Mars Evacuees

10

Look at it this way. We were stuck on an alien planet with no parents or teachers. We could go out of our minds with terror, or we could just, well, go out of our minds.

Kayleigh’s birthday party lasted three days.

Obviously the first thing we wanted to do was stop those stupid alarms. Of course it ended up being Carl who was hanging from one hand up among the struts at the top of the dome, whacking at the speaker with a broken chair leg. Finally it went quiet and we all cheered, and Carl hooked his knees over the strut and swung upside down with his arms outstretched, whooping.

Then we celebrated. We raided the kitchen to find something nicer to eat than spinach, and though the best we could find was some vaguely chocolate-flavoured gludge and some under-ripe raspberries from the garden, it was certainly an improvement on the meal we’d been having when everything went down. Some of the older kids broke into the offices and labs to see if they could find any alcohol. They didn’t find any champagne, only a couple of bottles of beer in a fridge, so no one got more than a mouthful but it was the principle of the thing, I guess.

Josephine stood there in the middle of all this, looking like a computer program crashing, or like a person who does not have to do any flight and combat training for the immediate future, but who also does not like it when alarms go off and mobs of people run around shouting. That is to say she didn’t move or say anything much, until eventually when pressed she said, ‘Arrgh,’ and ran off again.

By this time the robots had stopped hooting or staring, and instead started following us around pitifully like unloved dogs, if unloved dogs were constantly trying to teach you algebra.

‘Aww, kids, equations can be fun,’ pleaded the Goldfish, bobbing unhappily in the air.

‘No, they can’t,’ said Carl firmly, but not unkindly. Then he charged ahead without having to worry too much about whether anyone was following. And pretty soon we’d herded all the teacher robots into classrooms or cupboards and barricaded them shut. There was just the Teddy still lying on the sports field and flashing its eyes and waggling its legs. It wasn’t particularly trying to teach us anything but looking at it got kind of depressing so we dragged it off to one side and threw gym mats over it.

But when things quietened down a bit I took a plate of the chocolate gludge and wandered around listening for the sound of a doleful harmonica until I found Josephine, in the rhubarb patch this time.

‘Here,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you come out and play that? We need some music.’

She looked dubious, but followed me over to the sports field where a hundred or so assorted kids were now sprawled in a daze of disbelief and accomplishment, and she never stopped playing, just gradually shifted the tone to something more cheerful. ‘Wooo, Josephine!’ yelled Kayleigh, lazily raising an arm, and a lot of kids who normally weren’t sure what to make of Josephine gave her a round of applause. Josephine didn’t look up but smiled cautiously around the harmonica, and some of the other musical kids joined in. There weren’t many musical instruments at Beagle, because you weren’t allowed to take very much with you on the spaceship. But I guess the President of the EDF ’s nephew was a special case, because he had a guitar that he went and got, and there was a girl who said she was a drummer in a band back on Earth and she started whacking plastic chairs because we didn’t have any drums. Kayleigh started dancing, and everyone joined in, and that was the nicest part of the adult-free phase on Beagle Base.

By the third day, a few things had got slightly on fire.

I woke up some time around noon in the stationery cupboard. Christa and her boyfriend Leon had taken over our dorm the night before, though we’d at least managed to rescue our duvets. It wasn’t so bad. It was a big cupboard and there is something to be said for having a ready supply of star-shaped stickers.

Getting to sleep for as long as you liked, provided you could find a quiet place to do it, was a novelty on Beagle Base, and I only woke up because Josephine was shaking me awake.

‘We’ve got to move,’ she said. ‘Gavin knows we’re in here.’

‘So what?’ I groaned, burrowing under the shelf with the highlighter pens and the Blu-Tack.

‘Because he and his friends are coming and it’s bad news,’ insisted Josephine, yanking at my arm, so I had to roll out and look up at her. Neither Colonel Cleaver nor Miss Clatworthy would have approved of her current appearance: she now had her red scarf tied round her forehead like a pirate, hair erupting out from underneath in a distinctly non-military way. She also had a grim expression and a bloody lip.

‘WHAT THE HELL,’ I said when I saw it, sitting up at once.

‘Gavin,’ said Josephine.

‘Wha–?’

‘Because he could,’ explained Josephine, in a maddeningly patient way, apparently finding me very dense. ‘And he doesn’t like you very much either.’

‘Right,’ I growled, not quite sure whether to concentrate on the first-aid kit that I was sure I’d seen somewhere, or on the dreadful things that ought to happen to Gavin. He might be fairly horrible, and had some horrible friends, and the same went for Christa and her lot, but it wasn’t as if we were completely defenceless and I didn’t see that we should let anyone push us around any more: getting kicked out of our room was quite enough of that. Carl would be on our side, and he was more or less the king of a sizeable faction of kids…

‘Civil war of some kind is inevitable, let’s not precipitate it, shall we?’ said Josephine, apparently reading my mind. She grabbed her bag from the floor and threw a handful of highlighter pens into it, just because they were there. ‘We need to talk about what we’re going to do.’

Regretfully, I let her lug me out of the cupboard.

‘Hang on a minute,’ I said.

Josephine didn’t, just dragged me down a passage of empty classrooms. Sure enough I could hear some unpleasant laughter approaching that sounded a lot like Gavin and Lilly’s gang.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked. Josephine hurried me through an unexpected outer door into the wind and dust of Mars, and I was glad that I was still dragging a duvet with me and threw it over my shoulders like an awkward cloak.

‘Up there,’ she said grimly, pointing across the scrubby ground at the communications tower, a great spindly cone of metal latticework blurred by the sandy wind. There was a drum-shaped cabin, presumably some kind of control or maintenance station, just below the final length of the antenna. And that was evidently where Josephine was headed, for in a few good running leaps she was over at the tower and climbing up hand over hand with a determination that would have made Colonel Cleaver proud.

I seemed to have got so much into the habit of running after her that I was soon following, even while I was saying: ‘I am not holing up with you in some bird’s nest on top of a pole.’

‘It’s only temporary,’ said Josephine. ‘I can’t get any of the comms working, but we can keep trying to get a message to Zond Station, and we’ll at least have the high ground while we work out what we’re doing. And no one else is going to kick us out! No one wants to stay there.’

Well, I could at least agree with her on that much.

‘Look,’ I pleaded, ‘if you don’t want to have a fight with Gavin, then all right, but can’t we just… not do whatever it is you’re doing? Why don’t we stick with Carl’s lot—’

‘Carl’s lot,’ snorted Josephine derisively.

‘Well, we’ll be all right with them until the Colonel or… or somebody comes back. We’re already in as much trouble as we possibly can be. We might as well enjoy what time we’ve got. They were going to go down to the sea today anyway; we’re going to try and build a raft.’

‘Alice!’ cried Josephine. ‘What if being in trouble is the least of our problems? What if no one is coming?’

We both stopped moving. She’d swung round and was staring down at me.

‘They wouldn’t just –’ I began.

‘Exactly! They wouldn’t just. They didn’t abandon us for fun. Don’t you think something’s happened to them? What if that thing happens to us?’

I looked down at the ground. I had been having nervous thoughts about just how long the food would last and whether the garden robots would keep on growing it; I just hadn’t wanted to concentrate on them. I mumbled, ‘I guess we ought to get a bit more organised.’

Josephine sighed so enormously she must have used up most of what little oxygen was in the air. ‘You’re not going to be able to organise Gavin and Lilly into being productive members of a self-sufficient little farming community.’

‘Oh, come on!’ I said. ‘The channels to Earth’ll open up again automatically in another couple of months; we’ve only got to hang on till then. What are you suggesting?’

‘Leaving and going for help, obviously,’ said Josephine witheringly.

‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but we’re on Mars,’ I said. ‘We can’t exactly pop round to the neighbours for a cup of sugar.’

‘That’s why we need to work out how to get into the hangar,’ said Josephine.

I forgot about saving oxygen and made a long alarming noise that was sort of laughing and groaning at the same time. ‘You want us to steal a spaceship,’ I translated.

‘Only a little one,’ said Josephine. ‘I haven’t worked out how to get past the locks yet, but we’ll think of something. Obviously you’ll have to do most of the piloting.’

I dropped my forehead against the cold metal of the tower. ‘Please tell me you’re not thinking I can fly you back to Earth.’

‘Well, probably not, but—’

‘Probably!’

‘I should think you’re easily good enough to get us to Zond Station, that’s only three thousand miles—’

‘Three thousand miles!’

‘Stop repeating everything. Zond’s a proper military base: we’ll tell them what’s happened – we’ll find out what’s gone wrong! They’ll either be able to sort it out or they can fly back to Earth before the channels open and at least whatever else happens we’ll be away from all of this.’ She waved a hand down at Beagle Base. Then she said more quietly, ‘And I want to know what happened to Dr Muldoon.’

‘This is insane, Josephine,’ I moaned.

‘There isn’t a risk-free option! Sitting around here hoping it all works out is the most dangerous thing we can do.’

‘Oh, you don’t know that,’ I shouted. ‘I think crashing a Flarehawk in the middle of the Terra Sabaea sounds pretty dangerous!’

‘Alice,’ said Josephine more quietly than before. ‘People are going to start killing each other.’

There was a long pause. The tower hummed in the wind.

‘Now come on,’ she urged me at last, and started to climb again.

After a moment I started climbing too – but the other way, down to the ground. She called my name, but she didn’t stop going her way, and I didn’t stop going mine.