Mars Evacuees Read online

  But when things quietened down a bit I took a plate of the chocolate gludge and wandered around listening for the sound of a doleful harmonica until I found Josephine, in the rhubarb patch this time.

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you come out and play that? We need some music.’

  She looked dubious, but followed me over to the sports field where a hundred or so assorted kids were now sprawled in a daze of disbelief and accomplishment, and she never stopped playing, just gradually shifted the tone to something more cheerful. ‘Wooo, Josephine!’ yelled Kayleigh, lazily raising an arm, and a lot of kids who normally weren’t sure what to make of Josephine gave her a round of applause. Josephine didn’t look up but smiled cautiously around the harmonica, and some of the other musical kids joined in. There weren’t many musical instruments at Beagle, because you weren’t allowed to take very much with you on the spaceship. But I guess the President of the EDF ’s nephew was a special case, because he had a guitar that he went and got, and there was a girl who said she was a drummer in a band back on Earth and she started whacking plastic chairs because we didn’t have any drums. Kayleigh started dancing, and everyone joined in, and that was the nicest part of the adult-free phase on Beagle Base.

  By the third day, a few things had got slightly on fire.

  I woke up some time around noon in the stationery cupboard. Christa and her boyfriend Leon had taken over our dorm the night before, though we’d at least managed to rescue our duvets. It wasn’t so bad. It was a big cupboard and there is something to be said for having a ready supply of star-shaped stickers.

  Getting to sleep for as long as you liked, provided you could find a quiet place to do it, was a novelty on Beagle Base, and I only woke up because Josephine was shaking me awake.

  ‘We’ve got to move,’ she said. ‘Gavin knows we’re in here.’

  ‘So what?’ I groaned, burrowing under the shelf with the highlighter pens and the Blu-Tack.

  ‘Because he and his friends are coming and it’s bad news,’ insisted Josephine, yanking at my arm, so I had to roll out and look up at her. Neither Colonel Cleaver nor Miss Clatworthy would have approved of her current appearance: she now had her red scarf tied round her forehead like a pirate, hair erupting out from underneath in a distinctly non-military way. She also had a grim expression and a bloody lip.

  ‘WHAT THE HELL,’ I said when I saw it, sitting up at once.

  ‘Gavin,’ said Josephine.

  ‘Wha–?’

  ‘Because he could,’ explained Josephine, in a maddeningly patient way, apparently finding me very dense. ‘And he doesn’t like you very much either.’

  ‘Right,’ I growled, not quite sure whether to concentrate on the first-aid kit that I was sure I’d seen somewhere, or on the dreadful things that ought to happen to Gavin. He might be fairly horrible, and had some horrible friends, and the same went for Christa and her lot, but it wasn’t as if we were completely defenceless and I didn’t see that we should let anyone push us around any more: getting kicked out of our room was quite enough of that. Carl would be on our side, and he was more or less the king of a sizeable faction of kids . . .

  ‘Civil war of some kind is inevitable, let’s not precipitate it, shall we?’ said Josephine, apparently reading my mind. She grabbed her bag from the floor and threw a handful of highlighter pens into it, just because they were there. ‘We need to talk about what we’re going to do.’

  Regretfully, I let her lug me out of the cupboard.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said.

  Josephine didn’t, just dragged me down a passage of empty classrooms. Sure enough I could hear some unpleasant laughter approaching that sounded a lot like Gavin and Lilly’s gang.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. Josephine hurried me through an unexpected outer door into the wind and dust of Mars, and I was glad that I was still dragging a duvet with me and threw it over my shoulders like an awkward cloak.

  ‘Up there,’ she said grimly, pointing across the scrubby ground at the communications tower, a great spindly cone of metal latticework blurred by the sandy wind. There was a drum-shaped cabin, presumably some kind of control or maintenance station, just below the final length of the antenna. And that was evidently where Josephine was headed, for in a few good running leaps she was over at the tower and climbing up hand over hand with a determination that would have made Colonel Cleaver proud.

  I seemed to have got so much into the habit of running after her that I was soon following, even while I was saying: ‘I am not holing up with you in some bird’s nest on top of a pole.’

  ‘It’s only temporary,’ said Josephine. ‘I can’t get any of the comms working, but we can keep trying to get a message to Zond Station, and we’ll at least have the high ground while we work out what we’re doing. And no one else is going to kick us out! No one wants to stay there.’

  Well, I could at least agree with her on that much.

  ‘Look,’ I pleaded, ‘if you don’t want to have a fight with Gavin, then all right, but can’t we just . . . not do whatever it is you’re doing? Why don’t we stick with Carl’s lot –’

  ‘Carl’s lot,’ snorted Josephine derisively.

  ‘Well, we’ll be all right with them until the Colonel or . . . or somebody comes back. We’re already in as much trouble as we possibly can be. We might as well enjoy what time we’ve got. They were going to go down to the sea today anyway; we’re going to try and build a raft.’

  ‘Alice!’ cried Josephine. ‘What if being in trouble is the least of our problems? What if no one is coming?’

  We both stopped moving. She’d swung round and was staring down at me.

  ‘They wouldn’t just –’ I began.

  ‘Exactly! They wouldn’t just. They didn’t abandon us for fun. Don’t you think something’s happened to them? What if that thing happens to us?’

  I looked down at the ground. I had been having nervous thoughts about just how long the food would last and whether the garden robots would keep on growing it; I just hadn’t wanted to concentrate on them. I mumbled, ‘I guess we ought to get a bit more organised.’

  Josephine sighed so enormously she must have used up most of what little oxygen was in the air. ‘You’re not going to be able to organise Gavin and Lilly into being productive members of a self-sufficient little farming community.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ I said. ‘The channels to Earth’ll open up again automatically in another couple of months; we’ve only got to hang on till then. What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Leaving and going for help, obviously,’ said Josephine witheringly.

  ‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but we’re on Mars,’ I said. ‘We can’t exactly pop round to the neighbours for a cup of sugar.’

  ‘That’s why we need to work out how to get into the hangar,’ said Josephine.

  I forgot about saving oxygen and made a long alarming noise that was sort of laughing and groaning at the same time. ‘You want us to steal a spaceship,’ I translated.

  ‘Only a little one,’ said Josephine. ‘I haven’t worked out how to get past the locks yet, but we’ll think of something. Obviously you’ll have to do most of the piloting.’

  I dropped my forehead against the cold metal of the tower. ‘Please tell me you’re not thinking I can fly you back to Earth.’

  ‘Well, probably not, but –’

  ‘Probably!’

  ‘I should think you’re easily good enough to get us to Zond Station, that’s only three thousand miles –’

  ‘Three thousand miles!’

  ‘Stop repeating everything. Zond’s a proper military base: we’ll tell them what’s happened – we’ll find out what’s gone wrong! They’ll either be able to sort it out or they can fly back to Earth before the channels open and at least whatever else happens we’ll be away from all of this.’ She waved a hand down at Beagle Base. Then she said more quietly, ‘And I want to know what happened to Dr Muldoon.’

  �
��This is insane, Josephine,’ I moaned.

  ‘There isn’t a risk-free option! Sitting around here hoping it all works out is the most dangerous thing we can do.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know that,’ I shouted. ‘I think crashing a Flarehawk in the middle of the Terra Sabaea sounds pretty dangerous!’

  ‘Alice,’ said Josephine more quietly than before. ‘People are going to start killing each other.’

  There was a long pause. The tower hummed in the wind.

  ‘Now come on,’ she urged me at last, and started to climb again.

  After a moment I started climbing too – but the other way, down to the ground. She called my name, but she didn’t stop going her way, and I didn’t stop going mine.

  11

  Over in the garden dome, Carl’s lot, which meant about fifty kids, mostly younger than thirteen, had built a camp in the middle of the sports field with mattresses and crash mats and a few tents made out of blankets and gym horses and things. It was a bit smellier and messier than it had been the day before, but it still looked festive, like some sort of carnival, what with the flags and paintings people had made. But I did notice there didn’t seem to be as many kids around any more, and there was a row going on between the ones who were left.

  ‘We can’t sit on our bums here forever, where’s the fun in that?’ Carl was saying.

  ‘It’s a bad idea to go anywhere,’ said a boy called Ramesh. ‘We’ve got to protect our territory.’

  ‘We’re not dogs,’ objected Carl, who was looking much more harassed than I’d ever seen him.

  ‘I just don’t think Christa and Leon were kidding about wanting us out of the dome,’ said Ramesh.

  ‘Well, so we’ll leave guards,’ said Carl.

  But though several people seemed not to want to go down to the sea, nobody wanted to sit around and be a guard either, especially since guarding anything implies you’re expecting to be attacked.

  ‘Let’s draw lots,’ Carl proposed.

  ‘I notice you’re not volunteering to stay,’ grumbled a girl called Mei.

  ‘This whole thing with the boat is my idea!’ cried Carl in exasperation. But he still grinned when he saw me. ‘Oh hey, Alice, welcome to Carltopia,’ he greeted me. ‘You and Jo not joined at the hip after all then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call her that where she can hear you,’ I said. And I suppose I should have sat down for a sensible discussion about what we were going to do about Christa and Leon and Gavin and Lilly and all the horribleness that was brewing at Beagle Base. But I still couldn’t really believe things could be all that bad after just three days without adults and robots, and after all, nothing dramatically dreadful was happening right there where I could see it. I didn’t want to be thinking about territory and factions and guarding things any more than Carl did, so I said, ‘What about building this boat?’

  ‘Good question. What about it?’ he asked the rest of the assembled kids. ‘Because I’m going to the sea. The rest of you can do what you like.’

  So it started out as a bad-tempered, muddled expedition, without anyone making any decisions about guarding the camp and people just going or staying depending on what they felt like. And those of us who were going fought quite a lot about what we would make the raft out of and whether or not we should take sheets to make a sail with.

  Noel said something about driftwood, but of course there wasn’t any; the seas of Mars were too new for that. And though there must have been some hammers and nails and things in Beagle Base somewhere, we hadn’t found them. But we did find plenty of empty barrels near the hangar that had once held liquid oxygen, and we had a table and some strips of plastic panelling that had been torn off a wall at some point in all the excitement. Then Carl found some tough plastic-covered string stuff in the garden and decided we were ready.

  ‘Cavemen could make boats without nailing things,’ he said to the slightly demoralised band he was leading across the Martian countryside. ‘And so can we.’

  Somewhere between Beagle Base and the sea, the faraway little sun came out from behind a purple-grey sheet of cloud. The wind had died down and though it wasn’t warm, it wasn’t freezing either. Cydonia was having its spring. Mei squeaked, ‘Rabbits!’ and Noel corrected, ‘Arctic hares!’ And whatever you called them, they were white and fluffy and adorable and hopping about the Martian tundra.

  ‘They’re there so their droppings add biomass to the soil,’ said Noel happily.

  ‘And so we can hunt them,’ said Carl.

  ‘Oh my God, I want one,’ said Mei, and we all agreed catching a baby one and keeping it as a pet would be the next order of business.

  By the time we dragged our raw materials to the dunes we were all much more cheerful, and the actual raft-building was just as lovely as I’d hoped it would be.

  ‘WE ARE THE FIRST MARINERS OF MARS!’ yelled Carl, into the silent lavender sky, as soon as the amethyst sea opened before us. And I’ve never read about any of the earlier scientists or explorers using boats on the Borealian or the Utopian seas, so he was probably right. We dropped everything and ran down to the water to start kicking it about and shrieking at how cold it was. I found tiny white flowers growing among the red rocks and thought it was wonderful that even with a gigantic war going on, humans could make flowers grow on a planet that used to be dead.

  Obviously, when we lashed the table to the barrels with the string, the resulting raft was not particularly seaworthy and it fell apart before very long, but it did last until everyone had had a go on it, and when I was lying on the tabletop, looking up at the passing snow geese, with Carl using a cane from the gardens to punt through the shallows, I thought that being kids alone with an entire kids’-sized planet to play with really wasn’t so bad.

  Then I wondered what Josephine was doing and that made me feel uneasy and a bit guilty, so I tried to stop.

  The string holding the raft together came undone again and no one felt like mending it this time and we left its ruins on the shore as a monument to the expedition. Even then, although we’d all started shivering a bit and Mei said her hands had gone numb even inside her gloves, we weren’t in a great rush to head back. No one wanted to say that we were scared we wouldn’t like what we’d find. And anyway, Noel wouldn’t let us leave until everyone had had a look for his flying worm-thing, but we didn’t find any sign of it.

  But eventually it started to get dark. We were all very cold and wet, despite the fact that our suits and boots were supposed to be waterproof, and we were also a little bit oxygen-deprived, which might have been why we got slightly lost on the way back to Beagle Base. It didn’t last all that long but it was enough to spook us, and even when we did see the domes rise over the horizon at last, the relief felt unsatisfactory and achy because we weren’t really home, everything was sort of a mess, and we didn’t actually know what would be going on inside.

  I looked up at the communications tower. Josephine couldn’t really be planning to spend the night up there, could she? I decided I’d look for a decent spot on a crash mat somewhere in ‘Carltopia’ and get something to eat and then try to find her, though I really didn’t fancy climbing the mast in the dark.

  The sliding doors opened for us the same as ever and we got a nice head-clearing rush of oxygen and warmth.

  Then we smelled the smoke.

  In the middle of the sports field, Carltopia was a wreck – all torn apart and scattered, and to make a point someone had set fire to one of the crash mats, which was pouring awful-smelling smoke everywhere.

  Carl gave a yell of indignation and rushed straight for his ruined kingdom, and at that a lot of unfriendly-looking kids appeared, namely Gavin and Lilly and plenty of others, all of whom seemed remarkably much bigger than us, though that might have been the effect of the chair legs – and the limbs of dismembered garden robots – that they were carrying as weapons.

  ‘Hey, idiots,’ said Gavin. ‘New rules. None of you lot gets to come in the dome any more.’

/>   ‘Yeah, that’s totally something you get to decide,’ scoffed Carl. But he sounded uncertain.

  ‘Leon made a list; you’re not on it,’ said Gavin.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, and they all sniggered. ‘Lilly – Lilly, let’s just go and talk, OK?’

  But she looked at me as if she didn’t know who I was, as if something awful had got inside her and eaten away the person I’d thought so normal-looking the first day we arrived on Mars. She didn’t look normal any more, none of them did. They all had an expression I’d never seen before, but it was a little like the look on Christa’s and Leon’s faces when they were hitting that little robot until they broke it – flushed and breathless like that, but much wilder and more desperate, and I wasn’t sure they could stop now even if they wanted to.

  ‘Lilly,’ I tried again, backing away as the gang advanced.

  ‘Wait, not yet,’ said Lilly to Gavin, and for a moment I thought it might be all right. But then she said, ‘Get their tablets and stuff off them first.’

  The next part wasn’t pleasant. By the time it was finished I was missing my tablet along with a clump of my hair, and my shin was bleeding where Lilly had hit me with a robot’s leg. I would have thought Carl would stay and fight like anything, but when at last Lilly shoved me back and the gang laughed and withdrew, Carl and Noel had already vanished. Mei and the rest were scattering too.

  I limped after them at first. But then we passed the communications tower and I broke off and called, ‘Josephine!’ up at it.

  It came out sounding feeble. The wind was picking up again and I didn’t think she’d have heard. I climbed a few experimental steps up the frame but my leg hurt such a lot and I couldn’t even see the top of the tower. I mostly thought Josephine probably wasn’t up there anyway. So I came back down.

  Mei and everyone else had disappeared into the dark by this time. I supposed the sensible thing would be to camp in the wheat dome or the soya dome and hope things looked better in the morning. Some kids were sleeping there already and I knew it was all right, if kind of scratchy. Or maybe someone had managed to get into the grown-ups’ block and then we could really be comfortable, at least until Leon and Christa kicked us out of there too. But had they really taken over the whole centre of the base – the ring with its segments, as well as the dome? And what about the kitchen and the food storage buildings?