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Worlds at War

"So, let me see if I understand you correctly," Mycroft Holmes said, as he spoke to the League in the underground room. "You made contact with the Martians. They shot at you. Then you killed it, after its guns were destroyed by you. Then a second one tried to attack you, and was killed by Mrs Harker. Correct?"

"Pretty much, yeah," Sawyer replied. He hadn't mentioned the fact that he hadn't destroyed the second gun; he'd prefer to cover that factor once they had time for explanations.

"Well, this is not good," Mycroft sighed, as he sat back in his seat. "Now that we've killed two Martians, they may be less willing to open up negotiations with us than before, not that they were probably eager to in the first place."

"Yeah," Skinner pointed out. "I mean, did it ever occur to anyone that maybe they came to Earth in order to make it theirs?"

Everyone looked over at Skinner, a look of growing horror on their faces.

"What?" Skinner asked, sounding a little less confident than he had before. "Did I do something wrong?"

"No," Mina said, speaking for them all. "But you may have thought of something there..." She looked over at Mycroft. "Is there a book on the solar system here somewhere?"

"Yes, just over there, I think," Mycroft said, indicating a nearby shelf. Quickly, Mina got out of her seat and headed over to the shelf, followed by Sawyer and Jekyll, with the rest of the League craning to see the book over the other's shoulders.

Mina flicked through the book for a few minutes, and eventually stopped on one page. She looked over at Sawyer. "We may have a problem."

"Scratch the 'may', Mina," Sawyer replied, as he took the book from her and began to read the page she'd been looking at. "If this is accurate, everything that's happened to us so far takes on a far more chilling aspect than it had already."

"What?" Skinner yelled from the back of the League. "What what what what what?" Sawyer looked back at the rest. "According to this book, Mars is far older than the Earth, and, if there is life on it, it's been developing since the Earth was still just a mass of molten rock."

"So?" Skinner asked.

"Be sensible, Skinner," Nemo said, sighing at the invisible man. "If Mars is older than Earth, than logically it is nearer the end of its life than Earth is. Therefore, the Martians will want to survive the destruction of their world. Therefore, they will logically attempt to take over the nearest planet they can reach so that they have a home they can go to after its death."

"And the nearest inhabitable planet is this one," Logan said, looking at the rest as that fact sunk in. They were dealing with an entire species that had nothing to lose and everything to gain by fighting them, in a number that was totally unknown, and they also had incredibly advanced technology.

The League were in trouble now.

Still, when had they ever been out of it in their new career together?

"Shall we get going now?" Hartdegen asked, looking around at his friends. "After all, no time like the present."

"You'd know, I suppose," Frank put in bluntly, as they began to walk up the stairs, leaving Mycroft behind them.

Hartdegen smiled a little at that comment. He did, didn't he?

*****

As they began to drive back to the field where they'd left Terry, Nemo took the wheel to allow Sawyer the chance to talk with the others.

"So, anyone got any ideas about where we begin to fight the Martians?" he asked, deciding to get the obvious issues out of the way first.

"Maybe we could examine the ship," Jekyll said. "After all, it must contain some clues about the Martians strengths and weaknesses."

Mina sighed. "A sensible suggestion, Doctor, but with two flaws. Firstly, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to understand their technology. Secondly, it would surely be more practical to study the body of the Martian that we have already killed and study it to find a weakness that is possessed by the species itself.

*****

You really should learn to look at everything, Henry, Hyde said in his head.

Shut up, Edward, Jekyll thought. You may say I make mistakes, but I notice that you didn't make any conclusions of your own.

Hyde shut up at that. Realising that his little... talk... with Hyde had made him miss part of the conversation, he tried to see if he could catch up.

Frank was currently saying, "Even if we got the body, who's to say we could find a weakness? After all, nobody's been able to pin down exactly what's different about Logan, so maybe we won't be able to pin down a weakness for them."

"It cannot hurt to try," Nemo put in from the driver's seat. "If it fails, we will have lost nothing, but if we succeed, we may have gained something that will make all the difference between winning and loosing."

"Plus," Hartdegen added, his face lighting up as inspiration struck him, "Even if we can't find anything, there's no reason why technology in the future won't be able to."

"Excellent!" Sawyer smiled, patting the time traveller on the shoulder in a congratulating manner. "You know, it's that kind of thinking that shows what you contribute to the League beyond your machine."

*****

After several short lines of basically inane chatter, consisting of things like whether Skinner's attempts to cure his invisibility were making any progress, the League finally pulled into the field where they had left Terry. However...

"Oh my god..." Sawyer said, as he got out of the car and stared at the scene of carnage in front of him.

It was terrible. Something had apparently charged in through one of the fences, firing what looked like another heat ray at the field, turning everything in its path to a crisp. The Martian ship had been burnt beyond repair, the two Martian bodies had apparently been reduced to a pile of ashes, and as for Terry...

Well, it appeared he had been lucky. He was lying off to the side of the main hole, clutching his gun in his hand. The coat of Skinner's that he'd claimed for himself was badly burnt down at the bottom, now reduced to about half of its original length, and his other clothes were smouldering slightly at the back. However, he himself appeared relatively unharmed, apart from some of the hair on the back of his head having been burnt away.

As the League got out of the car, he raised his head and looked back at them. Things didn't look too bad there either; his pince-nez were cracked, but his skin and eyes were unharmed.

He nodded at them.

"You're back," he said simply. Then he got up off the ground and dusted himself down. His clothes had some small red markings on them that may have been blood, but it was hard to tell from this distance. Besides, he wasn't even sure if Terry had blood- at least, blood like humans had.

"W-what happened to you?" Jekyll asked, shaken at his friend's condition; it took a lot to hurt Terry, and no human could have done that.

"Another Martian ship," Terry replied simply, as the rest of the League joined Jekyll in examining his wounds. "This one was different; it was on long legs and was capable of independent motion. It managed to fire off several heat bursts at me, vaporising the Martian corpse and the broken ship, and almost destroyed me. I only just managed to retreat to safety and avoid being vaporised."

*****

The League looked at each other in terror with that statement. Mobile Martian ships? The Fantom's tanks had been deadly enough, based on what they'd read in the files; the last thing they needed was this!

"We have a problem," Frank whispered to nobody in particular, after an ominous silence had descended on the League, covering them with its bleak embrace for some minutes.

"That is an understatement, Frank," Sawyer commented, as he looked down at the ground.

Logan groaned and glanced around at the others. "Any ideas, guys?"

"Well, Hyde's in favour of all of us chasing that ship and seeing how much damage it can do to us, but that's just him," Jekyll put, sounding like he was having one of his better days where Hyde was concerned; at least he wasn't trembling and stuttering.

The League looked over at each other. Sawyer noticed that at least he wasn't the only one who was giving that idea some thought; Nemo and Hartdegen were looking very thoughtful, as though the Martians were a scientific equation that they needed to crack, Frank and Logan looked like they were looking forward to a fight, and Mina... well, on the surface she looked very calm, but Sawyer knew that she was already going over what they knew of the Martians and what they needed to know.

Terry and Skinner were basic enigmas; after all, Terry had no real body language and Skinner's was difficult to read even with his coat.

"Shall we?" he asked, cocking his Winchester.

Mina looked at him and smiled. "Why not?" She glanced back at Terry. "Should the ship still be within range of us?"

"Based on the length of its stride and the immediate terrain, there is no reason why, at top speed, we should not be able to catch up with it in the car," Terry replied.

"Let's roll," Sawyer replied. He glanced over at Jekyll. "Keep your serum available." He turned his head to face Skinner. "Get ready for action."

He never liked telling Skinner directly to get undressed; he thought it sounded sick.

"Check!" Skinner replied, as he shrugged off his coat and stuffed his hat in his pocket. From where he was standing, footprints then appeared between him and the car, before a door opened and his distinctive voice was heard.

"All aboard!" he said, sounding like he was grinning.

*****

The League looked at each other and shrugged. Quickly they are jumped into the car, Sawyer taking the wheel. He quickly pushed the pedals down and tore forward, bursting through the fragile strands of the fence that were left after the Martians had torn through it.

Even as he hit the button that retracted the roof of the car and felt the cool wind blowing on his face, however, his mind was unable to get away from two rather frustrating topics.

One was the mission. If they beat the Martians in this fight, or at least fought them to a stalemate, they would have a better idea of what their capabilities were in combat. The alternative was far more horrifying; if they fell, then the whole world would be in danger.

The other was a far more puzzling thing.

Who had destroyed the Martian's second weapon?