Mars Evacuees Read online

  ‘Huuuuumans!’ wailed an unearthly voice.

  ‘It’s Thsaaa!’ screamed Noel, jumping to his feet.

  The windows had been blasted in completely, leaving a ragged hole behind. Outside, a shape bobbed against the daylight in a cloud of dust.

  ‘Are you all aliiiiive?’ keened Thsaaa into the ruins.

  We rushed for the gap in the wall. The Flying Fox was hovering outside, the hatch open, Thsaaa’s tentacles waving from within and changing colour madly.

  The silhouette of the Flying Fox abruptly lurched away. ‘I cannot fly this ship very well!’ Thsaaa’s voice called, from somewhere below.

  Indeed, the Flying Fox was wobbling about so badly Colonel Cleaver would have given Thsaaa a detention on the spot.

  ‘Thsaaa, you bastard!’ Carl bawled. He scrambled over the rubble up to the hole and, without ceremony, jumped out. It would have been terrifying if I hadn’t already burned through my entire capacity for feeling normally scared and was now getting by on some wild fiery feeling instead. But Carl landed with a clunk on the Flying Fox’s roof and the Flying Fox wobbled even more worryingly as he climbed around the hatch to slide inside.

  Almost at once the ship steadied as Carl took over the controls. Then it was hovering beside the gap with Thsaaa standing in the doorway, tentacles reaching for us.

  ‘I am sorry,’ they said immediately.

  We didn’t have time to accept apologies. ‘Alice! Down!’ Josephine yelled, and loosed a burst of fire over my head as I ducked. A cooked Space Locust dropped to the ground beside me.

  ‘Get in the ship!’ cried Thsaaa, though it was easier said than done. Space Locusts that must have been stunned by the explosion were waking up and wriggling into the air.

  ‘The Goldfish . . .!’ Noel insisted.

  ‘Grab it! Throw it to Thsaaa!’ I ordered. Noel dragged the Goldfish up to the hole and more dropped than threw it, but Thsaaa’s tentacles were deft and strong and the Goldfish was flipped inside. ‘Now you,’ I panted to Noel, and he jumped while Josephine and I stood back-to-back, me trying to zap any new Space Locusts that came in from outside and Josephine toasting anything that moved in the shadows.

  ‘Go on. Get out!’ Josephine screamed, painting fire around the room. I hesitated. ‘Go on, I’ve got to be last, I can’t jump carrying this and we need the cover.’

  I gritted my teeth and jumped for the ship. I felt Thsaaa’s tentacles lock around my arm and waist in mid-air. Then I was inside the Flying Fox yelling for Josephine, who stood right on the edge and set off one last massive torrent of fire. Then she let the flamethrower fall from her shoulder and leaped.

  Thsaaa caught her, flung her back into the ship beside me and slammed the door shut.

  ‘Kuya, go!’ Noel cried, and Carl yanked viciously on the controls, climbing so steeply that the g-force put paid to my efforts to sit up. We hurtled north around the curve of Olympus, out of the grip of the swarm. I thought about trying to get up on to one of the seats, but on the whole I decided it was too much of a bother when I could curl up on the nice comfortable floor and have a cry. Josephine, sprawled beside me, had chosen the blank staring approach for the time being.

  Thsaaa was standing over us in various sombre shades of navy and teal.

  ‘I am sorry,’ they said again, softly and formally. They patted us awkwardly with their tentacles. ‘Are you badly hurt?’

  ‘Still conscious,’ croaked Josephine beside me. ‘That’s a good sign.’

  I couldn’t even answer at first, as I needed to think about it. I hadn’t noticed it in all the excitement, but now my left arm wanted me to know that it hurt, not horribly but in a way that felt significant. I thought I might have broken it when the explosion knocked me over. Still, I did have a left arm, and a right arm come to that, so I knew I should count myself lucky. Staggeringly lucky, in fact.

  ‘Thsaaa! You killed our Goldfish!’ Noel howled, before I could offer a summary of any of this.

  ‘I deactivated your Goldfish. Surely it can be mended,’ said Thsaaa.

  ‘But you just ran off,’ said Noel, who had taken it all very hard.

  ‘I wanted to get back to my people!’ cried Thsaaa. ‘I did not want to be a prisoner or an experiment!’

  ‘Fair go, Noel, they came back,’ said Carl shakily from the helm.

  ‘And I would have sent my people to find you – I did not mean to leave you there forever. I would never, never have left you to them. When I saw their swarm in the sky . . . and I knew you would feel just as I would . . . I had to return for you.’ Thsaaa’s tentacles waved fretfully in the air and then covered their face. ‘Ohhhhhhh, if you had not fired that cannon I might never have found you.’

  I managed to get up and into a seat, hugging my arm against my chest. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Thsaaa,’ said Josephine, lifting her head from the floor. ‘You recognised the Space Locusts.’

  ‘“Space Locusts”?’ echoed Thsaaa curiously, like they didn’t understand the word ‘locust’. But it didn’t matter. ‘I have never seen them, only heard the stories. But yes, I know them. No Morror could make a mistake.

  ‘They are the Vshomu.’

  23

  ‘The Vshomu drift through space,’ said Thsaaa. ‘They feed on whatever they find, the organic compounds in the rocks and dust, the ice of comets. But when they come to a world full of life, they feast, and their numbers . . .’ They made an expressive movement with their tentacles.

  ‘. . . explode,’ supplied Josephine.

  ‘Yes. Explode. They never stop feeding until there is nothing left. Then many of them starve, their numbers decline again, very fast, and the survivors drift on. Their sight is very keen. They are the reason we learned to make ourselves invisible. But all we learned of them – all we know, came too late to save our world. They stripped it to the core, which cooled and died and fell away from our sun. For so many years all we could do was run from them.’

  ‘Yeah, and you led them to us!’ said Carl.

  ‘It’s not their fault,’ said Noel, who was mollified by now.

  ‘I don’t know. The Vshomu have devoured so many worlds across the galaxies,’ said Thsaaa.

  ‘They’ll eat Mars,’ I said.

  ‘At that rate, they’ll eat the solar system,’ said Josephine.

  ‘We must tell my people,’ said Thsaaa.

  ‘We have to tell everyone,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ said Carl. ‘So everyone’s had a chance to freak out back there except me. Does anyone know where the hell we’re even going?’

  ‘The Morror base,’ said Josephine. ‘They must have one on this planet. Don’t they, Thsaaa?’

  There was a pause while we all tried to get used to the idea of running into a horde of hostile Morrors on purpose.

  ‘Is there a map on this ship?’ asked Thsaaa.

  ‘Sure,’ said Carl, calling one up in the corner of the viewport. Thsaaa gazed at it thoughtfully, then reached out with one tentacle and pointed to a place on the screen.

  ‘I think,’ they whispered, ‘we should be searching there.’

  I’d stopped crying by now, so I lurched over to the helm and said, ‘I’ll fly if you want,’ so that Carl could have a fair turn at freaking out.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Josephine, scrambling off the floor. ‘You can’t pilot with one hand. I’ll do it.’

  ‘. . . Er,’ Carl and I said simultaneously, remembering the wreckage of the obstacle course back at Beagle and all that exploding.

  Josephine seemed unworried, though. ‘I’ve at least had more relevant training than Thsaaa has. It’s not really that hard.’

  It was true, actually; seeing as we weren’t currently taking off or landing or shooting invading ships or dodging Vshomu, piloting wouldn’t be much more complicated than just telling the computer where to take us. She nudged me out of the way and took over at the controls and we carried on flying and did not blow up. Josephine gave a very small smile.


  Carl flopped into one of the seats at the back of the ship and Noel gave him a hug, and I flopped alongside them. I couldn’t help but wish the Goldfish was keeping an eye on the piloting just in case.

  But the Goldfish was still just a broken piece of luggage in the back of the ship.

  ‘Do you think they’re alive?’ asked Josephine, as we sped through a sky stained orange with Martian dust. ‘The people from Zond and Beagle . . . Dr Muldoon?’

  Dr Muldoon’s name couldn’t have meant anything to Thsaaa, but they rippled pink and orange at her in what might have been encouragement. ‘I hope we will find everyone.’

  The thing about someone pointing to a place on a map of an entire planet and saying, ‘I think it’s somewhere over there,’ is that at best that means flying over an approximately Wales-sized bit of ground without any idea what the thing you’re searching for looks like.

  So basically we had to zigzag back and forth and round and round for ages, getting more and more ratty, and Thsaaa said more and more things in their language which I’m sure were incredibly rude. And none of us had had anything to eat that day, and it was weeks since anyone had had a cup of tea.

  Then after hours of this, Thsaaa yelped, ‘There! There!’ and leaped towards the viewport in order to point at . . . nothing.

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘We’ve gone past it now,’ said Thsaaa, in grumpy purples and ambers.

  Josephine doubled back and we flew around for what seemed like another million years.

  ‘That is the exact place you were pointing out,’ said Carl.

  ‘Clearly that cannot be true, because it is not there,’ said Thsaaa.

  We flew on.

  ‘There! There!’ cried Thsaaa again.

  ‘Yeah, that’s a very nice rock face,’ said Carl.

  ‘The entrance is invisible,’ said Thsaaa. ‘What else would you expect?’

  ‘I’m . . . really not that enthusiastic about flying straight into a rock face,’ said Josephine.

  ‘I can see it,’ I whispered. I could make out that sort of vague shimmer in the corner of my eye that I was getting used to where Morrors were concerned. ‘You can fly into it. It’s a big square hole in the rock, like a gate . . .’

  ‘I hate how you are not even looking at the screen when you say that,’ Carl moaned.

  ‘It’s there,’ I said. ‘That is . . . at least, I think so.’

  ‘Well, that’s just lovely,’ Josephine said.

  ‘I can see it perfectly well,’ announced Thsaaa. But Thsaaa wasn’t actually looking straight at the screen either, they were doing the same corner-of-the-eye thing I was.

  ‘Obviously I can’t see it if I look at it,’ they said scathingly when this was pointed out. ‘It is invisible.’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ moaned Carl.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Down . . . and no, Jesus, right a bit! And a bit more down . . . not that far down! And there. There. Straight ahead.’

  At this point I had to look at the viewport properly and couldn’t help but wince because we were, on the face of it, about to splatter ourselves against a massive rock wall like a bug on a windscreen and it was hard to hold on to the belief that this was a good idea.

  Josephine let out a shriek as she closed the last few feet . . .

  And then the wall was gone, and it was dim all around us.

  We were in a huge chamber inside the mountain. It was very obviously not a natural space; it was square-cut and terraced into different levels, and though it was much starker and emptier than the inside of the Morror ship, there were coloured lights set into the ceiling and the floor, far below us.

  And there didn’t seem to be anybody there.

  ‘Aaargh,’ said Josephine, panicking after flying through a wall and now having to pilot a Flying Fox in a sudden confined space.

  ‘Give,’ said Carl, swiftly leaning over her and taking the controls.

  ‘I’d have been all right,’ said Josephine, aggrieved, as he lowered the ship towards the rock floor.

  ‘Is there some way to cast one’s voice outside the ship?!’ cried Thsaaa sharply, in very urgent colours.

  ‘Uh, a PA system? Yeah, I think this thing . . .’

  ‘Give it to me. Now.’

  Josephine handed them a microphone, and Thsaaa started to talk into it, just as my eyes adjusted to the light inside the chamber and I started to pick up that faint shimmer of something . . .

  Not just in one corner of my field of vision, either.

  Everywhere.

  ‘Morthruu Mo-raaa uha-raaa porshwuraaa va, ha’thraa vel Thsaaa athla-haaa quurulu nas huruuumua . . .’

  There was an instant of silence. Then another voice spoke, loud but in soft, long, rippling syllables. ‘Shuwathaaahal-vaaa-raha, ath-shal vel lamnawath vramlashaaa ath amna-clath.’

  ‘We should go outside,’ said Thsaaa. ‘But stay behind me.’

  Josephine flicked a button to open the hatch, and we stepped out. Thsaaa spread their tentacles in front of us like a shield.

  All around us, Morrors started uncloaking.

  I hope we had decent excuses for being overwhelmed even before we found ourselves surrounded by aliens. Anyway, I came over slightly dizzy. It wasn’t just that there were so many Morrors, and they were all changing colour and tendril-rippling like anything, but they were so different from each other as well as from us. I don’t know if I’d have worked out about the five sexes if I hadn’t known it already, but as I did I could see that there were Morrors with lacy manes, and narrow-built Morrors whose manes covered nearly their whole faces, and very tall Morrors who didn’t have tendrils at all. But it wasn’t just that, it was that they had different-shaped mouths and eyes and no two colour palettes were really the same, and I mean, of course they weren’t all the same, but in our recent circumstances, it had been hard not to think of Thsaaa as the standard representative of the Typical Morror.

  For one thing, these Morrors were all grown-ups, and thus bigger.

  For another, other than invisible suits, I guess Morrors didn’t really do military uniform, or else their clothes had some sort of meaning I couldn’t get. Many of them wore long A-line kilts like Thsaaa’s but in all different colours, and some of them with fin-shaped trains, and others wore layers of transparent fabric, or cream-coloured robes with holes cut away here and there so you could still see the colour racing across their skin.

  Anyway, so all of that was very interesting, but you also had to take account of how several of them were holding things that were plainly weapons. Colourful, pretty weapons. But weapons. Pointed at us.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, giving the Morrors a silly little wave.

  The Morrors talked to each other. The sound of their voices rose and fell; sometimes they’d get very vociferous, but sometimes it seemed as if most of what they wanted each other to know was in the colour and play of their tendrils and so they didn’t actually have to say much.

  And tides of colour kept sweeping round the group like someone was dragging a paintbrush from one Morror body to the next, though any Morror might be dimmer or brighter. And there would always be streaks and twists that didn’t get passed on with the dominant colour, which would sometimes get into a little eddy in a smaller group or meet a splash of a totally different colour, which would either sweep around in turn the other way or bounce to and fro, which I thought maybe meant the Morrors were disagreeing with each other.

  Thsaaa was talking and waving their tentacles too, but their colours didn’t seem to be meshing up with everyone else’s at all.

  ‘Are they saying, “Get out of the way so we can shoot your little human friends”?’ asked Carl.

  ‘That is not a helpful comment,’ said Thsaaa.

  ‘Yeah, but are they?’

  Thsaaa didn’t seem to want to tell us, which I couldn’t help feeling was not a very good sign.

  Josephine huffed impatiently. ‘Why are they keeping us standing around when the planet’s being eaten?’ />
  ‘I have told them,’ Thsaaa insisted. ‘They’re discussing sending a party to see if the Vshomu are really there or if it is some human trick. Be patient.’

  Josephine sighed enormously, was patient for two and a half seconds, then muttered, ‘Oh, to hell with this,’ and reached into her bag.

  The Morrors raised their weapons, and one of them thundered, ‘KEEP YOUR HANDS VISIBLE,’ in startlingly perfect English.

  Josephine lifted her arm.

  She was holding the dead Vshomu that we’d killed in the first Flying Fox.

  Some of the Morrors cried out – short, almost-human yelps or long rustling roars like faraway landslides. Some of them went silent and grey and half-transparent. I thought that along with Paralashath and shalvulu, I might possibly have picked up another word: it was au-laaa and it meant no.

  Then several Morrors left, some of them possibly crying, and the ring around us broke into smaller, messier groups talking even more animatedly than before, but no one seemed to be pointing guns at us now, and Thsaaa lowered their tentacles and looked at us nervously.

  Then a stocky Morror – one of the mane-all-over-face ones – came up and whisked the Vshomu out of Josephine’s hands and took it back to the group to talk over.

  Josephine said indignantly, ‘That was mine.’

  ‘How is a dead Vshomu yours?’ I asked.

  ‘It was in my bag,’ Josephine grumbled.

  A pair of Morrors came over to us. The first was very tall and one of those I found hard not to think of as ‘bald’ because they didn’t have tendrils, just colour patches. The other was dressed in a gold kilt with a triangular fin at the back, and had a cloud of curly tendrils standing out like an Elizabethan ruff around their face.

  ‘Hello,’ said the big one without the mane. ‘I am Swarasee-ee. This is Flath. Come with me, please, humans. Flath will look after Thsaaa now.’

  Swarasee-ee must have been the one who’d told Josephine to keep her hands up: they spoke incredibly good English with no Morror accent or long nouns like Thsaaa had at all. In fact, if you shut your eyes you’d probably think you were talking to a Californian woman.