Loosely inspired by the 2013 mockumentary by the History Channel and the Science Fiction classic...
The Great Martian War
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Streaks of Golden Light
Loosely inspired by the 2013 mockumentary by the History Channel and the Science Fiction classic by H.G. Wells.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the farther worlds of space as sources of human danger or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and an insatiable hunger, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the second decade of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
January 23rd, 1914 - The Royal Observatory's 28 inch Grubb refracting telescope detects numerous flashes of light upon the planet Mars that continue intermittently for more than a week. This phenomena would be observed off and on throughout the remainder of the year. Though small seeming in the glass of telescope, to be detected by astronomers on Earth, the flashes must be large indeed. It is theorized that the flashes are the eruption of Martian volcanoes. Astronomers would not realize how wrong they were for another six months.
June 25th, 1914 – The skies of Europe were lit up with the lights of a meteor shower of such intensity that had never been witnessed in living memory, or indeed in written memory. Streaks of golden light smeared across the night sky in the thousands, and frighteningly loud explosions were reported in Belgium and the plains of Poland. A great crop of blood and misery was being sown across fields and farms, one whose harvest would begin the next day to the astonishment of Man.
June 26th, 1914 - The people of Belgium awoke to find much of the land north and east of Namur scoured as torn apart by a plow. Trees and the more shoddy farm houses were blasted down and the very earth was torn up and pocked with innumerable craters. The people of Poland, west of Lodz along the Warta river found much the same. And as the dawn faded into the brightness of day, they found much worse...
June 26th, 4:46am - As the dawn glow faded, washed away by the bright light of the morning sun, the farm folk investigating their land, along with curious villagers and what local authorities that could be convinced to investigate so early in the day began to hear a low, metallic hum. A hum that quickly grew louder and set the disturbed earth a quiver, pebbles and small clumps of dirt rolling down cratered hill sides.
The people had no time to be confused, as great machines burst up from the earth; glittering, black steel domes erupting from the ground with frightening speed, shedding rock and dirt like a man emerging from a pool does water. They rose with shrieking hiss to an enormous height, a full hundred feet high, upon three, twice jointed legs that though thicker than a man looked spindly in comparison to the ugly, bulbous head that sat upon them. Puffs of dark green smoke emitted from the back of the caracpace, spawned by whatever dark engine powered the things.
People cried out and stepped back, but for many it was too late. Tentacles of segmented white metal descended from underneath the main body and lashed out, seizing whoever was in reach and tearing them to pieces with as much effort as a man with a piece of paper. These first victims were the lucky ones. They died fast in a spray of crimson. It was those that the machines gathered next that suffered, as the machines lumbered forward, their gangling stride deceptively fast, and snatching up victims from the panicking crowd, only a few who had come on horseback or by motor car escaping.
The Tripods played with this second set of captives as cruel child would with an insect, testing to see just how much pressure was need to pull off a limb. And all around them new machines continued to emerge from the ground, smaller tripods, a fourth as high and far greater in numbers. From great steel discs, far too large to move at anything but the slowest crawl over tracked treads, poured an endless tide of tentacled horrors carrying weapons, supplies and machines of unknown but no doubt fiendish purpose. Those few, poor wretches that had served the handling of the Tripods were given unto them to suffer a yet more terrible fate.
June 27th, 3:49pm
The cabinet meeting was tense. King Albert and his ministers could feel a palpable sense of unease in the air. Odd things were afoot, and the odder things seemed the more concrete they seemed to become. It had all started with that spectacular light show two nights ago. Beautiful and unexpected, but not something that seemed poised to shake the pillars of natural law.
Yet the following morning refugees by the score, then by the hundreds began streaming into Namur from the north, hysterical and screaming of monsters, death, and great black machines striding across the landscape belching smoke and fire. Impossible things of course, the sort of superstitious nonsense you'd expect to her in the Congo, not a civilized nation like Belgium, but where there was smoke, some sort of fire most be burning, perhaps one lit by Flemish insurrectionists or German saboteurs. Yet, all attempts to investigate the strange disturbance by the constabulary had resulted in garbled reports of skirmishes just as strange, or worse an ominous silence with no reports at all.
That night that followed had seemed longer by far than the short summer hours had any right to, streaked once again golden lights. And with the coming dawn came a doubling of the reports of chaos and death, this time stretching north across the border into Walloon Brabant. The refugees from the affected areas must number over 10,000 by now, and if they were to be believed the dead in the high hundreds at least, if not into the thousands.
The government had been spooked enough that early this morning it had ordered a limited mobilization of the army, ostensibly done so in order to maintain civil order and offer aid due to natural disaster in northern Namur province. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the military's report and finding out what was really going on.
Voices were raised outside the doors to the room, and before the ministers could enquire as to what was going on the doors were thrown open.
"What is the meaning of this Colonel?" the King demanded of the cavalry officer striding into the office. He was followed closely by six men carrying a farmhouse door burdened by a heavy load, burden obscured by a sheet soaked by what looked like… caked, half dry purple blood.
The Colonel threw back the sheet exposing the horror beneath, "Forgive my impertinence your Majesty, but it's all true."
The King and his ministers looked agape at the corpse, as large as pony and with six muscular limbs, not unlike the limbs of a cephalopod in their design, though modified for transport on land. Its skin was thick and mottled a mix of dark shades and had granular texture. Leather straps were wrapped around its torso and lined with pouches. The creature had an enormously thick neck, and if there was a spot where the neck ended and the 'head' began it was not readily apparent to the audience. It simply seemed to end in a hideous face, with four bulbous black eyes, and mouth out of nightmare, akin to that of giant lamprey. It was great and circular and filled with row upon row of hooked, yellow fangs. The only consolation those observing the monster could draw was that it had been killed, it was riddled with gunfire.
"What the devil is this thing!?" gasped the Prime Minister Charles de Broqueville.
"Whatever it is they're swarming all over the country side, them and their infernal machines."
"Them?" asked de Broqueville, "How many are there, where did they come from?"
"My battalion clashed with a few hundred of these freaks, 75 kilometers northwest of Namur, however we believe there must be thousands of them out there. We also sighted blocks of infantry in the distance, squat and conic…" he paused a moment, searching for words before continuing on "somewhat starfish like and lumbering forward on three limbs. We didn't clash with those creatures directly, we were too busy with this lot. As for where they all come from, no one knows for sure, though we've two theories, equally outlandish."
"With creatures this bizarre, their origin can hardly be mundane," interjected the King.
"No," admitted the Colonel. "The few survivors of the first attacks we've intervened claim that their machines burst forth from underneath the Earth, and so we at first entertained the idea that that's where they originated like in the old Jules Verne tale. However, the earth was already disturbed and torn up when the farmers arrived to investigate. There'd been explosions in the night you see, beginning and ending with that unbelievable meteor shower."
The King frowned in consternation, "Are you suggesting that these events are connected!?" he asked incredulously.
"One of my junior officers' father is an astronomer at the University in Liege, and he has discussed the unusual phenomena detected on Mars in the last six months in some depth with him." The Colonel shook his head in seeming disbelief at what he was saying, "It's madness but these...beings clearly came from somewhere, and it beggars the imagination to believe that a hostile, industrial civilization has been hiding beneath our feet for all these years. If not from Earth, then is not the closest world to it a reasonable suspect? Especially when science tells us it that world is habitable, yet drying out. Our world is wet and lively, it is not too farfetched to believe these things would covet it, and with their technology, be able to reach it."
"Are their machines, their weapons as fearsome as their appearance?" asked de Broqueville, who also helmed the Ministry of Defence, with trepidation.
"They... may be as far beyond us as the maxim gun is beyond the tribes of the Congo," the Colonel said with dread. "Their war machines stride across the land like giant, skittering bugs with three legs. Most are about eight meters tall, and topped with a large armored cockpit the shape of mushroom's cap. There are larger ones though that must tower a full thirty meters above the ground. They bear metal tentacles, whip crack quick, flexible and strong beyond belief, able to tear a horse in half." A haunted look crossed his eyes, remembering that no doubt, along with the fate of their riders. "And they carry some kind of...gun. It fires a long bolt of energy...," he struggled to describe the weapon, "a ray of tremendous heat, strong enough to melt through a stone wall like a hot knife through butter. We'll need copious amounts of heavy artillery to deal with them, more than we have to be honest. You must ask France and Germany for aid your Majesty."
"We will," breathed the King, quickly dispatching an aide to request the immediate appearance of the ambassadors of France, Germany, and Britain, while de Broqueville sent another to the ministry of Defense with orders for a full-scale mobilization of the army.
"What of these things themselves, what are their abilities?" the King pointed to the mangled corpse.
"They are quite quick and strong, and unflinchingly aggressive." He paused and looked off in the distance. "They look at a man, and it feels they're staring into your soul and find its very existence hateful." He shook off the malaise and continued on, "They can gallop on their six limbs, and are unbelievably flexible. They can lift their forward third up with ease to wield weapons like some sort of twisted centaur; and they can even rear up on their hind legs to fight with their front four for a short time. They carry swords and close for melee at every opportunity and are a whirling dervish in battle. If you engage them at a distance, they carry powerful grenades which they can fling surprisingly far, as well as...firearms of a sort. "
The Colonel hesitated, turning the words over in his head before speaking them. "They're heavy and bulky, with perhaps half the rate of fire of a good bolt action rifle, but like the weapons of their walking machines they fire a bolt of ...cohesive fire. It's a much shorter bolt than used by their machines, but no less deadly to a man. It'll bore a hole straight through you near as big as a fist and ignite your clothing to boot."
"Dear God!," exclaimed the King in horror.
"At least those hit square on die instantly, or at least go into shock and feel nothing before quickly expiring." The Colonel explained. "Civilians caught by these things suffer...," here the poor Colonel nearly broke down, face pale, voice cracking. "To say they suffer is...human language is completely inadequate...We found this monster separated from its fellows, a farmwoman held clasped in its forearms, writhing in agony as the beast devoured her alive, mangling her chest with its cruel fangs and drinking her blood...while it simultaneously violated her."
There was nothing to say after that, the King and his ministers stunned into a silence that stretched on and on. Finally, the King broke the spell, whispering "May God have mercy on us." Then they went to work and tried to save Belgium.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the farther worlds of space as sources of human danger or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and an insatiable hunger, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the second decade of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
January 23rd, 1914 - The Royal Observatory's 28 inch Grubb refracting telescope detects numerous flashes of light upon the planet Mars that continue intermittently for more than a week. This phenomena would be observed off and on throughout the remainder of the year. Though small seeming in the glass of telescope, to be detected by astronomers on Earth, the flashes must be large indeed. It is theorized that the flashes are the eruption of Martian volcanoes. Astronomers would not realize how wrong they were for another six months.
June 25th, 1914 – The skies of Europe were lit up with the lights of a meteor shower of such intensity that had never been witnessed in living memory, or indeed in written memory. Streaks of golden light smeared across the night sky in the thousands, and frighteningly loud explosions were reported in Belgium and the plains of Poland. A great crop of blood and misery was being sown across fields and farms, one whose harvest would begin the next day to the astonishment of Man.
June 26th, 1914 - The people of Belgium awoke to find much of the land north and east of Namur scoured as torn apart by a plow. Trees and the more shoddy farm houses were blasted down and the very earth was torn up and pocked with innumerable craters. The people of Poland, west of Lodz along the Warta river found much the same. And as the dawn faded into the brightness of day, they found much worse...
June 26th, 4:46am - As the dawn glow faded, washed away by the bright light of the morning sun, the farm folk investigating their land, along with curious villagers and what local authorities that could be convinced to investigate so early in the day began to hear a low, metallic hum. A hum that quickly grew louder and set the disturbed earth a quiver, pebbles and small clumps of dirt rolling down cratered hill sides.
The people had no time to be confused, as great machines burst up from the earth; glittering, black steel domes erupting from the ground with frightening speed, shedding rock and dirt like a man emerging from a pool does water. They rose with shrieking hiss to an enormous height, a full hundred feet high, upon three, twice jointed legs that though thicker than a man looked spindly in comparison to the ugly, bulbous head that sat upon them. Puffs of dark green smoke emitted from the back of the caracpace, spawned by whatever dark engine powered the things.
People cried out and stepped back, but for many it was too late. Tentacles of segmented white metal descended from underneath the main body and lashed out, seizing whoever was in reach and tearing them to pieces with as much effort as a man with a piece of paper. These first victims were the lucky ones. They died fast in a spray of crimson. It was those that the machines gathered next that suffered, as the machines lumbered forward, their gangling stride deceptively fast, and snatching up victims from the panicking crowd, only a few who had come on horseback or by motor car escaping.
The Tripods played with this second set of captives as cruel child would with an insect, testing to see just how much pressure was need to pull off a limb. And all around them new machines continued to emerge from the ground, smaller tripods, a fourth as high and far greater in numbers. From great steel discs, far too large to move at anything but the slowest crawl over tracked treads, poured an endless tide of tentacled horrors carrying weapons, supplies and machines of unknown but no doubt fiendish purpose. Those few, poor wretches that had served the handling of the Tripods were given unto them to suffer a yet more terrible fate.
June 27th, 3:49pm
The cabinet meeting was tense. King Albert and his ministers could feel a palpable sense of unease in the air. Odd things were afoot, and the odder things seemed the more concrete they seemed to become. It had all started with that spectacular light show two nights ago. Beautiful and unexpected, but not something that seemed poised to shake the pillars of natural law.
Yet the following morning refugees by the score, then by the hundreds began streaming into Namur from the north, hysterical and screaming of monsters, death, and great black machines striding across the landscape belching smoke and fire. Impossible things of course, the sort of superstitious nonsense you'd expect to her in the Congo, not a civilized nation like Belgium, but where there was smoke, some sort of fire most be burning, perhaps one lit by Flemish insurrectionists or German saboteurs. Yet, all attempts to investigate the strange disturbance by the constabulary had resulted in garbled reports of skirmishes just as strange, or worse an ominous silence with no reports at all.
That night that followed had seemed longer by far than the short summer hours had any right to, streaked once again golden lights. And with the coming dawn came a doubling of the reports of chaos and death, this time stretching north across the border into Walloon Brabant. The refugees from the affected areas must number over 10,000 by now, and if they were to be believed the dead in the high hundreds at least, if not into the thousands.
The government had been spooked enough that early this morning it had ordered a limited mobilization of the army, ostensibly done so in order to maintain civil order and offer aid due to natural disaster in northern Namur province. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the military's report and finding out what was really going on.
Voices were raised outside the doors to the room, and before the ministers could enquire as to what was going on the doors were thrown open.
"What is the meaning of this Colonel?" the King demanded of the cavalry officer striding into the office. He was followed closely by six men carrying a farmhouse door burdened by a heavy load, burden obscured by a sheet soaked by what looked like… caked, half dry purple blood.
The Colonel threw back the sheet exposing the horror beneath, "Forgive my impertinence your Majesty, but it's all true."
The King and his ministers looked agape at the corpse, as large as pony and with six muscular limbs, not unlike the limbs of a cephalopod in their design, though modified for transport on land. Its skin was thick and mottled a mix of dark shades and had granular texture. Leather straps were wrapped around its torso and lined with pouches. The creature had an enormously thick neck, and if there was a spot where the neck ended and the 'head' began it was not readily apparent to the audience. It simply seemed to end in a hideous face, with four bulbous black eyes, and mouth out of nightmare, akin to that of giant lamprey. It was great and circular and filled with row upon row of hooked, yellow fangs. The only consolation those observing the monster could draw was that it had been killed, it was riddled with gunfire.
"What the devil is this thing!?" gasped the Prime Minister Charles de Broqueville.
"Whatever it is they're swarming all over the country side, them and their infernal machines."
"Them?" asked de Broqueville, "How many are there, where did they come from?"
"My battalion clashed with a few hundred of these freaks, 75 kilometers northwest of Namur, however we believe there must be thousands of them out there. We also sighted blocks of infantry in the distance, squat and conic…" he paused a moment, searching for words before continuing on "somewhat starfish like and lumbering forward on three limbs. We didn't clash with those creatures directly, we were too busy with this lot. As for where they all come from, no one knows for sure, though we've two theories, equally outlandish."
"With creatures this bizarre, their origin can hardly be mundane," interjected the King.
"No," admitted the Colonel. "The few survivors of the first attacks we've intervened claim that their machines burst forth from underneath the Earth, and so we at first entertained the idea that that's where they originated like in the old Jules Verne tale. However, the earth was already disturbed and torn up when the farmers arrived to investigate. There'd been explosions in the night you see, beginning and ending with that unbelievable meteor shower."
The King frowned in consternation, "Are you suggesting that these events are connected!?" he asked incredulously.
"One of my junior officers' father is an astronomer at the University in Liege, and he has discussed the unusual phenomena detected on Mars in the last six months in some depth with him." The Colonel shook his head in seeming disbelief at what he was saying, "It's madness but these...beings clearly came from somewhere, and it beggars the imagination to believe that a hostile, industrial civilization has been hiding beneath our feet for all these years. If not from Earth, then is not the closest world to it a reasonable suspect? Especially when science tells us it that world is habitable, yet drying out. Our world is wet and lively, it is not too farfetched to believe these things would covet it, and with their technology, be able to reach it."
"Are their machines, their weapons as fearsome as their appearance?" asked de Broqueville, who also helmed the Ministry of Defence, with trepidation.
"They... may be as far beyond us as the maxim gun is beyond the tribes of the Congo," the Colonel said with dread. "Their war machines stride across the land like giant, skittering bugs with three legs. Most are about eight meters tall, and topped with a large armored cockpit the shape of mushroom's cap. There are larger ones though that must tower a full thirty meters above the ground. They bear metal tentacles, whip crack quick, flexible and strong beyond belief, able to tear a horse in half." A haunted look crossed his eyes, remembering that no doubt, along with the fate of their riders. "And they carry some kind of...gun. It fires a long bolt of energy...," he struggled to describe the weapon, "a ray of tremendous heat, strong enough to melt through a stone wall like a hot knife through butter. We'll need copious amounts of heavy artillery to deal with them, more than we have to be honest. You must ask France and Germany for aid your Majesty."
"We will," breathed the King, quickly dispatching an aide to request the immediate appearance of the ambassadors of France, Germany, and Britain, while de Broqueville sent another to the ministry of Defense with orders for a full-scale mobilization of the army.
"What of these things themselves, what are their abilities?" the King pointed to the mangled corpse.
"They are quite quick and strong, and unflinchingly aggressive." He paused and looked off in the distance. "They look at a man, and it feels they're staring into your soul and find its very existence hateful." He shook off the malaise and continued on, "They can gallop on their six limbs, and are unbelievably flexible. They can lift their forward third up with ease to wield weapons like some sort of twisted centaur; and they can even rear up on their hind legs to fight with their front four for a short time. They carry swords and close for melee at every opportunity and are a whirling dervish in battle. If you engage them at a distance, they carry powerful grenades which they can fling surprisingly far, as well as...firearms of a sort. "
The Colonel hesitated, turning the words over in his head before speaking them. "They're heavy and bulky, with perhaps half the rate of fire of a good bolt action rifle, but like the weapons of their walking machines they fire a bolt of ...cohesive fire. It's a much shorter bolt than used by their machines, but no less deadly to a man. It'll bore a hole straight through you near as big as a fist and ignite your clothing to boot."
"Dear God!," exclaimed the King in horror.
"At least those hit square on die instantly, or at least go into shock and feel nothing before quickly expiring." The Colonel explained. "Civilians caught by these things suffer...," here the poor Colonel nearly broke down, face pale, voice cracking. "To say they suffer is...human language is completely inadequate...We found this monster separated from its fellows, a farmwoman held clasped in its forearms, writhing in agony as the beast devoured her alive, mangling her chest with its cruel fangs and drinking her blood...while it simultaneously violated her."
There was nothing to say after that, the King and his ministers stunned into a silence that stretched on and on. Finally, the King broke the spell, whispering "May God have mercy on us." Then they went to work and tried to save Belgium.
obssesednuker
Commander of 10 Million Men
- Location
- In the Kremlin, activating Perimtr.
Will these Martians have any form of indirect fire? Otherwise, it'd be a bit too easy to shell them into submission...
The tripods are rather high above the landscape, expanding their range.
French only have 75 cm guns that fire at a flat trajectory at this time.
The Germans and British have heavy artillery though of course the British army is still small.
obssesednuker
Commander of 10 Million Men
- Location
- In the Kremlin, activating Perimtr.
I'm aware, but greater LOS can only achieve so much so long as one is restricted to LOS-only weapons.
Macros
omnisciently vague councilman
- Location
- Dirac Sea
Not quite. While the 75mm is ubiquitous in 1914 (almost 5000 of them), there are some heavy artillery units (from the French wiki, two hundred 120mm and one hundred 155mm, plus a few hundreds guns of various caliber splitted between siege artillery, fortress defense and coastal defense. Compared to German heavy artillery, it's not much (and the models are often on the older side), but it's hardly nothing.
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JuliusClonkus
Scatterbrained Speculator
- Location
- Federal Reichspublic of Karlsland
I'm a sucker for alien invasions of the old school.
Consider this watched.
Consider this watched.
Not to mention that while not that accurate, when anywhere near the coastline you can add a fair number of 11", 12", 13.5" and 15" guns to the barrage. Plus 14" if the US gets involved.
Numen
Long Time Creeper
- Location
- Canada
Pretty sure humans have done that too. Probably. Also is this because Martians are freakishly aggressive? Genetically bred to be freakishly aggresive shock troopers? Because there's little in the way of evolutionary reasons for violating your prey.
JuliusClonkus
Scatterbrained Speculator
- Location
- Federal Reichspublic of Karlsland
I'm fairly sure they don't see us as prey in the normal sense of the word - odds are it's equal amounts terror tactics and indulging in the rush of absolute superiority.
Or the rest is more well-behaved and luck of the draw means Belgium got invaded by the alien version of the Dirlewanger unit.
- Location
- los angeles
I like h.g. wells i liked the marvel version of war fo the worlds continue this please
- Location
- Anchorage, Alaska
whelp good way for the imperium of mankind to form, because Aliens are so much worse then us sometimes...while we can be just as bad this one instance will paint them as demons from the stars which they need to exterminate with EXTREME prejudice.
Than lets hope the new BBC War of the Worlds TV series will be to our liking.