Mars Evacuees

23

‘The Vshomu drift through space,’ said Thsaaa. ‘They feed on whatever they find, the organic compounds in the rocks and dust, the ice of comets. But when they come to a world full of life, they feast, and their numbers…’ They made an expressive movement with their tentacles.

‘…explode,’ supplied Josephine.

‘Yes. Explode. They never stop feeding until there is nothing left. Then many of them starve, their numbers decline again, very fast, and the survivors drift on. Their sight is very keen. They are the reason we learned to make ourselves invisible. But all we learned of them – all we know, came too late to save our world. They stripped it to the core, which cooled and died and fell away from our sun. For so many years all we could do was run from them.’

‘Yeah, and you led them to us!’ said Carl.

‘It’s not their fault,’ said Noel, who was mollified by now.

‘I don’t know. The Vshomu have devoured so many worlds across the galaxies,’ said Thsaaa.

‘They’ll eat Mars,’ I said.

‘At that rate, they’ll eat the solar system,’ said Josephine.

‘We must tell my people,’ said Thsaaa.

‘We have to tell everyone,’ I said.

‘OK,’ said Carl. ‘So everyone’s had a chance to freak out back there except me. Does anyone know where the hell we’re even going?’

‘The Morror base,’ said Josephine. ‘They must have one on this planet. Don’t they, Thsaaa?’

There was a pause while we all tried to get used to the idea of running into a horde of hostile Morrors on purpose.

‘Is there a map on this ship?’ asked Thsaaa.

‘Sure,’ said Carl, calling one up in the corner of the viewport. Thsaaa gazed at it thoughtfully, then reached out with one tentacle and pointed to a place on the screen.

‘I think,’ they whispered, ‘we should be searching there.’

I’d stopped crying by now, so I lurched over to the helm and said, ‘I’ll fly if you want,’ so that Carl could have a fair turn at freaking out.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Josephine, scrambling off the floor. ‘You can’t pilot with one hand. I’ll do it.’

‘…Er,’ Carl and I said simultaneously, remembering the wreckage of the obstacle course back at Beagle and all that exploding.

Josephine seemed unworried, though. ‘I’ve at least had more relevant training than Thsaaa has. It’s not really that hard.’

It was true, actually; seeing as we weren’t currently taking off or landing or shooting invading ships or dodging Vshomu, piloting wouldn’t be much more complicated than just telling the computer where to take us. She nudged me out of the way and took over at the controls and we carried on flying and did not blow up. Josephine gave a very small smile.

Carl flopped into one of the seats at the back of the ship and Noel gave him a hug, and I flopped alongside them. I couldn’t help but wish the Goldfish was keeping an eye on the piloting just in case.

But the Goldfish was still just a broken piece of luggage in the back of the ship.

‘Do you think they’re alive?’ asked Josephine, as we sped through a sky stained orange with Martian dust. ‘The people from Zond and Beagle… Dr Muldoon?’

Dr Muldoon’s name couldn’t have meant anything to Thsaaa, but they rippled pink and orange at her in what might have been encouragement. ‘I hope we will find everyone.’

The thing about someone pointing to a place on a map of an entire planet and saying, ‘I think it’s somewhere over there,’ is that at best that means flying over an approximately Wales-sized bit of ground without any idea what the thing you’re searching for looks like.

So basically we had to zigzag back and forth and round and round for ages, getting more and more ratty, and Thsaaa said more and more things in their language which I’m sure were incredibly rude. And none of us had had anything to eat that day, and it was weeks since anyone had had a cup of tea.

Then after hours of this, Thsaaa yelped, ‘There! There!’ and leaped towards the viewport in order to point at… nothing.

‘What? Where?’

‘We’ve gone past it now,’ said Thsaaa, in grumpy purples and ambers.

Josephine doubled back and we flew around for what seemed like another million years.

‘That is the exact place you were pointing out,’ said Carl.

‘Clearly that cannot be true, because it is not there,’ said Thsaaa.

We flew on.

‘There! There!’ cried Thsaaa again.

‘Yeah, that’s a very nice rock face,’ said Carl.

‘The entrance is invisible,’ said Thsaaa. ‘What else would you expect?’

‘I’m… really not that enthusiastic about flying straight into a rock face,’ said Josephine.

‘I can see it,’ I whispered. I could make out that sort of vague shimmer in the corner of my eye that I was getting used to where Morrors were concerned. ‘You can fly into it. It’s a big square hole in the rock, like a gate…’

‘I hate how you are not even looking at the screen when you say that,’ Carl moaned.

‘It’s there,’ I said. ‘That is… at least, I think so.’

‘Well, that’s just lovely,’ Josephine said.

‘I can see it perfectly well,’ announced Thsaaa. But Thsaaa wasn’t actually looking straight at the screen either, they were doing the same corner-of-the-eye thing I was.

‘Obviously I can’t see it if I look at it,’ they said scathingly when this was pointed out. ‘It is invisible.’

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ moaned Carl.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Down… and no, Jesus, right a bit! And a bit more down… not that far down! And there. There. Straight ahead.’

At this point I had to look at the viewport properly and couldn’t help but wince because we were, on the face of it, about to splatter ourselves against a massive rock wall like a bug on a windscreen and it was hard to hold on to the belief that this was a good idea.

Josephine let out a shriek as she closed the last few feet…

And then the wall was gone, and it was dim all around us.

We were in a huge chamber inside the mountain. It was very obviously not a natural space; it was square-cut and terraced into different levels, and though it was much starker and emptier than the inside of the Morror ship, there were coloured lights set into the ceiling and the floor, far below us.

And there didn’t seem to be anybody there.

‘Aaargh,’ said Josephine, panicking after flying through a wall and now having to pilot a Flying Fox in a sudden confined space.

‘Give,’ said Carl, swiftly leaning over her and taking the controls.

‘I’d have been all right,’ said Josephine, aggrieved, as he lowered the ship towards the rock floor.

‘Is there some way to cast one’s voice outside the ship?!’ cried Thsaaa sharply, in very urgent colours.

‘Uh, a PA system? Yeah, I think this thing…’

‘Give it to me. Now.’

Josephine handed them a microphone, and Thsaaa started to talk into it, just as my eyes adjusted to the light inside the chamber and I started to pick up that faint shimmer of something…

Not just in one corner of my field of vision, either.

Everywhere.

‘Morthruu Mo-raaa uha-raaa porshwuraaa va, ha’thraa vel Thsaaa athla-haaa quurulu nas huruuumua…’

There was an instant of silence. Then another voice spoke, loud but in soft, long, rippling syllables. ‘Shuwathaaahal-vaaa-raha, ath-shal vel lamnawath vramlashaaa ath amna-clath.’

‘We should go outside,’ said Thsaaa. ‘But stay behind me.’

Josephine flicked a button to open the hatch, and we stepped out. Thsaaa spread their tentacles in front of us like a shield.

All around us, Morrors started uncloaking.

I hope we had decent excuses for being overwhelmed even before we found ourselves surrounded by aliens. Anyway, I came over slightly dizzy. It wasn’t just that there were so many Morrors, and they were all changing colour and tendril-rippling like anything, but they were so different from each other as well as from us. I don’t know if I’d have worked out about the five sexes if I hadn’t known it already, but as I did I could see that there were Morrors with lacy manes, and narrow-built Morrors whose manes covered nearly their whole faces, and very tall Morrors who didn’t have tendrils at all. But it wasn’t just that, it was that they had different-shaped mouths and eyes and no two colour palettes were really the same, and I mean, of course they weren’t all the same, but in our recent circumstances, it had been hard not to think of Thsaaa as the standard representative of the Typical Morror.

For one thing, these Morrors were all grown-ups, and thus bigger.

For another, other than invisible suits, I guess Morrors didn’t really do military uniform, or else their clothes had some sort of meaning I couldn’t get. Many of them wore long A-line kilts like Thsaaa’s but in all different colours, and some of them with fin-shaped trains, and others wore layers of transparent fabric, or cream-coloured robes with holes cut away here and there so you could still see the colour racing across their skin.

Anyway, so all of that was very interesting, but you also had to take account of how several of them were holding things that were plainly weapons. Colourful, pretty weapons. But weapons. Pointed at us.

‘Hello,’ I said, giving the Morrors a silly little wave.

The Morrors talked to each other. The sound of their voices rose and fell; sometimes they’d get very vociferous, but sometimes it seemed as if most of what they wanted each other to know was in the colour and play of their tendrils and so they didn’t actually have to say much.

And tides of colour kept sweeping round the group like someone was dragging a paintbrush from one Morror body to the next, though any Morror might be dimmer or brighter. And there would always be streaks and twists that didn’t get passed on with the dominant colour, which would sometimes get into a little eddy in a smaller group or meet a splash of a totally different colour, which would either sweep around in turn the other way or bounce to and fro, which I thought maybe meant the Morrors were disagreeing with each other.

Thsaaa was talking and waving their tentacles too, but their colours didn’t seem to be meshing up with everyone else’s at all.

‘Are they saying, “Get out of the way so we can shoot your little human friends”?’ asked Carl.

‘That is not a helpful comment,’ said Thsaaa.

‘Yeah, but are they?’

Thsaaa didn’t seem to want to tell us, which I couldn’t help feeling was not a very good sign.

Josephine huffed impatiently. ‘Why are they keeping us standing around when the planet’s being eaten?’

‘I have told them,’ Thsaaa insisted. ‘They’re discussing sending a party to see if the Vshomu are really there or if it is some human trick. Be patient.’

Josephine sighed enormously, was patient for two and a half seconds, then muttered, ‘Oh, to hell with this,’ and reached into her bag.

The Morrors raised their weapons, and one of them thundered, ‘KEEP YOUR HANDS VISIBLE,’ in startlingly perfect English.

Josephine lifted her arm.

She was holding the dead Vshomu that we’d killed in the first Flying Fox.

Some of the Morrors cried out – short, almost-human yelps or long rustling roars like faraway landslides. Some of them went silent and grey and half-transparent. I thought that along with Paralashath and shalvulu, I might possibly have picked up another word: it was au-laaa and it meant no.

Then several Morrors left, some of them possibly crying, and the ring around us broke into smaller, messier groups talking even more animatedly than before, but no one seemed to be pointing guns at us now, and Thsaaa lowered their tentacles and looked at us nervously.

Then a stocky Morror – one of the mane-all-over-face ones – came up and whisked the Vshomu out of Josephine’s hands and took it back to the group to talk over.

Josephine said indignantly, ‘That was mine.’

‘How is a dead Vshomu yours?’ I asked.

‘It was in my bag,’ Josephine grumbled.

A pair of Morrors came over to us. The first was very tall and one of those I found hard not to think of as ‘bald’ because they didn’t have tendrils, just colour patches. The other was dressed in a gold kilt with a triangular fin at the back, and had a cloud of curly tendrils standing out like an Elizabethan ruff around their face.

‘Hello,’ said the big one without the mane. ‘I am Swarasee-ee. This is Flath. Come with me, please, humans. Flath will look after Thsaaa now.’

Swarasee-ee must have been the one who’d told Josephine to keep her hands up: they spoke incredibly good English with no Morror accent or long nouns like Thsaaa had at all. In fact, if you shut your eyes you’d probably think you were talking to a Californian woman.

Flath didn’t talk to us, just towed Thsaaa away. Thsaaa looked back anxiously. ‘I hope it will be all right,’ they called plaintively.

‘What are your names?’ asked Swarasee-ee politely.

‘Josephine Jerome.’

‘Carl Dalisay, and this is Noel.’

‘…I can say my own name, why do you always have to go first?’ Noel grumbled.

‘Alice Dare,’ I said.

Swarasee-ee paused and looked at me in mild perplexity. ‘…Alistair?’ they repeated.

I sighed at considerable length, while Carl chuckled.

‘Terrific, that’s just terrific,’ I said.

Swarasee-ee led us down over the terraces, between what I was pretty sure were some invisible ships and under rows of rainbow-y lamps.

‘Where are you taking us?’ I asked. ‘This is a waste of time. We need to get back to Earth and warn everyone, or no one will get to live on it.’

Swarasee-ee said nothing, but their spots turned blue and orange by turns.

We were walking towards the rear wall of the chamber. There didn’t seem to be anything in particular over there, except it was a long way from all the other Morrors, and I was reminding myself that the Morrors hadn’t wanted to wipe out humans and so Swarasee-ee probably wouldn’t be taking children into a nice quiet corner to kill us without bothering anybody else.

Then, because I happened to look nervously at Josephine to see if she was thinking the same thing, I noticed how shimmery the back of the cavern was.

‘Oh!’ I said.

Swarasee-ee stretched out their tentacles to the wall, which rippled faintly as they peeled aside a panel of invisible fabric.

‘In you go!’ they said, sounding almost as perky as the Goldfish.

There didn’t seem much point in making a fuss about this, as there were enough Morrors around to put us anywhere they pleased. So in we went, though it was hard not to keep worrying about how stupid we’d feel if it turned out we were being led to our doom, and Swarasee-ee sealed it up from outside.

Wide steps led down into another chamber of bare, red stone – a bit warmer than the one outside, which was nice, and wide and almost as empty as a sports field. But not quite, because about fifty human adults were sitting or lying about in groups in the middle of it, looking thoroughly fed up.

‘Dr Muldoon!’ Josephine cried. ‘You are alive!’

Dr Muldoon stood out because of her long red hair. There was a field-hospital area over to one side, with about ten people covered in bandages or attached to drips and so on. Dr Muldoon was among them helping out, even though I knew she wasn’t that sort of doctor. She was in full military uniform, something we’d never seen before, though of course the Morrors had taken all weapons off her. She looked as if she should be tired, with her hair all loose and dirty-looking around her shoulders, but she still seemed far more awake than anyone else.

‘Josephine,’ she gasped, and came running. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Kids!’ cried Colonel Cleaver as he came rolling up from the back of the group. I say rolling because he hadn’t got his robot legs; he was sitting on a bit of metal panelling that looked as if it might once have been part of a Flarehawk, with wheels clumsily attached, and he was pushing himself along with his hands.

‘They took your legs?!’ exclaimed Noel, horrified. ‘That’s awful.’

‘Never mind that. Did they capture Beagle Base? Are you OK? Where are the others?’

‘They’re still there. We didn’t exactly get captured,’ said Carl, and after that of course we had to explain everything, which got quite complicated. I was not used to either Colonel Cleaver or Dr Muldoon being apologetic. But they were now – in fact not just them but a load of other adults we didn’t even know bustled up to say how they were very, very sorry about everything that had happened to us, and how they hadn’t been there to stop it. And that’s before they even knew more than ten percent of what had happened to us, and while I’m not going to say I was against receiving a bit of adult sympathy and attention, I wasn’t sure this was a good use of our time.

So I thought maybe we’d better not tell them everything until later, and I glanced at the others and saw that Carl and Josephine had already got the same idea. But Noel was completely oblivious and went on saying things like, ‘And then when the spaceship crashed for the second time…’ which made everyone wring their hands and fall over themselves to say they hadn’t meant things to turn out like that some more. Then Colonel Cleaver hugged us all and most of us said ‘ow’ and that’s how they found out my arm was broken and that Josephine had cuts and Carl was singed and everyone was generally the worse for Space Locusts. The grown-ups were in the process of getting even more upset when Carl bawled, ‘ANYWAY. The planet’s being eaten and is there any food?’

‘James, get them some food!’ snapped Dr Muldoon at a poor man with the photosynthetic patches on his arms from Beagle Base, as if he should have known to do it already.

We sat down on the floor of the chamber to eat and carry on explaining. There was a mix of human and Morror food (‘The light-blue spirally stuff is better than it looks,’ said James apologetically), some Smeat, some raisins, but no tea. Dr Muldoon put my arm in a sling and cleaned us up a bit.

‘Of course, our actual medical doctor had to be hit by a shockray rebound,’ she said, sighing, dabbing on disinfectant.

A woman waved feebly from one of the beds. ‘You’re doing fine, Valerie.’

‘Why did they take your legs, Colonel Cleaver?’ asked Noel, timidly.

‘Ah, it’s no big deal. I can get around without them,’ said the Colonel.

‘He kept climbing the walls,’ said Dr Muldoon, looking slightly tired at last. ‘Literally. Trying to disable that seal.’ She stared glumly at the curtain we’d come through, which was back to looking like a bare stone wall.

‘You say that like I stopped,’ said Colonel Cleaver, grinning, and I remembered him climbing up the tower at the base using just his arms.

‘We’ve tried pulling it down, and digging under it, and cutting through it,’ said Dr Muldoon. ‘And frankly, we’ve been doing it more for entertainment value than anything else, because even if we got through there’d still be the small matter of the Morrors on the other side.’

‘Weirdo invisible no-good clowns that they are,’ said Colonel Cleaver. ‘Forget my legs – it’s her you should be worried about.’

‘The one that speaks such good English knows who I am,’ Dr Muldoon said. ‘It keeps asking me about accelerated terraforming.’

‘They haven’t hurt you?’ I asked.

‘They’re not stupid. You can’t get a scientist to do anything useful by torturing her. But they started hinting they might separate me from the others or take me off the planet altogether. And I can’t understand why they’re so interested; they’re already altering Earth to suit them, they don’t need my help with that. But I don’t imagine they’re asking just out of sheer curiosity.’

‘We know why they’re interested in terraforming,’ said Josephine.

Dr Muldoon looked at us keenly. ‘Do you? And what did you mean, “The planet’s being eaten”?’

And finally we managed to get them to listen to a decent account of why the Morrors had come to Earth, and what the Vshomu were. Josephine didn’t have the dead one any more, but she did have some pictures she’d taken of it on her tablet.

‘…And they eat planets,’ said Dr Muldoon flatly, in the end.

‘Yes.’

‘They’re eating Mars.’

‘Yes.’

‘Mars.’

‘With us on it, yes.’

‘My life’s work,’ thundered Dr Muldoon, springing to her feet with fire in her eyes. ‘My home. I create scientific miracles out of rock and dust, and vermin come along and eat it.’

‘…We’re actually pretty worried about Earth as well,’ I said, but I’m not sure Dr Muldoon really heard me, seeing as she was racing up the steps towards the seal at the time.

‘Morrors!’ she shouted. ‘Let me out! I need specimens! I need my lab! I need to kill them all.’

‘There are millions of them, you know; you probably can’t kill them all yourself,’ said Noel as we followed her up the steps.

‘We’ve gotta evacuate, Muldoon,’ said Cleaver. ‘I’ve got to get those kids out of Beagle right now. HEY, MORRORS,’ he bellowed at the wall. ‘Are you going to let us out of here? Or are you leaving kids and prisoners of war to be eaten alive?’

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s a good idea to annoy them,’ Noel moaned anxiously.

‘Yeah, Morrors!’ boomed Carl at the wall. ‘What are you doing out there? We have places to be!’

Dr Muldoon raised her fists and would probably have pounded them against the wall if it had actually been a wall, but as it was more of a kind of holographic curtain-thing, she ended up just grabbing handfuls of it and yanking them around as best she could.

‘Morrors!’ she yelled. ‘Are you listening? Are you still even there?’

‘Morrors!’ Josephine joined in. ‘We’ve got to get back to Earth! We have to warn the government! We have to start cooperating.’

‘Morrors!’ I shouted, dragging at the seal in my turn. ‘You can’t fight the Vshomu and us at the same time! And if you couldn’t get rid of the Vshomu on your own before, what chance have you got this time? You need humans now. You have to talk to us so we can help each other!’

‘Morrors!’

‘Morrors!’

Then quite suddenly, the wall fell. It detached from its fastenings high above with a hissing sound and crumpled, shimmering and glitching as it dropped, until it lay in a weird, half-invisible pile at our feet. All the Morrors were there on the other side, looking at us. And all the other humans gasped at the sight of them – all that time shut up inside the mountain, and they’d never seen the Morrors uncloaked.

‘Yes,’ said Swarasee-ee. ‘We agree.’