Chapter Fourteen

'Perhaps they are just biding their time. They could start wiping us out at any moment.'

The Brigadier conceded the point, 'You're right. Now, I don't know my Martian military history, but I know that on this planet many a battle has been lost because the superior force got complacent. They don't realise just how hard we can hit them. We also know that they won't be using the gas.'

Bambera nodded. 'We've had word from Strike Command: the Harriers are ready, and can be here in four minutes. There are anti-aircraft batteries at Spitalfields and St James Park.'

'Trap Two has a couple of artillery pieces,' the Corporal added.

Lethbridge-Stewart was fitting a radio earpiece. 'We stay in position. We do nothing to provoke the Martians. We sit this one out if we have to.'

Theo Ogilvy had done his best, and he told Xznaal as much. Without the Orbiter, the nearest telescope to Mars was the Hubble, circling the Earth. For the next three hours, its orbit kept it on the wrong side of the planet to face the alien's home world.

All his professional life, Ogilvy had taken careful measurements, analysed blips in line graphs and spectroscope readings. He'd studied sketch charts with all the majesty and grandeur of a dot-the-dots puzzle, gasped in awe at blurred photographs of white pinpricks against a black background. Astronomy was an odd science, one that saw men in tweed suits growing old staring up into the infinite, timeless night sky in the hope of fathoming how the universe was put together. Every night, he and tens of thousands of people like him would observe tiny coloured specks of light, sometimes forgetting that every single one of those specks was large enough to swallow Earth and Mars without even noticing. There were sunspots wider than the diameter of the Earth on each and every pinprick in the sky.

He was a thirty-eight year old bachelor, and the first time he'd even flown in a plane was a trip to NASA three years ago, when he'd been appointed Mission Controller of Mars 97. He'd lived in Watford all his adult life. Now, an alien was forcing him, at gunpoint, to show it photographs of Mars. An eight-foot green reptile. But how could a cold-blooded creature survive in the sub-zero temperatures of Mars? How could anything even remotely resembling a human breathe nitrogen? Why would a creature from a low-gravity world evolve into such a powerful, muscular form? Ogilvy pushed all those questions to the back of his mind and concentrated on the task in hand. But despite being in the global nerve centre for Martian studies, the clearest image of the planet that he could manage to find was from tracking station 63 in Madrid. It showed a new feature in the atmosphere, a vast brown/red cloud.