Mars Evacuees Read online

  ‘Maybe we should have gone round after all,’ said Josephine when finally Monica scuttled us up the other side.

  ‘There must be such a lot of them now,’ I said.

  Josephine made faces. ‘The question is, are they arriving, or are they breeding?’

  ‘Ugh . . . brrr . . .!’ I shuddered.

  There was nothing we could do but keep on, of course. Josephine felt better enough to play her harmonica for a bit, but then Noel rather tactlessly wondered aloud how far the sound carried and if maybe the Space Locusts could hear her. So she stopped.

  The signs of the Space Locusts faded away from the landscape. Patches of green reappeared on the rocks and eventually they were fuzzy and mossy again.

  ‘We should make camp,’ I said.

  ‘When we find somewhere flat enough,’ agreed Carl.

  Then we saw something else up ahead – something pale, streaming up into the purplish air.

  ‘Is that them?’ asked Noel anxiously, all of us thinking of the plumes of dust we’d seen rising from the ground where the Space Locusts had been.

  ‘That looks more like steam,’ said Josephine. And indeed the column of vapour seemed to wisp into nothing in a way that wasn’t like rising dust.

  ‘Maybe there’s somebody here!’ said Noel excitedly.

  Somehow, even though we’d come all this way and had so many bad things happen to us expressly so we could try to find somebody, this was surprisingly unnerving. We were used to having miles and miles of emptiness all to ourselves, and this wasn’t where we were expecting to find any people. We were silent, watching the steam.

  ‘Can you see what’s causing that?’ Josephine asked the Goldfish.

  The Goldfish soared up to have a better look, but soon dipped back down to us. ‘Darndest thing, it looks as though it’s coming right out of thin air. I’m going to check it out, kids. You wait here,’ it said, and bustled away.

  We were left kicking our heels on Monica’s back.

  ‘Christ, it’s freezing,’ said Carl.

  ‘It’s Mars,’ I said. ‘It’s always freezing.’

  ‘It wasn’t this bad before,’ Carl grumbled. ‘Not even with the wind going.’

  He was right. The moss on the rocks around us was crusted with frost. I noticed little white pockets of ice in the hollows between them. Our breath misted the dry, cold air like the white thread of steam up ahead.

  We decided we’d get down from Monica and move around a bit to warm up, so we were stamping and blowing into our hands and then someone blurted out: ‘What’s that?’ and to my surprise I realised it was me.

  ‘What’s what?’ asked Noel, reasonably enough.

  ‘I . . . thought I saw someone, just there by those rocks. But obviously there isn’t. Ha ha.’ I didn’t like how babbly and weird I sounded and was in the process of shutting up when there was – or at least, I thought there was – this flickering on the edge of my vision. I said, ‘Oh, there, it moved! Wait, no. Sorry. Having a funny turn, apparently! Oh dear.’

  ‘You do sound a bit oxygen-deprived,’ Noel said sympathetically. ‘Put your mask back on for a while.’

  ‘Alice,’ said Josephine quietly. ‘Can you still see it?’

  Josephine was making herself look and sound extremely calm, but I knew she wasn’t. She had gone very still, except for how she was breathing faster than normal and her hands were screwed into fists. I looked over at the perfectly ordinary patch of Martian ground. ‘Nope. Nothing,’ I said decidedly.

  But Josephine reached out and took hold of my shoulders, to make me face her.

  ‘Alice,’ she said firmly, ‘look at me. Do you see it now? Out of the corner of your eye?’

  The iciness in the air wormed its way under my skin, gnawing and wriggling like the Space Locusts chewing up soil. I wanted to squirm away. I whispered, ‘Sort of.’

  ‘And what’s it doing?’ Josephine asked impassively.

  ‘Standing on the rock,’ I stuttered. ‘Watching us. No.’

  Carl breathed, ‘It couldn’t be . . .’ and he and Josephine exchanged a look. I wasn’t an idiot, I knew what they were thinking. They were thinking that even if Mum’s genius for flying spaceships wasn’t particularly hereditary, maybe other things about her were. In which case . . .

  ‘No it couldn’t,’ I agreed, and I lurched forwards, bounded off the rock and stumbled straight towards what wasn’t, couldn’t possibly be there and so it had to be my imagination that something had seen me coming and was backing away.

  ‘Alice, wait!’ Carl called, and he and Josephine came hurrying after me.

  But they couldn’t stop me in time, and the thing that wasn’t there couldn’t get away from me. There was nothing, there had to be nothing, I had to prove there was nothing – so I ran into it, something solid and invisible and very cold. I almost fell over and grabbed on instinct, and felt swathes of smooth, icy fabric under my fingers, which slid away from the shape underneath.

  For a moment, I was face-to-face with something like a salamander with a mane of glassy fur, its head hanging impossibly in mid-air where the invisible fabric still cloaked the rest of it. Its eyes were huge and transparent and veined with subtle colour, like glass paperweights.

  Then the Goldfish swooped down like the wrath of God. It came flashing and making a howling noise I would never have thought it could make. And it did the zapping thing it had done to us, only much, much harder.

  The Morror fell over and didn’t get up.

  17

  ‘You killed it!’ said Noel. ‘It wasn’t doing anything! That’s not fair!’

  I would have told him to shut up, except that I still felt too sick and trembly from having touched the thing. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been too unhappy if the Morror was dead, because even if it was unfair, it wouldn’t have been our fault. It wouldn’t even have been the Goldfish’s fault really, seeing as it’s a robot and was only trying to protect us. And we wouldn’t have been stuck with a Morror that could go invisible when it wanted and might do anything. And what with being lost on the wrong planet already because of these guys, I don’t think it’s exactly surprising if I didn’t feel very friendly.

  But then the Morror moved and I thought, Oh, this isn’t going to be that easy.

  ‘Oh, you only stunned it,’ said Noel, relieved.

  ‘MY AIM WAS NOT TO STUN IT, MY AIM WAS TO ELIMINATE IT,’ said the Goldfish, sounding completely deranged. And then it zapped it again.

  This time nothing much happened, the Morror just made a sound like it was in pain, because it obviously was, and the Goldfish beeped in confusion and zapped it another time, and by this point it was fairly clear that the Goldfish was trying as hard as it could and only succeeding in hurting the thing.

  ‘We could probably kill it with rocks,’ suggested Carl.

  So I said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, we are not killing anything with rocks; I’m pretty sure that is actually a war crime.’

  ‘It’s helpless, Goldfish,’ said Josephine quietly. ‘And it’s true: we’re soldiers. It’s a prisoner of war.’

  ‘You’re children,’ insisted the Goldfish, still sounding pretty scary.

  ‘Exo-Defence Force cadets,’ said Carl, grudgingly.

  The Goldfish thought for a moment. ‘TEACHER ROBOTS ARE NOT SUBJECT TO INTERNATIONAL MILITARY LAW,’ it concluded, and was about to have another zap before Noel flung himself in front of the Morror.

  ‘Stop it!’ he cried. ‘Stop hurting it! You’re being horrible!’

  ‘Killing it would be a waste,’ said Josephine. Her voice was oddly expressionless. ‘No one’s ever even seen a Morror before. And we’re going to leave the first live captive rotting somewhere on Tharsis? Without learning anything about it?’

  The Goldfish made a frustrated electronic groaning sound and its eyes went back from red to blue. ‘Well kids, I think you might be biting off more than you can chew,’ it said brightly. ‘But it’s great to see you all compromising and working as a team! And
if that Morror takes one step out of line . . .!’

  There was a brief red flash in its eyes, but it backed off a bit.

  ‘Well, what now?’ said Carl.

  So we stood there and stared at it. Or rather at its fallen, disembodied head, which was not getting any less creepy to look at.

  ‘We should get the rest of the invisible thing off,’ I said eventually. ‘We can’t have it running off in that thing.’

  The invisible suit seemed more like a kind of sack than anything else; heaven knows how the Morror managed to walk around in it without tripping over all the time. I could sort of not quite see it out of the corner of my eye (the effect was starting to make me feel slightly sick), and the others couldn’t at all, but of course we could all feel it. It was very fine and silky and clingy under our hands as we dragged it off.

  ‘So that’s what they look like,’ breathed Carl.

  ‘That’s what this one looks like,’ corrected Josephine.

  There was the first Morror human eyes had ever seen. The translucent mane covered its newt-like head, extended over its neck and shoulders, and stretched across its cheeks into tapering panels of shorter strands beneath its eyes. The mane wasn’t really fur, of course, it was made up of tendril-things, sort of like what sea anemones have. The strands of the mane got shorter and shorter as they approached bare skin, until they were just glossy round dots that spotted the Morror all over like a leopard, covering its chest and the six long, slender tentacles – three on each side – that hung from its shoulders. Between the dots . . . I suppose you’d have to call it grey, but such a complicated, mottled grey, sort of bluish or greenish or purplish, depending on how you looked at it. Each tentacle might have reached its knees, assuming it had them. But we couldn’t see what it had in the way of legs, because though it was bare from the waist up it was wearing a kind of long skirt made from stiff dark-red papery stuff.

  Its eyes were shut, but I’d already seen them: as big as my fists, glossy and transparent round the edges and wells of deep black in the middle.

  The Morror was still moaning quietly. It flicked up a couple of tentacles to cover its face, but it didn’t seem to be actually awake.

  ‘So, does this work on humans?’ Carl wondered, and put a fold of the invisibility cloak over his head and went, ‘Wooo. Wooo.’ It worked very well, but it turned out that a headless boy capering about was one more thing than I could properly cope with right now.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell, don’t,’ I said. Everything around me got swimmy and floaty and I realised I might possibly be falling over. Then someone had got their arms round me and was making me sit down on a mossy rock.

  ‘You’re all right,’ said Josephine firmly. ‘You’re just in shock. Drink some of this.’

  She was holding that silver bottle of perfume I’d seen on the Mélisande.

  ‘What’re you making me drink perfume for?’ I croaked, the higher intellectual functions being beyond me at present.

  ‘It’s not perfume,’ said Josephine. ‘It’s rum. It’s my dad’s hip flask. Have some, there’s a good girl.’

  I did as I was told and Josephine patted my head approvingly, while Carl laughed in a way that suggested he might be a bit in shock himself. ‘We’ve got a Morror prisoner,’ he giggled, ‘and Josephine’s a twelve-year-old alkie . . .’

  ‘I’m nothing of the sort. I’m just extremely well prepared,’ sniffed Josephine, hugging her bag of peculiar objects proudly to her side. She passed Carl the little flask. ‘You’ll note it’s full.’

  Carl had a little swig and then Josephine took it back and did the same, and Noel looked at her expectantly.

  ‘You’re not having any,’ Carl said flatly.

  ‘So, what, I’ve got to just stay in shock?’ Noel asked in indignation.

  ‘Yes,’ said the rest of us.

  Something strange happened to the Morror. The tendrils of its mane rippled and flared, and colour pulsed through them, bands of purple and deep flame-orange that welled up in its leopard dots and swept across its skin. This freaked us all out except for Josephine, who put her chin into her hands and watched for a moment, then got out her tablet and started filming it.

  ‘Is it meant to do that?’ asked Noel anxiously.

  ‘Hey,’ said Carl. ‘Hey, Morror.’

  The Morror keened quietly, and opened its eyes. There were faint threads of orange and purple in the transparency around its pupils.

  ‘Are you all right, Morror?’ Noel enquired.

  The Morror sat up and wrapped its tentacles around itself. It looked at us in silence.

  ‘We’re army cadets and this is our Goldfish, and I’m not going to let it hurt you any more, but you’re our prisoner so we’re taking you to the nearest military base, and we won’t hurt you either but don’t try anything,’ Noel summarised helpfully, running out of breath a bit towards the end.

  More silence.

  ‘Do they . . . talk?’ asked Noel uncertainly, and I figured that they must do, because clearly they’d communicated with humans at the start of the invasion and we must have got the name ‘Morror’ from somewhere, but I didn’t think they’d had anything to say in all the time I’d been alive.

  The Morror said something. And meanwhile it changed colour. Blues and turquoises and yellows and reds quivered across its spots and tendrils, and its voice sounded like wind in trees and all the syllables sounded like sighing. It said – and this is the closest I can manage and really there could easily be more ‘a’s in there – ‘Haaaa’thraaaa vsaaaa Mo-raaa uha-raaa . . .’

  There was a pause. ‘Well, let’s tie it up,’ said Carl briskly.

  The Morror did not want to be tied up. It was very wriggly and its tentacles flapped and whipped and it changed colour a lot. We were a bit worried about touching it, because for all we knew it was poisonous. But it was four against one – five against one, really, because the Goldfish was still hovering there as menacingly as it could, so eventually we got its tentacles bound to its chest in duct tape. We’d tried to make some kind of handcuffs to tie the ends of its tentacles together behind it, but we didn’t have enough tape left. And as far as we could tell we hadn’t been poisoned, so that was something.

  ‘Damn, where’s the invisible suit?’ Carl said after we were finished. Everyone looked at me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I protested. ‘It’s getting dark, anyway, how am I supposed to . . .’ But they made me turn round and round trying to see it out of the corner of my eye until I started feeling wobbly again. I didn’t find it, actually; Noel did by walking into it so the tip of his boot disappeared.

  ‘How are we not going to lose this,’ I said. The Goldfish suddenly sprang open a compartment we hadn’t known it had in its side, but didn’t say anything. I don’t know if it was trying to overcome the moral conflict between its programming and our decision, or if it was just sulking.

  We put the cloak inside and the compartment snapped shut.

  ‘It is getting dark, though,’ I repeated. The rum had helped but I didn’t feel I could face travelling much further. Still, I wondered how anyone was going to get much rest around a silent tied-up Morror changing colour like a set of traffic lights all the time.

  ‘I assume that was its ship you found, Goldfish?’ said Josephine. ‘Let’s go and look at that.’

  We tried to tie the Morror to Monica’s leg, but we didn’t have enough duct tape left to do that either. So in the end we left the Goldfish to make sure the Morror didn’t get up to anything, and Noel to make sure the Goldfish didn’t get up to anything, and the rest of us started scrambling over the rocks towards the plume of steam.

  Something occurred to me on the way. ‘Does your dad know you’ve got his hip flask?’ I asked Josephine.

  ‘Yes, he’s probably worked it out by now,’ Josephine said.

  The Morror ship, obviously, didn’t seem to be there. The steam just poured out of empty air, into empty air, about fifteen feet above the bottom of the little valley. Exce
pt – and they were subtle enough that you might not have seen them normally – here and there were these little transparent patches of crusted ice, on the invisible contours of nothing, and cold was rolling off it.

  The ground was a bit flatter – just where you’d aim for if you were crashing and trying to find somewhere to do an emergency landing. But I was pretty sure it had bashed into the high rocks we were standing on anyway.

  Thinking about Morrors crashing and trying to save themselves made me feel a bit weird. Then I wondered if our Morror was the pilot, and rather belatedly asked myself how big the ship was and if it was likely to have more Morrors inside it waiting to spring to the defence of their crewmate.

  ‘How do we “take a look at this” exactly?’ I said, regardless.

  ‘You tell us, magic-eye girl,’ said Carl.

  So I had to do my corner-of-the-eye trick again. ‘It’s about a third again bigger than a Flarehawk, I guess,’ I told the others, after waggling my head around and swivelling my eyes until I felt like a total moron. ‘It’s shaped sort of like . . . well, it’s in two round bits joined together in the middle, like an hourglass. But I also think it’s kind of spiky. Or . . . hairy. The front bit is all caved in.’

  ‘And can you see a door?’

  ‘No!’ I said crossly. ‘I can’t really see the stupid thing at all!’

  I told myself I couldn’t reasonably be frightened of touching a Morror spacecraft after touching an actual Morror, so I went and cautiously patted at mid-air. I felt something surprisingly ridged and slightly damp, and continued stroking my way along the side of the thing. Then my hand suddenly pushed empty space and, from the point of view of everyone outside including me, vanished.

  I yelped and pulled my hand back, freaked out even though I could feel it hadn’t actually ceased to exist or anything and I knew I’d really just found the door.

  The others started getting down from Monica as I stuck my head through, and I heard Carl saying, ‘Christ that looks awful,’ at my apparently headless body from outside, which was more than a little hypocritical.