Mars Evacuees

21

OK, technically that’s not true. There was plenty left in the way of rubble and ash and mangled Flarehawks, and there were even some buildings that were more or less in one piece. But that there’d been a battle at Zond pretty recently, and that it hadn’t gone very well for the home team, was not something you could miss.

It was also pretty noticeable that there didn’t seem to be anyone around, either to pick up the pieces or to welcome in battered and bedraggled fugitive children.

‘Oh God,’ whispered Josephine, looking at it through a pair of binoculars from the Flying Fox. Then, through gritted teeth: ‘Faster. Make her go faster, Goldfish.’

The Goldfish’s eyes flashed and Monica lumbered on quickly enough that the wind ripped at our hair or tendrils and we were too busy clinging on to really talk to each other. Which was perhaps for the best.

Zond Station sat on a plateau amid the foothills of Olympus. The empty plains of Mars stretched away below, and above it the gentle, bare slope of the mountain went on and on until its peak disappeared above the atmosphere.

We climbed off Monica. ‘Oh, kids…’ said the Goldfish helplessly, sagging in the air.

I found that even though I had this heavy, empty feeling, like Earth-gravity had suddenly slammed back on inside me, I wasn’t actually surprised. Of course I’d hoped there’d be people at Zond to help us, and I hadn’t wanted to think about the possibility there might not be. But it’d been there with us all along, the chance that maybe we weren’t running to anything so much as running away from something that was always bound to catch up. It had nearly caught us once in the Labyrinth of Night, and now it was really here.

Josephine was beginning to shake beside me. ‘We’re not finished yet,’ I said to her. Somehow it came out sounding quite calm and sincere, which was odd as it didn’t seem to have a lot to do with what I’d been thinking and I hadn’t known I was going to say it.

‘HALLO!’ Carl boomed, in that enormous voice of his. ‘There must be somebody here… HALLO!’

But no one answered.

Zond Station was much smaller than Beagle Base, and clearly a lot less science had been going on here, though there were a few algae pools and things doing their bit for the terraforming effort. Otherwise, there were a couple of barracks buildings with roofs on and the blackened remains of a couple more. There was a single farm dome with a wheat field, but it was broken open and nearly everything inside was black and dead.

‘The comms tower,’ breathed Josephine, pointing. It was snapped in two like a breadstick. No wonder the Goldfish hadn’t been able to contact Zond at all.

Thsaaa was changing colour rapidly, grey-black-blue-purple, tendrils rippling and swaying.

‘Did you know it was going to be like this?’ I blurted out.

‘You know I did not,’ Thsaaa hissed. ‘I am no better off than you.’

‘But Morrors did this. You know what’s happening. You know why they came here, don’t you? You’d never tell us.’

‘Do you think they tell me everything? I am only thirteen. What do your adults tell you?’ cried Thsaaa. ‘My parents had been reassigned, I was being transported to a training centre nearer the Earth. But something happened and we were called to this awful place.’

‘That’s really it? That’s all you know.’

Thsaaa said nothing.

‘We need to know when this happened,’ said Josephine in a thin, breathy voice.

‘What difference does it make when?’ asked Carl.

Josephine ignored him. ‘Everything’s dry. But nothing’s smoking any more. It was recent, but not that recent… Some of the lights are still on… Goldfish – can you get any information off the life-support system? When did the main doors last open?’

The Goldfish obediently darted off into the command centre. It came back, and told us the date.

‘A week ago. When the grown-ups vanished,’ whispered Josephine. ‘So that’s it. Something started here, and everyone at Beagle went to help.’

‘But they couldn’t,’ I said, and it felt like the silent thing that had chased us here from Beagle was roaring so loud I could hardly hear myself.

‘Guys,’ said Carl urgently, grabbing Noel and turning him against his chest. ‘Don’t look.’

There was the wreck of an Aurora lying in the ruins of the comms tower. Maybe a shockray had sent it smashing into the tower, I’m not sure. The cockpit was ripped open and you could see there were people still in there.

There was a moment where we all stood there frozen in a huddle. Then Josephine set her jaw, and started walking towards them.

‘Don’t,’ I said.

‘I have to see who they are,’ she said, in a voice like stone. ‘Dr Muldoon came here.’ And I went stumbling along too, though I wasn’t sure I could make it all the way.

We didn’t go that close in the end. Just close enough to see that neither was Dr Muldoon or the Colonel.

But they were still somebody. And I thought, Oh God, are we going to have to look at every body to see if it’s someone we know? Because I assumed there would be lots.

But there weren’t, as it turned out. We picked our way through the ruins, into the farm dome, across the spacepad, past the ranks of unmanned guns. There were places where it was hard to be sure; some of the buildings were so badly collapsed or burned that we couldn’t really tell if there were people under the rubble. But we didn’t see anyone else dead. Josephine was moving like a sleepwalker, stumbling and staring. I only noticed that in a dazed, distant kind of way, so maybe that was how I was moving too.

And then, in one of the launching bays, we found a big splash of blood on the ground and some empty bandage wrappings scattered about. Someone had been hurt, and someone had tried to help them, but neither of them was here now.

‘…That’s good, though?’ Noel said. ‘I mean, maybe they’re still alive.’

‘When did your ship crash, Thsaaa? You’d been there a few days when we found you – long enough to lay the bodies out and cover them. Was it the same day this happened?’ Josephine sounded almost like someone in a trance now.

‘Perhaps. I cannot be sure,’ said Thsaaa.

‘You said something happened and your ship was called here. This was what happened. Your ship was called to help. Wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Thsaaa.

Josephine took in a long, long breath and let it out in a sigh. She said, in a strange, faraway little voice: ‘I do.’ She closed her eyes and then opened them, and when she spoke again all the haze and shock had gone and she sounded cold and sure: ‘The people here got into a fight with so many Morror ships they couldn’t handle it themselves; they had to call in reinforcements from Beagle Base, and even then it wasn’t enough. Of course, your side was calling for backup too. Maybe the humans had no idea there were Morrors on Mars until they were under attack, or maybe they found Morrors here and hit first. Either way, you’re here. They lost. Humans don’t have control of Mars any more. The Morrors do.’ She was looking at Thsaaa hard enough to bore a hole in them. ‘But the Morrors don’t want Mars. It’s no good to you because it hasn’t got a magnetic field. And there’s nothing here that’s much of a target. OK, a few hundred kids being trained to fight you, but you’ve never gone for kids like that before, and you didn’t attack Beagle Base. So it wasn’t that.

‘So why would Morrors come to Mars when the humans here weren’t threatening you, when they were getting out of your way. Unless… that’s why. Your planet is gone. You need the Earth, and its magnetic field. But humans don’t need such particular conditions, and after all, we’re so blank, aren’t we? You saw a place humans were going voluntarily, where we can live and you can’t, where we were millions of miles away from the thing you want most. The only thing wrong was that it wasn’t all of us.

‘You’re going to resettle humans here. So you can have Earth to yourselves.’

The wind rasped across the wreckage of Zond Station and there was no other sound. Then Thsaaa whispered, ‘It seemed the kindest way.’

‘Kind!’ Carl exploded.

‘We did not want to wipe out an intelligent species entirely! We could not allow you to stop us building the Vuhalimath-laa for another fifteen years!’ said Thsaaa. ‘What else could we do?’

‘What else? Oh, rack off,’ said Carl.

Josephine cocked her head. ‘You were building what?’

Thsaaa’s tendrils trembled and fluttered and they didn’t say anything.

I felt an almost overpowering urge to curl up in a ball until someone else came along to sort everything out, but I tried to make myself focus. ‘This isn’t helping us,’ I said. ‘We need a new plan. There’s got to be something here we can use. Food. Oxygen. Goldfish, do you have the plans for this base?’

‘Forget that – what we need is a ship,’ said Carl.

No arguing with that. So we went looking for one.

The hangar doors were wide open. And right at the back, looking small and lonely, there was a single, untouched Flying Fox.

Carl let out a sigh when he saw it, which was probably mostly relief, but maybe exhaustion too.

‘There was a science post at Schiaparelli Crater, wasn’t there?’ I said. ‘Or back to Beagle?’

‘Want to just lift it straight out of the atmo? Maybe we’ll find a nice space-cruiser wandering past,’ Carl said, managing almost to smile.

‘Let’s find supplies first,’ I said.

Then Thsaaa moved.

They were completely without colour now. Just dark grey dappled with black and frost-white. They turned and those six tentacles whipped out – four of them hooking round our ankles and yanking, or simply knocking us off balance, so within a split second we were all on the ground. And at the same time, two tentacles stabbed straight into the Goldfish, knocking in one plastic eye. The light went out inside the Goldfish and it crashed to the ground. Thsaaa dragged out the invisible suit from inside it and ran for the Flying Fox, throwing on the suit as they did so.

‘Thsaaa!’ wailed Noel, sounding more heartbroken over this than anything else we’d seen on Mars, and that made me furious. I scrambled up and chased after them, and Carl and Josephine were soon charging along with me.

But we couldn’t see Thsaaa. Even though we knew they were heading for the hatch of the Flying Fox, we couldn’t see how close they were or what they were doing. I tried to grab for the hatch myself and something knocked me away. And then it was too late: the hatch opened and closed before we could do anything.

Inside I had a glimpse of controls moving, as if by themselves. I jumped up and banged on the door and screamed, but the ship began to move with me still clinging to the outside.

Thsaaa must have had some trouble working out how to actually fly a human craft; they just taxied out of the hangar and wove around awkwardly in the launch bay for a while, which must have looked ridiculous with me helplessly spreadeagled across the side of the ship. But then it began to move faster and faster until I dropped off. The others came running up as the ship finally lumbered into the air and swooped away.

‘They just left us!’ cried Noel. ‘They left us to die.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ I said mechanically. ‘Maybe it’s not that bad. There’s stuff here. Shelter. At least enough oxygen for a couple of weeks. Not all the plants are dead. We can just kind of… live here for a while.’

‘But how could Thsaaa do that?’ Noel cried.

‘We’re the enemy,’ Josephine said flatly.

‘But we weren’t! Not us!’

I wondered if maybe you couldn’t really blame Thsaaa. If I was taken prisoner by some Morror kids and saw a chance to get away from them, it would probably seem moronic not to take it. But that didn’t change anything, or make me feel any better.

I’m going to give up, I thought. I’m going to just give up completely.

But only for a few minutes.

So I did that. I stayed on the ground, hugging my knees. Carl kept yelling and swearing at the horizon where Thsaaa had vanished. Josephine sat down heavily next to me and I turned my forehead against her shoulder and shut my eyes.

‘We’ll work something out. We will,’ I said.

Then Carl stopped shouting. He backed up a few paces closer to us. ‘Oh Christ,’ he whispered. ‘Look.’

I lifted my head. I looked along the line of his pointing arm. A dark cloud had risen on the horizon. Whirling pillars of dust scoured the land ahead of it.

The Space Locusts were coming.