The evening was heavy with the sound of work -- the sound of clattering tools and dragged carts, of creaking wood and straining ropes, of the padding of immense feet. In the darkness, visible between the tiny lamps that flickered and guttered to give the mortals awake at this time of hour a chance to completing their tasks, the sight of immense, impossible figures shifted and flowed, shadow into shadow.
It had been nearly a week since the Martians had been repulsed from their first assault, using mortal men and women transformed into their servants and tripods built out of local materials, and the last army on Europe that had not been smashed, gassed, or burned into cinders was working to devise a new means of war from the cutting edge of modernity and with magic long thought lost and shadowed into darkness.
Mina Murray watched it all from a small hilltop, next to her husband and George Wells, as the two of them operated a telescope, liberated from one of the cities that the vampires of the army had visited to retrieve supplies from. The telescope was the finest that she had ever seen -- brass and wood and finely detailed engraving, and the two of them peered through it, murmuring softly one to the other. George was here because he had spent some time in an astronomic club and had used telescopes to observe the moon and several of the more interesting planets in the bygone days before the war.
Jonathan was here because, beyond keeping clerical lists and organizational charts, he was entirely useless for the great work going on below -- work that required vampiric alchemy and vampiric shapeshifting. Poor Jonathan hadn't yet figured out how to create the simplest concoctions that a vampire could manage -- noctis vitae or album vitae. His shapeshifting remained constrained to rather small, inoffensive creatures like terriers and house cats. If he felt ashamed of that, he concealed it behind his normal studious affect, and took detailed notes as George and he panned the telescope through the sky, night by night, seeking out any sign of the incoming Invasion Cylinders that they knew were steadily drawing nearer and nearer to London.
Mina herself had a collection of reports in her lap, and she knew she should be reading them. But her mind felt utterly unfocused -- skipping from task to task, unwilling to settle down. General Fosch and General Schlieffen had (with her glaring at them periodically) worked out a means of organization that would allow the French and German armies to fight side by side, with the Spanish thrown in for good measure. Her scouts had ferreted out more unlikely survivors -- a whole company of British fusiliers who had made the harrowing ride in boats too small to be struck by the Martian aerial corps from the coast to the continent, the tattered remains of an Austrian regiment that was primarily comprised of their machine gunners, and piecemeal remains of artillery battalions from every major power.
Their stories blurred together -- miraculous escapes, hiding, running, surviving by falling in with other scattered people. But in their totality, they painted a terrifying picture of the demographics of Europe. Bats sent to the far east and south said that there were stories of mass exoduses -- boats that had fled across the Mediterranean and Black Seas, trains that had carried people by the thousand over the Hellespont, and eastward into the vast Russian steppe. Refugees, crammed into every city surrounding Europe. But then there had come the terrible day where the Martian aerial corps had smote the shipping lines of humanity.
Mina tried to imagine the number of mortal men and women and children who, in that single twenty four hour span, had thought they had gotten away, had thought that they had been safe...only to see the flying chevron of the Martians, had time enough to leap into the oceans, to hope that it would save them before heat rays struck the decks of their ships, immolating wood, slicing through steel, piercing into boilers and transfiguring rigging into Hell upon the Earth.
Mina closed her eyes. She now, quite fiercely, wished to imagine anything but.
The civilians who had not fled nor been smothered by the Black Smoke were now congregating here. The best of the vampires at explaining things gently and calmly -- using their words, not any hypnotic power -- had been set to the task of gently introducing those civilians to the reality of life in the camp. There, Jonathan had been tracking the amount of blood they had to take, and the album vitae they had to make, and then began to work out a procedure for the creation of new vampires. Experimentation had shown that if they were buried in a coffin that itself was suspended above the ground, within a casket of earth mixtures from across Europe, that they returned from unlife with the ability to slumber in France or Germany or Poland with equal ease -- and so, teams of vampires in the forms of bats and wolves had been dispatched to gather up the mixtures of Earth, moving stealthily through the continent and returning in drips and drabs -- creating the row upon row of casket that they now used to birth new vampires.
Due to the fact they had to use the same set of coffins and bits of Earth for each vampire thus born, they had a linear growth rather than exponential -- and Mina wasn't sure if that was the right thing. They had several thousand civilians gathered around their small army, and from them they had created a mere hundred and twenty vampires, who were split into training cadres...but...
The Martians had been busy as well. Her bat spies said that rather than continuing their lightning attacks and aerial raids, they had instead focused upon taking and fortifying several coastal towns. They had not been able to get close enough to make more concrete checks, because the Martians had taken their 'sun ray' idea and expanded it into the creation of immense, curved mirrors that swept the skies and grounds around their fortified areas, preventing any vampire from drawing too close, lest they lose their powers and be left vulnerable.
Behind that cloak of uncertainty, anything could be happening, and Mina knew that if she guessed wrong, if she made the wrong move, if she sent her forces outwards, they would be...that would be...
"Mina?"
She lifted her eyes and saw Jonathan looking at her, his eyes filled with concern. "Are you well?" he asked.
Mina rubbed her palms against her face. "Yes, Jonathan, dearest. I just have a great deal of paperwork to get done. Who knew being a general would have more paperwork than being a schoolmistress." She smiled, then looked down at the documents. She skimmed over the figures and numbers -- and wondered if that vampiric ability to learn quickly had already, invisibly, served to make this more legible and understandable than it would have been otherwise. Because rather than a mystifying number of shells and explosives and rifle bullets and meat and bread, she saw instead that they had food enough to keep themselves operating for two months, but the rates of growth were slowing.
The storehouses of Europe were meant to be filled by farmers and factories -- but those farms were either empty and fallow or were keeping their food to themselves and their heads down.
She ruffled the papers over -- then a rustling sound came from the air and a bat landed upon her knee -- Antoni.
Mina flashed, for a moment, upon the memory of turning him. It was still...one of the most intense moments of her life, and why, unlike Lucy, she found herself unable to repeat the act very often. She had watched him laying upon the soft earth, trembling, as Jonathan stroked himself to the side. She had impaled herself upon his warm cock, the young artilleryman's hands gripping her buttocks. She had felt his heart-beat, throbbing inside of her cunt, and she had felt powerful and heady and wild. She had ridden him, her hips slamming against his, her mouth opening in a moan. She had let that feral rush fill her and sank her fangs into his throat, pinning him down. He had cum inside of her -- filling her mouth with his blood and her womb with his seed.
And then, once he had been emptied of both, she had slid free, and pounced upon Jonathan, still wild, still fierce.
It had been...
A bit much.
Especially since she had been needed at a meeting with the civilian leadership and the generals a few minutes afterwards -- she hadn't realized how
wild
she'd have been, how insatiable. So, she had quietly refrained form turning others, much as it caused Lucy to tease her for being a 'prude.'
Now, Antoni shifted to his human form and she had to admit...vampirism suited him quite well.
Even if he looked grave, rather than his usual little smile.
