Mars Evacuees

9

I know it sounds bad, but at first we didn’t actually notice.

We noticed when the Colonel went away, obviously – he wasn’t the sort of person who blends into the background and anyway, he told us he was going. In fact, he galloped through Beagle Base on his Beast yelling through the Goads that he was going on a short mission and would be back in a few days and everyone had better damn well remember they were EDF cadets and act as a credit to the force while he was gone.

Carl and I saw him soar away in his Flying Fox, off into the purple sky.

After that we had our flight and combat training with the Goldfish.

And that was just it. We were all so used to being looked after by the robots now. They got us up in the mornings (well, the walls started humming in a cheerful way at half past seven, and the Goldfish used to hover from room to room to encourage us) and they herded us into the mess room where more machines would dollop your food out on to trays, and they taught us our lessons, and broke up fights, and made sure everyone was more or less where they were supposed to be at night. There weren’t that many adults around to miss, and so when we didn’t see any we all just assumed they were off around the corner doing something else.

We did ask sometimes exactly when the Colonel was coming back and what he was doing, but the robots plainly didn’t know, so we stopped. In the meantime, it was quite nice having a break from being yelled at, even if it meant the Goldfish got to make us sing even more songs about teamwork and having a positive attitude.

I think I had a vague feeling of unease by the fourth day, but what with the war and being on another planet and there possibly being not one but several creepy flying worm-things out there in the Martian wilderness, that was fairly normal. Also we were getting closer and closer to the day the channels opened up, which meant another opportunity to maybe hear that my mum was dead, so that was another way I was distracted.

If only we’d realised a little bit earlier, it might not have been such a problem.

So, on this particular morning after lessons, we all got messages beamed to our tablets.

Mum’s email was very short, but it was there.

She was alive, anyway. Or had been two days ago. So that was good.

Dad’s was a bit longer.

Meanwhile, Josephine read her messages, stared blankly at the screen, and then ran off crying. I could only think of one reason for anyone to react like that and I got a horrible cold feeling in my chest where all the relief had been. So of course I went after her.

She was faster than me. And she wasn’t in the loos, though there was someone else crying in there, which was awful, but at least there was a girl and a boy sitting on the floor outside the cubicle making sympathetic noises through the door. I hurried out. I went into some of the classrooms in case she was under any of the desks. She wasn’t. Then I went out into the big green space at the centre of the garden dome. All the usual robots were skittering among the plants but the only people I could see were Christa Trommler and a large, muscular boy, playing a messy game of tennis on the sports field. Neither of them had had any bad news, clearly; they were laughing breathlessly as they lunged for the ball, as it hurtled back and forth, as it squeaked and tried to get away…

It wasn’t a ball, of course. It was a little hovering robot, and sometimes it would manage to catch itself in mid-volley and bounce in the air as if half stunned, uttering confused chirps, until one of them hit it again.

‘What are you staring at?’ demanded the boy.

I was staring. I’d stopped dead without quite noticing. I wasn’t sure the little robot was exactly alive – it probably wasn’t, surely? – but it looked and sounded so much as if it was in pain, and that was exactly what they seemed to be laughing at…

‘Leave it alone,’ I said, and my voice came out small and feeble.

But the large boy heard me all right. ‘You want to mind your business, or you want to come here and join the game?’ he said, and shifted his grip on the racquet in a way I didn’t like at all. Christa stopped to gaze at him, still panting, her eyes shiny with devotion.

Then the little robot made a desperate spring into the air and Christa pounced on it, giggling. ‘Leon, help! It’s getting away.’

The boy turned back to the game with one last meaningful swing of his racquet in my direction and I hurried into the gardens before they could take any more notice of me. I didn’t find Josephine but I did find the Teddy, which was clumping awfully down the path between the runner beans, singing, ‘OLD MACDONALD HAD A FARM,’ in an extremely menacing way.

‘HALLO ALICE,’ it said when it saw me.

‘Uh… hi,’ I replied, looking up at it. The Teddy was mostly blue, with a pattern of pink hearts on its tummy. Its face was fixed in a sinister grin. It freaked me out even more close up and I gained new respect for the seven-year-olds who hadn’t lost their minds completely since we’d arrived. ‘You haven’t seen Josephine Jerome, have you?’

‘YES. JOSEPHINE JEROME IS CRYING IN THE MARROW PATCH,’ said the Teddy. ‘I SANG HER A SONG. IT DIDN’T HELP.’

‘Right. No. I can see how that might have happened. I’ll have a go instead, then, shall I?’

The Teddy tried to come with me but I managed to get rid of it.

The marrows were genetically engineered to be enormous, and Josephine was very well hidden under their leaves, and she wasn’t answering when I called her name, but I still did find her after a while.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Go away,’ said Josephine. But I didn’t. After a while, Josephine sighed and wiped her nose. ‘No one’s died,’ she told me.

I sat down beside her in a tent of marrow leaves, wondering what else could be so awful. ‘Then what is it?’

Josephine sobbed a bit more and thrust the tablet at me. The email on the screen went like this:

And it went on like that.

‘…What?’

‘Oh,’ said Josephine wearily, taking the tablet back. ‘Sorry. I forgot. It’s a code Lena and I use.’

‘Right,’ I said, managing not to yelp why. ‘Lena’s your sister, then, is she?’

Josephine smiled crookedly at me. ‘Yes. She’s eighteen. She’s a bit… odd. But very clever. She mostly looked after me when I was little. She thought learning cryptography would help develop my brain. She also thinks it’s very important to always carry duct tape.’

I tried to imagine someone who was odd even by Josephine’s standards, but I didn’t say anything. Josephine rubbed her eyes and then read out the message as easily as if it had been in proper English:

I wasn’t absolutely sure I understood all of this even translated, but I already knew Josephine had hoped she’d be able to do science for the EDF rather than any actual Morror-fighting once she graduated in four years’ time. And according to Lena, that wasn’t going to work out.

‘You’ve seen what I’m like,’ she choked. ‘What do you think’s going to happen when I have to do it for real? It’s dangerous enough for people who are any good at it.’

‘It’s a long way off yet,’ I said. ‘And you could do fine if you tried.’

Josephine made a despairing snorting sound.

‘You could! I don’t think you’re used to trying. I think normally either you’re just good at things, or you don’t do them at all, right?’

Josephine looked rather angry for a second, but then sighed. ‘Maybe. I will try, I suppose. But I’ve already tried to try and I hate it so much. And it’s not just flying the ships and shooting and being so bad at it – it’s being in the army. I’ll lose my mind if I have to live like that.’

‘Maybe the war will be over by then, like you said,’ I said, as confidently as I could.

‘I always try to think it will,’ Josephine said, but her voice was all wobbly.

We sat there for a while. ‘Hey, I don’t think you translated everything,’ I said, eventually. ‘What’s that underlined bit?’

At the end of the message from Lena, it said: ‘CRXF PQID IYWL’

Josephine rolled her eyes and started to look a bit more like herself. ‘It says COMB YOUR HAIR.’

A little fanfare played over the PA system, which meant it was lunch, and we could hear the cheerful calls of robots herding children to the mess room. Josephine groaned but she got up and we emerged from under the marrow leaves.

As we made our way across the garden dome, I saw the broken remains of the little robot, smashed on the asphalt of the running track.

In the mess room, the walls were singing a happy song about vitamins.

I suppose you couldn’t say the trouble started that lunchtime, as the trouble had actually been going on for days, but this was when it started coming out. It was all because of what happened with the spinach.

‘Maybe Dr Muldoon would help,’ I said, when we’d found a couple of places together at one of the long tables. ‘Maybe she’d take you on as a sort of assistant, and then you could become indispensible, and then she’d do some sort of appeal so she could keep you, and then you wouldn’t have to go.’

‘I could let her do experiments on me,’ said Josephine, sounding faintly hopeful. Then she looked at me in a wondering way. ‘But you’ll still have to go. Don’t you ever mind about it at all?’

‘Well, of course. But I don’t hate it like you do, and I’m not bad at it…’ I shrugged. ‘And I never expected I might get to do anything else, so it’s different.’

‘Don’t you ever even think about what you could be, if you didn’t have to be in the army?’

‘No,’ I said firmly.

Then the trays of food started gliding down the conveyer belts on the tables, and everyone started groaning, just as Carl arrived suddenly and emphatically in the seat in front of us.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘This has gone too far.’

We both knew what he meant, even before we saw what was on the trays.

Spinach.

Now, back at Muckling Abbot, all the dinner ladies (except Mrs Skilton, who usually just snarled) were always going on about how there was a war on and we couldn’t be fussy, and you know, in principle, that’s fair enough. And it’s not that I hate spinach, because it can be all right. But lately some programme in the kitchen computers had got completely fixated on spinach and we’d been having little processed bricks of it, sort of half-dry and half-soggy, at every meal for days. And if you didn’t eat it, you only got more at the next meal and the robots sang even more songs about nutrition at you. And it wasn’t as if we didn’t have other vegetables growing in the garden.

‘I mean, does anyone seriously think the grown-ups are eating this?’ Carl said. ‘I don’t see any of them here, do you? Hey, are you OK?’ he asked Josephine, whose eyes were still rather red.

Josephine gave a non-committal growl.

‘Good. You’re in, then, right?’ said Carl and bounced up to stand on his chair and announced passionately: ‘They can’t make us eat this! Not over and over again. That’s not fair!’

‘Sit down, Carl, please,’ said the Goldfish pleasantly but firmly.

‘I want to talk to a person,’ said Carl. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘He’s right; the adults can’t really be putting up with this,’ I said. ‘Some of them had champagne.’

That caused a discontented grumble to ripple across the tables.

‘Please sit down, Carl,’ said the Goldfish and the Sunflower in mildly sinister unison, and then when Carl didn’t, the Goldfish and the Sunflower and the Star and the other floating robots sort of slowly closed in and hung there on each side of him, uncomfortably close, staring at him with their glowing plastic eyes.

I couldn’t imagine they were really going to hurt him, but it was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen the robots do, and for a moment everyone in the mess room went quiet. Carl might have sat down and done as he was told, I think, and if he had maybe everything would have gone differently, at least for a while.

But then Kayleigh jumped up and it all kicked off. ‘I want to talk to a person too!’ she said. ‘It was my birthday yesterday! And the computers still won’t let me watch Untying Paolo and you robots are still making me go to bed at ten, and I’m not fifteen, I’m sixteen, and if they’re going to send me off to fight Morrors next year I should at least get to watch whatever I like!’

All Kayleigh’s friends applauded and went, ‘Wooo!’ and jumped up as well. And Kayleigh had a lot of friends.

The Sunflower went whooshing over to stare creepily at Kayleigh – but that was a mistake, because it left a space between the other robots for Carl to slip through. And when they tried to close in around him again, Josephine reached up and yanked on the Goldfish’s tail and said grimly, ‘He’s asking to talk to a person, what’s wrong with that?’ And everyone started yelling, and there plainly weren’t enough robots to surround all of us. So instead, the robots all made a nasty high-pitched shrieking noise that I think was meant to subdue us, but it just made us more annoyed and feel more justified in making a lot of noise of our own. So Carl yelled, ‘Come on!’ and we all ran out of the mess room.

We carried on running.

The loudspeakers weren’t making jolly little fanfares any more; the robots must have signalled them and now they were whooping angrily. I think a few of the older teenagers decided the whole thing was beneath them, but otherwise it was all three hundred cadets of Beagle Base, the finest fighting force of seven-to-fifteen-year-olds in the solar system, on the rampage.

Carl stayed in the lead, though he’d managed to fish Noel out of the melee and was steering him along beside him. We went into the dorms, and then we tried to get into some of the labs but they all turned out to be locked.

Theoretically we were looking for A Person, but really we expected A Person to find us: I think we all assumed that someone – somebody scary and in charge and human – would appear and we would all be in very serious trouble. And the more we expected it and the more it didn’t happen the more worked up all of us got.

We spilled across the garden dome, bouncing along in swooping Martian leaps, and the Teddy appeared and lumbered after us, honking, as if catching one or two of us would do any good. The kids it reached out for darted easily out of the way, then surged back and knocked the Teddy over. It turned out the Teddy couldn’t get up again after that, and it lay there waggling its plastic legs like an upturned tortoise, and we all shrieked and laughed and bounced onwards.

Nothing happened. Nobody came.

We zipped up our uniform jackets and went outside. Some of us grabbed oxygen cylinders but not everyone bothered. The sky was dull and powdery, and there was a scouring pinkish wind sweeping between the hills. We could still hear the hooting of the alarms from inside but it sounded a lot further away than it really was.

We went round to the hangar where the spacecraft were kept. The huge doors were firmly shut but there was a row of thick windows, and the mass of kids spread along the nearest wall, peering inside.

A couple of Flying Foxes were still there, but…

‘The Flarehawks are gone,’ breathed Josephine.

All the fighter-craft were missing.

‘You know what?’ said Carl, turning to face all three hundred cadets, and his voice rang even there, out in the wind. ‘There isn’t anyone here. They’ve all gone and left us.’

There was a breathless pause, then a soft flurry of voices – no one really reacting yet, just repeating it, translating it, into Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish…

‘What are we going to do?’ whispered a girl.

For a second Carl looked wide-eyed and tight-lipped and just scared. But then he grinned.

He said: ‘Anything we want.’