Chapter Fourteen

Xznaal stood there, watching them too.

The warship had stopped, its prow hanging over the Space Museum, the vast mass of the ship hanging over London and disappearing over the horizon.

The Martian lifted its slablike foot, the first movement that it had made.

The warship was blotting out the sun, making everything else around it irrelevant.

Xznaal swung forward, those broad shoulders slouching, its eyes turned blankly to the ground.

Far from the Martian the first bottle arced into the air. It dashed against the pavement, scattering the crowd where it fell. Voices were being raised again.

The Terran gravity was taking its toll. Xznaal was like a medieval knight in a suit of armour. Clad in a chain mail vest and plate armour weighing as much as he did, even a knight in prime condition had been unable to fight for long. Many falling on their face into the mud of a battlefield would find that they didn't have the strength to pull themselves back up. The weight of their armour would drag them down and they would drown.

Xznaal took another step.

On the other side of the Square, there was a great crashing sound, shouts of surprise. The crowd had uprooted a lamppost. A fight had started, a small incident at the base of Nelson's Column. It was impossible to see who was fighting. As members of the crowd realised that there wasn't anything to stop them: no police, no army, no laws, the violence spread like fire. Within seconds the crowd was a seething mass of flailing arms, rising and falling.

With a great, rolling clank, a panel on the underside of the warship was grinding open.

The crowd were pushing against the crash barriers, right in front of Trap One. The metal fence was buckling, scraping against the tarmac.

The crash barriers toppled, the front row of the crowd falling with them. Like a dam had burst, a seething mass of humanity surged through the gaps in the barrier. Men were clawing their way over children, women were punching and kicking their way to the front. The noise. Ten thousand shouts and screams and cries, all merging into a monster voice.