Mars Evacuees

24

Being stuck in the middle of an alien evacuation procedure might have been less bewildering if we could at least see the ships that teams of Morrors kept vanishing into. But we couldn’t, and we couldn’t understand what the Morrors were saying to each other either, except when Swarasee-ee or one of the others took the time to say something to us in English, which was mostly, ‘Wait.’ So we just stood around feeling rather awkward and vulnerable, and wondering if Thsaaa had already gone, except for Colonel Cleaver, who’d got his legs back and was striding around amid the Morrors, talking to them and looking ready to go and trample Vshomu beneath his robotic feet.

‘This is it, cadets,’ he said at last. ‘A couple of our Day-Glo pals here are taking me out to Beagle to get the rest of the kids.’

‘Oh, aren’t we going with you?’ asked Noel, dismayed.

‘Their biggest carrier will only take fifty,’ said Cleaver. ‘They say they’re calling more ships in for the rest. Don’t know how far we can trust them, but doesn’t seem we’ve got a lot of choice. So you’d just take up space, and this way you’ll get home sooner, and you all need decent medical attention.’

I nodded. I was sorry he was leaving so soon, but I found I didn’t want to go back to Beagle anyway; I wanted to see Kayleigh and Chinenye and Mei, but too much had happened, both when we were there and afterwards. And just hearing the words ‘you’ll get home’ made me feel slightly dizzy.

‘We’re really glad you’re all right,’ I said. ‘We were worried.’

‘Seems like these Vo-sho-whatevers would have eaten the lot of us if it weren’t for you kids,’ said the Colonel, cheerfully. ‘And I’ve had enough of things eating me to last a lifetime. So. Good work, cadets.’

He threw us a salute. We all saluted back except for Josephine, who being a genius had been looking at something else and then got confused as to which arm to use. Cleaver scrutinised her thoughtfully until she started squirming, then he said gruffly, ‘Good soldiering, Jerome, knew you had it in you,’ and dropped a big hand on to her shoulder.

‘Thank you,’ said Josephine, as the Colonel walked away. When he’d gone she muttered to me, ‘None of this changes anything, I’d still be an absolutely awful soldier.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if this works out, perhaps you won’t have to be.’

A tall Quth-laaa Morror – at least, that’s what I assumed they must be because they had the same kind of tendrils as Thsaaa – came along and sighed, ‘I am Warth-raaa. Come thiiiiiiis waaaaaaaay,’ at us, being not as good at English as either Thsaaa or Swarasee-ee.

‘Do you have to – to run off anywhere else, Dr Muldoon?’ Josephine asked, trying to sound casual about it.

Dr Muldoon smiled. ‘No. Swarasee-ee and I need to be on the first ship to reach Earth; someone has to be the one to brief the EEC. And I need you to make sure I have all the facts.’

‘Hey, kids!’ called an unmistakeably perky voice.

‘Goldfish!’ Noel cried in delight before we could even see it.

The Goldfish came swimming over the heads of the remaining Morrors, with Thsaaa hurrying along behind it.

‘You’re OK!’ it said. It showered us with sparkles. ‘I’m so proud of you guys! Doesn’t that just show you what teamwork can do?’

‘…Well, teamwork, flamethrowers and energy torpedoes, yes,’ Josephine said.

‘They fixed you!’ Noel said, reaching up to hug it.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Noel!’ said the Goldfish, with that faint edge to its perkiness that meant it was in fact profoundly cross. ‘These pesky Morrors! You can’t expect them to fix anything. Not properly, anyway!’

‘Why? What’s wrong with you?’

It still looked rather a mess, of course. There was no light behind its right eye, which had been stuck clumsily back into place with glue, and it still had all its scrapes and dents. But it was flying and talking.

‘They took out your zapper, didn’t they,’ said Josephine.

Carl burst into tactless laughter. The Goldfish’s eyes flashed red, but indeed, nothing happened.

‘We could not let it fly around armed,’ said Thsaaa. ‘It tried to attack us the moment it was reactivated.’

‘Look, I know it must be very confusing for you, Goldfish, but a lot of things happened while you were… deactivated, and now us and the Morrors are kind of on the same side,’ I said.

‘It’s more of an informal truce,’ said Josephine.

‘And now you can’t make us do history,’ said Carl, who hadn’t stopped laughing.

The Goldfish went into a massive sulk and stopped talking to everybody.

‘I’m sorry it’s being so rude,’ said Noel to Thsaaa. ‘Thanks so much for fixing it.’

Thsaaa flared their tentacles dismissively. ‘It is really a quite primitive device,’ they said. ‘It was simple to repair.’

Josephine cocked her head sceptically. ‘Did you actually do it yourself ?’

Thsaaa shuffled and went slightly yellow. ‘Well… no. I got a grown-up to do it.’

‘Thsaaa!’ called Flath, rippling green and peach and gesturing. ‘Athwara sel lamarath-te!’ And Warth-raaa beckoned to us again, with the same colours.

‘Just a minute,’ I called.

‘I have to go,’ said Thsaaa hurriedly. ‘But first, I want to… Josephine. Please take this.’

Thsaaa was holding out the Paralashath.

Josephine went very still and wide-eyed. In fact, we all did.

‘Because it may be a while before we see each other again, but when we do, I hope neither of us will be prisoners of war,’ said Thsaaa. ‘And because of the music.’

Josephine stared at the Paralashath, which was pulsing softly with the same colours streaming across Thsaaa’s skin. Then she reached into her bag and fished out her harmonica. ‘Then you take this,’ she said. ‘For the same reasons.’

Thsaaa took the harmonica and Josephine hugged the Paralashath to her chest.

‘Thank you,’ said Thsaaa, turning solemnest blue as Flath led them away.

‘You gave them your harmonica?’ I hissed at Josephine incredulously, as Warth-raaa herded us off towards an invisible ship.

Josephine threw me one of her withering looks. ‘Yes. I gave them my harmonica. I didn’t give away my ability to buy a new one.’

The Morror ship swooped out of the cavern and into the lavender sky. Sunlight streamed in through the windows and glittered in the bands of colour around us on the walls. The wild empty ground plunged away as if we’d dropped it. We could see the dust left by the Vshomu, huge clouds of it now, clogging the sky. But they hadn’t ruined Mars yet. We rose higher, until we could see the green and red patterns of the tundra, then the shape of the new continents in the bright new sea. And somehow, despite the fact that we’d been clamouring to get off Mars for hours, it felt shocking to be actually doing it. I suppose it should feel shocking. Jumping on and off planets is a shocking thing to ever be able to do.

Mars shone and shrank until we tore free of the purple sky and it hung in the dark like a pendant made of copper and amethyst and jade and gold.

‘Beautiful,’ whispered Josephine, pressed against the window.

Her breath frosted in the air. The spaceship was just as colourful as the one we’d found on Tharsis, but even colder. The Morrors had seen this problem coming. You might have hoped this meant they would have some advanced, alien-y way of dealing with the problem of transporting easily chilled humans, but in fact they just piled a few wardrobes’-worth of spare clothes on to us and left us to huddle in a corner.

We did a lot of huddling on that voyage. Occasionally we’d try to warm up by jumping on the spot, as the ship was too small and the situation too urgent for a decent round of the Getting Around as Much of the Spaceship as Possible Without Touching the Floor game. And we had quite a lot of time to worry and feel the cold. The ship was faster than the Mélisande had been, but not that much faster: as in, we were going to get back to Earth in about three days rather than a week, but we weren’t going to flit back magically in twenty seconds, which is of course what we wanted to do. And there weren’t proper beds for us; the Morrors roosted in alcoves to rest and so we had to stay huddled in the pile of clothes on the floor to sleep. Camping on an alien spaceship is weird and going to the loo is even weirder, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

I missed Thsaaa. The grown-up Morrors were just like grown-up humans in that they talked almost exclusively to other grown-ups (Dr Muldoon, in this case) and didn’t tell us what was going on. Swarasee-ee did at least show us how to make the Paralashath work as a heater (though we couldn’t have it on all the time because the Morrors got too hot) and Josephine tried to ask them about the people who made it and what it meant.

‘I’m sorry, I have never been very interested in Paralashath as an art form,’ said Swarasee-ee, politely.

Unfortunately, once we’d been in space a few hours, the Goldfish stopped sulking.

‘Hmm, looks like we’ve got a lot of time on our hands,’ it said. ‘What shall we do?’

‘Oh, no,’ I said.

‘How about… biology? Alice loves biology, don’t you, Alice?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, too bad,’ said the Goldfish. ‘Let’s talk about BIOMASS.’

We cast despairing looks at Dr Muldoon, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground, wrapped in five layers of Morror kilts, and jabbing important things into Josephine’s tablet.

‘As an EDF officer, I’m ordering you to stop this,’ Dr Muldoon told the Goldfish.

The Goldfish didn’t care. It started projecting the carbon cycle all over the place.

‘Look at them,’ said Dr Muldoon. ‘They’re frozen and traumatised and they should all be in hospital.’

‘And they’re very behind with the syllabus!’ the Goldfish panicked.

‘This time, you really can’t make us do it,’ said Carl. ‘You can’t zap us.’

For a few seconds the Goldfish seethed silently in the air, eyes flashing red.

Then it started buzzing.

‘Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt,’ it went at the volume of a decent-sized road drill. ‘Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.’

‘Are you malfunctioning?’

‘Nope,’ said the Goldfish airily and carried on buzzing.

‘Aha. I see what you’re doing,’ said Carl. ‘It won’t work.’

‘Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt,’ said the Goldfish.

‘Aaaaargh,’ said Warth-raaa, waving their tentacles in frustration. ‘Maaaaaake it stoooop, or we will breeeeeaak it!’

The Goldfish stubbornly kept buzzing.

‘Oh, FINE!’ cried Josephine. ‘But I’m not borrowing back my tablet from Dr Muldoon, she’s doing important work!’

The Goldfish practically evaporated in the force of its own smugness. Until Carl decided to liven things up by pretending to pass out.

And then we saw a pale bluish star that was brighter than the others, and it grew in the dark, like a flower.

‘Oh,’ I said, feeling tears come into my eyes. I wonder if maybe I’d been afraid it wouldn’t still be there.

‘Yes,’ said Swarasee-ee. ‘Home.’

We watched Earth in silence. From this distance it didn’t look as if it could possibly have any problems at all.

‘Swarasee-ee,’ said Josephine. ‘Thsaaa said something about humans stopping you building the Vuhalimath-laa. What is that?’

Swarasee-ee went yellow, purple and black, and said something to Warth-raaa, whose tendrils swished crossly. ‘Thsaaa should not have spoken about that.’

‘They shouldn’t have spoken about lots of things,’ said Josephine, ‘and if they hadn’t you’d still be in the cave with the Vshomu on the way. Come on, it can’t make that much difference now.’

Swarasee-ee made a grumbling noise, and hesitated. Then they pointed. ‘That is the Vuhalimath-laa.’

For a moment I thought they were pointing at the planet itself. It made sense: maybe they just meant the humans were stopping them building a home. But then I made out the first, faint glitter of the web of reflector discs that enveloped the world.

‘Oh, is that all?’ I said. ‘Just the light-shield. The big fridge you’ve shoved Earth in.’

‘“Big fridge”…? Ah, I understand. That is not all it is for,’ said Swarasee-ee. ‘If it was complete, it would be the same as our gowns, or our ships.’

‘An invisibility shield for a whole planet,’ said Dr Muldoon, making frantic notes on her tablet. ‘It could hide us from the Vshomu?’

‘That was always our hope,’ said Swarasee-ee sadly. ‘Of course, we prayed it would never be needed. We thought we had run far enough.’

We fell silent again. You could have stared at the approaching Earth, hypnotised, for hours.

Except that just then a squadron of Flarehawks charged out from inside the Vuhalimath-laa and started trying to blow us up.

A torpedo skimmed past our port bow. The ship shuddered ominously.

‘Uncloak!’ screamed Dr Muldoon. ‘Go visible! We have to show them we’re not a threat!’

‘It is impossible,’ said Swarasee-ee, frantically working the controls. ‘The invisibility of our ships is inherent; it does not turn off.’

‘Open a channel! Let me talk to them!’

Swarasee-ee pulled at some leaf-like controls and an unpleasantly goopy, web-like device descended from the ceiling. Swarasee-ee spared two tentacles to fix this over Dr Muldoon’s head, while still steering the ship with the other four. ‘Speak.’

Warth-raaa said something urgent and went indigo and neon orange.

‘This is Dr Valerie Muldoon, I’m a – for God’s sake, don’t fire at them!’

But Warth-raaa did fire at them. In fairness, the humans had just fired at us. And it wasn’t just us, of course, there was a whole fleet of invisible Morror vessels behind us bristling with shockrays and that was all you needed to put together a perfectly respectable space-battle.

The ship dived. What with the artificial gravity we couldn’t really feel the motion, but we could see it on the viewport and that was an excellent way to make yourself space-sick, as if we hadn’t already got enough problems.

‘Can anyone hear me? I’m an EDF officer aboard a Morror vessel –’ shouted Dr Muldoon as something in the ship blared a warning.

The Flarehawks plunged after us, graceful as homicidal ballet dancers, flinging torpedoes like ribbons of light.

‘Oh, come on, we can’t get killed by our own side!’ groaned Carl, wrapping his arms round Noel.

Then there was a thud, and all the lights went out.

We went flying.

It took me a second – in which time some cold-blue backup lights had come up, and I bounced from wall to wall to ceiling and into the Goldfish – to work out that the torpedo must have damaged whatever made the artificial gravity work. I’d been flung into the air, and at first my brain couldn’t catch up with why I was staying there.

I grabbed the edge of one of the Morrors’ sleeping niches to anchor myself and looked around.

‘Dr Muldoon!’ shouted Josephine, launching off the floor to reach for her.

Dr Muldoon was floating limply just below the ceiling. Spherical drops of blood hung in the air like tiny planets.

The Morrors, having more limbs to hang on to things with, were doing rather better than we were: Warth-raaa had scrambled their way back to the helm and was doing their best to steer us out of danger; Swarasee-ee had opened a panel in the floor and was wrangling with the workings of the ship.

I heard Dr Muldoon groan softly. I kicked off the wall and swam through the air, bounced into the ceiling and crawled my way along it towards the helm. I dragged the goopy web-thing over my head.

‘Hello? Hello!’ I said, floating there above the control panel, watching the Flarehawk squadron-leader lunge straight towards us, the blue glow of the Earth framing it like a halo. ‘We’re human passengers on the Morror ship; please stop torpedoing us. We’ve got very important news and we swear we’re not trying to shoot anyone. We need safe passage to Earth.’

I found I’d screwed up my eyes towards the end of this in anticipation of being exploded. Nothing happened. I opened them a crack.

The Flarehawk had stopped moving. It didn’t fire. It seemed so close that, if we hadn’t been invisible, the pilot could almost have looked inside and seen me.

‘Oh, God,’ whispered a voice, over the channel. ‘Alice?’

Swarasee-ee fixed the gravity. I might have dropped to the ground even if they hadn’t. Everyone except the Goldfish landed in a series of thuds and groans.

I pulled myself up to my knees and steadied the communicator on my head. I breathed, ‘Mum?’