Mars Evacuees

14

‘Space Locusts,’ said Noel. ‘We should call them Space Locusts.’

‘That’s a good name for them,’ agreed Josephine. ‘Ow,’ she added, pulling her hand away from me.

‘I’ve got to disinfect it,’ I said. ‘It might have… space germs.’

The spaceship had shaken and rattled its way through a few hundred miles of sky before Carl had to drop us on a flat-topped mountain above a maze of jagged rifts and canyons scribbled in an angry mess over the ground. I’d got the first-aid kit out and was doing my best to patch everyone up: we were all a bit bloody but the slice the Space Locust had taken out of Josephine seemed to be worst. And then there were the jaggedy tears it had made in our uniforms – special high-tech made-for-Mars fabric isn’t much good with holes in it. But duct tape turned out to be excellent for both problems.

Meanwhile Noel, under Josephine’s direction, had laid the worm on a rock and was trying to dissect it. He had taken pictures of its eyes (seven) and segments (five) but the knife Josephine had found in the ship’s survival kit couldn’t get through the hard shell to find out what its insides were like.

‘OK, I admit I see the point of taking duct tape into space now,’ I said, using a piece of it to stick some gauze to the back of Josephine’s hand.

‘I told you, that was Lena’s idea. And she’s almost always right,’ said Josephine, sounding mildly disgruntled about it. ‘Goldfish, can you very carefully shoot a seam through the creature’s exoskeleton?’

But the Goldfish couldn’t.

We heard something go clank inside the spaceship, and Carl swearing. He had pulled off a panel (it was almost falling off anyway) and was burrowing around in the engines, so I guess it was a good thing he’d got some getting-into-the-guts-of-spaceships experience back on the Mélisande after all.

Josephine gave up on cutting open the Space Locust with a sigh. ‘I wish I could see what was going on inside this thing. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter.’ She wrapped up the Space Locust in a towel and contented herself with patching the ruins of her bag together with duct tape and a staple gun, so that she had somewhere to put it. ‘Either the Morrors are breeding these things as weapons, or they aren’t, and this is a completely new problem. We’ve got to get it to the government.’

‘Yeah, that’s great,’ said Carl, dropping out of the bottom of the Flying Fox; ‘but I don’t know if we’re going anywhere in this thing.’

I’d actually been avoiding looking at the spaceship, and I think Noel and Josephine had been too. It was fairly easy to do when there were people shaking and bleeding and a dead Space Locust there to concentrate on. But it turns out when Space Locusts eat holes in your spaceship, the spaceship does not like it very much.

The Flying Fox was riddled with holes, and there were important-looking cables that had been chewed through sticking out of it all over the place, and it was giving off an unhappy singed smell.

Carl went in and poked some buttons on the dashboard, and the ship whirred miserably and its lights flickered for a second before going out again.

‘Carl, are we… stuck?’ asked Noel. And being a bright but not particularly optimistic kid, he put the rest of it together pretty fast. ‘Are we going to run out of oxygen and die?’

‘We’re fine, Noel,’ said Carl grimly. ‘We’re going to be fine.’

‘But what are we going to do?’ asked Noel.

‘Math!’ blurted the Goldfish, but then it shook itself and said, ‘I have some tutorials on spaceship repair.’

So the Goldfish projected plans and talked us through the things that needed to be welded together and the leaks that needed to be plugged. Our problems were twofold. Firstly, the people who made the tutorials had never really thought about being partially eaten by flying worms as a condition a spaceship might get into. Secondly, I soon got the idea that the main principle for learning spaceship repair is: don’t be crashed miles from anywhere on the surface of Mars when you need to do it.

Still, we stuck everything back together that we could and Josephine worked out how to re-route the power around the broken bits, I guess, and the lights came on. Then Carl jiggled the controls around for about a thousand years and eventually worked out that you now had to hold the control yoke at a special angle, and we finally got back into the sky. We all cheered and the Goldfish covered us in sparkles. There is a limit to how pleased you can honestly feel about having to go flying in a ship that now resembles a colander more than anything else, but you have to take what you can get.

But sure enough, about an hour later, smoke started wafting gently out of the panelling. And then we were heading for the ground at a few hundred miles an hour, out of control and on fire.

Valleys gouged between jagged red rock walls blurred underneath us at a nasty angle. Carl wrenched at the controls, which had stopped working altogether, and yelled, ‘Somebody hold it.’ I crawled underneath the yoke and tried to hold it solidly at the special position so he could actually steer.

We came within a second of flying straight into a cliff face. Somehow we hit the valley floor instead. Bounced with an awful noise of crunching metal. Skidded. Stopped.

We sat there for a while hyperventilating and not looking at each other. Then, when we didn’t really have an excuse for not doing it any more, we got out to look at the damage.

It was awful. There was a trail of blackened bits of Flying Fox strewn back along the valley and the ship was lying tilted over, propped on one fin, and even at a glance you could see three of its thrusters were crumpled like used crisp packets.

‘How far are we from Zond, Goldfish?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I make it one thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven miles, Alice,’ the Goldfish said.

There didn’t seem to be much to say about that. ‘We’d better get started,’ I said. And we got out our meagre collection of tools and began again.

The thing about trying to fix plasma compression engines with a staple gun, duct tape and highlighter pens is: you can’t.

We kept trying, though. For hours. Even when the light faded and our fingers went numb, and we got weak and dizzy from the low-oxygen air and had to keep topping our canisters up from the ship’s supply. At least that was still working.

‘How long will that last?’ I asked the Goldfish airily, as though the answer wasn’t particularly important.

‘Five days, three hours, forty-seven minutes. Give or take,’ the Goldfish replied.

I kept on trying to work out if the three chunks of twisted metal in my lap could be made to resemble an inertial compensator if I applied enough superglue.

‘Those things are still out there,’ muttered Noel.

We looked at the sky. There didn’t seem to be any Space Locusts in it, but we’d seen how fast they could move.

There didn’t seem to be much to say about that either.

Eventually Carl said in a weird, forced, cheerful voice that didn’t sound like him at all: ‘Guess there’s nothing more we can do tonight! Let’s get some rest while we can. We’ll get straight back to it, come first light.’

There was a big hole in the tent and none of us had the heart to try and get it set up anyway, so we just packed together for warmth into an unhappy pile of people at the bottom of the spaceship and tried to sleep.

I dreamed Mum flew down into the valley in her Flarehawk and said she’d been looking for us for ages. It seemed so real that though I woke up a lot of times during the night, I found that I could shut my eyes and go on dreaming that we were on our way back to Earth and then landing on a sunny base somewhere in Africa, and Josephine was showing some military scientists the Space Locust, and Dad was there and we were drinking tea while I told them about everything that had happened…

(I didn’t go as far as dreaming the war was over and everything was completely fine. I guess that would have seemed too unrealistic and I’d have woken up.)

But eventually I did have to wake up properly, because something was making a pounding noise, sharp and ringing like someone hammering metal, annoyingly close.

‘Whassat,’ I groaned into a grubby fold of Space-Locust-chewed sleeping bag.

‘That’s Carl,’ said Josephine dully. I sat up and looked at her. She was sitting in the pilot’s seat, motionless. She somehow looked as if she’d been there a long time and I wondered if she’d slept at all. ‘He’s been doing it for hours.’

I went outside to look. It was barely light. The two little moons were still pale in the sky, and the valley was striped with weird shadows from the columns of twisted rock that stood along its walls. Carl was kneeling on the ground, using a flat rock as an anvil and trying to bang some part of the engine back into shape with a stone.

‘Are any of you going to help, or what?’ he exploded as soon as he realised I was watching.

Josephine appeared at my side, soundless as a ghost. ‘It’s hopeless, Carl,’ she said softly.

Carl let out a strangled yell and hurled the bit of engine at the rock wall with all his strength so it bounced off with a noise like SPANG and the echoes clattered around the valley. Carl swiped one hand across his eyes. Then he turned round and said so brightly he sounded almost like the Goldfish, ‘OK! So we’re going to have to get rescued.’

Josephine put her oxygen mask on and quietly wandered away along the valley. I don’t think Carl paid much attention. It wasn’t Josephine he was talking to. He was talking to Noel, even though he couldn’t quite look at him; Noel, who was sitting on the edge of the Flying Fox’s wing, very still and huge-eyed and quiet. Carl went and pushed him off and wrestled with him a bit in a pointedly brotherly way. ‘Kind of embarrassing. We’re never going to hear the end of it when we get home.’ His voice was even louder than usual. ‘What we need to do is work out how to get attention. There’s probably a mirror somewhere in the ship we can use, to flash in Morse code or something.’

‘Goldfish, can you send out a signal that we’re here and we need help?’ asked Noel.

‘Already doing it, Noel,’ said the Goldfish. Carl looked briefly deflated.

‘So there’s nothing to do but wait,’ whispered Noel, looking at the ground.

Carl gave him what I guess was supposed to be an affectionately boisterous shove, and yelled, ‘We’re not going to just wait. That’d be… that’d be feeble! Let’s make a sign. You know. Belt and braces. Just in case no one picks up what the Goldfish is doing.’

We gathered stones and laid them on the ground to spell out ‘HELP’ in big letters. Then we thought of adding an arrow pointing to where we were.

Then we ate a dismal lunch of Smeat and energy bars. Carl kept talking breathlessly the whole time: ‘This stuff is gross. What do they get paid for in those labs? I bet you I could synthesise something better out of sawdust, or… or Blu-Tack. I could murder a hamburger made of actual dead cow, I don’t care what you say, Noel.’

Noel was in fact saying nothing, so I felt I had to fill in some of the gaps. ‘You know, what I’d really like is spaghetti carbonara. I haven’t had decent pasta in forever, they couldn’t do it properly at Muckling Abbot either. My gran makes it with cream…’

I wished I hadn’t thought about my gran. Or about spaghetti carbonara, come to that. And Noel still didn’t say anything, until at last we were finished and he looked over at our sign and asked, ‘What shall we do now?’

‘Add an exclamation mark?’ I said.

‘Nothing left but to pass the time, until they get here,’ said Carl, shrilly.

So we played cricket. That was Carl’s idea, obviously. Carl had a tennis ball, it turned out, but cricket does not work very well with three people in low gravity with broken bits of spaceship for bats and wickets, and Carl was blatantly letting Noel win, which was so unnerving that I got worried about Josephine and went looking for her.

She was perched on top of a twisted stack of red rock, high above the valley floor, her legs dangling. Her harmonica was lying on her lap, but she wasn’t playing it. She was just staring into the distance.

‘Um, hi,’ I yelled up at her.

‘It’s so huge,’ she said blankly. ‘You can’t see from down there.’

‘Huh?’

‘The Labyrinth. It goes on for miles.’

The Labyrinth of Night. I hadn’t quite realised we were in it.

‘Come back,’ I said. ‘There might be Space Locusts.’

Josephine hung her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Pretend to Noel that we’re not going to die.’

I felt a bit like kicking her and a bit like screaming. I did know, in one way, that this was what Carl was doing, and what I was doing too since I’d gone along with it. You don’t want an eight-year-old to work out that he’s part of a small group of people who are all going to run out of oxygen soon. You probably don’t want twelve-year-olds to work it out either, but unfortunately no one was in a position to do much about that. But I didn’t like her just saying it. ‘Well someone might find us,’ I said desperately. ‘Where there’s life there’s hope.’

Josephine sort of half smiled and gazed at nothing.

‘It’s cold out here,’ I said.

She climbed down and walked back with me in silence. We found Carl on the brink of volcanic overreaction to Noel having lost the tennis ball and Noel possibly about to burst into tears, and Josephine shut her eyes at the sight of them before strolling over and saying with forced energy, ‘Let’s get back inside; I know a game.’

Actually she knew about a million extremely complicated word games, which I guess Lena had taught her on long car journeys or whatever. Josephine got very eye-rolly when we forgot the rules, but she kept us occupied and this was about as perfect for our horrible situation as anything could have been. She managed to keep typing something on her tablet while we were struggling to come up with a three-word phrase made up of words beginning with S in the form of a question, and eventually Noel curled up into a ball of half-shredded sleeping bags and went to sleep.

Carl looked at him and said, ‘Oh, God’, and then lurched out of the ship. Josephine and I went too and next thing I knew, Carl and Josephine were both collapsed against the wreck practically cuddling each other.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks for all of that. I couldn’t. I can’t.’ He put his head in his hands and said in a broken little voice, ‘Mum and Dad are going to be so angry with me.’

‘They’re not,’ said Josephine. ‘They’ll think you were amazing. I’ve written down everything that happened.’

She showed him her tablet. Carl grinned shakily. ‘I see you’re guilting them into making “Jeromiana Waterlands” official.’ He paused, reading on. ‘…That’s nice. Thank you.’

‘Your parents will be proud of you,’ said Josephine. ‘They’ll be right to be.’

Carl smiled again, but he was crying again too. ‘They’re going to be wrecked.’

Josephine swallowed. ‘I’m sorry. I was the one who wanted to run away. I stole the ship. This is all because of me. We should have stayed back at Beagle.’

‘Oh, that’s bull, Jo, everything had gone to hell back there, you didn’t make that happen. You didn’t munch a load of holes in the spaceship either. Everything was messed up to start with: you tried to do something about it. It’s not your fault it worked out like this.’

Josephine gave a crumpled laugh. ‘I guess at least it looks like I won’t have to be in the bloody army.’

‘Ahh, if they gave you a chance and a decent laboratory or whatever, you’d probably win the whole war in like a day.’

They went on telling each other in heartfelt terms how awesome the other was and I didn’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to be part of this conversation. A bit of me wanted to go and hug them and tell them they were amazing and that whatever happened, I was glad I was with them. But somehow I also felt like knocking their heads together.

The Goldfish was a little way off, hovering twenty feet above the valley floor, and I decided I’d go and chat. ‘How’s the signalling going?’ I called up.

The Goldfish’s glow was very dull and even its permanent smile seemed like a kind of torture, like someone had forcibly carved it on to its plastic cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry, Alice,’ it whispered.

‘And evidently you can’t think of anything to get us out of this,’ I added.

The Goldfish waggled dolefully in the air, and I understood it was shaking its head. ‘I guess I’m just not programmed for this.’

‘Me neither,’ I growled and stomped back past Carl and Josephine, climbed back into the spaceship, lay down and pulled the sleeping-bag rags over my head.

‘Alice,’ whispered Noel. ‘We’re not getting out of here, are we?’

I knocked my head gently against the floor. ‘Of course we are,’ I said brightly.

‘It’s all right. You don’t have to pretend right now. Except… except please go on doing it when Carl’s around,’ whispered Noel. ‘I don’t want him to know I know.’ And he burrowed into an even smaller ball.

I knocked my head against the floor more vigorously.

All that work we’d put in trying to fool him, and apparently the only person still being fooled was me.

And that was even though, in the far distance beyond the hovering Goldfish, I’d seen many high, drifting plumes of dust, which probably marked the destruction the Space Locusts left in their wake.

In the morning (three days, sixteen hours, seven minutes of oxygen left) Josephine started playing her harmonica again. I’d never heard a harmonica sound so beautiful before, or so despairing. It was as though all the emptiness and shadow in the Labyrinth of Night was mourning for itself through her, using her mouth and lungs and the little metal box she held to pour itself into heartbroken sound.

And very annoying it was too.

‘You’re using up oxygen,’ I said.

Josephine gave a one-shouldered shrug and a sad smile, and might as well have yelled I PREFER TO DIE A LITTLE FASTER DOING SOMETHING I LOVE for how subtle it was.

And somehow that did it. ‘OH FOR GOD’S SAKE,’ I said. ‘OW,’ I added, because I happened to have kicked the spaceship rather hard at the same time.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Noel, who’d been listlessly absorbed in some game on his tablet. By now I was shouldering my oxygen canister and wrapping up the nearest odds and ends and Smeat bars in a sleeping bag.

‘I have had enough,’ I announced. ‘You can all sit around being tragic if you want, I am going… THAT WAY, to look for a way out of this. So.’ A little hiccup of mad laughter found its way up my throat. ‘Yes. I’m going outside. I may be some time.’

‘What the hell, Alice,’ Carl said. But I jumped out of the spaceship and started marching off in what I thought was the direction of Zond.

The others tagged along, trying to reason with me or point out that I was an idiot.

‘You can’t walk a thousand miles on one tank of oxygen,’ Josephine snapped.

‘Well, I’m going to give it a try,’ I said. ‘You can do what you like. You can come along and be useful if you want. But –’ I waved my arms, ‘– I’m done with this entire doom thing.’

Josephine sighed. ‘Carl,’ she said apologetically and quietly, as if having gone loony I wouldn’t be able to hear her, ‘I don’t want her to go on her own. All right, Alice,’ she said more loudly, in a patient and noble sort of way. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No!’ I yelled. ‘You can come with me if you’re going to help. If all you’re going to do is trail along looking like you just dropped your ice cream then you’re not allowed!’

‘What do you want me to do?’ snapped Josephine, and sounded just a bit more alive.

‘Think,’ I said. ‘You’re some sort of bloody genius, aren’t you? What’s the use of that if you just sit there and wait to die? Just try, can’t you?’

‘I can’t!’ Josephine cried. ‘It’s not fair to put that on me. What do you think I can do that you can’t? You haven’t got any ideas either!’

‘Yes, I have!’ I said. ‘I’ve got the idea of walking that way until I somehow bump into something that’ll help. And if you think that’s stupid then you could at least try and think of something better!’

‘There isn’t anything better!’ shouted Josephine. ‘God! Just because I’m not bad at exams – doesn’t mean I can do magic, Alice. We don’t have any oxygen, we don’t have enough food – there was hardly anyone or anything to help on this planet even before they all ditched us and now there’s nothing out here except –’

And she stopped. There was total silence.

‘…Except?’ I breathed.

‘Except…’ said Josephine again, though I don’t think she even heard herself or knew she was still talking. She turned slowly, eyes wide and unfocused, facing back the way we’d come.

‘What?’ Carl asked, ear-splittingly.

‘Robot pals,’ whispered Josephine. ‘Robot pals! Goldfish!’ She started jumping and waving and the Goldfish swooped down from its signalling station above the valley floor. ‘That lesson,’ she went on breathlessly. ‘Do you remember? We were learning about Noctis Labyrinthus and… Goldfish! Carl said there were only a few hundred people on the planet, most of them us, and Goldfish, you said there were plenty of your robot pals.’

‘Sure, Josephine,’ said the Goldfish, startled out of its gloom and as happy she’d remembered a lesson as if we were all still back in the classroom.

Josephine grabbed the Goldfish and stared into its plastic eyes. ‘Are there any of your robot pals near here now, Goldfish? Big robots—?’

Lights flickered in the Goldfish’s eyes as it thought – or rather, I supposed, scanned – for nearby robots. ‘There are some seed-planters and soil-testers and earth-movers about ten miles off…’

‘HA!’ yelled Josephine. She kissed the Goldfish’s plastic face and turned an unexpected cartwheel.

‘We’re going to do what, exactly, with the robot pals?’ asked Carl, in a slightly sarky way that was obviously the result of trying not to be too hopeful.

Josephine came right side up again, eyes shining. She said, ‘We’re going to catch one.’