Continuing my Worm / War of the Worlds crossover story.
The previous chapters are archived on these sites:
On Twisting the Hellmouth - https://www.tthfanfic.org/story.php?no=33872
On AO3 - https://archiveofourown.org/works/39112812
On Fanfiction.net - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14083560/1/The-Martian
On Spacebattles Forum - https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-martian-worm-the-war-of-the-worlds-au.1034761/
See chapter I for disclaimers.
The Martian
X - Space 1889
On Monday morning none of the stories I was following had updated, and the busiest thread on PHO was an idiotic argument between XxVoid_CowboyxX and Winged_One, both claiming that the other was a sock puppet for the Simurgh. They were pretty much going around in circles and I didn't want to be late to school on my first day back so I left most of it unread and got breakfast, and since Dad and Hannah both had to go to work I got out of the house in good time to catch the bus. Two cars that I'd seen in the secret PRT parking garage on Saturday and Sunday took turns following the bus, presumably keeping an eye on me.
Over the weekend Hannah had given me a mobile phone - superficially an oldish model that was literally just a phone, no camera or touch screen, no "smartness" whatever, apart from a couple of very simple games. Disadvantage, sending text messages was a pain. Advantage, nobody in their right mind would want to steal it. If anyone asked it was a spare she'd given me after upgrading - in fact it came from somewhere in the Protectorate bag of tricks, and if I pressed the 1,8, and 3 keys and the volume control simultaneously it would start to transmit a continuous emergency locator signal with nothing showing on screen to indicate it was active. I typed in a quick message, and Hannah confirmed that the cars were a precaution until Emma was tracked down. I deleted the message and spent the rest of the ride playing a very crude version of Tetris.
And back to Winslow... which didn't suck as much as usual. No sign of Emma and no Sophia, of course, with a lot of people wondering what had happened to them. There were already plenty of rumors about the Barnes family - there was police tape around their house and a boarded-up window, they were nowhere to be found, and people had noticed. Nobody asked me, for some reason. Eventually their pal and fellow bully Madison Clements made a half-hearted jibe about "slimy tentacles" in home room, which was pretty dumb considering that our skin is more like smooth sharkskin in texture.
I pretended to ignore her for a few moments, then turned one eye towards her - she didn't merit more of my attention - and said "I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't be saying that if Emma was in school today. You might want to be careful, wouldn't want her to turn on you if she decides you're a racist or something. I hear she has a mean streak."
She thought about that for a while, but didn't say or try anything. Without the other two she looked a little lost, and I suspected that she wasn't going to be much of a problem. During second period she was summoned to Principal Blackwell's office, and came back at the end of the lesson looking shaken. By lunch break half the school seemed to know that she'd been questioned by the police, who wanted to know Emma's whereabouts. No explanation given, of course.
I decided to risk lunch in the cafeteria for a change, taking care not to leave my property or food unattended. As usual there was nothing any sane Martian would want to eat, which is why I always bring in a packed lunch, but unlike usual nobody was trying to steal it, knock it out of my tentacles or spill garbage into my lunch box. I could get used to this, though Hannah was working on getting me transferred to Arcadia - she'd visited a few times as Miss Militia and said that although their Martian food was mostly pre-packaged concentrates, they were buying reasonably good brands, cooling them properly, and making sure they served properly balanced meals.
Towards the end of lunch Greg Vader, a human boy in my class, came over. I never quite knew what to make of him - he'd never been one of my bullies, and I think he had bullies of his own, but he'd never really done anything to help me. I had an idea he was attracted to Sophia, despite her odious personality. He hesitated for a moment, then said "Have you heard anything about Sophia or Emma?"
"No idea about Emma, I try not to talk to that bitch these days..." It was the literal truth, if incomplete "...but I heard that Sophia's dad got a new job and they've left town. Maybe that's why Emma isn't in, could be she's run away to follow her soul mate, or whatever it is they are to each other."
"Haven't you heard?" asked Greg. "Word is that they're on the run from the IRS. You were friends with her, weren't you?"
"Not in a long time, she and Sophia made sure of that. The IRS, you said?"
"That's what I heard. Something about undeclared income."
"Greg, her dad's a lawyer, he probably knows better. You shouldn't listen to rumors."
"The other story is that they're terrorists, but that's really dumb."
"There you go then. Like I said, you shouldn't listen to rumors."
He started to turn away, then said "Hey, you work at the Maritime Museum, don't you?"
"What about it?"
"The PRT was testing a weird truck in the docks on Saturday, about one in the afternoon, looked like a personnel carrier with tentacles. Did you see it?"
"No, but there was some sort of drive-by shooting outside and they had the museum locked down for a while so it might have been around while that was going on. What did it look like?"
He pulled out his phone, something fancy from Kumquat, and showed me a couple of photos of the Tentaclemobile parked outside the hospital. Since I wasn't supposed to have seen it I said "Oh come on, that's got to be a fake. The Marine Corps was messing around with something like that during the Vietnam war and they could never get it to work, why would the PRT have one in Brockton Bay? And that's not even the museum, it's some car park."
"I took the pictures myself at Brockton General," he said proudly, "it isn't a fake. Some PRT trooper chased me off when I got too close. Word on PHO is that they were testing it and responded to an incident in the docks, and took someone to hospital." A couple of his geeky friends came over and seemed to agree with him.
"I guess that makes sense, must be tinkertech then. I give it a week before the tentacles fall off."
"That's the odd part," said Greg, "they said it's not tinkertech, it's engineering, but assembled using parahuman powers."
"Whatever that means. Didn't Uber and Leet make a Tripod by firing some sort of expanding ray at a model? Could it be something like that?"
That got Vader and the geeks arguing, but the eventual consensus was no - the Tripod had looked like the real thing, more or less, but lacked detail, the tentaclemobile looked like "Shit bolted together from spare parts."
I took another look at the photos and started pointing out the most obvious of the flaws Armsmaster had spotted on Saturday, ending with "...and the tentacle segments have different sizes, can you imagine how many different spare parts you'd have to have to keep it running? It's just stupid."
I'd timed it so the bell for classes rang as I finished my rant, and that put an end to the conversation.
On my way to the next class I thought over the conversation. So far I hadn't heard anything to suggest that anyone else at school knew that Sophia and Emma had planned a visit to the museum on Saturday, which made sense if Emma was pulling most of the strings and had intended to attack Sophia and frame me from the outset. She'd hardly announce her plans to the world. I just hoped that nothing else made the connection more obvious. I wasn't entirely sure that criticising my own work was the best way to distance myself from it, but a lot of people at Winslow knew I was interested in littoral warfare systems and engineering. I decided to leave it alone until Hannah, Dad and I could talk about my cover.
The first class after lunch was English Literature. Our usual teacher was on maternity leave and the substitute, Mr. Beale, was actually reasonably competent, almost unprecedented in the mess that was Winslow High. Today's class was about Philip K. Dick's Space 1889, a 1957 novel which reversed the history of the Invasion by having Earth use Cavorite to invade Mars first. With my new eidetic memory I could remember Annette talking about the book a couple of years before she was killed, and was able to make a few good points in the discussion. The novel's research was shoddy, to say the least - Cavor didn't make his lunar flight until three years after the Invasion ended, it's believed that Cavorite was made using chemicals he found in the ruins of a Martian encampment, and his ship and formula were lost within hours of its return - but Dick's images of a peaceful Mars facing unstoppable bipedal aliens with biological weapons were an interesting commentary on the usual historical accounts of the invasion. Martians might have been better off in the end - I doubt that Mars would have been nuked if there were human colonists living there - but the main impetus for the invasion of Earth had been dwindling resources, I doubt an invasion the other way would have done anything to fix that.
We ended the day with math, not my favorite subject but essential for engineering so I try to get good grades. Without Sophia and Emma I could concentrate on my work and get it done. Madison sat well away from me and for once didn't try any pranks, and left fast after the lesson. I took my time getting out, making sure that none of the trio's friends were waiting for me, and got to the bus stop just in time to get a reasonably fast ride home. The driver looked familiar, and after a few seconds I remembered him as one of the PRT troopers I'd seen on Saturday, presumably there to make sure I was okay. I didn't think it would be a good idea to say anything that might blow his cover, so sat toward the back and played another couple of games of Tetris.
Hannah was already back when I got home, and asked a couple of questions about my day. I guessed that there was a reason why she was home so early, and eventually asked "Is there any news? Any sign of Emma or the rest of her family?"
"Yes and no. We still don't know where Emma or her parents are, but there's been some disturbing news from Boston. Anne Barnes was attacked last night, some human thugs got into the college dorms and went after her. She was lucky, they nearly caught her but campus security chased them off. The report says they were acting like Nazis, but none of them had tattoos or insignia so it doesn't look like they were E88."
"Were they definitely after Anne, or just Martians in general?"
"When they were chasing her they passed a couple of other Martian students without trying to attack them, so it looks like it was really her they wanted."
"Okay... I wonder if that's connected to the other things that have been happening."
"It seems plausible. One thing that was in the report, the first thing Anne did once she'd been rescued was try to contact the rest of her family, unless she's a good actress it doesn't seem likely that she knew that they were on the run."
"Weird."
Once Dad got home we talked for a while but didn't really reach any conclusions, and I went up to do my homework and get an early night. Tuesday was pretty much a repeat, without people being yanked out of lessons but with Madison continuing to keep her distance.
The other shoe dropped on Tuesday night.
TBC
Space 1889 is a role playing game whose themes include 19th century British and European colonization of a version of Mars with intelligent (but humanoid) natives. I wrote an adventure and a few articles for it in the 1990s, to the best of my knowledge Philip K. Dick had no involvement.
The War of the Worlds was originally serialised in 1897-8 and published as a book in 1898. Cavorite was an anti-gravity material in Wells' The First Men in the Moon (1901), which does not mention a Martian invasion.
I'm probably going to be writing less fanfic over the next few months since I want to give more attention to another writing project, but I'll try to update occasionally if inspiration strikes.
Comments please before I post to archives.
The previous chapters are archived on these sites:
On Twisting the Hellmouth - https://www.tthfanfic.org/story.php?no=33872
On AO3 - https://archiveofourown.org/works/39112812
On Fanfiction.net - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14083560/1/The-Martian
On Spacebattles Forum - https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-martian-worm-the-war-of-the-worlds-au.1034761/
See chapter I for disclaimers.
X - Space 1889
On Monday morning none of the stories I was following had updated, and the busiest thread on PHO was an idiotic argument between XxVoid_CowboyxX and Winged_One, both claiming that the other was a sock puppet for the Simurgh. They were pretty much going around in circles and I didn't want to be late to school on my first day back so I left most of it unread and got breakfast, and since Dad and Hannah both had to go to work I got out of the house in good time to catch the bus. Two cars that I'd seen in the secret PRT parking garage on Saturday and Sunday took turns following the bus, presumably keeping an eye on me.
Over the weekend Hannah had given me a mobile phone - superficially an oldish model that was literally just a phone, no camera or touch screen, no "smartness" whatever, apart from a couple of very simple games. Disadvantage, sending text messages was a pain. Advantage, nobody in their right mind would want to steal it. If anyone asked it was a spare she'd given me after upgrading - in fact it came from somewhere in the Protectorate bag of tricks, and if I pressed the 1,8, and 3 keys and the volume control simultaneously it would start to transmit a continuous emergency locator signal with nothing showing on screen to indicate it was active. I typed in a quick message, and Hannah confirmed that the cars were a precaution until Emma was tracked down. I deleted the message and spent the rest of the ride playing a very crude version of Tetris.
And back to Winslow... which didn't suck as much as usual. No sign of Emma and no Sophia, of course, with a lot of people wondering what had happened to them. There were already plenty of rumors about the Barnes family - there was police tape around their house and a boarded-up window, they were nowhere to be found, and people had noticed. Nobody asked me, for some reason. Eventually their pal and fellow bully Madison Clements made a half-hearted jibe about "slimy tentacles" in home room, which was pretty dumb considering that our skin is more like smooth sharkskin in texture.
I pretended to ignore her for a few moments, then turned one eye towards her - she didn't merit more of my attention - and said "I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't be saying that if Emma was in school today. You might want to be careful, wouldn't want her to turn on you if she decides you're a racist or something. I hear she has a mean streak."
She thought about that for a while, but didn't say or try anything. Without the other two she looked a little lost, and I suspected that she wasn't going to be much of a problem. During second period she was summoned to Principal Blackwell's office, and came back at the end of the lesson looking shaken. By lunch break half the school seemed to know that she'd been questioned by the police, who wanted to know Emma's whereabouts. No explanation given, of course.
I decided to risk lunch in the cafeteria for a change, taking care not to leave my property or food unattended. As usual there was nothing any sane Martian would want to eat, which is why I always bring in a packed lunch, but unlike usual nobody was trying to steal it, knock it out of my tentacles or spill garbage into my lunch box. I could get used to this, though Hannah was working on getting me transferred to Arcadia - she'd visited a few times as Miss Militia and said that although their Martian food was mostly pre-packaged concentrates, they were buying reasonably good brands, cooling them properly, and making sure they served properly balanced meals.
Towards the end of lunch Greg Vader, a human boy in my class, came over. I never quite knew what to make of him - he'd never been one of my bullies, and I think he had bullies of his own, but he'd never really done anything to help me. I had an idea he was attracted to Sophia, despite her odious personality. He hesitated for a moment, then said "Have you heard anything about Sophia or Emma?"
"No idea about Emma, I try not to talk to that bitch these days..." It was the literal truth, if incomplete "...but I heard that Sophia's dad got a new job and they've left town. Maybe that's why Emma isn't in, could be she's run away to follow her soul mate, or whatever it is they are to each other."
"Haven't you heard?" asked Greg. "Word is that they're on the run from the IRS. You were friends with her, weren't you?"
"Not in a long time, she and Sophia made sure of that. The IRS, you said?"
"That's what I heard. Something about undeclared income."
"Greg, her dad's a lawyer, he probably knows better. You shouldn't listen to rumors."
"The other story is that they're terrorists, but that's really dumb."
"There you go then. Like I said, you shouldn't listen to rumors."
He started to turn away, then said "Hey, you work at the Maritime Museum, don't you?"
"What about it?"
"The PRT was testing a weird truck in the docks on Saturday, about one in the afternoon, looked like a personnel carrier with tentacles. Did you see it?"
"No, but there was some sort of drive-by shooting outside and they had the museum locked down for a while so it might have been around while that was going on. What did it look like?"
He pulled out his phone, something fancy from Kumquat, and showed me a couple of photos of the Tentaclemobile parked outside the hospital. Since I wasn't supposed to have seen it I said "Oh come on, that's got to be a fake. The Marine Corps was messing around with something like that during the Vietnam war and they could never get it to work, why would the PRT have one in Brockton Bay? And that's not even the museum, it's some car park."
"I took the pictures myself at Brockton General," he said proudly, "it isn't a fake. Some PRT trooper chased me off when I got too close. Word on PHO is that they were testing it and responded to an incident in the docks, and took someone to hospital." A couple of his geeky friends came over and seemed to agree with him.
"I guess that makes sense, must be tinkertech then. I give it a week before the tentacles fall off."
"That's the odd part," said Greg, "they said it's not tinkertech, it's engineering, but assembled using parahuman powers."
"Whatever that means. Didn't Uber and Leet make a Tripod by firing some sort of expanding ray at a model? Could it be something like that?"
That got Vader and the geeks arguing, but the eventual consensus was no - the Tripod had looked like the real thing, more or less, but lacked detail, the tentaclemobile looked like "Shit bolted together from spare parts."
I took another look at the photos and started pointing out the most obvious of the flaws Armsmaster had spotted on Saturday, ending with "...and the tentacle segments have different sizes, can you imagine how many different spare parts you'd have to have to keep it running? It's just stupid."
I'd timed it so the bell for classes rang as I finished my rant, and that put an end to the conversation.
On my way to the next class I thought over the conversation. So far I hadn't heard anything to suggest that anyone else at school knew that Sophia and Emma had planned a visit to the museum on Saturday, which made sense if Emma was pulling most of the strings and had intended to attack Sophia and frame me from the outset. She'd hardly announce her plans to the world. I just hoped that nothing else made the connection more obvious. I wasn't entirely sure that criticising my own work was the best way to distance myself from it, but a lot of people at Winslow knew I was interested in littoral warfare systems and engineering. I decided to leave it alone until Hannah, Dad and I could talk about my cover.
The first class after lunch was English Literature. Our usual teacher was on maternity leave and the substitute, Mr. Beale, was actually reasonably competent, almost unprecedented in the mess that was Winslow High. Today's class was about Philip K. Dick's Space 1889, a 1957 novel which reversed the history of the Invasion by having Earth use Cavorite to invade Mars first. With my new eidetic memory I could remember Annette talking about the book a couple of years before she was killed, and was able to make a few good points in the discussion. The novel's research was shoddy, to say the least - Cavor didn't make his lunar flight until three years after the Invasion ended, it's believed that Cavorite was made using chemicals he found in the ruins of a Martian encampment, and his ship and formula were lost within hours of its return - but Dick's images of a peaceful Mars facing unstoppable bipedal aliens with biological weapons were an interesting commentary on the usual historical accounts of the invasion. Martians might have been better off in the end - I doubt that Mars would have been nuked if there were human colonists living there - but the main impetus for the invasion of Earth had been dwindling resources, I doubt an invasion the other way would have done anything to fix that.
We ended the day with math, not my favorite subject but essential for engineering so I try to get good grades. Without Sophia and Emma I could concentrate on my work and get it done. Madison sat well away from me and for once didn't try any pranks, and left fast after the lesson. I took my time getting out, making sure that none of the trio's friends were waiting for me, and got to the bus stop just in time to get a reasonably fast ride home. The driver looked familiar, and after a few seconds I remembered him as one of the PRT troopers I'd seen on Saturday, presumably there to make sure I was okay. I didn't think it would be a good idea to say anything that might blow his cover, so sat toward the back and played another couple of games of Tetris.
Hannah was already back when I got home, and asked a couple of questions about my day. I guessed that there was a reason why she was home so early, and eventually asked "Is there any news? Any sign of Emma or the rest of her family?"
"Yes and no. We still don't know where Emma or her parents are, but there's been some disturbing news from Boston. Anne Barnes was attacked last night, some human thugs got into the college dorms and went after her. She was lucky, they nearly caught her but campus security chased them off. The report says they were acting like Nazis, but none of them had tattoos or insignia so it doesn't look like they were E88."
"Were they definitely after Anne, or just Martians in general?"
"When they were chasing her they passed a couple of other Martian students without trying to attack them, so it looks like it was really her they wanted."
"Okay... I wonder if that's connected to the other things that have been happening."
"It seems plausible. One thing that was in the report, the first thing Anne did once she'd been rescued was try to contact the rest of her family, unless she's a good actress it doesn't seem likely that she knew that they were on the run."
"Weird."
Once Dad got home we talked for a while but didn't really reach any conclusions, and I went up to do my homework and get an early night. Tuesday was pretty much a repeat, without people being yanked out of lessons but with Madison continuing to keep her distance.
The other shoe dropped on Tuesday night.
TBC
Space 1889 is a role playing game whose themes include 19th century British and European colonization of a version of Mars with intelligent (but humanoid) natives. I wrote an adventure and a few articles for it in the 1990s, to the best of my knowledge Philip K. Dick had no involvement.
The War of the Worlds was originally serialised in 1897-8 and published as a book in 1898. Cavorite was an anti-gravity material in Wells' The First Men in the Moon (1901), which does not mention a Martian invasion.
I'm probably going to be writing less fanfic over the next few months since I want to give more attention to another writing project, but I'll try to update occasionally if inspiration strikes.
Comments please before I post to archives.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-27 01:39 am (UTC)Thanks for the chapter.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-27 02:39 am (UTC)