Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [113]
I don't mean to scare you: rest assured that the Martians can be stopped. With your assistance, they wil be stopped today. We would ask those Londoners wishing to evacuate to head south, down to Kent. Those who wish to join us are equal y welcome - you can help us by cutting power and telecommunications lines, by barricading the smaller roads and by preventing the Provisional Government's security forces from barricading the major ones.
Hopeful y, we will not have to fire a single shot to end the Martian Occupation. It is now a quarter past twelve. Our tanks will be in Ealing, now. God willing, the Provisional Government wil have fallen within the hour.'
***
The speech finished, the broadcast cut to live coverage of the Queen's address to the United Nations. She had been informed of the effort to retake London and had given it her blessing. Her speech began by wishing Lethbridge-Stewart and his men luck. As she spoke, her advisors were outside, preparing to hand out press releases and lobbying ambassadorial staff.
Without any help from UNIT, details of the damage inflicted on the Martians in Portsmouth and the location and plans of the EG refinery had found their way to New York via the Internet. Pictures, text and sound files were downloaded onto the new computer newsgroups and bulletin boards that had been set up around the world. These had eventual y found their way to the world's military and media.
At an emergency session of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President ordered that if the Martian ship left British airspace it was to be shot down, by any means necessary.
Unaware of events elsewhere in the world, half a dozen trained UNIT men followed Ray through the refinery and I followed the soldiers. Ray knew which routes the guards patrolled. The place was swarming with them, apparently, but I didn't see a single one. The troops were hand-picked by Captain Ford and moved through the base swiftly and silently. No doubt if we had come across any of the patrols, the UNIT men would have dispatched them with the same efficiency - each carried an automatic pistol with silencer, and enough knives to fill a cutlery drawer. Our main weapons were the packs of thermite explosive we carried in special belt pouches. Even I had three packs -
each was about the size of a paperback book but packed enough punch to bring down a house or blow open a tank. The UNIT boffins had told us that the high explosive generated enough heat to incinerate even the most deadly nerve agents. When I had chal enged them, suggested that they might free the Martian gas rather than destroy it, they were proud to announce that mankind had devised much more virulent materials than the substance released over Adisham. The bombs would work, if enough of them were planted in the right locations.
Back in Windsor Forest, as soon as Lethbridge-Stewart had finished his briefing, Ray had drawn a map for the refinery assault team. He'd helped to build the plant four years ago, and he knew virtually every pipe and wire. To me, the refinery complex looked like an alien city, with pressurised skyscrapers and pipelines instead of pavements. In a way, of course, it was an alien city: the first Martian colony on Earth. The silos had been designed by Vrgnur for the sentient gas, and duplicated conditions on Mars. Behind the stainless steel, Vrgnur had been propagating something entirely inimical to man. At the time I knew little about the Red Death. Later, I would have time to search the ancient Martian texts and I would learn of an assassination weapon capable of passing through the narrowest gap in relentless pursuit of its target.
In the scarce atmosphere of Mars it was subtle, invisible.