Russian technology in defence of all mankind. Conspiracy theorists claim that the USA and possibly other nations were involved too, and got the Russians to agree to run it as a black project. It really doesn't matter much - either way, nobody bothered to send more probes to Mars after that, there wasn't much chance of finding anyone or anything alive there.
A couple of years later Professor Haywire opened the portal to Earth Aleph, and their media showed that the invasion was more or less the same there - minor differences in landing sites and casualties, but a century later the results looked much the same. One thing was different though; there was never a nuclear strike against Mars, and they have sporadic radio contact with a tiny remnant Martian population there. I'm not sure what that implies - maybe on Bet there was some tinker-tech involved in the bomb project, or maybe the Earth Aleph scientists were just a little luckier with their landing sites. The conspiracy theory says that there were survivors in our universe too, but NASA and the Russians concealed the information until they could nuke the ice caps and eliminate the problem.
Around that time Parahumans were the new Big Thing. The term "Parahuman" is a misnomer in one important respect; Martians can have powers too. In fact more Martians trigger than humans, as a percentage of our population - roughly one human in 8000, one Martian in approximately 5000. The "approximately" is there because there simply aren't that many Martians, so the data is inexact. We tend to produce more Thinkers and Tinkers than anything else, and we're naturally low-level Brutes. The only publicly acknowledged Martian capes in Brockton Bay are Miss Militia, a hero whose ancestors are rumoured to be survivors of the Martian force that landed in the Middle East, and Über, a sidekick of the human villain Leete, who was allegedly born here and so far as I know is the only Martian who has ever streamed video of himself having public tentacle sex with a human prostitute while simulating a scene from Grand Theft Auto. About which I can only say "Ewwwwwww!" Given the size of the Martian community in Brockton there's a good chance I've met the creep, which does not make me feel warm and fuzzy. Not that Martians are, of course!
By now you're probably wondering why I'm telling you all this. After all, everyone knows about Martians, the invasion, the whole enchilada. There are Martians on TV, typically comedy relief or hostile aliens in rubber body suits, although very few have leading roles except as villains. There are reasons, and I'll get to them eventually.
Part of it started at Winslow, the wretched hive of scum and villainy which has been my daytime prison for much of the last couple of years. It's a cesspit of a school, with rival gangs using it as their recruiting grounds, and the poor bastards the gangs don't want usually treated as their victims. None of the current major gangs want Martians, or seem to know quite how to handle us; the ABB and E88 are different variations on racist, Asian and Nazi respectively, and see us as despised outsiders, while the Merchants have yet to find any drugs that they can sell to us, and don't trust anyone they can't hook on their poison. Nobody really knows what the hell Coil's gang is up to, but whatever it is, it doesn't appear to include recruiting Martians. About the only thing protecting us is that the gangs are pretty wary of the unions and really don't want to stir up trouble with them. Last time that happened our pickets started to turn up at sites linked to E88, including several that they really didn't want the police or PRT to know about, protesting their use of scabs and disregard of equal opportunities laws, and Hookwolf somehow ended up with one of our picket signs up his ass, with pictures on PHO.
Some time between Junior High and Winslow my former friend Emma seems to have decided that she was going to ditch her best friend and become besties with a human girl called Sophia Hess, who started at Winslow at the same time as we did. Since Sophia is apparently some sort of psychopath the way that Emma cemented her friendship was to join Sophia and a few of her human cronies, most notably Madison Clements, in bullying me. This started in Autumn of 2009 and went on through 2010 and into this year. For some reason nobody in the school management was doing anything to stop this; this may possibly be related to the fact that Winslow doesn't have a single Martian teacher or support staff member, which I would have thought bends most of the affirmative action laws. I'd given serious thought to the idea that Sophia might be some sort of Master, but she's a jock, probably the school's best track star, and I think most of it can be explained by Principal Blackwell wanting to keep those trophies coming in. If that meant that I had to be treated like hgkpol then hey, what's one Martian kid with her possessions ruined compared to a shiny faux-silver plastic trophy? That was an ongoing thing, and I was still brooding about it when I got to the museum, dumped my umbrella, bag, and wet boots (they look like long thick condoms, one per walking tentacle) in my locker, put on my tour guide sash, and went out to meet my first group of the day.
I was starting with twenty or so kids from Immaculata Junior High, with a couple of nuns running crowd control. That was a good start, it probably meant I wasn't going to have to spend all my time making sure that nobody got lost.
"Hello. My name's Taylor, and I'd like to welcome you to Brockton Bay Maritime Museum. Ten years ago the city marked the centenary of the 1901 Martian Invasion by funding exhibits here and at the Christner Museum near City Hall; both cover different aspects of its effects on Brockton Bay. You may have noticed that I'm a Martian-American..." a couple of the kids giggled, others just looked bored "...so I have a stake in explaining what really happened, rather than the versions that you might have seen on TV. There's quite a lot of ground for us to cover, so if you'd like to come with me we'll go into hall one, and I'll show you where it all began." For once all of them followed without anyone goofing off.
The exhibits I took them to were two 1/5th scale models of a steam warship; one intact and floating low in water simulated by a sheet of plate glass, the other a rusted wreck lying on its side on simulated sea bed, with gaping slashes in its hull. The upper works were almost gone, what was left was incomplete, the steel warped and rounded, half-melted. "Sisters, kids, these are replicas of the vessel that won one of the most significant victories of the war. They were donated to museums around the world by Britain's Royal Navy for the centenary of the invasion. One shows her as she was built, the other her condition when they salvaged her. This is His Majesty's Ship Thunder Child, an ironclad torpedo ram built in 1881. Twenty years later, when she was already considered obsolete, she engaged three Martian tripods off the British coast and destroyed at least two of them before she was sunk, with the loss of all hands. In doing that her crew saved the lives of several thousand evacuees who were fleeing the invasion in a flotilla of small ships. The battle triggered a huge change in naval thinking. One of the consequences was development of Brockton Bay as a naval dockyard, and several generations of ships inspired by the Thunder Child were built here and in other ports around the USA. Any questions so far?"
"What was a torpedo ram?"
"I'm glad you asked me that..." Someone always does. "...At the end of the nineteenth century naval design emphasized big ships with big guns and heavy armour that could shrug off attacks from smaller ships. That was when the first battleships were built, and started an arms race that ended with the First World War. Torpedo rams were an early attempt to come up with a defence against battleships; they were designed for speed and maneuverability, and were armed with light guns and torpedoes. The name pretty much says what they were supposed to do - get in close, until the battleship guns couldn't depress enough to fire at them, ram the battleship if possible, and fire torpedoes into it at point-blank range. You can see that she floated really low in the water, to make her a smaller target, and had a sharp beak underwater for ramming, there's actually a torpedo tube that fires through the beak. The trouble was that naval gun technology and torpedo defenses improved dramatically; in 1880 a fast-moving ship like this had a good chance of avoiding fire, by the 1890s the attack she was designed for would have been suicide. It might have stayed like that, but after the Invasion everyone tried to come up with ways to fight any future Martian attacks, and the Thunder Child suggested that the Martian tripods were unusually vulnerable in the sea. It's likely that battleships would have been effective too, but in this particular case they didn't reach the fight in time to help. That suggested a need for very fast, heavily armed ships, preferably designed to minimize vulnerability to Martian weapons, and able to engage the tripods in coastal waters; it had to be coastal waters because the tripods were limited to a maximum sea depth of around ninety feet, any deeper than that and the crew compartment would have been submerged. Now, that all sounds good, but you can't just build dozens of specialized ships to fight an enemy that you might never have to face again; it uses resources that you might need to fight more credible threats. Anyone want to guess what they did?" There were a lot of blank looks, but eventually one of the nuns raised a hand. "Sister?"
"I think I recall reading that they were used to attack coastal shipping."
"Thank you, that's exactly right. They improved the guns and torpedoes, put in steam turbines which nearly doubled their speed, and used them for what's now called littoral warfare - that's spelled with two T's and an O if you're taking notes, it means fighting in coastal waters, where big ships have lots of problems maneuvering, and attacking coastal shipping and installations. The first world war began with attacks on British, French and German shipping, which continued throughout the war, eventually spreading to the coastal waters of most of the belligerents including the USA and Canada. It's one of the reasons why the British were slow to ramp up their forces in France, they lost a huge percentage of the shipping they needed for it in the early weeks of the war, while the Germans could move their forces across Europe by rail."
"By then Brockton Bay already had major military shipyards. There are several reasons for that. The main one is that one of the Martian cylinders landed near Boston and its occupants destroyed the shipyards there. We took up some of the slack, and we were close enough to Boston to attract a lot of their skilled work force. Once humans started talking to Martian prisoners the government learned that six cylinders were aimed at the East Coast. Three landed successfully near Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and their crews and weapons are accounted for. A fourth broke up on impact in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with no survivors. The fifth has never been found, but there were numerous sightings of a green meteor trail impacting somewhere out at sea at about the right time, and when you put them all together the most likely location for that is somewhere due East of Brockton Bay, probably in deep water off the continental shelf. The crew probably wouldn't be able to get out with that much pressure on the hull, but the government wanted a strong naval presence here in case that was wrong. Nobody's ever found any wreckage, and it's possible that it's still down there somewhere. There have been a lot of attempts to find it over the years, so far nobody has."
"What happened to the sixth cylinder?" asked one of the kids.
I shrugged a few tentacles. "Best bets are it broke up on launch, or went off course and never reached the Earth. It was the last one launched to this region, so we'll probably never know."
"You don't sound too upset about it," said a familiar voice; Emma. She and Sophia had come in while I was talking, and were standing behind the tour group. I guessed that they were about to try to make a scene.
"Since you ask, I'm upset by the waste of any life. Most of the survivors claim that they were forced to take part in the invasion, but for all I know they were gung-ho patriots determined to invade Earth and enslave humanity for the glory of the Martian race. If they were they probably got what they deserved. If the survivors are telling the truth, they probably died cursing the Supreme Leader and the High Martians. Either way, there's really not much I can do to change things more than a century later."
"That's dissing your ancestors," said Sophia.
"My ancestors had the good sense to surrender the second the High Martians were gone. I'd imagine that that's true for your friend too, and any other Martians you know. Okay, kids, sorry for the interruption. Any other questions about the Thunder Child before we move on?"
By then the nuns had their eye on the dynamic duo, and they glowered a little then left. It was really low key compared to the usual bullying I got at Winslow, and it wasn't hard to guess that they'd be on my case at school on Monday. But I carried on with the tour, and hopefully kept the kids interested. Eventually I reached the conclusion of the talk, which is best summed up as "Yay for military spending that made Brockton Bay great for a few decades, shame it's pretty much gone away again," suggested some books and DVDs that have information on the topics we'd discussed (all available, by some strange chance, from the museum bookshop), answered some final questions and pointed out the way back to the cloakrooms and washrooms, and went to take a break.
There was an oddly appetizing smell in the locker room, and when I opened my locker I recognized the source. Blood, and the body it was coming from. I hit the emergency alarm button, the one we're supposed to use if there's a major incident, hoped that the guards were on the ball in locking the place down, checked for a pulse, then used the emergency phone to call 911. I was still trying to speak to someone human when the first guards arrived, led by Stefan something, the human guy who was in charge of security. He took a look around, and saw me standing by the locker, trying to keep wounds closed with some of my tentacles while I made the call.
"What the hell's going on?"
"Found her in my locker when I came for my break. I'm trying to get an ambulance, I think she's still alive."
"Any idea who she is?"
"Yes. Her name's Hess, Sophia Hess. She's in my class at Winslow."
TBC
Notes: The main sources for this story are Worm and The War of the Worlds. Secondary sources are Kim Newman's story Famous Monsters (1988), and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume II (2002-3). The title of each chapter has some connection with Mars, but it may not always be obvious. See Wikipedia for more on torpedo rams and littoral warfare. Before anyone asks, this will NOT be a "ship girl" story. I don't think that genre really works for non-humans like Taylor...
There's a bit of an info dump in this chapter but it's a very AU setting and need to get some information (and a few red herrings) into the story early. Hopefully it still works.
Comments please before I post to archives.
