Mars Evacuees

22

Thousands, millions of Space Locusts now, the dark mass of them seething and heaving high into the purple sky. Already we could hear their buzzing on the wind.

‘We need to get under cover,’ I said. ‘Gol— oh.’

I’d forgotten for a second. I’d been going to ask again if the Goldfish had plans of the base so we knew where to look for basements or bunkers. But the Goldfish was lying lifeless on the floor of the hangar. I got a burning feeling in the back of my eyes and throat.

‘How long do you think before they get here?’ I asked.

‘The horizon’s only a mile and a half away,’ Josephine whispered. ‘All that’s slowing them is what they’re eating… Maybe ten minutes, if we’re lucky.’

‘Right,’ I said. And for what seemed like far too long in the circumstances, we all stayed put in a heap on the ground.

‘We need weapons,’ said Carl. ‘At least this is a good place to look for them.’

‘OK,’ I said, getting up. ‘Three minutes. We’ll look for anything that might hurt them or anywhere we can hide. Meet back at the dome.’ And we ran.

There had to be an armoury around somewhere, but after the first panicky minute I didn’t think I was going to find it. I decided I’d focus on looking for shelter, so I ran from the barracks towards the back of the base because maybe there’d be fortifications built into the mountainside itself. Sure enough, I found a trench leading to a heavy door set into a huge slab of grey concrete amid the red Martian stone. On the other side of the door, there was a tunnel and stairs leading up into the mountain, and for a wild moment I thought maybe I’d find a whole underground base, with all the soldiers missing from the surface who would know exactly what to do about the Space Locusts. But I only found a little control room looking out over Tharsis, and empty rooms behind with a poured-concrete floor extending into natural caves.

I glanced at the bank of controls beneath a band of windows of thick glass. It did not strike me as a moment for being sensible about not pressing strange buttons, so I did some brief experiments and found I’d fired some sort of energy cannon. The blast went off westwards in the general direction of the Space Locust swarm, though I’d be surprised if I’d hit any part of it. Still, it was a satisfying thing to have found.

I must be already out of time. I ran back down to the heart of the base, yelling, ‘I’ve found somewhere to hide!’

‘I assume you were responsible for the fireworks,’ Josephine’s voice rang back to me.

‘Yes, but I hope someone’s got something more portable.’

Carl, thankfully, had come back with armfuls of energy guns. Noel, on the other hand, was just pitifully dragging the Goldfish along the ground by its tail, and Josephine didn’t seem to have found anything except a couple of canisters of some kind of liquid. She was crouched over her oxygen tank, doing something to it.

‘What are you up to?’ I asked.

Josephine looked up. ‘Making some adjustments,’ she said. She’d taken the mask off the oxygen hose, which she now pointed into the air. She released a glorious spray of red fire, arching a good twenty feet, and laughed. And as laughs go it sounded pretty crazy, but it was so good to hear.

‘Nice,’ I said.

‘Maybe it’ll keep them off.’ She shouldered the improvised flame-thrower.

Around us, the first few Space Locusts smashed into Zond Station ahead of the swarm: ploughing through the soil; into the farm dome; churning up the algae pools.

‘RUN,’ shouted Carl, tossing me an energy gun.

‘We can’t just leave the Goldfish,’ whimpered Noel.

I looked down at it. Maybe it wasn’t exactly rational; taking it with us would have to slow us down a little, but I thought it deserved better than being left to be eaten by Space Locusts too. ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘We can’t.’

We could hardly hear each other by now; the sky was growing darker and darker, and the buzzing was a booming roar that seemed to come from everywhere. Streams of dust coursed across Zond and we could feel a strange wind on our skin.

Carl and I carried the Goldfish – it wasn’t heavy, just bulky and awkward with no good handholds. Behind us Josephine ignited pretty much everything even vaguely flammable, leaving walls of fire between us and the oncoming Space Locusts. It did make me feel a little less defenceless, but it also made me think: Even if they don’t get us, even if they pass on and we’re not eaten – what’s going to be left of Zond Station? Where will we look for food and oxygen and shelter next?

There really isn’t any more hope. Even though everyone’s being so brave and brilliant, there just isn’t.

But I couldn’t stop what I was doing now, for everyone else’s sakes, and they couldn’t stop, for each others’ and mine. We just couldn’t. And I thought stupidly, Well, you never know, maybe something good will still happen.

So we kept on trying to do the impossible.

We slammed the door to the tunnels behind us and ran gasping up the steps. We weren’t doing that brilliantly for oxygen now – we shared a few puffs from Carl’s tank and left Noel and the Goldfish towards the back of the cave. You could barely see out for the clouds of dust and the boiling mass of the swarm itself. Carl bagsied the big gun and fired off an energy blast into that oncoming wall of darkness and made a sizeable hole in it.

We cheered. But the gap closed up again at once, and then the Space Locusts truly fell upon Zond Station, and were devouring it within seconds.

Had they seen us? Could they smell us? Had those first few at the Jeromiana Waterlands somehow passed on a curiosity for the taste of humans? I don’t know. But it felt as if the Space Locusts were as desperate to get to us as we were to get away from them. Even with all that Carl could throw at them, there were just so many coming in from everywhere and there wasn’t any barrier thick enough to keep them out.

A little hole opened at the edge of the window, glass dust spilling down the bank of controls. A single Space Locust’s head squeezed through, then more, gnawing and worrying at the gap so that it spread and spread. ‘Get away from there, Carl,’ Josephine screamed. He scrambled back and Josephine jumped forwards, and swept flame across the opening. The effect wasn’t instantaneous; a few of the Space Locusts simply swooped through the fire into the chamber, but some of the ones behind weren’t so fast or lucky and they blackened and dropped to the ground like lumps of coal.

But there was a handful of the creatures inside with us now. I had a vague memory of promising Miss Clatworthy, I’ll try to kill lots of aliens, and aimed and fired and aimed and fired again, while Josephine kept hosing fire on to the widening hole in the wall like a firefighter in reverse. But step by step, the Space Locusts forced her back as more of them wormed through. One of them took a slice out of my scalp before Carl shot it, and I met Josephine’s eyes for a fraction of a second and felt sure we were thinking the same thing: We’re not going to last much longer.

Then there was the sound of an explosion. Possibly more than one – with all the noise and fire, I think I might actually have missed the first one.

‘What is that?’ I said, to no one in particular.

A torpedo burst against the control centre. Dead Space Locusts and debris showered inwards. We were all knocked off our feet. If the Space Locusts hadn’t already forced us so far back from the window, we’d have been killed.

‘Huuuuumans!’ wailed an unearthly voice.

‘It’s Thsaaa!’ screamed Noel, jumping to his feet.

The windows had been blasted in completely, leaving a ragged hole behind. Outside, a shape bobbed against the daylight in a cloud of dust.

‘Are you all aliiiiive?’ keened Thsaaa into the ruins.

We rushed for the gap in the wall. The Flying Fox was hovering outside, the hatch open, Thsaaa’s tentacles waving from within and changing colour madly.

The silhouette of the Flying Fox abruptly lurched away. ‘I cannot fly this ship very well!’ Thsaaa’s voice called, from somewhere below.

Indeed, the Flying Fox was wobbling about so badly Colonel Cleaver would have given Thsaaa a detention on the spot.

‘Thsaaa, you bastard!’ Carl bawled. He scrambled over the rubble up to the hole and, without ceremony, jumped out. It would have been terrifying if I hadn’t already burned through my entire capacity for feeling normally scared and was now getting by on some wild fiery feeling instead. But Carl landed with a clunk on the Flying Fox’s roof and the Flying Fox wobbled even more worryingly as he climbed around the hatch to slide inside.

Almost at once the ship steadied as Carl took over the controls. Then it was hovering beside the gap with Thsaaa standing in the doorway, tentacles reaching for us.

‘I am sorry,’ they said immediately.

We didn’t have time to accept apologies. ‘Alice! Down!’ Josephine yelled, and loosed a burst of fire over my head as I ducked. A cooked Space Locust dropped to the ground beside me.

‘Get in the ship!’ cried Thsaaa, though it was easier said than done. Space Locusts that must have been stunned by the explosion were waking up and wriggling into the air.

‘The Goldfish…!’ Noel insisted.

‘Grab it! Throw it to Thsaaa!’ I ordered. Noel dragged the Goldfish up to the hole and more dropped than threw it, but Thsaaa’s tentacles were deft and strong and the Goldfish was flipped inside. ‘Now you,’ I panted to Noel, and he jumped while Josephine and I stood back-to-back, me trying to zap any new Space Locusts that came in from outside and Josephine toasting anything that moved in the shadows.

‘Go on. Get out!’ Josephine screamed, painting fire around the room. I hesitated. ‘Go on, I’ve got to be last, I can’t jump carrying this and we need the cover.’

I gritted my teeth and jumped for the ship. I felt Thsaaa’s tentacles lock around my arm and waist in mid-air. Then I was inside the Flying Fox yelling for Josephine, who stood right on the edge and set off one last massive torrent of fire. Then she let the flamethrower fall from her shoulder and leaped.

Thsaaa caught her, flung her back into the ship beside me and slammed the door shut.

‘Kuya, go!’ Noel cried, and Carl yanked viciously on the controls, climbing so steeply that the g-force put paid to my efforts to sit up. We hurtled north around the curve of Olympus, out of the grip of the swarm. I thought about trying to get up on to one of the seats, but on the whole I decided it was too much of a bother when I could curl up on the nice comfortable floor and have a cry. Josephine, sprawled beside me, had chosen the blank staring approach for the time being.

Thsaaa was standing over us in various sombre shades of navy and teal.

‘I am sorry,’ they said again, softly and formally. They patted us awkwardly with their tentacles. ‘Are you badly hurt?’

‘Still conscious,’ croaked Josephine beside me. ‘That’s a good sign.’

I couldn’t even answer at first, as I needed to think about it. I hadn’t noticed it in all the excitement, but now my left arm wanted me to know that it hurt, not horribly but in a way that felt significant. I thought I might have broken it when the explosion knocked me over. Still, I did have a left arm, and a right arm come to that, so I knew I should count myself lucky. Staggeringly lucky, in fact.

‘Thsaaa! You killed our Goldfish!’ Noel howled, before I could offer a summary of any of this.

‘I deactivated your Goldfish. Surely it can be mended,’ said Thsaaa.

‘But you just ran off,’ said Noel, who had taken it all very hard.

‘I wanted to get back to my people!’ cried Thsaaa. ‘I did not want to be a prisoner or an experiment!’

‘Fair go, Noel, they came back,’ said Carl shakily from the helm.

‘And I would have sent my people to find you – I did not mean to leave you there forever. I would never, never have left you to them. When I saw their swarm in the sky… and I knew you would feel just as I would… I had to return for you.’ Thsaaa’s tentacles waved fretfully in the air and then covered their face. ‘Ohhhhhhh, if you had not fired that cannon I might never have found you.’

I managed to get up and into a seat, hugging my arm against my chest. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Thsaaa,’ said Josephine, lifting her head from the floor. ‘You recognised the Space Locusts.’

‘“Space Locusts”?’ echoed Thsaaa curiously, like they didn’t understand the word ‘locust’. But it didn’t matter. ‘I have never seen them, only heard the stories. But yes, I know them. No Morror could make a mistake.

‘They are the Vshomu.’