Mars Evacuees

by Sophia McDougall

  The few crew members who seemed to be in charge of us kept stalking around looking tense with their communicators beeping all the time. I heard one of them whispering to another. ‘We’re just going to have to go without them!’

  ‘Who’s missing?’ Kayleigh was saying, a few seats back from me. ‘What’s happened to them? Have the Morrors got them?’

  ‘Come on, we have to move,’ yelled the angry Swedish girl from before.

  Instead of actually talking to us, the EDF people let the ship do it. And apparently the ship’s idea of a useful contribution was to start playing twinkly music and waterfall noises. ‘Please relax and stay in your seats,’ crooned a soothing, automated voice. ‘Imagine a stream of healing energy flowing through you . . .’

  Outside, something – one of our ships or one of theirs, we didn’t know – exploded. I was hurting the palms of my hands by digging my fingernails into them. I tried to remind myself that there was no particular reason the Morrors should bother with a passenger ship trying to LEAVE the planet.

  Then there was a roaring sound very close that rattled everyone, but it was just an ordinary plane landing on the platform. All the crew’s communicators started beeping even more furiously and finally a door opened, and twenty kids ran up into the cabin, looking rather agitated to say the least.

  Before they’d even sat down, the door had slammed itself shut and there was a whirr and a lurch as the spaceship’s legs retracted. And then we were moving, skimming low over the Atlantic: I looked out and saw it melt into a dark-blue blur. Already the artificial gravity was working against the drag of the natural stuff, which meant you didn’t fall about as much as you would have done otherwise but felt very odd. None of us was used to it and some people were sick into the bags provided. Luckily I don’t throw up very easily, but it made me feel as if I was being hit lightly but persistently all over with tablespoons.

  And then we were beginning to climb. One of the new arrivals came staggering down the aisle and toppled into the seat opposite me, panting. ‘Hello,’ she said. To my surprise, she was English too.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ I said, as we shot upwards into the flashing blue sky.

  3

  Earth fought to hold on to us – we could feel its pull in our bones, and in the way the ship shivered. But we dragged stubbornly on, and the planet dropped away. And then there’s that moment when the surface you’re leaving curves in on itself and the horizon bends into a circle and you see the world really is round after all. Even though you know it’s going to happen, it’s still like the biggest, most shocking conjuring trick ever.

  Now we could see the bands of white at the poles, pressing in on the bright stripe of colour in the middle. Here and there, the world glittered with little sparks which were explosions and shockray fights.

  The girl opposite me whispered, ‘Beautiful,’ with a sort of break in her voice.

  She was pressed as close to the window as she could get. The ship, mercifully, had stopped advising us all to imagine we were relaxing in a sunlit glade and everything felt strangely quiet and still. I don’t think I answered; I just stared back as the Earth got smaller and smaller behind us.

  Then she added thoughtfully, ‘I’ve forgotten my suitcase.’

  I was appalled. ‘What?’ I cried. ‘Oh my God!’ And I actually started a little out of my seat as if I could run back to Earth and get it for her.

  She seemed much less worried than I was. ‘Oh well. It only had clothes in it.’

  ‘But – what, you’ve got nothing?’

  She looked reproachful. ‘There was a lot going on,’ she said. ‘And no, I didn’t forget anything important.’ Now I saw there was a large shoulder bag slumped open on the seat beside her, the stuff inside it on the point of spilling out. So she began to take things out of it and set them on the table between us.

  ‘This is all you’ve got in the entire world?’

  She shrugged, vastly. The shrug went all the way to the tips of her fingers and up into her hair. ‘We’re not in the world any more.’

  She had: a battered tablet, which was almost the only thing that had an obvious point. A tangle of string. A magnifying glass. A gold wire star that looked as if it came from a Christmas tree. A harmonica. A square silk scarf. A thick roll of duct tape. A little round silver bottle. A small patchwork cushion, which might have started out as dark red but was now mainly grey and worn. A tiny wooden sculpture of a cat. And lots of stones, some with holes in them.

  ‘You have rocks,’ I pointed out. ‘In your bag. Which you’re taking into outer space. Rocks. And no clothes or a toothbrush.’

  She stared at me blankly as if this was what everyone should be doing.

  I did some minor flailing and said, ‘You can borrow things of mine.’

  She seemed surprised, and sort of amused. ‘That’s nice of you. You don’t even know my name yet.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, flustered by this point. ‘Well.’

  ‘It’s Josephine Jerome. Have a ginger biscuit.’

  She shook a packet of them at me. Well, that was one more thing I could see the point of. ‘Alice,’ I said.

  Any of my clothes would be too big on her though, I thought, looking at her. She was small and black and spindly with a pointy chin and a wide bulgy forehead. She had an explosive cloud of hair, held tightly back from her face with grips, and her large starey eyes gave her the look of being in a mild state of shock the whole time. Though just then, it occurred to me, she actually might have been.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked her. ‘How come you were all so late? And you’re English – why weren’t you on the same flight with us?’

  Josephine slotted her thumb through the hole in one of the stones. ‘We should have been. But, uh, there were some shockray hits in London yesterday. Everything shut down.’

  ‘In London?’ I said, shocked, and angry no one had told us. Despite everything the Morrors got up to, direct attacks on major cities were pretty rare. They were more about freezing everything over and zapping the hell out of anyone who tried to stop them.

  Josephine nodded grimly and gripped the stone more tightly. ‘They could flatten the whole city if they wanted; they must just want people to leave. And now we are.’

  I was quiet. It hadn’t quite struck me before that at this rate the whole of Britain would probably be gone by the time I came back to Earth, if I ever did.

  ‘So the flight out from Belgium got diverted to pick us up. Anyway, we made it in the end. And they’ll have toothbrushes,’ she added, reassuringly. ‘They couldn’t expect us to use the same ones for years and years, could they?’

  At this point we were interrupted by a demonstration of what to do if the spaceship came under attack or got into an accident (though clearly the real answer was: die). And then a man came round with a register to make sure they’d got all the right people, although it was a bit late to do anything about it if they hadn’t.

  ‘Alice Dare,’ I said, after Josephine had given her name.

  The crewman’s eyes lifted slowly from his tablet and he looked at me. He said doubtfully, ‘Alistair . . .?’

  ‘ALICE. DARE!’ I said, possibly rather loudly. Now, I did once know a boy called Lauren so anything is possible, but I do NOT look as if my name should be Alistair. I was wearing a skirt and as well as the pink streaks in my hair, I also had some glitter.

  I always speak very clearly too, so the reason this keeps happening is that people do not listen.

  A few people looked around at us and the crewman grimaced and moved on quickly.

  ‘I think you scared him,’ said Josephine, grinning, and she leaned forwards to study me quite blatantly in a way that some people might think a little rude. ‘Dare, huh,’ she said. ‘No relation . . .?’

  I thought, I’ve got one second to say no and come up with a whole new identity and maybe not have to deal with any of that she-thinks-she’s-so-special-because-of-her-mum stuff. And then I realised I hadn’t got that long
at all, because immediately Josephine said, ‘Ohhh . . .’ and sat back in her seat with her eyes even wider than usual. In a lower voice she asked, ‘What’s that like?’

  I sighed. ‘It’s like nothing at all,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen her in over a year.’

  ‘But that’s why you’re here,’ she went on, relentlessly. ‘Too demoralising if people heard the Morrors got you. They’d never look at that poster the same way again.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ I said, rather irritably. ‘What are you in for?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ said Josephine, biting her lip. ‘I sort of . . . well, there was this exam, and . . . not that they told us why they were setting it, but . . .’

  We looked at each other and grinned sort of shiftily. And I knew we were both thinking that there just wasn’t a reason to be chosen for this ship that wasn’t kind of dodgy and unfair, whether it was doing well in an exam or having a famous mum or even being chosen at random (because that was the other way they did it). But there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. We were twelve.

  ‘Is it true your mum’s seen a Morror?’ asked Josephine, because except for some singed tentacles that had been picked out of a wreck in Minnesota, and some bits of what might have been a head found floating in the Pacific, no one had seen a Morror back then. They were really good at staying invisible even when they were dead.

  ‘No. She’s got this . . . sense about them – you know, it’s been on the news. Sometimes she says it’s as if she can see their ships, like she forgets they’re invisible. But she doesn’t know what they look like or anything.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Josephine said. She put down her stone and looked at her collection of objects on the table for a moment, wriggling her fingers absently in the air. She picked up the bottle. ‘This is a Morror ship, right? The invisibility shield guides light all the way round it.’ She slid her forefinger over the silver surface. ‘But maybe some does scatter off. Maybe your mum is sensitive to some wavelength of light most people can’t pick up consciously.’

  I thought about this. Most people – Mum included, actually – seemed to think her special Morror-finding sense was practically magic. I never said so, but secretly I had always assumed it was just good luck. I liked the idea of it being something science-y like that instead. It made it seem more likely it would go on working.

  ‘What’s in the bottle?’ I asked.

  She squirreled the bottle away back into the bag and answered, ‘Perfume.’

  I wondered why someone who evidently didn’t care about clothes at all cared about perfume, but I didn’t press it. Maybe it was her mum’s or something.

  She had another look at me, and grinned again. ‘You like pink, huh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, a little menacingly, because I thought she might be laughing at me.

  She held up her hands, to show she didn’t mean any harm. ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’

  I stared at her. From what she’d said about light wavelengths and passing exams I’d got the impression that she must be pretty clever, except with suitcases. So this was just a bizarre thing to say. ‘I’m going to be in the army,’ I said flatly.

  ‘I’m going to be an archaeologist,’ said Josephine dreamily, assembling her stones into another pattern. ‘And a composer. And a mum.’

  ‘Why are you saying this?’ I asked, baffled.

  ‘Why not?’

  I folded my arms. ‘Well. I expect you could write some music, if you wanted. In your spare time. And you could possibly have a baby. In your spare time. But you’re not going to be an archaeologist. You’re going to be in the EDF like everyone else on this ship. Didn’t they tell you that part?’

  Josephine’s hands went still on the objects and for a few seconds she didn’t look at me. Then she threw back her head and smiled again, but in a more complicated sort of way. She remarked, ‘You’re a fairly gloomy person, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am not gloomy,’ I said. ‘I’m realistic.’

  ‘The war can’t go on forever.’

  ‘But look,’ I said. ‘We’re twelve. We’re going out to Mars where we’re going to have military training. We won’t be able to use it until we’re sixteen or so. So the EEC plainly think the war’s going to go on for at least four years and then some! Because otherwise it wouldn’t be worth it! And it’s already been going on forever with no end in sight – certainly no sign that we’re winning –’

  ‘Fifteen years.’

  ‘A lifetime.’

  ‘But still. It has to end sometime. Wars always do. Everything has to end,’ said Josephine, eating another ginger biscuit and getting unexpectedly philosophical.

  ‘Yeah. Things like human civilisation,’ I said.

  She went still again. She bowed her face over her objects and asked, ‘Is that really what you think will happen?’

  She said it in a very calm, neutral voice, as if she were just curious. But it was at this point, rather late I suppose, I realised I was actually upsetting her. ‘No,’ I said, trying to sound less . . . harsh. I felt suddenly very tired. I looked out of the window again. ‘I just think things are going to carry on the way they are for a really, really long time.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Josephine, loading a book on to her tablet and slumping down on the seat-bed-thing with the patchwork cushion under her cheek.

  Mum had been right. We could see the net of light-shields around the Earth now. From the outside of it, the reflectors shone brightly, beaming all that warmth back towards the sun. So many of them, it looked as if Earth was wrapped in a glittery spider’s web. But there were wide raggedy holes here and there, and I smiled and wondered if the gap in the net we were passing through was one Mum had made.

  ‘About your mum,’ murmured Josephine from across the table. ‘I shouldn’t worry about getting any hassle out here.’

  ‘I never said I was worried!’

  ‘Well, if you were,’ said Josephine, patiently, ‘you’re not going to be the only VIP on board. If you’re here, then everyone in the Coalition cabinet must have sent their kids out.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling at once very relieved and rather stupid. ‘I guess so.’ I thought about it a bit more. ‘Thanks.’

  4

  We were on the Mélisande for about a week. By the end of the first day, Earth was just a little blue-and-green bead in the far distance. By the end of the second, Mars was an orange spot on the blackness ahead. Like a red lentil, then a copper penny, then like the amber light of a traffic signal. And now you could see how the terraforming was changing it from the bare red rock it had once been. The bruise-purple seas. The silvery clouds. The dark-green smudges of arctic grassfields. The red and turquoise blazes of algae lakes.

  The view was not enough to content Christa Trommler, the Swedish girl I’d noticed before. ‘There’s been a mistake. I need a cabin to myself,’ she told Sergeant Kawahara on the first day. ‘My father’s contributed a lot to the war effort.’

  ‘There aren’t any cabins, miss,’ said Sergeant Kawahara.

  Christa put her hands on her hips and stuck out her jaw. She could only have been fifteen or sixteen, but she was tall and square-shouldered in an impossibly crisp white blazer and looked easily twenty. ‘There are cabins for the crew; some of them will have to move out for me.’

  Kawahara stared at her blankly.

  ‘My father would never have allowed me to come if he’d known I would be treated like this. This ship is practically mine, anyway.’

  ‘Well, your father isn’t here now, is he?’ snapped Kawahara at last, and Christa’s eyes bulged and her face got red and wobbly.

  ‘Who is her father?’ I asked Josephine. I was getting to assume she knew everything.

  ‘Rasmus Trommler. He owns Archangel Planetary,’ Josephine said.

  ‘But I can’t possibly sleep with all these people around,’ cried Christa. And for a moment she didn’t look grown-up at all. In fact, she looked about to burst into tears.

  As it turned
out, getting to sleep wasn’t a problem for anyone – or at least, not in the way Christa expected. At the end of each day, the ship would try to soothe us gently with the sound of wind chimes or waves lapping at a shore. But just to make completely sure, they also used to knock us out with sleeping gas. I mean, I could see their point, I guess, because there were only five crew to manage three hundred kids and those five crew were looking pretty rough and ragged by the end of day two. By then there were not only romances but tearful shouty break-ups going on, and there were tribal allegiances forming, and there were fights. And then there were also things like the fort some of the younger ones built out of suitcases in the exercise room, and the game where you tried to get around as much of the spaceship as possible without touching the floor. So I suppose the crew did value being able to blast us with Somnolum X and then getting nine hours or so when they could be sure no one was up to anything.

  Still, we were all outraged after we woke up the first morning and remembered the crew putting on oxygen masks and the captain pressing a button on the wall with a sigh of relief, and then a sort of whooshing noise and a funny smell in the air and then . . .

  ‘This is completely unethical,’ said Josephine, the moment she opened her eyes.

  ‘What about our human rights,’ demanded Carl, who’d gathered a small deputation of kids within minutes.

  ‘There’s a war on,’ said Crewman Devlin, shortly.

  I wondered if this meant grown-ups actually listened to you when there wasn’t a war on, because somehow I was sceptical.

  The best thing about being on the ship was that sometimes they’d turn off the artificial gravity in the exercise chamber, and let you float and glide and bounce off the walls. Though it did tend to make some people sick, which is not a good thing to happen during weightlessness.

  Sorry, there is rather a lot of throwing up in this part of the story.

  Josephine mostly liked to read in there, drifting through slow somersaults, past windows full of stars, her tablet in her hands. But then, she liked to read everywhere, lying with the curtain drawn round her bed, tablet held above her face and a heap of stones-with-holes-in-them piled on her chest like some weird prehistoric-ritual dead person. When she was not reading, she was the most fidgety person I had ever met. I think someone else must have clipped her hair back for her so neatly that first day, because after that she mainly used her hairgrips for arranging into patterns, and then lost nearly all of them. She made wild and wavy hand gestures when she was speaking and sometimes even when she wasn’t. She even twisted small screws out of their holes in the panelling on the walls (using one of her few remaining hairgrips) and at that point I said, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll get in trouble,’ and she gazed at me in that blank way of hers and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know I was doing it.’