Mars Evacuees Read online

  Flath didn’t talk to us, just towed Thsaaa away. Thsaaa looked back anxiously. ‘I hope it will be all right,’ they called plaintively.

  ‘What are your names?’ asked Swarasee-ee politely.

  ‘Josephine Jerome.’

  ‘Carl Dalisay, and this is Noel.’

  ‘. . . I can say my own name, why do you always have to go first?’ Noel grumbled.

  ‘Alice Dare,’ I said.

  Swarasee-ee paused and looked at me in mild perplexity. ‘. . . Alistair?’ they repeated.

  I sighed at considerable length, while Carl chuckled.

  ‘Terrific, that’s just terrific,’ I said.

  Swarasee-ee led us down over the terraces, between what I was pretty sure were some invisible ships and under rows of rainbow-y lamps.

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ I asked. ‘This is a waste of time. We need to get back to Earth and warn everyone, or no one will get to live on it.’

  Swarasee-ee said nothing, but their spots turned blue and orange by turns.

  We were walking towards the rear wall of the chamber. There didn’t seem to be anything in particular over there, except it was a long way from all the other Morrors, and I was reminding myself that the Morrors hadn’t wanted to wipe out humans and so Swarasee-ee probably wouldn’t be taking children into a nice quiet corner to kill us without bothering anybody else.

  Then, because I happened to look nervously at Josephine to see if she was thinking the same thing, I noticed how shimmery the back of the cavern was.

  ‘Oh!’ I said.

  Swarasee-ee stretched out their tentacles to the wall, which rippled faintly as they peeled aside a panel of invisible fabric.

  ‘In you go!’ they said, sounding almost as perky as the Goldfish.

  There didn’t seem much point in making a fuss about this, as there were enough Morrors around to put us anywhere they pleased. So in we went, though it was hard not to keep worrying about how stupid we’d feel if it turned out we were being led to our doom, and Swarasee-ee sealed it up from outside.

  Wide steps led down into another chamber of bare, red stone – a bit warmer than the one outside, which was nice, and wide and almost as empty as a sports field. But not quite, because about fifty human adults were sitting or lying about in groups in the middle of it, looking thoroughly fed up.

  ‘Dr Muldoon!’ Josephine cried. ‘You are alive!’

  Dr Muldoon stood out because of her long red hair. There was a field-hospital area over to one side, with about ten people covered in bandages or attached to drips and so on. Dr Muldoon was among them helping out, even though I knew she wasn’t that sort of doctor. She was in full military uniform, something we’d never seen before, though of course the Morrors had taken all weapons off her. She looked as if she should be tired, with her hair all loose and dirty-looking around her shoulders, but she still seemed far more awake than anyone else.

  ‘Josephine,’ she gasped, and came running. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Kids!’ cried Colonel Cleaver as he came rolling up from the back of the group. I say rolling because he hadn’t got his robot legs; he was sitting on a bit of metal panelling that looked as if it might once have been part of a Flarehawk, with wheels clumsily attached, and he was pushing himself along with his hands.

  ‘They took your legs?!’ exclaimed Noel, horrified. ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘Never mind that. Did they capture Beagle Base? Are you OK? Where are the others?’

  ‘They’re still there. We didn’t exactly get captured,’ said Carl, and after that of course we had to explain everything, which got quite complicated. I was not used to either Colonel Cleaver or Dr Muldoon being apologetic. But they were now – in fact not just them but a load of other adults we didn’t even know bustled up to say how they were very, very sorry about everything that had happened to us, and how they hadn’t been there to stop it. And that’s before they even knew more than ten percent of what had happened to us, and while I’m not going to say I was against receiving a bit of adult sympathy and attention, I wasn’t sure this was a good use of our time.

  So I thought maybe we’d better not tell them everything until later, and I glanced at the others and saw that Carl and Josephine had already got the same idea. But Noel was completely oblivious and went on saying things like, ‘And then when the spaceship crashed for the second time . . .’ which made everyone wring their hands and fall over themselves to say they hadn’t meant things to turn out like that some more. Then Colonel Cleaver hugged us all and most of us said ‘ow’ and that’s how they found out my arm was broken and that Josephine had cuts and Carl was singed and everyone was generally the worse for Space Locusts. The grown-ups were in the process of getting even more upset when Carl bawled, ‘ANYWAY. The planet’s being eaten and is there any food?’

  ‘James, get them some food!’ snapped Dr Muldoon at a poor man with the photosynthetic patches on his arms from Beagle Base, as if he should have known to do it already.

  We sat down on the floor of the chamber to eat and carry on explaining. There was a mix of human and Morror food (‘The light-blue spirally stuff is better than it looks,’ said James apologetically), some Smeat, some raisins, but no tea. Dr Muldoon put my arm in a sling and cleaned us up a bit.

  ‘Of course, our actual medical doctor had to be hit by a shockray rebound,’ she said, sighing, dabbing on disinfectant.

  A woman waved feebly from one of the beds. ‘You’re doing fine, Valerie.’

  ‘Why did they take your legs, Colonel Cleaver?’ asked Noel, timidly.

  ‘Ah, it’s no big deal. I can get around without them,’ said the Colonel.

  ‘He kept climbing the walls,’ said Dr Muldoon, looking slightly tired at last. ‘Literally. Trying to disable that seal.’ She stared glumly at the curtain we’d come through, which was back to looking like a bare stone wall.

  ‘You say that like I stopped,’ said Colonel Cleaver, grinning, and I remembered him climbing up the tower at the base using just his arms.

  ‘We’ve tried pulling it down, and digging under it, and cutting through it,’ said Dr Muldoon. ‘And frankly, we’ve been doing it more for entertainment value than anything else, because even if we got through there’d still be the small matter of the Morrors on the other side.’

  ‘Weirdo invisible no-good clowns that they are,’ said Colonel Cleaver. ‘Forget my legs – it’s her you should be worried about.’

  ‘The one that speaks such good English knows who I am,’ Dr Muldoon said. ‘It keeps asking me about accelerated terraforming.’

  ‘They haven’t hurt you?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re not stupid. You can’t get a scientist to do anything useful by torturing her. But they started hinting they might separate me from the others or take me off the planet altogether. And I can’t understand why they’re so interested; they’re already altering Earth to suit them, they don’t need my help with that. But I don’t imagine they’re asking just out of sheer curiosity.’

  ‘We know why they’re interested in terraforming,’ said Josephine.

  Dr Muldoon looked at us keenly. ‘Do you? And what did you mean, “The planet’s being eaten”?’

  And finally we managed to get them to listen to a decent account of why the Morrors had come to Earth, and what the Vshomu were. Josephine didn’t have the dead one any more, but she did have some pictures she’d taken of it on her tablet.

  ‘. . . And they eat planets,’ said Dr Muldoon flatly, in the end.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’re eating Mars.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mars.’

  ‘With us on it, yes.’

  ‘My life’s work,’ thundered Dr Muldoon, springing to her feet with fire in her eyes. ‘My home. I create scientific miracles out of rock and dust, and vermin come along and eat it.’

  ‘. . . We’re actually pretty worried about Earth as well,’ I said, but I’m not sure Dr Muldoon really heard me, seeing as sh
e was racing up the steps towards the seal at the time.

  ‘Morrors!’ she shouted. ‘Let me out! I need specimens! I need my lab! I need to kill them all.’

  ‘There are millions of them, you know; you probably can’t kill them all yourself,’ said Noel as we followed her up the steps.

  ‘We’ve gotta evacuate, Muldoon,’ said Cleaver. ‘I’ve got to get those kids out of Beagle right now. HEY, MORRORS,’ he bellowed at the wall. ‘Are you going to let us out of here? Or are you leaving kids and prisoners of war to be eaten alive?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s a good idea to annoy them,’ Noel moaned anxiously.

  ‘Yeah, Morrors!’ boomed Carl at the wall. ‘What are you doing out there? We have places to be!’

  Dr Muldoon raised her fists and would probably have pounded them against the wall if it had actually been a wall, but as it was more of a kind of holographic curtain-thing, she ended up just grabbing handfuls of it and yanking them around as best she could.

  ‘Morrors!’ she yelled. ‘Are you listening? Are you still even there?’

  ‘Morrors!’ Josephine joined in. ‘We’ve got to get back to Earth! We have to warn the government! We have to start cooperating.’

  ‘Morrors!’ I shouted, dragging at the seal in my turn. ‘You can’t fight the Vshomu and us at the same time! And if you couldn’t get rid of the Vshomu on your own before, what chance have you got this time? You need humans now. You have to talk to us so we can help each other!’

  ‘Morrors!’

  ‘Morrors!’

  Then quite suddenly, the wall fell. It detached from its fastenings high above with a hissing sound and crumpled, shimmering and glitching as it dropped, until it lay in a weird, half-invisible pile at our feet. All the Morrors were there on the other side, looking at us. And all the other humans gasped at the sight of them – all that time shut up inside the mountain, and they’d never seen the Morrors uncloaked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Swarasee-ee. ‘We agree.’

  24

  Being stuck in the middle of an alien evacuation procedure might have been less bewildering if we could at least see the ships that teams of Morrors kept vanishing into. But we couldn’t, and we couldn’t understand what the Morrors were saying to each other either, except when Swarasee-ee or one of the others took the time to say something to us in English, which was mostly, ‘Wait.’ So we just stood around feeling rather awkward and vulnerable, and wondering if Thsaaa had already gone, except for Colonel Cleaver, who’d got his legs back and was striding around amid the Morrors, talking to them and looking ready to go and trample Vshomu beneath his robotic feet.

  ‘This is it, cadets,’ he said at last. ‘A couple of our Day-Glo pals here are taking me out to Beagle to get the rest of the kids.’

  ‘Oh, aren’t we going with you?’ asked Noel, dismayed.

  ‘Their biggest carrier will only take fifty,’ said Cleaver. ‘They say they’re calling more ships in for the rest. Don’t know how far we can trust them, but doesn’t seem we’ve got a lot of choice. So you’d just take up space, and this way you’ll get home sooner, and you all need decent medical attention.’

  I nodded. I was sorry he was leaving so soon, but I found I didn’t want to go back to Beagle anyway; I wanted to see Kayleigh and Chinenye and Mei, but too much had happened, both when we were there and afterwards. And just hearing the words ‘you’ll get home’ made me feel slightly dizzy.

  ‘We’re really glad you’re all right,’ I said. ‘We were worried.’

  ‘Seems like these Vo-sho-whatevers would have eaten the lot of us if it weren’t for you kids,’ said the Colonel, cheerfully. ‘And I’ve had enough of things eating me to last a lifetime. So. Good work, cadets.’

  He threw us a salute. We all saluted back except for Josephine, who being a genius had been looking at something else and then got confused as to which arm to use. Cleaver scrutinised her thoughtfully until she started squirming, then he said gruffly, ‘Good soldiering, Jerome, knew you had it in you,’ and dropped a big hand on to her shoulder.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Josephine, as the Colonel walked away. When he’d gone she muttered to me, ‘None of this changes anything, I’d still be an absolutely awful soldier.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if this works out, perhaps you won’t have to be.’

  A tall Quth-laaa Morror – at least, that’s what I assumed they must be because they had the same kind of tendrils as Thsaaa – came along and sighed, ‘I am Warth-raaa. Come thiiiiiiis waaaaaaaay,’ at us, being not as good at English as either Thsaaa or Swarasee-ee.

  ‘Do you have to – to run off anywhere else, Dr Muldoon?’ Josephine asked, trying to sound casual about it.

  Dr Muldoon smiled. ‘No. Swarasee-ee and I need to be on the first ship to reach Earth; someone has to be the one to brief the EEC. And I need you to make sure I have all the facts.’

  ‘Hey, kids!’ called an unmistakeably perky voice.

  ‘Goldfish!’ Noel cried in delight before we could even see it.

  The Goldfish came swimming over the heads of the remaining Morrors, with Thsaaa hurrying along behind it.

  ‘You’re OK!’ it said. It showered us with sparkles. ‘I’m so proud of you guys! Doesn’t that just show you what teamwork can do?’

  ‘. . . Well, teamwork, flamethrowers and energy torpedoes, yes,’ Josephine said.

  ‘They fixed you!’ Noel said, reaching up to hug it.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Noel!’ said the Goldfish, with that faint edge to its perkiness that meant it was in fact profoundly cross. ‘These pesky Morrors! You can’t expect them to fix anything. Not properly, anyway!’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with you?’

  It still looked rather a mess, of course. There was no light behind its right eye, which had been stuck clumsily back into place with glue, and it still had all its scrapes and dents. But it was flying and talking.

  ‘They took out your zapper, didn’t they,’ said Josephine.

  Carl burst into tactless laughter. The Goldfish’s eyes flashed red, but indeed, nothing happened.

  ‘We could not let it fly around armed,’ said Thsaaa. ‘It tried to attack us the moment it was reactivated.’

  ‘Look, I know it must be very confusing for you, Goldfish, but a lot of things happened while you were . . . deactivated, and now us and the Morrors are kind of on the same side,’ I said.

  ‘It’s more of an informal truce,’ said Josephine.

  ‘And now you can’t make us do history,’ said Carl, who hadn’t stopped laughing.

  The Goldfish went into a massive sulk and stopped talking to everybody.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s being so rude,’ said Noel to Thsaaa. ‘Thanks so much for fixing it.’

  Thsaaa flared their tentacles dismissively. ‘It is really a quite primitive device,’ they said. ‘It was simple to repair.’

  Josephine cocked her head sceptically. ‘Did you actually do it yourself ?’

  Thsaaa shuffled and went slightly yellow. ‘Well . . . no. I got a grown-up to do it.’

  ‘Thsaaa!’ called Flath, rippling green and peach and gesturing. ‘Athwara sel lamarath-te!’ And Warth-raaa beckoned to us again, with the same colours.

  ‘Just a minute,’ I called.

  ‘I have to go,’ said Thsaaa hurriedly. ‘But first, I want to . . . Josephine. Please take this.’

  Thsaaa was holding out the Paralashath.

  Josephine went very still and wide-eyed. In fact, we all did.

  ‘Because it may be a while before we see each other again, but when we do, I hope neither of us will be prisoners of war,’ said Thsaaa. ‘And because of the music.’

  Josephine stared at the Paralashath, which was pulsing softly with the same colours streaming across Thsaaa’s skin. Then she reached into her bag and fished out her harmonica. ‘Then you take this,’ she said. ‘For the same reasons.’

  Thsaaa took the harmonica and Josephine hugged the Paralashath to her chest.

/>   ‘Thank you,’ said Thsaaa, turning solemnest blue as Flath led them away.

  ‘You gave them your harmonica?’ I hissed at Josephine incredulously, as Warth-raaa herded us off towards an invisible ship.

  Josephine threw me one of her withering looks. ‘Yes. I gave them my harmonica. I didn’t give away my ability to buy a new one.’

  The Morror ship swooped out of the cavern and into the lavender sky. Sunlight streamed in through the windows and glittered in the bands of colour around us on the walls. The wild empty ground plunged away as if we’d dropped it. We could see the dust left by the Vshomu, huge clouds of it now, clogging the sky. But they hadn’t ruined Mars yet. We rose higher, until we could see the green and red patterns of the tundra, then the shape of the new continents in the bright new sea. And somehow, despite the fact that we’d been clamouring to get off Mars for hours, it felt shocking to be actually doing it. I suppose it should feel shocking. Jumping on and off planets is a shocking thing to ever be able to do.

  Mars shone and shrank until we tore free of the purple sky and it hung in the dark like a pendant made of copper and amethyst and jade and gold.

  ‘Beautiful,’ whispered Josephine, pressed against the window.

  Her breath frosted in the air. The spaceship was just as colourful as the one we’d found on Tharsis, but even colder. The Morrors had seen this problem coming. You might have hoped this meant they would have some advanced, alien-y way of dealing with the problem of transporting easily chilled humans, but in fact they just piled a few wardrobes’-worth of spare clothes on to us and left us to huddle in a corner.

  We did a lot of huddling on that voyage. Occasionally we’d try to warm up by jumping on the spot, as the ship was too small and the situation too urgent for a decent round of the Getting Around as Much of the Spaceship as Possible Without Touching the Floor game. And we had quite a lot of time to worry and feel the cold. The ship was faster than the Mélisande had been, but not that much faster: as in, we were going to get back to Earth in about three days rather than a week, but we weren’t going to flit back magically in twenty seconds, which is of course what we wanted to do. And there weren’t proper beds for us; the Morrors roosted in alcoves to rest and so we had to stay huddled in the pile of clothes on the floor to sleep. Camping on an alien spaceship is weird and going to the loo is even weirder, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.