Chapter 1

I was walking away from the three way brawl between socialists, democrats and republicans taking place in Victory Plaza and along the waterfront district when I stumbled on the girl. Thick pylons rose from the red washed waters of New York Harbor, each one topped with something between a searchlight and a black rectangle about five meters – oh, sorry, fifteen feet wide. You might have imagined that being nearly wiped from the face of this holy Earth might have made us yanks reconsider our Imperial system. But I was an odd duck myself. Pa had raised me, from the day I could count past two, to use metric.

It had only gotten me almost killed once on my job – calling out meters instead of feet had left a longshoreman operating a Ford Spider rushing towards me faster than I expected.

I slid my hands into my pockets and breathed in the acrid stinks of the harbor. Coal burning ships mixed with the newer ones that used Telsa’s MPUs, while effluvia from the still damaged parts of the sewage system mixed with the acid runoff of burning red weed. My father had a naturalist chum – a girl by the name of Laurie, a nice looking bird if I did say so myself, not that pa ever let me wink at her or do anything more. He always adjusted his tie and would say, in that stuff way of his: Equality of the sexes is the cornerstone of the socialist movement, and the basis of a post-War world, Gipp.

“I know that,” I muttered to his almost visible mental image – I swear, I could see him and hear him as clearly as if he had been on a three-vee. “I just want to not stay a virgin into my twenties.” I kicked a piece of rock into the harbor. It splashed past floating, blackened husks of red weed.

It was that sound – the splash and the dissolute mutters of a nineteen year old day laborer – that changed my life.

A faint click came from behind me, from an alleyway between two warehouses, and a gruff voice that drawled thick with the accent of the far South: “Did ya hear that, Torg?”

Torg, it seemed, had. And he decided to answer his nervousness in a uniquely yank way: By drawing a pistol and opening fire. I didn’t see the pistol, nor did I see the hand that aimed it. The alleyway was too dark. But I still flung myself to the ground and behind a trash can with the trained instincts of a survivor – I had survived the Exodus, the Panic of 1901, and the Riots of 1914, I could survive this mugging gone wrong. Bullets wined and pinged off the trash can, which had been constructed out of sturdy refurbished steel. Paper crinkled as my head mashed against propaganda posters slapped up by the Republicans – a water washed, glowering Teddy Roosevelt looked down at me, like he expected me to do something about it.

Torg and his compatriot – a large, broad shouldered man with a handlebar mustache – emerged. They wore the same crude mix of clothes I did. Heavy leather gloves for working, rubberized shirts for fire work. But they had also attached some armor plates to the vital regions of their bodies, and carried weapons. Torg had a blustering, heavy bore pistol made for stopping squids, while his compatriot had a short heat cutter, which he had set to full. The crackling beam of burning air left a white smear on my face.

I scrambled for a weapon, anything as they sought to flank me out.

I found a rock.

“Stand back!” I shouted, springing to my feet. “I have a grenade!”

“It’s a limey!” Torg gasped at me.

“That’s right, I’m from Scotland Yard,” I said, trying to sound as posh as my father managed. “We know everything, if you throw up your hands now, we may take you alive.”

Torg dropped his pistol. His friend, clearly the brains of the operation, snarled: “There ain’t no Scotland no more!”

Inaccurate. Buried under red weed and choked by the bones of her former citizens did not make the mountains and highlands of Scotland vanish. Doubly inaccurate, actually, as Scotland Yard hadn’t actually been in Scotland. I corrected his lack of brains by braining him with the rock, or at least, trying too. It struck his heat cutter, producing a spray of molten rock. But by then, I was diving for the pistol. Torg caught me in the gut, the pistol went flying, and I was dished. The two men stood over me, Torg sweating and panting, the brains of the operation glaring at me.

“He don’t look Prussian, Terry,” Torg said. And now I had a name for the brains.

Terry shot him a look full of loathing. “Shut. Up. Torg. Shut your damnfool mouth, shut it or so help me, by the Lord’s name himself-”

A loud clunk sounded from the warehouse they had been standing beside. A figure went sprinting off, barely visible to me thanks to the two lugs between me and them. As they ran off, Terry howled in rage at Torg. “Torg! Shoot her! Shoot the red bitch!”

Torg swung around, but while they had stomped on my wrist and left my hand a mass of pain, I still had my legs. Long, ungainly things. But they worked. I kicked Torg in the thigh. He staggered and his gun went off and quite suddenly, Terry was missing the top half of his head. He staggered backwards, then plunged into the waters. As he vanished away, Torg started to scream – and scream and scream. He dropped the pistol then ran away as fast as his legs could carry him. The god I was fairly sure did not exist had a rather cruel sense of humor, as the pistol – still smoking and heavy with large bore bullets – smashed right into my forehead.

When I awoke, it was to a pair of brilliant blue eyes set in a crimson face. Raven black hair framed those cheeks, while coppery lips were set below a pert, perfectly formed nose. Those eyes were filled with concern – and a deep, alien knowing. Looking into those eyes was like looking into the oceans as they were before the Great War, before they had become choked with bodies and the red weed. They had no iris, you see. They were blue, all the way through. Her lips formed words – soft and musical.

“Are ... you okay, George?”

“How ... do you know my name?” I whispered. I realized that she had been holding my hand with both of hers. She had a single glove – her other hand was bare. Her skin felt oddly cool, and her fingertips were smooth.

“I know many things,” she said. Then, looking up, her brow furrowed. “They’re coming – the others.” She looked down at me. “George Philips Wells, remain here. It is not safe to help one such as me.” She then started to run away. I immediately started to sit up. The rest of her was as shockingly beautiful as her face. Her form was curvy and slender, and in the mode of her people, she wore only what she saw as required. In New York, during a muggy January day, that was a cloak, a breast band, and a thong, all of which clung to her coppery flesh like a second skin. Save for the cloak, of course, which billowed out behind her as she scampered off. I scrambled to my feet, my head still pounding.

“Wait!” I said, then scrambled down, grabbing the dropped revolver. I checked the chamber, then thrust it into my pocket. If I had been taught anything in my childhood, beyond what my genteel father had tried to communicate, it was that it was better to be armed than not. I ran after the woman. She came around the corner just as a police wagon rang up. The engine puttered and sparked, while the police were clad in cut down versions of military exoskeletons, each one hissing with steam. They carried shock prods and under the glass-plated helmets, their faces were mean. I skidded up behind the woman, who was lifting her hands into the air.

“Well, well, well...” the leader of the flatfoots, looking as tough and scarred as a Great War veteran – and just as mean as most of them. “A soomie trollop and her johnny...” he smirked.

“I am not a prostitute!” the woman said, sounding angry, and proving she had remarkable little experience with New York cops. The men in their exoskeletons started to fan around us. The hum and buzz of their backpack power supplies filled the air with as much menace as their glares. I gulped and then tried to defuse the situation slightly.

“I know, gents, that you don’t mind some honest work, if you get your cut...”

“A limey johnny!” the officer who had been talking laughed. “Looks like we got our duo.”

“What?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. Someone called in – a limey shot a man dead, with a soomie accomplice, right here, no more than five minutes ago,” he said, scowling. As the little scrum between Torg and Terry had happened less than a minute ago (maybe more, if that wallop to my head had left me cold longer than I had thought), I felt a strange prickling along my spine. The same prickling I had felt when the Martian had called me by my full name. That prickling was joined by a dryness in my throat as one of the exosuited cops stepped to my side, shockprod angling towards me.

“Listen...” I said, trying to sound even. “I’m an American citizen.”

“Limeys don’t count,” the leader of the cops said, sneering. “Run em in boys.”

The woman, then, did something rather odd. She made a throwing gesture with her hand. A ring of blue light glowed around her palm and seemed to strike the leader in the forehead. He staggered, then drew his sidearm. But rather than aiming at us, he aimed over our heads, crying out in fear. “Tripod! Tripod!” His men looked as stunned as I – but then the woman had grabbed my hand and was dragging me through the nest of men. We got past, came to the paddywagon itself, and there was one of the coppers sitting in the seat. He wasn’t in a suit, and he was looking as confused as the rest of us. I grabbed onto the upper edge of the window and swung myself in, like I was getting into a Spider.

My boots smashed into his chest and he tumbled out. That got my rump in the seat as the woman cried out: “Drive, George!”

I grabbed onto the stick, slapped the starter, and the MPU in the engine block roared to life with a crackling of lightning. The six spider-legs of the vehicle clattered to life and we rocked forward, careening around a corner, as the cops came around after us. Several opened up with their service revolvers, but ever since the Riot of 1914, their paddywagons had been built to take bigger fish than that. Bullets pinged off the roof and back, and one took off the backview optics, filling the dash with grainy green static before I slammed my palm on the controls.

“What the hell is going on, ma’am?” I asked. “Pardon my French.”

“You were not speaking French!” she exclaimed, then thrust her finger forward. “George! Avoid that!”

“My friends usually call me Gipp!” I snarled, then turned the wheel hard. The spider-legs clattered and we actually skimmed along the sidewalk, then onto the side of a building, leaving behind a series of deep imprints in concrete, shattering some poor folks windows. But that got us out of the way of a pair of great big transport pods, who were lumbering across the street, cargo containers swinging between their legs like ungainly ... um ... well, it wasn’t appropriate to refer to such things with a lady.

Even one dressed like her.

“My name is Tjen Ghendahari,” she said, sirens wailing behind us. The clattering sound of paddywagons and the cries of traffic leaping out of the way filled my ears. I gulped, looking at her mostly nude, coppery red body as I accelerated our stolen wagon to the fastest it could go. “I am a Red Martian.”

“Really? You?” I asked, sarcasm springing to my lips as readily as breathing. “I would never have guessed, ma’am.”

At that moment, we came full circle – I had started by leaving Victory Plaza, and now I had come back. The socialists had won their little tiff, though the police had come here en mass. They weren’t in exosuits, though. Just plain clothes, though more than a few had shocksticks. Several dozen women who had been part of the socialist delegation were tied together, while the men were being patted down by officers. The democrats, the staunchly conservative branch of American politics, were being let go. Police officers sprang aside, clearly having not been informed of our little chase, and we skittered towards the famous statue of Columbia, transfixing a squid with the American flag.

I twirled the wheel, hard, but the legs gave under the sudden turn. WE did not smash into the statue, but the knees did bend and snap and the paddywagon squealed along the ground, sending up sparks as we careened into the half-ruined socialist platform. Wood splinters filled the air and the great big sign of One Job, One Family went fluttering down. It covered the vehicle and plunged us into darkness. Tjen grabbed my hand with hers and hissed.

“Remain still,” she whispered.

I nodded.

A few moments later, the sign came fluttering off, cloth tearing as an exosuited cop glared into the wagon. He swung his light over us, his other hand holding a service revolver that looked toylike in the huge iron paw that topped the end of that great big arm. He looked right at me – through me – and then shook his head.

“They’re gone!”

I looked to Tjen. She smiled at me.

And blood dripped from her nose.

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched...” my father said, his voice the authoritative tone he used for recording his words. The clatter of the door of our flat closing shut behind me shut him up. I heard a click as he shut down his voice captor, and by the time he came to the front landing, I had quickly shoved Tjen into the front closet, where she could stand among coats and hats and boots. I leaned on the door – and reflected on the absurdity of hiding a woman from my father.

He was, after all, the man who had written the book on free love. Literally, if you compiled his essays at least.

My father had, in the old photos, been somewhat portly. No one remained portly, living through the Great War. The left half of his face had been hideously scarred by a boiling wave of water from the Themes, and he would walk forever with a limp and a cane, thanks to temporary exposure to the black smoke. But this did not change the attentive look on his face, the deep intelligence of his eyes, or the bristly way his mustache seemed to communicate more than his voice.

“Gipp,” he said. “Good heavens. What happened to you? You weren’t...”

“Oh, no, I got out of Victory Plaza before it got bad,” I said, grinning, cheerily.

“Then why aren’t you at your work?”

I felt an ice cube slip along my spine. My foreman would ... not be happy.

“Ah, the boil was overrated,” I said, nodding. “They only needed ten flamers, and thirty showed up. A bit of a shame.”

Father shook his head, then sighed. “Well, I’m recording the introduction of my book...” He smiled. “So do try and keep it quiet when you watch the football game or whatever it is you plan to spend your day doing...”

“Actually, father...” I said. “I was wondering ... do you remember that, ah, that researcher, that fellow who was studying the rumors of Red Martians and their, ah, eerie powers?”

“Mr. Houdini, yes?” Father said. “He said that it was better than the charlatans that he had been interviewing, but still not what he was...” He shook his head. “What is this about, Gipp?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, nodding quickly.

Father frowned. “You do know you can trust me on this, Gipp? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

I imagined opening the closet door and showing him the woman I had found. Father ... father was a good man. I might even go so far as to say he was a great one. But there was still a tiny worry in the back of my mind. One could say a great deal about the equality of races and sexes, but it was once thing to say something. It was another thing entire to have a former servant of your most hated enemy arriving, chased by scoundrels and the criminals in a government (a government not even your own) that had almost arrested you for sedition multiple times. And so, instead, I smiled.

“I know. But your readers await for the History of the Great War.”

Father chuckled. “All five or six of them?” He shook his head – turned and ambled into the next room. As he left, I opened the closet and found Tjen holding up one of my rubberized workboots. She was sniffing it curiously, and when she saw me and my bemused expression, she smiled shyly, set it down, and took my hand.

Once in my room, I sat on my bed, turned on the three-vee to a football game. The Brazillians were demolishing a German team – I wasn’t sure which one – and the sound of the crowd cheering, the announcer crying out in hyperbolic extremes would surely cover any conversation between me and Tjen. I drew my legs up underneath me, sitting cross legged, and put my palms on my knees. I frowned slowly and said: “All right. Start from the beginning, Tjen.”

“My people were slaves of the tripod builders,” she said, seriously.

I smiled, despite myself. “Not, ah, that far back, Tjen.”

She bit her lower lip. “We must begin that far back, George.”

“Gipp,” I said, grinning. “Calling me George makes me sound like one of my stuffy ancestors.”

“I’m sorry, Ge ... Gipp,” she sighed, then reached up. She undid her cloak and tossed it aside with a casual, fluid motion. The movement sent astounding rippled through her lean, muscled frame. And to her firm, smalish breasts. Contained as they were by her breast band, they still managed to have more than enough freedom to bounce in a way that sent my heart racing. I knew it was entirely improper – but to be fair, inviting her into my room unchaperoned in the first place was improper. Besides. The times had changed since my father had been courting. I gulped slowly as her cloak hit the ground. With her arms crossed over her chest, Tjen continued. “We red martians were enslaved by the tripod builders when they first built their weapons of war. They enslaved us and the green martians to work their fields, to dig their canals. But it was not enough to save our dying world.”