Mars Evacuees

13

I went very slowly for what the Flying Fox was capable of – which is to say, about four hundred miles an hour. I screamed only occasionally, even though there was a ferocious wet wind coming the other way, scouring over the Gulf of Chryse. The Goldfish helped me, and Carl tried to help me too. At least, that’s what he said he was doing, but in practice it was more that the Goldfish would suggest I do something and I would try to do it and Carl would say, ‘No, no, not like that,’ and, ‘are you sure you don’t want me to take over?’

Then Josephine sighed, leaned across and quietly did something to him I couldn’t see on account of not daring to take my eyes off the viewport, and Carl yelped, ‘OW,’ and, ‘What did you do that for, I’m only trying to help,’ and though he was not actually quiet after that, at least he wasn’t bothering me and I was able to tune him out.

But I was not going to keep this up for very long in the dark. It was about two in the morning or something equally awful by now. We were on our way, and far beyond Leon and Christa and Lilly and Gavin and that was the main thing.

‘We’ve got to stop and rest. I need something nice and flat to land on, Goldfish,’ I warned, trying not to sound panicky about it. We were flying over something nice and flat at the time, but it was the sea.

‘That’s OK, Alice, just bear south-south west, forty k,’ it said soothingly. It was interfacing with the Flying Fox’s computer, which was handy.

I skimmed over the dark coast, activated the lifters and lumbered down on them before dropping the Flying Fox rather awkwardly on to something. It bounced around a bit before it stopped completely and we all yelled, except for the Goldfish, and Noel, who slept right through it.

Silence settled in around us.

‘Are we there yet?’ asked Noel, waking up.

I thought we would have to sleep wherever we could cram ourselves on the floor, but it turned out the Flying Fox was better equipped than that. You pressed a button and the hatch to outside popped open, and an egg-shaped pod with smooth, firm walls of glossy fabric ballooned itself out of a cavity in the wall, little legs unfolding to the ground to support it. Or rather, the Goldfish pressed the button with its nose; we’d never have found it otherwise. I thought the Goldfish looked even smugger than usual after that, which should have been impossible as its expression couldn’t really change and it always looked smug. The Goldfish called its discovery a Sleep Capsule and I called it an unusually impressive tent, but either way all we had to do was fasten some toggles and get the sleeping bags out of compartments under the seats – and the Goldfish had to tell us where they were, too.

We had Smeat bars and dried apricots for supper, and then we flopped into the tent. Carl dragged his sleeping bag over to the far wall and, with a dramatic huff, lay down as far from Josephine as possible.

‘What did you do to him earlier?’ I whispered to her when the Goldfish had turned out the lights and settled into standby mode for the night.

‘Nerve clusters,’ she replied darkly, and instantly went to sleep, leaving me wondering rather anxiously just why she knew about those.

But in the end I went to sleep too, without really having much of a clue where we were, besides hundreds of miles from the nearest human being.

When I woke up, I was alone in the tent, though I could hear Josephine’s harmonica nearby so I knew nothing too awful had happened.

Someone had opened a slit in the rear wall of the tent. I poked my head out of it.

Hundreds of perfectly round little lakes and ponds were scattered across the red plain, shining in the sunlight as though someone had dropped handfuls and handfuls of silver coins. And bright green moss was growing on the rocks.

The Goldfish was resting on a hump of moss in the sunshine. Noel was lying on his front, letting a beetle run across his ungloved fingers and talking to it softly. Josephine was perched on the wing of the Flying Fox, swinging her legs and playing the harmonica.

‘We thought we should let you sleep, seeing as you got so bashed up last night,’ Noel told me, as I lowered myself down to the ground.

‘Are you feeling better, Alice?’ the Goldfish asked.

In one way I was feeling worse, because all the places I’d been hit had got more achy in the night, but the sun and the solar mirrors were bright in the lilac sky, and the light was sparkling on the water, and I’d successfully avoided crashing the spaceship into anything the night before, and we could now be completely confident of being left alone by Gavin and Lilly and co., so I felt pretty good about life. ‘Yes, thanks,’ I said. Josephine tossed me a pack of crackers and dried fruit and I started my breakfast.

Carl walked up from behind the Flying Fox. ‘Where are we, Goldfish?’

The Goldfish was very happy to be asked. ‘This is the Acidalian Plain, Carl,’ it began.

‘The Acidalia Planitia,’ grumbled Josephine, who preferred the old Latin names.

‘And look, you see those ponds and lakes?’ the Goldfish went on. ‘Those are all craters left by meteor strikes, filled with water now because of terraforming! We’re still north of the Martian dichotomy line, which is why the ground was nice and smooth for Alice to land on. If we keep heading south, things are going to get a whole lot more bumpy.’

I started worrying about that, but Carl had other concerns. ‘Has anyone ever been here before us?’

The Goldfish tilted to one side. ‘Well, I don’t have articles about every exploratory trip before terraforming… but no, Carl, probably not.’

I might have had a nice little moment of awe about us being the first people ever to be there, but before I could really get it going, Carl flung his arms wide in triumph. ‘THEN I AM THE FIRST PERSON TO DO A WEE ON THE ACIDALIA PLANITIA,’ he announced to the universe.

Josephine dropped her harmonica to utter a scoff of disgust, which only made Carl even more pleased with himself.

The Goldfish, however, seemed to take this as a prompt to start being even more teacherly and motivational. ‘Right, gang,’ it said, ‘anyone else need to go? No? All got your teeth clean? Good. Then…’ It did a joyous swirl in the air. ‘Iiiiiiit’s History Time!’

‘Oh, not this again,’ I said.

‘Goldfish, if you can’t understand why it isn’t History Time, then you’d better go home,’ said Josephine, jumping down from the wing of the Flying Fox. ‘Our priority is survival. We can’t keep having this conversation.’

‘There’s always time for the fall of the Roman Empire,’ said the Goldfish, its cheerful tone somehow stiffening.

‘Look, none of that teacher stuff applies any more,’ said Carl. ‘We’re not doing lessons. You can’t make us.’

The Goldfish hung motionless for a moment, the light inside it quietly throbbing. ‘Can’t I?’

Then its eyes flashed red and we all jumped as something whipped through the air around the Goldfish and stung us like an electric shock.

‘Ow!’ we cried in unison, and then stood there staring at the Goldfish and at each other, and couldn’t believe that had actually happened.

‘Was that corporal punishment?!’ Josephine asked, incredulous.

‘That’s against the law!’ cried Carl.

‘Would you like to make a complaint?’ enquired the Goldfish sunnily.

‘Yes!’ I said.

‘Your complaint has been logged! Your feedback is important! NOW,’ roared the Goldfish, in a blaring robotic voice, stripped of all perkiness and about two octaves lower than normal, ‘YOU WILL DO YOUR HISTORY COURSEWORK.’

All we could really do was make outraged noises as we sat down on the ground and got out our tablets, or rather Josephine and Noel got out theirs because the kids back at Beagle had stolen Carl’s and mine.

‘I never said I didn’t want to do lessons,’ said Noel piously. ‘You didn’t need to zap me.’

I wondered if the Goldfish was planning to do a full seven-hour school day right there on the Acidalia Planitia, or if it would just carry on teaching forever, zapping us whenever we tried to escape until we all died of hunger or radiation. But after an hour, when Josephine groaned, ‘We’ve got to get moving, Goldfish,’ the Goldfish agreed brightly, ‘OK, time to go!’ and floated off into the Flying Fox, content.

An hour of schoolwork a day, then, I thought. It wasn’t an unreasonable price to keep it happy.

So we started packing up, and I looked into the food situation. There was still quite a lot left.

‘I guess we should be at Zond by this evening,’ Noel said.

‘We should save some of this stuff anyway,’ said Carl. ‘In case anything goes wrong.’

And it was just as well we did.

‘I wish there could be toast,’ I said.

‘I wish there could be champorado,’ said Carl.

I glanced at him. ‘Hmm?’

‘It’s this kind of chocolate rice porridge; you have it for breakfast with dried fish.’

‘Oh. That sounds nice!’ I said, trying to make a face like I meant it.

‘Yeah, I know, you think it sounds disgusting,’ said Carl tolerantly. ‘All white people do, and you’re all wrong. We really only have it now when Auntie Marikit comes round. Well, we did have it then, I guess.’ He stirred around in the stock of Smeat bars and dried apricots, but there was nothing in there like Auntie Marikit’s champorado, and he sighed.

‘I miss popcorn,’ said Noel.

‘You’re kidding,’ Carl said. ‘Mars wouldn’t be far enough to get away from that stuff.’

‘I miss the smell,’ said Noel, a faint quaver in the back of his voice, and Carl’s expression tightened before he forced a grin and scrubbed his hand annoyingly over Noel’s hair.

‘Your parents work in a cinema?’ Josephine deduced.

‘They run the cinema,’ said Noel proudly.

‘Yeah, I’ve been sweeping popcorn off carpets since I was six, we all practically bleed the stuff now,’ said Carl. ‘Guess you can take the boy out of the cinema, but you can’t take the cinema out of the boy.’ He jostled Noel’s shoulder, then obviously remembered he was talking to Stephanie Dare’s daughter. He looked a little defensive. ‘Mum’s in the reserves too. And Dad’s a shockray warden. And Dad used to be in the regulars. But he got hit over the South Shetlands and it messed up his nervous system.’

I grimaced sympathetically.

‘It’s not that bad. He just shakes sometimes, can’t always hold stuff, that’s all. I’ll get the Morrors back for him, when I have the chance.’

He cleared his throat and frowned into space and we all went back to focusing firmly on packing up our supplies. We hadn’t got anything left to drink, though there were water-purifying tablets and a filtration kit (which was slightly disappointing to Noel, who had been looking forward to boiling drinking water over a fire, even though it’s really hard to get water hot in an atmosphere as thin as that).

We walked down with our empty bottles to the nearest lake. It was all so beautiful with the glitter on the water getting into the air and everything so new and untouched and quiet.

‘Has this got a name?’ wondered Carl, filling the bottle up.

‘Jerome Lake,’ said Josephine instantaneously.

Carl frowned, and brooded on this for a moment. ‘Fine,’ he said, and took a swooping leap to land boot-deep in the next pool. He called back, ‘But this is Dalisay Waterhole.’

‘And this one’s Dare’s Pond!’ I said.

And then we were all boinging about and leaping from pool to lake and racing each other to name things. This game wasn’t as much fun for Noel because of course he and Carl had the same surname, and he couldn’t keep up with the rest of us that well, but then he got distracted by some shrimpy things he found in a puddle anyway.

After claiming Jerome Lake, Josephine seemed to be making much slower progress than Carl and me, but the two of us mostly lost track of which ponds were supposed to be ours pretty quickly, and then it turned out that Josephine had been using the pens she’d stolen from the stationery cupboard to write her name on handy rocks before putting them back to mark the spot, as well as logging names, coordinates and pictures into her tablet for posterity.

Carl looked down at the slogan ‘Loch Lena’ neatly printed on to the broad red rock at Josephine’s feet, and then gave her an aggrieved stare. ‘Lend us a pen, then,’ he said.

‘No,’ replied Josephine serenely.

‘Please,’ said Carl, making his eyes very big and sad.

Josephine tapped a pen thoughtfully against her teeth. ‘All right. But on the understanding that this whole area –’ she waved her arm, ‘– is called the Jeromiana Waterlands. Except for whatever bit you peed on. I don’t want that.’

So we took the pens and kept on boinging around until we’d given everything in sight names that got fancier and fancier, and then Carl wondered if the gravity was low enough to let you run across the water like a skimming stone, if you were fast enough.

‘It won’t work,’ said Josephine, and started to talk about gravity and velocity and stuff but then Carl splashed her so she pretty much had to retaliate. And we almost forgot about Morrors and missing grown-ups and everything but being free.

This was all pretty absorbing so it was a while before us older ones noticed that Noel wasn’t playing any more. Instead he was waving and pointing at something in the sky and asking, ‘What’s that?’

(OK, possibly we had noticed but weren’t paying much attention because he was the little one.)

‘All right, what’s what?’ said Josephine finally.

‘There,’ said Noel, and we looked up. I couldn’t see anything at first, just the mirrors tilting lazily on their slow drift past. Then I made out a streak of motion almost straight above us: five little dark specks falling out of the thin pastel sky.

No, not falling, flying – sweeping in at a steep angle towards the ground.

Spaceships? Maybe the adults had finally remembered about us?

Then, I saw the colour of the things – a dull grey-green like the uniforms at Muckling Abbot – and my eyes worked out the perspective and I realised they were both a lot smaller and a lot closer than I’d thought and I took a step back on instinct. Foot-long, conical things – just a bit, I thought, like airborne marrows on the warpath. But then they were closer still and you could see the spinning segments and hear the dull grinding noise as they bored through the air.

One of them plunged into Crystal Mirror (mine) and one into the Cauldron of Doom (Carl’s) and the splash sent up great white pillars of water into the air, descending in Martian slow motion. The other worm-things went straight into the ground – drilling into the rock as soon as they hit it as if it was as soft as sawdust. The Jeromiana Waterlands shook and we grabbed at each other so as not to fall over, but before we had much time to work out how to react to any of this, three crooked furrows spread out from the three holes where the things had landed, as if something was ploughing up the ground from underneath, and a buzzing sound was getting louder.

The worm-things broke the surface, devouring everything in front of them, everything disintegrating under blunt, impossibly hard, impossibly revolving teeth.

‘Those are my animals,’ said Noel, with a faint air of triumph.

We watched Noel’s Animals chewing up soil and plants and rock. A cloud of colourless dust rose behind them and floated away on the breeze.

‘I don’t like them,’ I said.

‘They’re interesting,’ insisted Noel loyally.

The two animals that had landed in the water were not, apparently, any the worse for getting wet. They buzzed their way to land and began feasting on everything they found there. They were, I suppose, too hungry to be picky.

‘No,’ conceded Noel, tilting his head to one side. ‘I don’t like them either.’

‘Uh,’ said Carl, in a slightly strangled voice, pointing upwards. More specks were descending from the sky.

We had all drawn closer together. ‘Well, we could be taking some fascinating pictures about now,’ remarked Josephine, ‘or we could be running away.’

The nearest worm-thing reared up, and I could see a ring of tiny black eyes, motionless behind the whirring teeth. It was looking at us.

‘I vote run,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ agreed Josephine, ‘I think run.’

‘Why is this something we are talking about?!’ demanded Carl, grabbing Noel’s hand, just as Noel’s Animals decided that we were probably better to eat than rocks and stones, sprang into the air and flew straight at us.

And so we ran. And thank God we were on Mars where running was easy, and thank God we’d all had such a lot of physical training. On the other hand, if only we hadn’t already been jumping about using up oxygen and energy so recklessly.

And if only we’d packed the tent back into the spaceship. It was still standing on its struts, bulging out of the side of the ship.

I didn’t look back, though the buzzing seemed to be practically in my hair now and my own breathing and my heartbeat were almost as loud. I bounded up and through the slit in the tent and Carl threw Noel up after me and I dragged him inside, and then Josephine and Carl climbed in too, neither of them yet missing any pieces but with Noel’s Animals right there behind them. We charged into the ship and Josephine and I started fiddling with the buttons to fold the tent back in, but at this point one of Noel’s Animals drilled through the wall of the Flying Fox, and buzzed and bounced around inside like a very large flesh-eating wasp and so we got more preoccupied with screaming and looking for things to hit it with.

‘Hey, what’s going on, guys?’ asked the Goldfish pleasantly, as the Animal bounced off the opposite wall, chewing a chunk out of it as it went.

‘KILL IT, KILL IT, DO THE ZAPPY THING,’ I howled, ducking as the Animal flew at my face.

Carl hurled himself into the pilot’s seat, grabbed the controls and very rapidly got us out of there, which was great, except we were now lurching around in a small spaceship in the sky above Mars with:

a) the door still open

b) a big bulgy tent hanging out of one side

c) a horrifying flying monster-thing inside and trying to eat us

d) the rest of the horrifying flying monsters still coming after us.

The Goldfish gamely started trying to zap the Animal but it isn’t easy shooting a moving target, in a confined space that is also moving, with a number of children you’re programmed to protect right there. The air filled with the smell of scorched metal and the Animal remained perfectly healthy. It lunged at Josephine and ate a hank of her hair as she dodged out of its way.

‘Get the tent in – I can’t steady her,’ yelled Carl, unaware that this wasn’t as much of a problem as the Animal on a beeline for his head. Josephine grabbed her bag and swung it by the strap and batted the creature away from him, and I was never going to complain about anyone carrying a bag full of rocks with them anywhere again. The Goldfish took another shot but the Animal was too fast for it. Then just to make everything even better, the ship swung over sideways so the wall became the floor, and Noel fell through the door into the tent, which was of course still open to the air at the far end.

‘Noel!’ I bawled, hurling myself towards it. Noel was still there, thank God, clinging to one of the dangling struts.

‘Noel? What’s happening?’ asked Carl anxiously, dragging the Flying Fox through a terrifying swerve that I was almost sure was going to shake Noel off but somehow didn’t. I heard the ship’s guns go off so I supposed Carl was firing at one of the Animals outside the ship.

‘Nothing! Everything’s fine!’ I said in a ridiculously cheerful way, feeling that giving the pilot anything more to worry about wouldn’t be productive.

‘Uh, help, please?’ said Noel, sounding vaguely embarrassed as the tent bounced and thrashed in the whirling air.

I really couldn’t get near him. Fortunately we had somebody there who could fly.

‘Get him, Goldfish!’ I yelled, and the Goldfish stopped trying to shoot the Animal and dived into the tent.

Which left me and Josephine to tackle the Animal on our own.

Josephine swung her bag again and this time it exploded against those whirring teeth in a shower of interesting stones and highlighter pens.

I swung a bottle of water (it was at least moderately heavy), and Josephine hurled one of her stones with excellent aim for someone who was so terrible at Flight and Combat Training. The Animal actually dropped to the ground for a second before bouncing back up at us again, and so for a while it was just a matter of us both yelling, ‘AAAAARGH!’ and throwing anything that wasn’t tied down. Most of what we threw got eaten, which at least slowed the Animal down. Then it came at me again, and as I threw myself out of the way I knocked into the food crate, which I grabbed, and emptied everything out. And then I threw the crate over the Animal and jumped on top of it.

This happened so fast that even before I’d finished doing it, I was thinking, ‘I’m not sure I thought that through,’ because the crate was made of plastic and the thing could chew through rock. Still, I guess suddenly being in a small space, especially after having been bashed on the head with a number of stones, must have slightly confused the Animal, because it knocked about like a wasp in an upside-down glass for longer than I expected before it remembered its own killer spinning teeth. I had no idea what to do next when it bored through the side of the crate, but Josephine stepped on its back and pinned it to the floor, those awful teeth gnawing the air as it twisted and struggled and tried to get its maw to her feet. Then the Goldfish hovered back into the ship with Noel wrapped around it like a baby monkey, and I grabbed its nose and aimed it at the appalling thing under Josephine’s feet, and shouted ‘FIRE!’ and the Goldfish did exactly that.

The Animal twitched mightily and went still.

Josephine sat down abruptly on the floor. Someone, possibly me, must have finally got the tent inside but I don’t really remember much about that. The main thing was that Carl got proper control of the ship and we shot away at top speed with a flying worm from outer space lying dead in Josephine’s lap.