Whatever the city of Dunkirk had been before the turn of the century, it was gone now.
In it's place, using her own impressive eyesight as she perched on a small tree branch, her claws digging in tight, Mina Murray could see that the Martians had not been busy. Their industrious machines and their enslaved humans -- all of them bald and black eyed, like those she and her fellow vampires had rescued -- had torn down pretty French homes and large French piers and in their place had thrown up sleet black metal constructions that rose from the Earth with stark, fierce lines. They were geometric in shape and utterly alien in their design...and yet, despite that, Mina could immediately identify them as walls, towers, and bunkers.
There were no tripods that she could see, but she was positive that there was room enough behind the walls to conceal many of them.
The surrounding countryside, too, was being transformed before her eyes. The people rescued from Britain had made mention of something called the red weed -- and now, here, she could see it for herself. It grew out from the stark walls, creeping up and strangling trees, choking along creeks and flowing outwards along the beaches, reaching tendrils greedily into the ocean, careless of salt or waves both. To her vampiric nose, it smelled stark and acidic, and she found the color quite distasteful -- doubly so when she saw that the trees that had been completely entwined by it were already dead and collapsed down into ruins, creating a flat plane around the coastal city.
She swung herself down, so that she was hanging suspended from the branch, between the two others.
Time?
She asked, mentally.
Jenny Harker clicked her stopwatch shut. "Thirty minutes." She paused. "Are you sure about the timing?"
No...but...
Mina smiled toothily at the woman who had been her husband, and now would be her wife.
I'm sure that we can do it. No matter what.
The whole army had approached at night -- the humans guided and even carried through the wilderness by immense beasts, vampries using their shapeshifting to take forms that could bear entire companies in a single go, while the horses and beasts of burden they had rustled up carried the rest. The horses had needed to be forced to drink vampire vitae, to chain their simple minds to the control of the vampires in the army -- to force them from panicking when wolves the size of houses padded next to them during that long, night ride.
The vitae had further helped by enhancing their stamina, improving their constitution. AT the beginning of the ride, the officers and cavalrymen with the army had grumbled about how they would be lucky to have any horses to fight with by the time they arrived. Instead, their mounts remained frisky and eager.
"Are you sure about attacking during the day?" Aleera whispered to her left, his own hands nervous checking the weapons and tools that hung from the thin harness that he wore over a simple set of clothing that served in lieu of a uniform. It wasn't as if they needed many markers to indicate who was and was not a martian -- the German and French soldiers were fairly confident they could tell the shapeless, one-piece uniforms of the Martian indoctrinated from their own blue colors. "We're-"
They have sun lamps,
Mina said.
So, our powers are going to be cut down anyway -- and more, we have thousands of humans that need to see.
She shook her tiny head, then closed her eyes. She focused and gave the signal.
Now
.
A vampire during the day lacked many powers. They could not shapeshift, nor turn to mist. Mortal weapons could still barely harm them, but they could at the very least strike them. What was more, they were weak to being pierced with wooden stakes, which could bring about their final end. They still had some tricks of the mind, enhanced perception and senses, and they retained whatever shape they had taken during their last transformation. This, here, was the key to Mina's plan.
There was no
law
that said that vampires had to return to the human shapes they normally wore -- though many vampires did, simply because the human form was adaptable and useful and, more importantly, highly pleasing to their minds and souls. They were no longer mortal, but they were
human
.
But humanity had its weaknesses.
Twenty of the vampires had volunteered to have the discomfort and distress of being trapped in inhuman forms for the beginning of this battle. They were something close to large lumps of heavily corded muscle and bone, formed into crude, grasping claws, with long, multi-jointed limbs. Their eyes were mounted on long, thin stalks, allowing them to crouch behind low hillocks and behind trees and next to hedges while still seeing the world beyond. And with Mina's voice in their heads, they worked -- snatching up the first munitions beside them and hurling them outwards.
The munitions had been put together via the use of vampiric alchemy and the knowledge of some of the artillerymen, those who knew more about some of the more
clever
shells used by their armies. The exact mixture of potassium chlorate and lactose and dye was unknown to Mina, she hadn't been involved in the creation of them. But the
result
of their crashing into the red-strewn earth between the walls and their formation was...exothermic and obvious.
Smoke -- colored a brilliant red -- began to gush outward, from the impacts before the second volley had even landed. With three whole volleys thrown in a time it might take an average fellow to put three darts into a dartboard (if he didn't mind much about getting bullseyes), the entire front began to froth and smoke with red gas. It was unpleasant and burning to her nose, but it also completely blocked all vision.
Wolf brigades!
Mina thought.
Fifty vampires stood then -- each of them still in the immense, lupine forms that they had carried humans with before. But now their carrying harnesses had been replaced -- hastily, in the cover of the trees -- with metal boxes that were perched on their backs, with firing slits in them. The men within were the best sharpshooters of the German and French armies, and as the wolves bounded forward, they rushed into the smoke, which was beginning to flicker and glow with search lights and heat rays, trying to blast away the smoke.
The Martian base was beginning to wail with sirens.
Mina nodded.
Now it was time for the scary part.
Wish me luck,
she thought to Jenny, who leaned forward and kissed her furry belly...and then Mina Murray, who had been in the shape of a small, brown bat for the past four hours, dropped from the branch and beat her wings hard. She shot upwards, then soared above the battlefield, where the chaos of the ground fighting would keep anyone from noticing her. She looked down at the canvas of the battlefield and saw that the thick curtain of smoke had allowed the wolves to reach the walls. One of them had taken a glancing sear from a heat-ray before he had gotten to the wall, and his metal casing was glowing a faint red.
The men, though, were scrambling out as the wolves dove into their native soil, leaving behind the metal casings that abutted the wall. The men worked with feaverish speed, firing their rifles up at the heat rays, while indoctrinated humans tried to bring the heat rays around to fire down at the wall.
Now! Cavalry!
Mina thought to one of the vampires embedded in the German cavalry.
Come around to the eastern flank!
Then, switching her thoughts to the vampire embedded with the French artillery.
I see some tripods in the city! Be ready!
Looking down at the city, she could see that there were more than
some
. There were ten of them, each parked low to the ground, and another twenty of the smaller, quadrapedal versions that were used by humans. She could see Martians moving along the ground, pushing themselves to the tripods -- they had clearly not been expecting the attack so soon. She grinned, showing her cute little bat teeth, expecting the wolves to come out underneath the Martians and massacre them...but then she cursed.
We can't get into the city!
One of the wolves, Heinrich, said, his voice full of alarm.
There is something in the way!
They paved the ground with that black metal of theirs -- keep going, see if you can't get out on the beach, they haven't paved that. Don't go too far, though! If you come out into the ocean...
The tripods started to stand, each Martian having reached his war machine, while indoctrinated humans rushed for the smaller ones. Meanwhile, the heat rays at the walls had been taken out by the riflemen, and the infantry were beginning to advance, jogging towards the wall now that they weren't going to immediately be destroyed. They entered into the fog, grim and determined -- there was no gay war cry, no eagerness, just men who knew the risks doing what needed to be done. Interspersed among them were vampires who had been turned more recently than others -- German and Frenchmen and Spaniards, who had been in the artillery before they had been turned.
Mina beat her wings to keep herself above the battlefield as the tripods began to advance. The smoke was starting to clear -- she thought:
There are ten tripods emerging. Take this image...
she focused and
threw
the mental image that she was getting into the eyes of the vampire with the french quick firing guns.
The most agonizing moment came here.
There was nothing more that she could do than hope that the rest of her army knew what it was doing.
***
One of the artillerymen was Antoni. The young vampire had never served French guns before, but with the quick learning of a vampire, he had picked it up in a lighting hurry. His piece was near the front of the rows of hastily thrown up weapons -- they were essentially arrayed on a field, with no cover or earthworks. Any counterbattery fire would simply need to blow through their splinter shields and they'd be turned into so many chunks of meat. Despite the haste of their preparations, they had managed to take at least
some
precautions -- the ammunition had been hastily and partially buried by a vampiric wolf, creating a berm of dirt between it and the city, so that anything but a prolonged heat ray strike wouldn't simply immediately set off their powder.
Antoni tried to not think of that as the vampire who was serving as the conduit between the artillery and Mina pointed at the wall. "There's two coming there!"
The roiling smoke that still made the air between the wall and the artillery a hazy, indistinct mass, did as much to ruin Antoni's view of things as it did to all the other humans. Vampires were better at picking out subtle movement in chaotic environments, but even that had its limits. He narrowed his eyes, while his loader and shell jerker both looked at him nervously.
Uuuuuuuuuuuulaaaaa.
His ears perked.
The eerie siren call of a Martian tripod -- something like to a war cry, he thought -- rang out over the field, louder than the crackle of gunfire and the stamping of feet.
He sighted over open sights.
And for a single moment, his entire body roared with an intense awareness that
