Mars Evacuees Read online

  I missed Thsaaa. The grown-up Morrors were just like grown-up humans in that they talked almost exclusively to other grown-ups (Dr Muldoon, in this case) and didn’t tell us what was going on. Swarasee-ee did at least show us how to make the Paralashath work as a heater (though we couldn’t have it on all the time because the Morrors got too hot) and Josephine tried to ask them about the people who made it and what it meant.

  ‘I’m sorry, I have never been very interested in Paralashath as an art form,’ said Swarasee-ee, politely.

  Unfortunately, once we’d been in space a few hours, the Goldfish stopped sulking.

  ‘Hmm, looks like we’ve got a lot of time on our hands,’ it said. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said.

  ‘How about . . . biology? Alice loves biology, don’t you, Alice?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, too bad,’ said the Goldfish. ‘Let’s talk about BIOMASS.’

  We cast despairing looks at Dr Muldoon, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground, wrapped in five layers of Morror kilts, and jabbing important things into Josephine’s tablet.

  ‘As an EDF officer, I’m ordering you to stop this,’ Dr Muldoon told the Goldfish.

  The Goldfish didn’t care. It started projecting the carbon cycle all over the place.

  ‘Look at them,’ said Dr Muldoon. ‘They’re frozen and traumatised and they should all be in hospital.’

  ‘And they’re very behind with the syllabus!’ the Goldfish panicked.

  ‘This time, you really can’t make us do it,’ said Carl. ‘You can’t zap us.’

  For a few seconds the Goldfish seethed silently in the air, eyes flashing red.

  Then it started buzzing.

  ‘Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt,’ it went at the volume of a decent-sized road drill. ‘Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.’

  ‘Are you malfunctioning?’

  ‘Nope,’ said the Goldfish airily and carried on buzzing.

  ‘Aha. I see what you’re doing,’ said Carl. ‘It won’t work.’

  ‘Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt,’ said the Goldfish.

  ‘Aaaaargh,’ said Warth-raaa, waving their tentacles in frustration. ‘Maaaaaake it stoooop, or we will breeeeeaak it!’

  The Goldfish stubbornly kept buzzing.

  ‘Oh, FINE!’ cried Josephine. ‘But I’m not borrowing back my tablet from Dr Muldoon, she’s doing important work!’

  The Goldfish practically evaporated in the force of its own smugness. Until Carl decided to liven things up by pretending to pass out.

  And then we saw a pale bluish star that was brighter than the others, and it grew in the dark, like a flower.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling tears come into my eyes. I wonder if maybe I’d been afraid it wouldn’t still be there.

  ‘Yes,’ said Swarasee-ee. ‘Home.’

  We watched Earth in silence. From this distance it didn’t look as if it could possibly have any problems at all.

  ‘Swarasee-ee,’ said Josephine. ‘Thsaaa said something about humans stopping you building the Vuhalimath-laa. What is that?’

  Swarasee-ee went yellow, purple and black, and said something to Warth-raaa, whose tendrils swished crossly. ‘Thsaaa should not have spoken about that.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have spoken about lots of things,’ said Josephine, ‘and if they hadn’t you’d still be in the cave with the Vshomu on the way. Come on, it can’t make that much difference now.’

  Swarasee-ee made a grumbling noise, and hesitated. Then they pointed. ‘That is the Vuhalimath-laa.’

  For a moment I thought they were pointing at the planet itself. It made sense: maybe they just meant the humans were stopping them building a home. But then I made out the first, faint glitter of the web of reflector discs that enveloped the world.

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ I said. ‘Just the light-shield. The big fridge you’ve shoved Earth in.’

  ‘“Big fridge” . . .? Ah, I understand. That is not all it is for,’ said Swarasee-ee. ‘If it was complete, it would be the same as our gowns, or our ships.’

  ‘An invisibility shield for a whole planet,’ said Dr Muldoon, making frantic notes on her tablet. ‘It could hide us from the Vshomu?’

  ‘That was always our hope,’ said Swarasee-ee sadly. ‘Of course, we prayed it would never be needed. We thought we had run far enough.’

  We fell silent again. You could have stared at the approaching Earth, hypnotised, for hours.

  Except that just then a squadron of Flarehawks charged out from inside the Vuhalimath-laa and started trying to blow us up.

  A torpedo skimmed past our port bow. The ship shuddered ominously.

  ‘Uncloak!’ screamed Dr Muldoon. ‘Go visible! We have to show them we’re not a threat!’

  ‘It is impossible,’ said Swarasee-ee, frantically working the controls. ‘The invisibility of our ships is inherent; it does not turn off.’

  ‘Open a channel! Let me talk to them!’

  Swarasee-ee pulled at some leaf-like controls and an unpleasantly goopy, web-like device descended from the ceiling. Swarasee-ee spared two tentacles to fix this over Dr Muldoon’s head, while still steering the ship with the other four. ‘Speak.’

  Warth-raaa said something urgent and went indigo and neon orange.

  ‘This is Dr Valerie Muldoon, I’m a – for God’s sake, don’t fire at them!’

  But Warth-raaa did fire at them. In fairness, the humans had just fired at us. And it wasn’t just us, of course, there was a whole fleet of invisible Morror vessels behind us bristling with shockrays and that was all you needed to put together a perfectly respectable space-battle.

  The ship dived. What with the artificial gravity we couldn’t really feel the motion, but we could see it on the viewport and that was an excellent way to make yourself space-sick, as if we hadn’t already got enough problems.

  ‘Can anyone hear me? I’m an EDF officer aboard a Morror vessel –’ shouted Dr Muldoon as something in the ship blared a warning.

  The Flarehawks plunged after us, graceful as homicidal ballet dancers, flinging torpedoes like ribbons of light.

  ‘Oh, come on, we can’t get killed by our own side!’ groaned Carl, wrapping his arms round Noel.

  Then there was a thud, and all the lights went out.

  We went flying.

  It took me a second – in which time some cold-blue backup lights had come up, and I bounced from wall to wall to ceiling and into the Goldfish – to work out that the torpedo must have damaged whatever made the artificial gravity work. I’d been flung into the air, and at first my brain couldn’t catch up with why I was staying there.

  I grabbed the edge of one of the Morrors’ sleeping niches to anchor myself and looked around.

  ‘Dr Muldoon!’ shouted Josephine, launching off the floor to reach for her.

  Dr Muldoon was floating limply just below the ceiling. Spherical drops of blood hung in the air like tiny planets.

  The Morrors, having more limbs to hang on to things with, were doing rather better than we were: Warth-raaa had scrambled their way back to the helm and was doing their best to steer us out of danger; Swarasee-ee had opened a panel in the floor and was wrangling with the workings of the ship.

  I heard Dr Muldoon groan softly. I kicked off the wall and swam through the air, bounced into the ceiling and crawled my way along it towards the helm. I dragged the goopy web-thing over my head.

  ‘Hello? Hello!’ I said, floating there above the control panel, watching the Flarehawk squadron-leader lunge straight towards us, the blue glow of the Earth framing it like a halo. ‘We’re human passengers on the Morror ship; please stop torpedoing us. We’ve got very important news and we swear we’re not trying to shoot anyone. We need safe passage to Earth.’

  I found I’d screwed up my eyes towards the end of this in anticipation of being exploded. Nothing happened. I opened them a crack.

  The Flarehawk had stopped moving. It didn’t fire. It seemed so cl
ose that, if we hadn’t been invisible, the pilot could almost have looked inside and seen me.

  ‘Oh, God,’ whispered a voice, over the channel. ‘Alice?’

  Swarasee-ee fixed the gravity. I might have dropped to the ground even if they hadn’t. Everyone except the Goldfish landed in a series of thuds and groans.

  I pulled myself up to my knees and steadied the communicator on my head. I breathed, ‘Mum?’

  25

  ‘Alice . . . Alice. This is impossible – how can you be – have they hurt you? Are you all right?’

  ‘It’s really me, Mum,’ I said, ‘and I’m fine.’ That might not have been completely true but it would do for now. ‘I’m not a prisoner or anything. There’s a lot to explain. But the main thing is that there are these horrible things called Vshomu that ate the Morrors’ planet and they’re in our solar system now, Mum, and they’re absolutely awful; they ate bits of Mars and tried to eat us and we have to stop the war with the Morrors or they’ll eat Earth as well and –’

  I was, I suddenly realised, getting slightly hysterical.

  ‘Alice,’ said Mum, sounding completely in control again. ‘Slow down. Now, these Vshomu. Would they be anything to do with the swarm of small flying objects coming up behind you?’

  ‘What? YES!’ I screamed, absurdly looking over my shoulder as if I’d be able to see them.

  Mum’s ship pounced straight over ours like a cat and I saw the flash of her torpedoes light up the windows. ‘Squadron!’ I heard her saying over the channel. ‘Concentrate all firepower on the small incoming creatures! Do not attack the Morror vessels. Repeat, do not attack the Morror vessels.’

  She always did understand things quickly. It had been so long; I’d forgotten that about her.

  ‘Mum, don’t let them touch you! They’ll eat right through your ship!’

  I turned anxiously. Dr Muldoon was propping herself up on her elbows and groaning and Josephine was dabbing at a cut on her head with a Morror skirt. Carl and Noel were already pressed to the windows. I ran and joined them.

  I could only see bits and pieces of the battle, but there was one ship that moved just beautifully – that was the only word for it – like a bird of prey sweeping through a flock of sparrows, and I was sure that was Mum’s.

  I suddenly really wished I had a Flarehawk of my own. I felt sure I could have picked off a reasonable number of Vshomu given the chance; I was trained for this and it would have felt better than just sitting there waiting to see if Mum won or not. But I couldn’t have done a thing with the Morror ship, which seemed to be fairly broken anyway. And so was my arm, come to that.

  Her ship was out of sight now. Some debris that might have been fragments of exploded Space Locust floated past the window. I ran back to the communicator. ‘Mum, Mum – are you all right?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mum’s voice, sounding slightly out of breath. ‘That was exciting.’

  Swarasee-ee plucked the communicator from my head. ‘Good afternoon,’ they said, sounding for all the world like the kind of automated helpline my parents used to complain about back on Earth. ‘Am I right in thinking this is Captain Stephanie Dare?’

  ‘Who is this?’ asked my mum.

  ‘My name is Swarasee-ee.’

  ‘What . . .? A Morror. You don’t . . . sound like a Morror.’

  ‘I have a special knack for languages.’

  ‘You know who I am.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Swarasee-ee, rather grimly. ‘We know who you are.’ And there was a pause in which the atmosphere of the ship seemed even more icy than it had done before, with both of them just listening to each other’s silence and to the memory of fifteen years of war. ‘Our ship is damaged,’ said Swarasee-ee finally. ‘I doubt we can reach Earth without help.’

  ‘We can tow you in,’ said Mum. ‘But I can see there’s a whole fleet behind you; I can’t be responsible for escorting that many down to Earth.’

  ‘What do you mean you can see them . . . ?’ began Swarasee-ee, sounding faintly scandalised, but then shook it off. ‘It is of no importance. I agree the other ships can wait in orbit until terms are agreed.’

  ‘Off we go, then,’ said Mum briskly. And there was an odd feeling as if something was squeezing the ship, and then we were moving again, faster and faster.

  Earth came rushing to meet us.

  *

  I was warm. I’d more or less forgotten what that was like.

  I also felt as if someone had placed a large piece of furniture, possibly a chest of drawers or a big desk, on top of my chest. I groaned.

  ‘Alice. How do you feel?’

  ‘Urgh.’ I lifted one arm and watched it drop back on to the blankets in disgust. ‘. . . Heavy.’

  Mum laughed. ‘Yes, shifting gravity that suddenly is a pain, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Earth.’

  ‘I know that, I mean which country?’

  ‘Oh. America. New York.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I said. ‘Can we see the Statue of Liberty? It is still there, isn’t it?’

  The main thing I remembered from landing was being knocked flat by the gravity, and a lot of people gasping at their first sight of visible Morrors. Then we’d been scooped into ambulances and whizzed off to hospital. Someone had put a cast on my arm, although by that time I’d had trouble keeping my eyes open, and after that I couldn’t remember a thing, except it had clearly involved going to bed.

  ‘It’s still there.’

  I looked at Mum properly. She looked smaller and more ordinary than I remembered. I’d been finding it harder and harder to picture anything when I thought of her except that bloody poster.

  ‘Alice, you’ve had such a terrible time, and I nearly killed you.’

  ‘I’ve been being nearly killed all week,’ I said grandly. ‘Doesn’t bother me that much now.’

  ‘That is not a reassuring thing to say to your mother,’ Mum said, and crawled half on to the bed so as to hug me.

  A very tiny, spiteful part of me thought it was only fair if she had to do some worrying now; I’d been doing it long enough. But mainly it was just wonderful to curl up against her and not have to pretend I wasn’t bothered about where she was or what she might be doing, because she was there and alive and not going anywhere for a bit, hopefully. And her arms were warm and her hair smelled of the coconut shampoo she always used, which I’d completely forgotten about but now I remembered.

  ‘It wasn’t all terrible,’ I said. ‘And I’m not dead. And I’m glad I got the chance to watch you fight. I mean, I can’t say I enjoyed it at the time, but still, you really are amazing at it.’

  Mum sniffed a little. ‘You’ve done these incredible things.’

  ‘Oh, those,’ I said, trying to sit up. ‘What’s going on? Is the war over?’

  ‘Not quite, but –’

  ‘Why not?!’ I burst out, indignant.

  ‘It takes a long time to finish a war.’

  ‘I don’t see why. Everyone just has to stop fighting each other and start fighting the Vshomu. It’s not complicated.’

  ‘It is complicated,’ said Mum. ‘There’s the status of the territory the Morrors have occupied, the climate, the invisibility shield . . . a lot of loose ends. But there’s a ceasefire. The EEC president’s flown in; and there’s a Morror delegation in the UN now.’

  ‘So . . .’ I felt better for hearing the word ‘ceasefire’. ‘Do you think it will be OK?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Mum. ‘At least, as OK as it can be when the solar system’s infested with planet-eating bugs. It’ll have to be OK. There’s no real choice, for humans or Morrors.’

  ‘No, that’s exactly it,’ I said. And I flopped back on to the pillows, but the wave of tiredness eased off sooner than I expected.

  ‘I don’t need to be in hospital,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing particularly wrong with me.’

  ‘You’ve got burns, cuts, a broken arm, hypothermia, gravitational readjustment s
yndrome and dehydration.’

  ‘Like I say,’ I said, waving a hand and feeling I could milk this grizzled old veteran act for a while yet: ‘Nothing.’ And this time I did succeed in making Mum laugh. ‘So, what about everyone else? The kids from Beagle . . .’

  ‘They’ve only just landed. Some of them will probably be turning up here later. Things got pretty bad out there, from what I hear . . .’

  ‘But . . .?’

  ‘But no fatalities, no.’

  ‘Oh.’ I’d known the news wouldn’t be any better than that, really, but it still wasn’t good. I thought about Kayleigh and Chinenye and everyone else, and how I had no real idea what they’d been through. And even though I knew I couldn’t have done anything useful, I started to feel bad about leaving them. I never even said goodbye.

  ‘They’re alive. And you saved their lives.’

  ‘I didn’t really. That was all Josephine; I’d never even have thought to go off on my own and . . . Mum, my friends, are they here? I want to go and see them.’

  Mum didn’t try to stop me climbing out of the bed, and propped me up when I put my feet on the ground and got wobbly.

  ‘Why do we need so much gravity?’ I complained. ‘Completely over the top.’

  We shuffled out of the room and into a corridor. I thought of something. ‘Can I,’ I said, ‘have tea and beans on toast?’

  Mum laughed. ‘Well – in principle, of course you can. But finding the right kind of baked beans and tea in America . . .’

  ‘. . . has got to be easier than on Mars,’ I said.

  ‘True. Yes, then.’

  ‘Spaghetti carbonara would do in the meantime.’

  A hovering hospital robot came round the turn of the corridor. Someone was hanging on to it with both hands, letting themselves be pulled along, bare feet skidding on the ground. The robot did not seem happy about having a passenger; it twitched as we saw it, and the person fell off. But they jumped up for another go, letting out a cry of, ‘WOOHOO . . .!’