The Martian Ambassador (21 page)

‘Do not… blame… yourself,’ said Voronezh. ‘Find… Cold. Save… your friend. Save… Earth… and Mars.’

And with those words, Petrox Voronezh breathed his last, and the glinting lustre of his great dark eyes gradually faded to a thin, dry crust.

They carried Voronezh’s body back through the wood to the electric carriage. So light was he that by the time they had done so, they had barely broken a sweat. Even so, it was the longest journey Thomas Blackwood had ever made, for the heaviness of his heart more than made up for the lightness of his physical burden. Countless times he cursed himself for having allowed Sophia to accompany them: he should never have brought her into Leason’s Wood; he should have made her wait on the edge of the Cosmodrome while he and the others faced the danger.

Sophia had saved his life, but when she stood in dire need of his protection, he had been unable to save her. Now, she was in the clutches of the Venusian fiend, who was taking her God knew where, to do to her God knew what.

And now, Petrox Voronezh was dead, the second Martian to be murdered on Earth in less than a week. Blackwood could imagine the look on Grandfather’s face when he told him, and as for the Queen…

As he and de Chardin spied the carriage amongst the trees, some intuition told Blackwood that there was another tragedy yet to be revealed. Ghell’ed should have hurried out to meet them when he saw that they were carrying Voronezh’s body… but there was no movement in the vehicle’s front windows as they approached.

‘Something’s wrong,’ he said.

They laid the body down beside the open door, then took out their revolvers once again and entered the vehicle.

Ghell’ed was slumped over his controls, dead, the charred hole in his back still smoking slightly.

‘Great God,’ said de Chardin with bitter sadness. ‘How easily this fiend takes life.’

Without a word, Blackwood went to the telegraph machine which was set into the dashboard and began to send a message in Morse code.

De Chardin came and stood beside him. ‘The Bureau?’ he said.

Blackwood nodded. ‘I’m sending a request for the Unearthly Phenomenon Unit to come out here and retrieve the Æther ship. They’ll take it to one of our Research and Development laboratories for study…’

‘Blackwood… I’m sorry about Lady Sophia.’

The Special Investigator stopped what he was doing. ‘It’s my fault, de Chardin. I shouldn’t have allowed her to come.’

‘She has a rather forceful personality. She insisted.’

‘That’s no excuse.’

‘No… I suppose it isn’t.’

‘But I’ll get her back. So help me God, I’ll get her back, and make Indrid Cold pay for all the evil he’s done.’

*

Within an hour, the Unearthly Phenomenon Unit arrived in Leason’s Wood. Blackwood and de Chardin watched impatiently as two four-wheel carriages, each drawn by two horses, came into view, followed by a large, steam-driven lorry with a wide flatbed. Mounted directly behind the driver’s cab was a crane with block and tackle and a folded tarpaulin.

The vehicles came to a halt beside the Martian carriage, and a tall, imposing figure stepped down from one of the four-wheelers. Blackwood shook hands with him and introduced him to de Chardin as Colonel Caxton-Roper, Chief Operations Manager of the UPU.

Caxton-Roper took one look at Petrox Voronezh’s body, and signalled to the other four-wheeler. Three black-suited men emerged with a stretcher. They carefully lifted the Martian onto it, carried it back to their carriage and placed it inside.

‘Where are you taking him?’ asked de Chardin.

‘To the Home Office pathologist,’ replied the colonel in a clipped voice. ‘Protocol must be observed, even in extraordinary circumstances –
especially
in such circumstances.’

‘Has Her Majesty been informed?’ asked Blackwood.

Caxton-Roper nodded. ‘Indeed she has.’ He gave Blackwood a brief smile which was partly sardonic, partly sympathetic. ‘I daresay you have some explaining to do, sir.’

Blackwood sighed. ‘I daresay I have.’

‘Hmm. Now then, to the business at hand. Where is the vessel?’

Blackwood and de Chardin guided the steam lorry towards the clearing containing the Æther ship. Colonel Caxton-Roper walked beside them, looking around all the time, as if he expected Indrid Cold to come bounding through the trees once again, eager to have another crack at them.

The lorry was less bulky than the baroque Martian carriage and was able to reach the clearing with little trouble. The driver parked it beside the alien vessel, climbed down from his cab and immediately set to work untying the crane. The other four-wheeler followed behind but only made it to the edge of the clearing before the horses became agitated, whinnying and stamping their hooves upon the ground.

‘Curious,’ said Caxton-Roper. ‘They don’t seem to like this gadget.’

While the carriage driver climbed down and tried to placate the horses, murmuring comfortingly to them and stroking their necks, four more men emerged from the vehicle and joined the others in the clearing. They examined the Æther ship without hesitation, their faces expressionless, their manner utterly professional and lacking in anything which might remotely be called surprise. Blackwood wouldn’t have expected anything else, for the Bureau’s Unearthly Phenomenon Unit was used to dealing with such sudden departures from the normal run of things.

In short order, the Æther ship was secured with heavy canvas straps and hooked up to the block and tackle, which was a threefold purchase designed for heavy lifting. The men pulled on the hauling line and lifted the vessel from its nest of earth and branches, then the lorry driver pulled the crane’s boom around so that it was directly above the flatbed.

‘That was straightforward enough,’ said de Chardin as the lorry’s strange new cargo was tied down with more canvas straps. Finally, the men unfolded the tarpaulin, threw it over the Æther ship and secured it to the steel rings bolted along the sides of the flatbed.

‘Where are you taking it?’ asked de Chardin.

Caxton-Roper flashed his ephemeral smile once again and replied, ‘I’m afraid that’s classified information, Detective.’

De Chardin cast a glance at Blackwood, who shrugged apologetically. ‘Sorry, old chap. Need-to-know only, I’m afraid.’

The detective looked at the black-suited men, who met his gaze with expressionless faces, and nodded. ‘I quite understand, gentlemen. Well, I’d better get back to the Cosmodrome. There’s a great deal to be done there.’

Blackwood smiled and offered him his hand. ‘I appreciate your help, sir.’

‘Not at all. Will you let me know of any further developments?’

‘Without a doubt.’

De Chardin nodded. ‘Then I shall bid you all good day.’

With that, he walked, a little stiffly, out of the clearing and disappeared amongst the trees.

‘Shame,’ muttered Blackwood. ‘I didn’t enjoy rebuffing him like that.’

‘I understand,’ said Caxton-Roper. ‘He’s clearly a good man… but he’s not Bureau.’

‘So,’ Blackwood sighed. ‘Were
are
you taking it?’

‘To Station X, Bletchley Park.’

*

Bletchley Park was situated fifty miles northwest of London and consisted of three hundred acres of Buckinghamshire countryside next to the London and North-Western Railway line. It had been acquired in 1883 by Her Majesty’s Government from Herbert Samuel Leon, a wealthy London financier and Liberal MP, who had developed sixty of those acres into his personal estate. Now it was home to the newest and best-equipped of the Bureau’s research and development laboratories.

Blackwood rode in Caxton-Roper’s carriage. He was silent during the entire journey from Leason’s Wood and was grateful that the colonel was a man of few words, who did not attempt to engage him in conversation. He kept thinking of Indrid Cold’s words as he made off with Sophia:
My ship for her Ladyship. A fair exchange, don’t you think?
It was quite clear that the Æther ship was no longer of any use to him, which meant that Cold had come on a one-way trip to Earth, and had no intention of escaping and returning to his own world. This in turn implied that the Venusian plot was nearing its completion.

And then he thought of Sophia’s words in the immediate aftermath of the interplanetary cylinder’s destruction. He believed she was absolutely correct in her inference that Cold’s ultimate objective was to start a war between Earth and Mars, by creating a powerful sense of fear, mistrust and revulsion amongst each planetary population for the other. It did not matter that he looked nothing like a Martian; his words following each attack in the crowded streets of the British Empire’s capital were enough to equate Mars with violence and terror in the public mind. Then, the nature of Lunan R’ondd’s death was calculated to make the Martians equate Earth with parasitical infestation, of which they had a powerful racial terror – a primal revulsion. Blackwood had no doubt that the cylinder’s destruction (and the murder of two more Martians) would cause further outrage on the Red Planet, whose inhabitants would see it as an act of revenge for the attacks in London.

And yet, even these events were surely not enough to make the two worlds go to war… surely, a final catalyst was required, a final outrage to tip them into the abyss. What that catalyst would be, Blackwood had no idea, but he was quite certain that he would have to find out in pretty short order.

And what of his motive?
Blackwood thought, as the carriage entered the Bletchley Park estate.
Why does Cold want Earth and Mars to go to war? What possible use could it serve to Venus?

He recalled Private Buckley’s words when he, Sophia and de Chardin had spoken with him in his hospital bed at the Aldershot barracks:
Are we goin’ to war with Mars?… I don’t believe we’d come off very well if we did… but neither would they against us! We’d give ’em a good show, by God we would! They wouldn’t walk away without a few bloody noses and black eyes.

‘Neither would they against us,’ Blackwood murmured.

Colonel Caxton-Roper glanced at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’

And then Blackwood recalled the final words Petrox Voronezh said to him, before succumbing to his injuries:
Save… Earth… and Mars
.

All at once, the answer came to him. ‘My God, that’s it!’ he cried. ‘How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so blind?’

‘What is it, Mr Blackwood?’

‘I’ve just realised what the Venusians’ plan is. It’s been staring me in the face all along, but like a dullard, I’ve only just seen it.’

‘What is their plan?’ said the colonel.

Blackwood spoke quickly, giving voice to his thoughts as soon as they entered his mind.

‘The planet Venus is facing an environmental catastrophe which threatens to destroy its civilisation. Its industrial emissions have triggered an irreversible warming of the planet. Venusian society is highly secretive and isolationist: even the Martians, with their superior methods of interplanetary flight, know very little about it. Venusians are also aggressive and acquisitive. Their plan is to sow seeds of discord between Earth and Mars, which will, they hope, result in war between the two worlds.

‘But here’s the thing: they know that they would not be able to defeat Mars unless the Red Planet had already been weakened in a conflict with Earth. The Venusians intend to ignite a war between Earth and Mars, in which human civilisation will be destroyed,
and Martian civilisation weakened to the extent that the Venusians will be able to invade both planets
, thus ensuring the continuation of their own civilisation!’

‘Good grief!’ said Caxton-Roper. ‘Can that really be what they’re up to?’

‘It
must
be, Colonel. In an all-out war between our worlds, Earth would lose, but our new Æther zeppelins are nearing completion, which means that we would be able to inflict heavy losses on Mars. We wouldn’t be able to defeat them, but we
would
be able to weaken them enough for the Venusians to step in and finish the job.’

‘My God,’ said the colonel, appalled. ‘The
audacity
of the brutes!’

‘Audacious, indeed,’ agreed Blackwood, who then voiced his conviction that something more, some final atrocity, would be required to goad the worlds of Earth and Mars into a state of war.

‘A final push,’ nodded Caxton-Roper. ‘But what?’

‘I don’t know, Colonel,’ Blackwood sighed. ‘But I mean to find out.’

‘How?’

‘I believe that Indrid Cold has more than one ally on Earth…’

‘You mean humans?
Traitors?
’

‘Precisely. And one of them is very powerful – in more ways than one. I think I shall pay him a visit this evening.’

Perhaps
, he added to himself,
that is where Sophia has been taken
.

*

The Bletchley Park mansion had been built in a curious mixture of architectural styles. As the carriage approached, Blackwood frowned at the disparate elements of Gothic, Tudor and Dutch Baroque which gave the building a rather schizophrenic appearance not at all to his liking – although the impression of conflict it conveyed was entirely in keeping with the building’s function as the headquarters of the Bureau’s Unearthly Phenomenon Unit.