Mars Evacuees Read online

  ‘And Josephine, it’s no good pretending you weren’t involved. What about your little manifesto the other day?’

  ‘I agree with Carl’s goals,’ said Josephine loftily. ‘I have serious problems with his methods.’

  ‘And Crewman Devlin says this isn’t the first time you’ve tried to sabotage the ship. You’ve been seen unscrewing fixings before.’

  Josephine started a bit. ‘Oh. Not on purpose.’

  ‘It’s true,’ admitted Carl. ‘They didn’t have anything to do with this. No one else did. It was just me.’

  Captain Mendez stared down at him. ‘How’d you end up on this ship, Carl? Exam, VIP or did someone pull your name out of a hat?’

  Carl looked uneasy. ‘My brother’s name, actually,’ he said. That was how it worked. If your name came up in the lottery, your brother or sister got a place on the ship too.

  ‘It didn’t have to be that way, you know,’ said Captain Mendez. ‘When they were planning the evacuation lottery, not everyone thought they should take siblings. Some people thought it would be fairer if more families got a chance to have a kid out of the fighting.’

  ‘None of this is really fair either way, is it?’ Carl said shortly.

  Not fair to be taken, not fair to be left behind. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d been thinking the same thing Josephine and I had from the beginning.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ agreed Mendez. ‘But suppose that vote had gone another way. Your brother would have been out here on his own.’

  Carl paled. ‘You’re not going to . . . You wouldn’t send me back and leave Noel on Mars by himself ?’

  ‘I’m saying,’ said Mendez, ‘that we’re taking you all this way to keep you safe from the Morrors, and all those other kids on Earth have been left behind with the shockrays and the ice instead of you. It’s the most dangerous time humanity’s ever faced. And you seem to be doing the best you can to make it worse. I’m saying you’re here by a billions-to-one chance. And this is what you decide to do with it.’

  Carl did look shaken by that. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Alice and Josephine really didn’t do anything.’

  Captain Mendez must have kind of believed that, because he stuck Carl in the escape shuttle for the rest of the voyage and didn’t do the same thing to Josephine and me. But he must have also kind of not believed it, because he had all our tablets and games and stuff taken away, which caused Josephine to vow undying wrath against Carl.

  ‘Gassing us was wrong, though,’ Carl called defiantly as the door was shut on him. ‘I was trying to do the right thing.’

  Mendez looked at him hard through the little window in the shuttle door. ‘You actually care about doing right?’ he asked. ‘Or do you just like the spotlight?’

  I got a glimpse of Carl’s mouth falling open in indignation, but no words came out of it. Captain Mendez turned away. ‘You think about that.’

  Carl had broken the Somnolum X system pretty thoroughly, it turned out, and so there was no more of it for the last two nights of the voyage. And frankly no one got any sleep at all.

  ‘Well, we’ll sleep on Mars,’ I said to Josephine, in the middle of the last night. I could just see her glowering by the starlight from the windows as people whooped and snogged and ran around and sang and Sergeant Kawahara groaned for everyone to be quiet.

  ‘You’re disturbing Dr Muldoon!’ she tried when everything else had failed.

  ‘Oh, this is all right by me,’ said Dr Muldoon airily, watching the chaos with detached curiosity. ‘I only sleep once a week anyway.’ She gestured at her temples and smiled. ‘Cortical implants!’

  So that was why her eyes looked that little bit too sparkly.

  ‘What harm are they really doing?’ she asked indulgently, and Sergeant Kawahara looked as though she thought that was easy to say for someone who didn’t need sleep. ‘Let them have their fun,’ persisted Dr Muldoon more quietly. ‘When are they going to have another chance? Isn’t what we’re doing to their lives enough?’

  The planet was filling the dark ahead now – red and purple and gold and silver.

  5

  Landing on a planet is worse than taking off, or at least I think so, because you’re basically falling. For the first time in days, everyone on the ship mostly shut up. Opposite me, Josephine was gripping the edge of her seat.

  The windows filled with fire as we burned through the atmosphere, and then suddenly instead of blackness and stars around us we were plunging through a pale, purplish sky. The ship was once again urging us to breathe deeply and think of babbling brooks and sun-dappled beaches, and the being-hammered-by-tablespoons feeling was even worse than before.

  The coppery ground flies up at you and the spaceship starts to slow down but it doesn’t seem like it can possibly slow down enough, so you’re still absolutely sure you’re going to crash and how on Earth – how both on and off Earth – can my mum do this all the time?

  And then we stopped moving. Everything went weirdly quiet.

  We were on Mars.

  There was a floaty feeling that seemed as if it should wear off now we’d stopped moving, but it didn’t. It made you want to move. I was suddenly very, very impatient to get out of the spaceship and I wriggled against the seatbelt.

  ‘Ow,’ said Josephine, because I’d accidentally kicked her in the shin. My foot just came up a lot higher than I meant it to. This wasn’t the artificial gravity any more. This was Mars’ brand of the real thing, and there was a lot less of it.

  Kayleigh led a round of slightly hysterical cheering – theoretically for the crew, though really everyone just felt like clapping and screaming. The crew lurched around the main passenger cabin looking completely exhausted, making sure we’d all got oxygen masks, for acclimatising. The oxygen canisters were pretty big, but they didn’t feel heavy.

  There was a thump from the escape shuttle where Carl was still shut up in disgrace. I imagined that was him trying to get out, or at least doing an experimental jump around and hitting the ceiling.

  When we had the oxygen masks fixed over our faces, the doors opened and a blast of thin air flowed in. It was cold but as you know, I was used to that. And slower than we wanted, but faster than the crew wanted, we all spilled down the ramp on to the surface of Mars.

  Beagle Base was a cluster of domes and windmills and drum-shaped buildings on stilts. The hills above the base were smooth, abrupt lumps with polished red sides, still bald, though there was thin blackish-green arctic grass growing on the plain.

  But we weren’t that bothered about where we were going to be living at first. What we saw at once was that you would never, ever for a single second be able to forget you were on a different world. The sun was too small and too pale. The horizon was too close, and too curved. I don’t think people would ever have thought the world was flat if they’d started off on Mars.

  And the gravity. It was amazing. It felt like we’d suddenly got superpowers, because in a way we had. I jumped as high as I could. This turned out to be as high as my own head. It was almost as exciting as being able to fly, but kind of scary too, because that’s a long way to come down. But I descended slowly enough to see the red horizon settling lazily back into place around me, and Josephine looking up at me and then taking off herself. Soon everyone was doing it, three hundred kids all bouncing up and down on the alien plain like bubbles in a pan of boiling water.

  Then there was a horrible blaring noise overhead and everyone jumped or shrieked or giggled or fell over according to character. Until then we hadn’t noticed the three little flying silver ball-things that had whooshed over from behind a cluster of red rocks and were now spinning around in a triangle formation above us. They shouted in one deep, annoyed, American voice: ‘You will get in a line! You will be silent! You are all Exo-Defence Force cadets now! You will act like it!’

  So we did that, at least the getting-in-a-line part, and we were quick about it too because those things were scary.

>   ‘EDF Goads,’ said Josephine. ‘I read about them . . .’

  One of the Goads plunged down out of the pinkish sky and hovered in front of us, shimmering. In the shimmer we could see the face of an old, angry-looking man, who bawled at Josephine: ‘SILENCE!’ And then it swooped off along the line and bawled the same thing at a lot of other people, with variations like ‘STAND UP STRAIGHT!’ and ‘TAKE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE!’ and one of the other Goads swept along behind it translating into various languages and sounding just as furious whether it was yelling ‘SILENZIO!’ or ‘CHEN MO!’ even though it was automated.

  A large, strange shape was emerging over one of the hills; something huge and black with four legs, a bit like a horse and a bit like a dog and a bit like a monkey – except that it didn’t have a head, because being a robot, it didn’t need one. Astride its back was the man whose face we’d seen in the Goad. He was actually robot himself from the knees down. You could see this because even though he had to be at least seventy-five, and even though we were on Mars and it was chilly to say the least, he was wearing very short shorts.

  He looked down at us from his steed, which you almost expected to rear up dramatically against the skyline.

  ‘I AM COLONEL DIRK CLEAVER.’ He was very loud, even louder than Carl, but even if he hadn’t been, the three little Goads which were now whirling above him amplified his voice all over the Martian plain.

  ‘And there are some things you should know about me,’ he went on just as loudly. ‘I never wanted to wind up stuck on this rock, babysitting the likes of you, because some snivelling pen-pusher thinks I’m too old to fight. But since I am here, by God, YOU WILL BECOME THE FINEST FIGHTING FORCE OF SEVEN-TO-SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN. Those invisible scumbuckets will quail in terror of you. But first, you will quail in terror of me!’

  I was already quailing, maybe not quite in terror, but certainly in general Oh-God-What-Is-This-ness. I sneaked a glance at Josephine. She was not quailing at all, but she was staring into the distance in a resigned kind of way, as if she was sizing up what the next four years were going to be like.

  Dirk Cleaver pointed. ‘There are your barracks; I want you back out here in uniform in twenty minutes!’ For a moment he looked vaguely disgusted. ‘The civilian robots will show you what to do.’ He didn’t sound as if he thought much of the civilian robots. I was still keen to see what they’d be like; though the thing the Colonel was riding was exciting enough to be going on with. He shouted, ‘Yah!’ and the thing responded just as if it had been an animal; it charged down the hill with him sitting easily upright astride it. The headlessness was creepier when it moved – it could go in any direction without hesitating or looking where it was going. Sometimes, when there was a big rock or something in the way, it would go straight from galloping like a horse to moving sideways like a crab. Once he was down on the plain, the Colonel rode along the line of children with his whirling Goads sweeping after him, as we all tried to quail in suitable terror. ‘Go on! Get moving! March!’

  So we marched off as best we could towards Beagle Base. Colonel Cleaver’s voice continued to yell at us out of the Goads, ‘Quick march! Left, right!’ while another robot came to meet us, hovering above the ground like the Goads. Except this one was shaped like a sunflower with a smiley face and playing a jingly tune.

  ‘Hi there!’ it said in a friendly way. ‘Hola chicos! Namaste doston! Nimen hao! Wow, you’re a long way from home! Welcome to Beagle Base! Why don’t we take a look around?’

  ‘You will become living weapons!’ roared the Colonel. ‘You will be disciplined! You will be strong! You will be ruthless!’

  ‘We’re going to have a fun time together!’ giggled the sunflower robot placidly.

  ‘I don’t think I like it here,’ said Josephine.

  The Sunflower led us between a couple of buildings on stilts and down a tunnel into a huge, misty-looking transparent dome. Inside it was all green and warm and lovely, and full of growing things. Little robots skittered about between beds of plants, spraying stuff on them or picking cauliflowers and beans while bees hummed overhead. The Sunflower led us through the gardens, rocking gently from side to side as it hovered, talking in Mandarin and then Spanish in the same happy tone.

  ‘Look at all the healthy food we’re growing!’ it said when it went back to English. ‘And see, over there are some EDF scientists called ecologists! They’re helping to make Mars a safe, green, living planet for us all!’

  It was true; on the other side of the dome, standing between banks of strange plants that didn’t look like anything I’d seen on Earth, there were some actual humans. Some of them were wearing lab coats and some were in overalls, but all had the Exo-Defence Force comet symbol on the chest. They were directing the little agricultural robots around or comparing results on their tablets. One of them was a woman riding a vehicle like a more delicate, spidery version of the Colonel’s Beast. It carried her over the crops by elegantly placing its pointed feet into tiny spaces between plants, not even bending a leaf. All these people ignored us completely – we were the Colonel’s and the robots’ responsibility. The beds of vegetables opened out around a big oval sports field framed by a running track. It had been such a long time since I had seen anything like that which wasn’t covered in snow.

  ‘Let’s meet my friends!’ cooed the Sunflower.

  Our teachers and caretakers for the next four years were waiting for us in the middle of the sports field – standing or hovering. They came forwards, pleased to see us.

  Like the Sunflower, they were designed to appeal to children, and they mostly looked like huge toys. There was a Cat and a Star and a Flamingo and a Goldfish. The older kids just had a plain hovering globe thing like a slightly less aggressive version of the Colonel’s Goads. But I think something had gone wrong with the design for the robot for the smallest kids, or maybe it had got a bit broken on the way to Mars. It was a six-foot-tall Teddy Bear that lumbered forwards and said, ‘HELLO LITTLE CHILDREN’ in a deep and awful voice and four seven-year-olds burst into tears on the spot.

  Little Noel Dalisay didn’t cry, because he was too busy looking around for his brother.

  ‘They’ve forgotten Carl!’ I said to Josephine.

  ‘Huh,’ snorted Josephine bitterly. ‘Tragic.’ She’d only had her tablet and its library of books back for a couple of hours, so wasn’t in any mood to be forgiving.

  The robots seemed to know exactly who we all were, and more importantly how old we all were. They roamed about, looking at our faces and calling out names, until for the first time we were divided up by age rather than by nationality or by whoever we felt like hanging around with. Josephine and I and the rest of the eleven- and twelve-year-olds got the Goldfish.

  ‘Hey, kids!’ it said to us. It had a livelier, jauntier way of talking than the Sunflower, which sounded permanently spaced out on the bliss of being a flower-shaped robot. ‘I can’t wait for us all to get to know each other and start learning and having fun! Gosh, it’s gonna be super.’

  ‘Um,’ I began. It felt weird to be talking to a fish. ‘I think Carl Dalisay should be in our year? And he’s still on the ship.’

  ‘Aww, don’t you worry, Alice!’ it said fondly, as if it had known me for ages. ‘We’ll find him!’

  The Goldfish was a rather fascinating thing. It was orange and shiny and faintly translucent with a light inside that slowly pulsed from dim to bright, and big, glowing blue eyes. When it was talking English it had an American accent, and like the Goads and the Sunflower, it hovered above the ground. I thought it was programmed a bit too young for us, though. It hadn’t been talking for two minutes before it became clear it was very keen on sharing and everyone using their imaginations.

  ‘At some point,’ I whispered to Josephine, ‘that fish is going to make us sing.’

  ‘Well, I just bet you all want to know where you’re going to sleep, and what your new uniforms look like!’ chirped the Goldfish, as cheerful
ly as it said everything else. ‘Let’s go, kids!’

  It led us off across the sports field, down a path through more banks of plants and to the edge of the dome, where we found there were classrooms and corridors looped all around the central garden in rings. We got occasional glimpses of smaller domes outside, clustered round the main one like little bubbles in bathwater clinging to a big one.

  ‘That’s where they’re growing wheat and soy!’ the Goldfish told us happily. ‘In here for Assessment and Processing, kids!’

  I was a little scared of being Assessed and Processed, but it herded us into a wide, bright chamber full of little cubicles where you got blasted with an unexpected sonic shower and the floor weighed you and something in the walls scanned you to measure how tall you were, and I think maybe it was checking to see if you had any diseases too.

  ‘Hey,’ said somebody, while things whirred busily behind the walls. I turned. Lilly was in the cubicle with me.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, not too warmly.

  But Lilly was smiling at me – a humble, earnest sort of smile, like I was a duchess and she was interviewing for a job as my butler. ‘I like the pink in your hair, I never said. I’d never dare to do that, but it looks awesome.’

  I blinked. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I think your mom’s totally amazing, by the way.’

  ‘Mmm-hm.’

  Lilly stopped smiling and twisted her hands. ‘Look, I’m sorry about before, with the exam girl. We were all just joking around, and you know, I guess she can’t help it but she does come off as kind of strange, and maybe we got a little carried away.’

  I looked at her. Up till then, Lilly-and-Gavin-and-Christa-and-various-hangers-on had all been one blob of unpleasantness to me. But on her own, Lilly was very harmless-looking. She was about my height, slim, dark-blonde hair, pretty but not so you’d notice the first time you looked. Her shoulders were tense and her fingernails were bitten down to the quick.

  I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what to think.

  ‘Christa’s actually really cool,’ added Lilly. ‘And I’m sure she wasn’t trying to be mean either. And I was so scared, those first few days on the spaceship. And she’s, like, used to people who are celebrities and stuff, and it was so nice of her to hang out with us. So, you know.’