Mars Evacuees

2

What I was supposed to do after seeing Miss Clatworthy was go to the main hall with everyone else to sing the school song a few hundred times and listen to encouraging speeches and broadcasts from the EEC President and so on. But I didn’t feel like going and, in the circumstances, I thought there was a limit to how much trouble I could get into if I dodged it. So I went up on to the school battlements – yes, there were battlements – and read Mum’s letter.

I sighed a little bit. It’s not that I wanted Mum to be unhappy, of course, but I couldn’t help wishing she didn’t enjoy the war quite so much. She had to be one of the only people in the world who did.

I don’t want to give you the wrong idea about her. If, as she merrily swooped around the planet terrorising the invading aliens, some sort of genie with time-travelling powers had whooshed up in front of her and said, ‘Look, Stephanie Dare. Say the word and the war will NEVER HAVE HAPPENED and everyone who got killed in it will still be alive and your daughter will actually get to live with you and everything will be FINE – but you will have to be a bank teller again and never get to charge around in a spaceship blowing things up, or be on a poster or anything’ – then of course she would have said, ‘Go ahead.’ Because she is a good person. But some people never find out what they want to do, or what they’re good at. And even if my mum had somehow worked out, when sitting behind her counter at the bank, that what she really wanted to do and was really good at was being an alien-fighting, flying-ace space pilot, you can see how the knowledge would not have been all that useful to her.

I hoped Dad at least knew where I was going. He was an engineer on a submarine laying mines under the ice cap, so there wouldn’t be a letter from him for a while. I hadn’t seen him for even longer than I hadn’t seen Mum, but apart from some interest in getting to see the various odd creatures that the Morrors had released into the oceans, he had never given the impression he was having a nice time.

The sea was thick with clots of ice, a few loose bergs drifting along in the distance. I could just hear the purr of wings from a flight of heatships hovering low over the North Sea, and when I looked I could see them; the giant round lamps fixed underneath them glowing cherry-red through the plumes of steam from the water. They were crawling northwards, trying to slow the march of the ice, and they left curling streaks of clear dark water behind them. But the air was stinging cold on my face and ahead of those few ships there was so much white.

It was a good time in Earth’s history to be a polar bear. Unless the rumours were true about the Morrors eating them.

I did have some friends at Muckling Abbot, though I might have given you the impression I hadn’t. And it was just now hitting me that I wouldn’t be seeing them again for years, if at all.

I found Dot and Lizzy in our dorm. They’d had the same idea as me about skipping assembly and were sitting on the beds and watching videos on their tablets.

‘Are you OK?’ asked Lizzy. ‘What did Miss Clatworthy want?’

‘She wasn’t ghastly, was she?’ asked Dot, who said things like ‘ghastly’ on account of being just as posh as Annabel and Finty, without ever being so snotty about it.

‘It was just army stuff,’ I said, looking at the floor and the ceiling and the video of patriotic cats rather than at my friends’ faces.

‘Do you at least know where you’re going yet?’ asked Dot.

‘Oh… haha, sort of…’ I said. ‘What about you?’

Lizzy snorted glumly. ‘In the government programme. Staying with some random family in Cornwall.’

‘Cornwall’s supposed to be nice!’ I said rather too brightly.

‘Still don’t know for sure,’ said Dot. ‘But I’ve got cousins in the south of France.’

‘Oh, that’s brilliant!’ I said. ‘It’s still even sunny there, isn’t it?’

‘Sometimes. Supposedly. But Alice, where are you being evacuated?’

So I told them. There was a pause and then they both started being nice about it.

‘Well, that’s… cool,’ said Lizzy. ‘You’ll probably see some really interesting stuff.’

‘And the robots,’ Dot said.

‘Yeah, the robots,’ I said. ‘But it won’t be that great being stuck on a rock with hardly any oxygen and no way home. They’re using us for an experiment, really.’ Which was true but I said it because I didn’t want it to seem like this amazing special treatment I was getting and they weren’t. But that didn’t work very well because it was amazing special treatment I was getting and they weren’t. Although I would have preferred to go to the south of France.

Dot and Lizzy said they wouldn’t tell anyone and I don’t think they did. But it didn’t really make much difference, because the next morning a lot of buses turned up at the school gates and it became rather conspicuous that I was not getting on to any of them. People started looking at me in a suspicious and accusing way and I could hardly stand it. Of course, they guessed something was up and that it must be something to do with who my mum was. And I almost felt glad Annabel Stoker and Finty Carmichael used to give me a hard time, because in the end the EEC thought my life was worth more than theirs and it wasn’t fair. And so they’d kind of been right about me all along.

Finally the last bus pulled away and everyone had gone, except for the people boarding up the windows and Mrs Skilton, who seemed to be the person who’d got stuck with me until someone from the EEC came. Mrs Skilton was my favourite dinner lady, not because she was nice but because she was gloomy and dour and silent and didn’t prance around the dining hall chirruping about how everyone who did not eat up every scrap was basically evil because think of the starving Canadians.

Mrs Skilton grunted with vague contempt – either for me or for the universe in general – and then stood there on the terrace smoking a cigarette and glowering balefully into the icy distance. Which was pretty much what I’d been doing the day before on the battlements, so I didn’t judge and wandered off on my own, and she didn’t stop me.

It was sort of interesting seeing Muckling Abbot with no one in it, although lonely too, and I went into all the places I hadn’t been allowed before. I went into the staffroom and ate some biscuits I found there. I drew a little picture of the Earth on the wall in green biro with an arrow pointing to it and next to it I wrote, ‘ALICE DARE WAS HERE.’ And I wondered if anyone would ever find it or if the school would fall down under all the snow and ice before that happened.

Then Mrs Skilton bawled that the EEC man was here and I went down to the drive and there was a jeep painted in whitish-grey camouflage and a young soldier waiting for me.

Mrs Skilton dragged on her cigarette and announced fiercely, ‘I don’t hold with messing about on other planets,’ which rather took me aback, and then she grimaced in farewell and stomped off.

I got into the jeep and we drove away and I knew I’d never see Muckling Abbot again. And I never did.

The soldier’s name was Harris and amazingly he did not say a single thing about my mum and I quite liked him. He glanced back at Muckling Abbot’s icy towers and grinned and said, ‘Wow, my school was mainly portakabins,’ and I said my primary school in Peterborough had been much more like that too, but presumably on Mars it would be something else altogether.

‘So, you’ll be safe out of the fighting for four years,’ he said, when I’d finished explaining the new arrangements for my future.

‘Yes. Well. In theory.’ I tried not to think about all the various things that could go wrong between Lincolnshire and Mars. ‘It’s a privilege, I’m very lucky,’ I added dutifully.

‘But, in return, you have to join the army.’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though you’re twelve.’

‘Yes.’ It sounded awfully grim put like that, for all Miss Clatworthy’s cooing about how brilliant it was. ‘They’re only going to be training us,’ I said. ‘It’s just, we’ve got to start young so we can be this new wave of special fighters or whatever. I won’t be actually up against Morrors until I’m oh, at least sixteen.’

‘Hmm,’ said Harris, and made a face as if something smelled bad.

‘Everyone’s in the army,’ I said. ‘You’re in the army.’

‘I wasn’t when I was twelve. And I did have a choice.’

‘Well, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?’ I said. Because he was grown up.

This did not cheer Harris up particularly, so I asked him what he’d been doing in the war and he sighed and said he hadn’t been doing anything for a long time because he’d been hurt by Morror shockrays over Norway and had only just got better. ‘And after all that, look what they’ve got me doing. Ferrying little kids about.’

He smiled and I got the impression he was actually pretty pleased to be ferrying kids about, compared to some of the stuff he could have been up to.

We drove through a few little villages, some of which were completely abandoned to the cold, but some still busy and pretty with their snow-covered roofs, and except for the queues outside shops everything looked as if there was no war with aliens going on at all.

‘Still, seeing Mars, though,’ mused Harris, as if he’d been carrying on a debate about it in his head. ‘That’s something. Are you excited?’

I said, ‘Yes,’ automatically because life is generally easier if you answer such questions the way the person asking them obviously wants you to, but I really hadn’t been excited until then because I’d been busy thinking about Lizzy and Dot and Miss Clatworthy and Mum and about having to be in the army myself and other such considerations. Still it was a good question because it made me wonder for the first time if I could be excited. After all, I was going to be one of the first children living on another planet; anyone ought to be at least mildly excited about that. So I cheered up a bit and made an effort to stay that way.

We drove for about three hours or so, and eventually the snow thinned out and the landscape was mostly brown and grey instead of just white, and there were hundreds and hundreds of greenhouses growing food, and it was still pretty bleak but at least it was easier to play I Spy.

Then we got to an airbase in a valley somewhere in Suffolk, where there were planes and heatships and even some Auroras and Flarehawks standing around the muddy runways. And Harris said, ‘Well, have fun up there,’ and rather stupidly I said, ‘You too,’ and he smiled but his face was tight and he said he would be going north again soon and it would be good to see the rest of his squadron. But he didn’t look as if he expected it to be fun.

So he drove away and a lady led me into a rec room in one of the boxy buildings where there was a snooker table and a television and a games screen.

Through the rest of the afternoon other kids turned up looking dazed and lost, until by dinner time there were fourteen of us. There were a couple of little kids and a lot of teenagers, who monopolised the games screen and the TV, so I felt a bit stuck on my own and I thought, Oh God, is it going to be like this for the next four years? Because I didn’t know how many of us were going altogether.

But there was this girl called Kayleigh who was fifteen and very excited about everything in a slightly desperate way and she had multi-coloured hair and a bag full of all sorts of things she wasn’t meant to have. Most of it got taken off her later, but not before she and some of the other teenagers got fairly drunk after supper and Kayleigh had helped me dye pink streaks into my hair, which my mum probably wouldn’t have let me do and Muckling Abbot definitely wouldn’t. And that made me feel bold and intrepid and up for adventure. Well, relatively speaking, anyway.

So there was some unpleasantness when the soldiers found out what was going on and a corporal shouted at us for being so irresponsible and a disgrace to the Exo-Defence Force uniforms we were going to end up wearing, and after various people burst into tears because of that and other reasons, and when the boys and girls had been sorted back into their separate dormitories, we all went to sleep. And the next morning we were all packed on to a distressingly battered-looking plane and off we went to the middle of the Atlantic.

Kayleigh had cried a lot the night before, but she seemed to change mood very quickly and now she got everyone singing. And while endless cheery singalongs generally rather annoy me, I had to admit hers were better than the songs at Muckling Abbot.

They played some films on the flight but I was feeling too nervous to concentrate on them and so mainly I looked out the window a lot. Underneath the plane, the world turned green and then blue and it was the most colour I’d seen in ages. Even now I’m not exactly sure where we went, but I saw what had to be the coast of Africa rolling past all huge and golden, and once a scattering of islands. And I remembered my little green biro drawing on the wall in the Muckling Abbot staffroom and my heart started pounding too hard as I thought, But that’s where I’m from. And there’s so much I don’t know about it yet and what if I never come back.

At last we landed on a platform in the middle of the ocean like a small round metal island, maybe two hundred metres across. And crouching on this platform was a large spaceship shaped something like a stick insect with the name Mélisande on its bow. There were soldiers stationed around to stop people climbing on it, although nothing could stop the seagulls from perching all over it and pooing, which I thought was quite amusing because it made Kayleigh’s song almost prophetic.

Even with all the seagull poo, I thought it was an amazing place. There was no ice at all and the water and the sky were blue and sparkling and it was so warm.

Planes kept swooping down and dumping loads of children on the platform until there were about three hundred of us rattling around. There were some international games and sandwich-swapping, in the spirit of comradeship and standing united against a common foe. And there was also some international fighting, which was more in the spirit of history and tradition. But it was so sunny that after a while a lot of us just sprawled around on the painted steel, feeling completely dopey and blissful in the heat and really not wanting to go anywhere.

I was lying near the edge of the platform gazing dreamily at the glittery water, thinking that what I really wished I could do was go for a swim, when a pair of bare feet whisked right over my head and I looked up just in time to see someone leap up on to the barrier and go catapulting over it. It was too fast and the light was too bright for me to get a good look at this person, but I heard a yell like a kind of war cry and, a second later, an equally loud splash as he hit the water.

I jumped up, wondering if someone really objected to our looming Martian exile so much that he was prepared to drown himself over it. With several other kids and nearby alarmed crew members, I looked over the side. What I saw was a big fizzing patch of white bubbles, and in the middle of it a pair of legs in jeans was waving idly in the air. Then the legs tipped over with another splash and up came the head of a stubbly-haired boy about my age, who looked maybe Malaysian or Filipino or something. He bellowed: ‘EVERYONE COME IN, THE WATER’S AWESOME!’

He was Australian. He had an amazingly loud voice. I don’t know how there was even room for the lungs he must have had to produce that kind of noise. And all the crew had to react pretty quickly to stop about fifty of the nearest kids from doing exactly what he said and plunging into the water right then and there. And… well, I guess I might have been one of them. Although I did also think that kid was an idiot. I don’t know. I was torn.

So the platform crew were ordering us in their scariest military voices to get back from the edge while a forlorn little boy with tously hair was hopping about, clutching what must have been the older boy’s abandoned shirt and shoes and shouting, ‘Kuya…! Kuya…!’

And meanwhile the kid was happily turning another somersault and whooping and spitting spouts of water into the air until an extremely annoyed soldier stomped down a ladder to the ocean, jumped in after him and fished him out.

By the time the kid was sploshing across the deck, we were all lined up in our National Groups to stop us from acting on any more clever ideas. But I was still fairly close and honestly, I think even people in orbit could have seen that here was someone who wasn’t the least embarrassed at being hauled out in front of a couple of hundred people soaking wet with no shirt on. On the other hand the little boy clutching his shoes, who was now lined up with the other Australian kids, looked mortified.

The wet soldier turned the boy over to a sergeant who roared at him, ‘NAME?’

Even when the boy wasn’t actually yelling, his voice had a bit of a boom to it. He said, ‘Carl Dalisay,’ which was a little confusing to me because of the ‘Kuya’ thing.

‘You think you’re funny, do you, Dalisay?’

Carl Dalisay just gazed up at the sergeant with wide earnest eyes and said, ‘Come on! It’s my last chance to go for a swim on my own planet!’

The EDF people were all so angry I almost thought the sergeant might shoot Carl Dalisay right there as an example to the rest of us, and tell his family he unfortunately fell off the spaceship. But instead he just made him do push-ups, which Carl did, sploshily, while giggling the whole time.

After that he bounded over to the little kid, who was clearly his brother, and wrapped a damp arm round his head just to be annoying. The little one wriggled away and lamented, ‘Why’d ya have to do things like that, Kuya?’

‘Oh, what was going to happen? There was a ladder right there! I’m not a moron.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said the little kid. ‘And are there hammerhead sharks? A big metal beam under the water? You don’t know! And you’re in massive trouble!’

‘Yeah, well,’ Carl-or-Kuya said. ‘It was worth it.’

The little one sighed heavily and went off to try and feed a seagull.

Before any of us had really got our breath back from this incident, there was a cascade of noise from overhead – sonic boom after sonic boom – and people started pointing excitedly upwards, where sure enough a small flight of spacefighters had just punched through the atmosphere and were blazing down across the blue sky. And evidently they weren’t alone up there, because as they plunged they were wheeling and swooping and dodging and firing into what looked like a completely empty sky. Except that sometimes, just for a shaving of a second when they took a hit, you could see the outline of the Morror ships – U-shaped and transparent in the rays, flickering like ghosts. A Flarehawk looped backwards from a shockray blast. There was a mixture of cheers and screams from the kids on the platform, depending on how often they’d seen this sort of thing before.

In my case? Often enough that I didn’t make any noise. Not so often that my chest didn’t get tight either. Spaceship battles would be very pretty, if you could forget you might be about to watch someone die.

The EDF seemed to agree that it was time to get us off the planet. All the doors of the Mélisande sprang open and soldiers started hurrying us inside one National Group at a time, which meant Carl and the other Australians were soon on board but there was a lot of hanging about for those of us from countries down at the bottom of the alphabet like ‘United Kingdom’.

‘This is ridiculous! You are going to get us all killed!’ burst out a tall blonde girl in expensive sunglasses in the Swedish section. None of the EDF officers took any notice, and she subsided into complaining loudly to the few other Swedish kids.

At last I got jostled down an aisle and into a seat by a window, and at first I was too busy trying to look out to take in much about the inside of the ship. We could still hear the battle shrieking and booming, but no matter how uncomfortably I strained against my seat belt and pressed to the window I couldn’t see it, which somehow made it a lot more nerve-wracking and no one was cheering at all any more.

A trio of EDF officers assembled at the front of the cabin. ‘I’m Captain Mendez,’ said the man in the middle. ‘Everyone stay calm. You’re perfectly safe. The walls of this ship are strong enough to withstand any stray shockrays.’

He had a nice reassuring voice, but the effect was rather undermined by the crewwoman next to him nodding vigorously and adding, ‘Mostly strong enough.’

Forty or so hands went up at that, but no one seemed to be in the mood to be taking questions. Captain Mendez just scowled and said, ‘Thank you, Sergeant Kawahara,’ to the crewwoman and, ‘We’ll be leaving very shortly,’ to us and then he strode away again.

And yet we didn’t move. The windows flashed with the Morrors’ shockrays and we just sat there. I twisted around in my seat belt trying to see what the hold-up was. The Mélisande must have been some kind of luxury tourist liner before the war. It was all curved pearly surfaces and on the wall beside my head was a faded poster of a couple with champagne glasses in their hands, gazing soppily back at the Earth with the slogan ‘Archangel Planetary: Taking You to the Stars!’ But the shiny walls were lined with scars where the luxurious private cabins had been ripped out and sensible military fixtures had been bolted in. Now the ship was crammed with padded benches for both sitting and sleeping on. They were arranged in pairs with a table and a little curtain that could go around the two of you, and that was all the privacy you got.

But there wasn’t anyone on the bench opposite me.

Why wouldn’t there be someone on the bench opposite me?

The few crew members who seemed to be in charge of us kept stalking around looking tense with their communicators beeping all the time. I heard one of them whispering to another. ‘We’re just going to have to go without them!’

‘Who’s missing?’ Kayleigh was saying, a few seats back from me. ‘What’s happened to them? Have the Morrors got them?’

‘Come on, we have to move,’ yelled the angry Swedish girl from before.

Instead of actually talking to us, the EDF people let the ship do it. And apparently the ship’s idea of a useful contribution was to start playing twinkly music and waterfall noises. ‘Please relax and stay in your seats,’ crooned a soothing, automated voice. ‘Imagine a stream of healing energy flowing through you…’

Outside, something – one of our ships or one of theirs, we didn’t know – exploded. I was hurting the palms of my hands by digging my fingernails into them. I tried to remind myself that there was no particular reason the Morrors should bother with a passenger ship trying to LEAVE the planet.

Then there was a roaring sound very close that rattled everyone, but it was just an ordinary plane landing on the platform. All the crew’s communicators started beeping even more furiously and finally a door opened, and twenty kids ran up into the cabin, looking rather agitated to say the least.

Before they’d even sat down, the door had slammed itself shut and there was a whirr and a lurch as the spaceship’s legs retracted. And then we were moving, skimming low over the Atlantic: I looked out and saw it melt into a dark-blue blur. Already the artificial gravity was working against the drag of the natural stuff, which meant you didn’t fall about as much as you would have done otherwise but felt very odd. None of us was used to it and some people were sick into the bags provided. Luckily I don’t throw up very easily, but it made me feel as if I was being hit lightly but persistently all over with tablespoons.

And then we were beginning to climb. One of the new arrivals came staggering down the aisle and toppled into the seat opposite me, panting. ‘Hello,’ she said. To my surprise, she was English too.

‘Nice to meet you,’ I said, as we shot upwards into the flashing blue sky.