Mars Evacuees Read online

  I was getting extremely hungry, apart from anything else.

  What I decided I’d do was creep around the external doors and see how things looked, and if I could get in without being seen and find any food.

  And I did still have the idea that if it came to it, everyone else might start being sensible if I could just be sensible enough at them. I could find Kayleigh, I thought, or maybe Chinenye. Kayleigh wasn’t necessarily that sensible all the time but she was older and probably on my side and she had a lot of friends, and she had managed to get Gavin and Lilly to back down when we were all on the Mélisande. The scarier kids wouldn’t have things nearly so easy if all the reasonably nice people stuck together and looked after each other. Maybe the scarier kids would see that and they’d settle down and be vaguely normal.

  Although, if they didn’t, that did sound a bit like two rival gangs poised for something close to the civil war Josephine had predicted . . .

  I went back to the door Josephine had dragged me out through hours before, and after peering warily through the windows I put my hand on the sensor panel and went inside.

  No one was about. It felt so wonderfully warm after being outside. Finding a bathroom was equally welcome. Then I ran on tiptoe through Beagle Base, peeking round corners and through doors as I went.

  There was some kind of noisy fight going on in the garden dome, and while I hadn’t run into anyone unpleasant, I wasn’t finding the confident crew of nice people I’d been hoping for, either.

  In a classroom on Sarabhai Corridor, a group of girls were sitting on desks and chatting, but none of them was Kayleigh or Chinenye and I thought I’d seen at least a couple of them hanging out with Christa, so I didn’t talk to them. And though I did find nice, safe-looking hideaways in dorm rooms and laundry blocks, I kept thinking I didn’t fancy it on my own and that if anyone did find me there I’d be trapped.

  That made me think of the simulation deck, which I was pretty sure had a door of its own to the outside. I crept down the dark corridor, expecting the deck would probably be locked, but when I got close enough I saw someone had jammed the door open with a fire extinguisher. Without moving it, I poked my head through the gap and looked inside.

  I had the immediate impression of furtive whispers going quiet, so I called, ‘Um, hello? It’s just Alice.’

  Somebody shrieked, and Kayleigh scrambled out from behind a bank of seating. She looked dirty and red-eyed even before she hugged me and burst into tears.

  ‘I thought you were Christa or someone,’ she said. She started back to look at my injuries. ‘Oh my God, you poor thing. Are they looking for you?’

  ‘Shhh!’ hissed someone else from behind the seats.

  ‘Shhh!’ repeated Kayleigh to me unnecessarily, looking around with exaggerated caution, and we crept behind the seating, where Kayleigh and Chinenye and four others had made a kind of camp. It wasn’t a very good camp, just a pile of blankets and a few empty food wrappers, and the dim glow of a tablet for light, and a dismal unwashed smell in the air. Kayleigh looked pale and flinchy and Chinenye was curled in an exhausted ball with one of the Russian boys mechanically patting her hair.

  ‘I was looking for you,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ said Kayleigh, dragging her hands through her hair. ‘That’s nice. But you’re sure they don’t know where you are? We really can’t take any more trouble. Not after today.’

  I stared at her, feeling all my bruises start aching again. ‘Do you want me to go, then?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Kayleigh said, and she hugged me again and even tousled the pink bits she’d put in my hair. ‘Of course not. You can hide with us if you want. Alice can stay here, can’t she?’

  None of the others looked wildly enthusiastic, although

  Chinenye did manage to look up and sort of smile at me.

  ‘You’ll have to bring your own food, though,’ said one of the boys. ‘We haven’t got any.’

  ‘I was thinking of getting some food anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Oh God!’ said Kayleigh fretfully, twisting her fingers. ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Maybe you could come with me?’ I suggested. ‘Or someone else.’

  There was an awkward silence. Chinenye dropped her head back into the Russian boy’s lap. ‘We just can’t,’ she said, without opening her eyes. ‘We can’t go out again tonight. It’s not worth it.’

  ‘We think lying low here until the Colonel gets back is our best bet,’ Kayleigh explained.

  ‘Even if you starve?’ I said, beginning to get irritated with them all. They didn’t answer. ‘I was thinking we should start making plans for if nobody does come back.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that!’ Kayleigh said, starting to cry again. ‘They will. They have to.’

  I wondered if I’d somehow been imagining her as bigger than she was, because now she seemed sort of shrunken.

  ‘I’ll come back later,’ I told her. And then added, ‘Maybe,’ and I went back to the corridor. I’d get into the food store from outside, I decided. That would be safer, and then I’d take whatever I could find over to the wheat dome, and maybe somehow everything would look a bit better in the morning.

  I went back to the airlock. There was an oxygen pump there so I refilled my canister and put the mask on before I went outside.

  It was black and cloudy and I only had the glow of the dome to find my way by, but I managed to get into the food store beside the kitchens. I couldn’t find the lights at first, and a couple of larder robots whirred past my shoulder in the dark, carrying a tub of soybean oil over to a shelf, and I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from yelling out in shock.

  When I’d got my breath back, I collected some dried Smeat bars and fruit, a block of cheese, some noodles and a tub of chocolate gludge, and then a few slightly more random things that had survived the other kids’ raids, like a tub of hundreds and thousands and some tomato ketchup. I put everything in a wire crate I found in a rack, and carried it awkwardly outside and hid it behind one of the twisty pine trees near the Maggini entrance to the base. Even though I could lift such a lot in the low gravity, it was annoyingly bulky and the things inside kept sliding around, so it was too awkward to carry much further on my own.

  I should have gone straight to the wheat dome and got someone to help me carry everything. Unfortunately I decided I’d make another scouting trip and try and get some wipes and toothbrushes.

  I went back in through the food store and the kitchens. They were close to the Processing Chamber where we’d had our uniforms dispensed to us on the first day, and with a bit of luck I thought I might be able to make it and get something out of the machines. But this time, just as I was opening the door from the kitchen to Vogel Corridor, I heard someone coming.

  All the internal doors on Beagle Base were old-fashioned ones with hinges and door handles like back at Muckling Abbot, so that no one got stuck if there was ever a power cut. It was only the doors to the airlocks and the outside that slid open and shut. I drew back into the kitchen, and the door clicked.

  ‘What’s that?’ said a girl’s voice.

  ‘Just one of the kitchen robots,’ said a boy.

  ‘No, it wasn’t. It’s one of those kids trying to hide. Come on.’ Their footsteps sped up.

  It was Christa and Leon, wanting a snack, I supposed.

  I retreated further into the kitchen in the beginnings of a panic. I was sure they were coming inside, but there wasn’t time to run back through the food store. I decided I didn’t want to be found hiding in a cupboard, so I set my shoulders, pushed the door open and walked out. ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t take a hint, do you,’ said Christa.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I said reasonably. ‘I know we’ve never got on that well, but things are different now. We’ve got to cooperate. We don’t know if the grown-ups are even coming back.’

  ‘We’re the grown-ups now,’ said Leon. ‘And you’d better learn to do as you’re told.’


  ‘We need to at least work out how we’re going to organise the food,’ I pleaded, backing away as they came closer. Not that I meant to be pleading, but pleading seemed to be what came out. ‘We’ve got to make sure the wheat and soy and everything gets harvested. We don’t even know how long the robots will keep going or how to fix them if they break and if this goes on for weeks people could starve.’

  Leon grabbed my arm and dragged me down Vogel Corridor towards the garden dome. It was horrible how easy it was for him, that I was fighting as hard as I could and it didn’t really do a thing. I’d had all that training to toughen me up. But so had he.

  At this point Lilly and Gavin and all their gang came running to see what the noise was about, and they brought their chair legs and bits of robots.

  ‘Hey, Lilly?’ shouted Christa. ‘Isn’t this a friend of yours?’

  I did manage at this point to kick Leon in the knee as hard as I could. And he let me go – by throwing me towards Gavin and Lilly, and what with the gravity I went flying a scarily long way down the passage, even if I didn’t land as hard as I would have on Earth.

  This time, when they started hitting and kicking me, it was even worse than before, in that for a while I ended up on the floor with my arms over my head thinking about what Josephine had said about people are going to start killing each other. But it didn’t go on that long, I suppose, although it felt like it, and when they backed off I was not dead. They did not stop, there, though. I scrambled up and tried to break away and Lilly and Gavin laughed at me for running, but Leon grabbed me and said, ‘No, no, you wanted to get in, didn’t you?’

  He grabbed me again, just as easily as before. He hauled me a way down the passage and pulled out an old scaffolding pole or something jammed into the frame of a door, and he flung me inside a dark classroom. I could hear them all laughing outside as they wedged the pole back in place to hold the door shut.

  The classroom was a mess, all tumbled desks and chairs and burned gym mats someone had thrown in there. Not that I spent much time looking at any of that. I did what people trapped in rooms usually do: start banging on the door and shouting, ‘Let me out!’ even though I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere.

  After a while, I stopped and considered my situation. I reflected it was just as well I’d been to the loo recently, but it wouldn’t be much fun if I was still in here by the time I needed to go again.

  Also I was still very hungry, and thirsty too.

  I told myself they wouldn’t actually leave me in there until I died, but I wasn’t absolutely convinced. Even if they didn’t really mean to do that they might wander off to a different part of the base and forget I was there.

  At this point I was standing with my forehead against the door and my eyes shut, and just coming to the conclusion that I might as well have a little cry, when something came up behind me and boomed, ‘HEY THERE, ALICE,’ in my ear. I screamed.

  It was the Goldfish. It was hovering delightedly right in front of my face.

  I flopped limply against the door and swore, at length.

  ‘Now, EDF cadets don’t use language like that, do they, Alice,’ the Goldfish scolded me, but it seemed too excitable to stick to the subject. ‘I sure am glad to see you, Alice!’ it rejoiced. ‘We have so much to catch up on! Say! What about those quadratic equations?’

  12

  ‘Please,’ I groaned. ‘Please stop.’

  I was lying on my back on a desk. I would have been staring hopelessly at the ceiling, but the Goldfish was bouncing about in the air above me and it shone algebra problems into my eyes whenever I opened them.

  It was also singing.

  ‘Oh, little old x and negative b,

  They can be equal, you will see.

  When you plus or minus the square root,

  Divide it all by 2a so it’s neat and cute.

  It’s the fun that never ends,

  Quadratic equations are our friends.

  ‘Sing with me, Alice!’

  It wasn’t the Goldfish’s fault that it was programmed to teach children the EEC standard syllabus, or that, in its robot-y way, it seemed to feel terrible whenever it couldn’t. On the whole I was glad it was there. For one thing, it glowed, and it would have been very dark in the classroom without it as someone had smashed the lights. And it took my mind slightly off how long it would take to die of hunger and thirst, and made me instead focus on just how well-educated a person could be before she died of hunger and thirst.

  It was very annoying though.

  ‘Can’t you just try and get us out of here?’ I begged, picking idly at a plaster on my hand. The Goldfish had at least helped me find the first-aid kit. I had patched up my various injuries very thoroughly, because it was something to do and because the Goldfish didn’t try to teach me anything while I was doing it.

  ‘I already have, Alice,’ said the Goldfish sadly. ‘But hey! At least we’ve got plenty of time to learn! Now, what do you think that x might be?’

  ‘Four,’ I said sulkily, screwing my eyes shut.

  ‘Aww, come on, Alice! I know you can do better than that.’

  I sighed, and opened my eyes a crack. ‘Nine,’ I admitted.

  ‘Great work, Alice!’ the Goldfish cheered, and emitted a stream of sparkling stars over me like confetti. ‘So, let’s try another equation . . .’

  ‘Oh God, please,’ I said desperately. ‘Please, can’t we at least do something else? Can’t we do . . . biology? I like biology.’

  The Goldfish seemed to hesitate. It tilted slightly in the air, as if it was putting its head on one side.

  ‘Biology?’ it repeated, almost warily, as if I might be playing a trick on it.

  ‘Yes,’ I begged. ‘What about . . . cells. You know, the difference between plant and animal cells, and, and DNA and everything. Because I think all that’s fantastic.’

  The light behind the Goldfish’s eyes pulsed thoughtfully. ‘Fine,’ it said in a very grim voice for such a cheerful robot, and the glowing equations hanging in the air vanished and were replaced by friendly diagrams of eukaryotic cells.

  I felt pathetically grateful. I really do like biology, even if it came fairly low down the list of things I wanted to be doing just then.

  ‘Can I go to sleep afterwards?’ I asked. ‘It’s ever so late.’

  ‘OK, Alice,’ said the Goldfish, sounding a little mournful, and I wondered if it was thinking about how neither biology nor quadratic equations was going to give us a better morning to wake up to.

  ‘And Goldfish,’ I said forlornly, ‘when we’ve done the parts of the cell, and if I really concentrate, could you maybe . . . tell me a story? Or even sing a song, so long as it’s not about algebra?’

  The Goldfish came closer and I actually leaned my face against it. ‘Sure,’ it said gently.

  Half an hour and plenty of organelles and cytoplasm later, I was curled up on the desk while the Goldfish glowed and sang softly in Mandarin.

  This is going to be embarrassing if anyone finds out about it, I thought. But then I figured that if I was ever in a position where getting teased for asking a robot fish to sing me a lullaby was my most pressing problem, life would have improved immeasurably and I’d have no business complaining.

  ‘What does it mean, Goldfish?’ I murmured sleepily, hoping it wouldn’t see that as an opportunity to be educational.

  The Goldfish obligingly projected subtitles into the air without stopping singing, and I was too tired to read them all the way through but it was something about the moon and a river and being a long way from home.

  And so I fell asleep.

  I don’t think I slept very long. It was just as dark and felt just as empty around the classroom when I opened my eyes, except that something was happening outside the door. The pole was scraping and creaking in the door frame and someone was grunting with the effort to pull it free.

  Someone laid the pole quietly and carefully on the ground. I sat up.

  Josephine stoo
d in the doorway, her eyes wild under her pirate scarf. ‘Alice,’ she said. ‘Do you still have any objections to stealing a spaceship and getting the hell out of here?’

  Later I couldn’t help but wonder if she might have practised saying that, but whether she had or not the effect was excellent, so all I said was, ‘None at all,’ and ran to join her, feeling I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. I grabbed the first-aid kit on the way because I had the feeling that where we were going, we might need it.

  The Goldfish came sailing after me into the corridor, just as glad as I was to be free.

  ‘Stop glowing, anyway,’ I hissed when it didn’t go away.

  I don’t think the Goldfish was physically able to stop glowing altogether, but it did dim down until its eyes were hovering points of blue light in the dark.

  ‘How did you find me?’ I panted as we ran.

  ‘A kitchen robot saw it all happen,’ said Josephine. ‘Sorry it took me a while to get to you.’

  ‘But . . . what? The kitchen robots don’t even talk!’

  ‘No, but the Sunflower does,’ said Josephine. ‘It was shut in the laundry. I persuaded it to access all the visual records from the security cameras and the other working robots until it found you. It told me the code to get into the hangar, too.’

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘Why should it do any of that?’

  ‘Because I had something it wanted.’ We’d reached the main entrance lobby. Josephine slammed her hand on to the sensor panel to open the doors. ‘I let it teach me Spanish for four hours.’ She looked at me and grinned. ‘Hola.’