Mars Evacuees

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘. . . So, you were trying to impress Christa,’ I summarised.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Lilly looked harassed, and I wondered if I was being too hard on her. She’d just said she was scared, after all. ‘I wasn’t trying to do anything, I just . . . I really miss home and is it that big of a deal? Can we be cool?’

  I considered this as two tightly folded uniforms came plonking out of a hole on to a shelf, like a packet of crisps out of a vending machine.

  ‘Well,’ I said cautiously. ‘We don’t need not to be. But it’s not me you should be apologising to. It wasn’t me you were picking on.’

  She flinched a bit at me calling it that, but she said, ‘Oh, OK, I totally will.’

  And I think, at the time, despite everything that happened later, she probably meant to.

  Once everyone in our class had uniforms, we went off to the dorms to change. Girls and boys were divided up, and there were six of us to a room. Josephine and I stuck grimly to each other during this bit, because under these circumstances it seemed like a good idea to hang on to people and things that you know you like, or at least can put up with.

  Our dorm on Vogel Corridor was obviously a lot more modern than what I was used to at Muckling Abbot, but really the general idea – a bed and a chest of drawers and a little pinboard to put posters on – is much the same whatever planet you’re on. The ceilings were very high, though, because in this gravity a decent jump would probably have brained you otherwise. The uniforms were at least slightly better than the sludge-green ones at Muckling Abbot, and they were the same for boys and girls. There were ordinary white T-shirts to wear next to your skin, but the jackets and trousers were black and glossy on the outside, with a weird smooth texture like flexible glass, and a kind of soft webbing inside that could adjust to the warmth inside the dome as well as the cold, thin Martian air, so you were never uncomfortable. Of course they had that comet crest on the left side of the chest, and the EDF motto, which was ‘RECLAIMING EARTH’.

  Josephine had got the machines to give her a toothbrush and some things for her hair. She was pretty glad to change out of the clothes she’d been wearing all week, and she said she liked wearing black. But she didn’t like having to do her hair, which was very tangly now, because other than run her fingers through it and bundle it up in her scarf, she hadn’t done anything to it for the whole voyage. She sat on her new bed next to mine and began morosely trying to comb it. I tried to help but we weren’t getting anywhere, and then fortunately some older girls from next door wandered through and one of them was called Chinenye and she was from Nigeria and had similar-ish hair and a usefully bossy temperament. She took over.

  ‘What have you been doing to yourself ?’ she scolded Josephine. ‘Look at this mess. Don’t you know how to do your own hair?’

  ‘In principle, yes. In practice, it’s not one of my strengths,’ said Josephine, looking as if she was being martyred. She sighed and mumbled, ‘My sister does it, mostly.’

  ‘You never said you’d got a sister,’ I said. Actually, she hadn’t said anything about her family. And I hadn’t asked, not because I wasn’t interested, but because it’s a tricky subject in a war. Mostly people just don’t.

  Josephine became slightly frosty. ‘Well, I’ve only known you a week,’ she replied.

  I was a little bit hurt. But as I say, family’s a touchy thing when you’re in a war, or maybe even when you’re not, so I tried not to take it personally.

  Chinenye hastily did Josephine’s hair into two buns on top of her head like mouse ears, and said, ‘There.’

  ‘You look nice,’ I said.

  ‘How can I think straight with my head all pulled tight?’ moaned Josephine. ‘Anyway, what about you? Are you allowed to have your hair dyed pink in the army?’

  ‘No one said I couldn’t,’ I said anxiously, and scraped my hair back so the pink bits didn’t show. This dampened my morale and I felt more sympathetic to Josephine’s gloom.

  I’ve just realised I never said what I look like, though we’ve already covered that I like pink and that I’m good at glaring. Aside from that, my eyes are blue; my hair is short and brown. My face is rounder than it would be if I had got to design it myself, but I look nice enough in a sturdy kind of way.

  ‘Quick! We’ve got to run,’ said Chinenye, because the dorm room was empty by now except for us. I didn’t want to find out what Colonel Cleaver would do if we were late so we did run, across the gardens and the sports field and out of the dome on to the plain, and hastily lined up with the rest of our group. We already made a tidier, more military-looking formation than we had before – I suppose putting on a uniform does something to you. But we had the Goldfish hovering beside us this time.

  ‘Let me tell you this! Mars is tough! And it will MAKE YOU TOUGH!’ roared Colonel Cleaver. ‘You will learn to survive!’

  ‘Learning is fun!’ piped up the Goldfish in agreement. The Colonel scowled and one of his Goads came whooshing over to us with his face glaring out of it. The Goldfish gazed back with its unblinking blue plastic eyes. It was impossible to tell if it was actually aware of taking part in a staring competition, but in any case, it won, because the Goad bobbed irritably and flew back to the Colonel looking somehow disgruntled.

  Then the Goldfish went swimming off towards the Mélisande and said something to the haggard-looking crew, who were standing there watching us assemble. There was a small kerfuffle and then Sergeant Kawahara went and opened the doors of the escape shuttle and Carl came soaring out.

  The Colonel rode over on his Beast. ‘Ha!’ he said to the crew. ‘Looks like you nearly flew off with this one aboard!’

  Captain Mendez shuddered visibly at the thought.

  Carl was doing just what the rest of us had done as soon as we got outside – looking around and jumping up and down a lot. He didn’t mind doing this in front of an audience of three hundred, any more than he’d minded being dragged out of the sea with everyone watching.

  ‘STOP THAT!’ barked the Colonel. ‘STAND UP STRAIGHT!’

  Carl obeyed instantly, even flinging the Colonel a salute.

  ‘I’m ready to learn how to fight aliens, sir,’ he announced, and then looked at the robot beast as if he’d just fallen in love. ‘Oh, sir,’ he said. ‘When do we get one of those?’

  There was a pause while Colonel Cleaver looked Carl up and down.

  ‘I like you, kid,’ he announced, finally.

  Beside me, Josephine quietly hit herself in the face.

  6

  As the days went by, it became clear that it would be the older kids who got the brunt of the Colonel’s training regime, because they were going to be doing all this stuff for real in a year or two. So the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds were doing flight sims and weapons drills and climbing over the Cydonian hills every day, while we younger ones were mostly indoors doing Wordsworth or learning how to do comparisons in Spanish or mediaeval crop rotation with the Goldfish.

  Sometimes, though, as a change from telling us about the French Revolution, it gave lessons about the planet we were actually living on.

  ‘Hey, kids,’ sang the Goldfish, glowing contentedly as it floated around the classroom. ‘Today we’re going to be talking about the Labyrinth of Night!’

  The name sent a pleasant shiver down my spine. I imagined a huge, dark maze full of ghosts. There were all these strange and lovely names on Mars. Memnonia, Mariner’s Valley, the Golden Plain. And thinking about them made me wish I could go to those places and see if they looked anything like the way they did in my head.

  ‘Do you think we could go there?’ I said wistfully. ‘On a sort of . . . field trip?’

  ‘Oh, no, Alice,’ said the Goldfish. ‘You kids need to stay here at Beagle where it’s full of fun and oxygen! Until the terraforming’s finished, Mars is too dangerous for exploring!’

  I thought crossly that the EDF weren’t so worried about keeping us safe once we’d successfully been turned into living weapon
s, and meanwhile the Goldfish hovered over to Gavin.

  ‘So Gavin, what can you tell us about the Labyrinth of Night?’

  ‘Uh,’ said Gavin, biting his lip. ‘I guess it’s . . . erm . . . on Mars. Somewhere.’

  ‘Aww,’ said the Goldfish sadly, after waiting in vain for more. ‘You need to put in more work by yourself, buddy! But never mind! See what you can learn in class today.’ It bustled over to Josephine. ‘Can you help us out, Josephine?’

  Josephine didn’t notice the Goldfish was talking to her. She was leaning back in her chair, dreamily gazing up at a bee circling under the transparent roof of the dome. The bees got kind of everywhere on Beagle Base. Our classroom was in the inner ring around the garden dome, so there weren’t any windows in its high white walls, but you could see the clouds through the curve of the ceiling, and it had been raining heavily all morning – weird rain, falling so much more slowly than on Earth, making a purring, warbling noise on the roof. It was quite nice in a way, feeling hidden and safe, with no spaceships zapping each other overhead and nothing in the sky but rain. But on the other hand it made you feel shut in and very aware of how lonely Beagle Base was and how we really were very cut off from everything. We’d been on Mars nearly a month by now, and we hadn’t had any kind of contact from Earth. Sometimes I wondered if the Morrors could have actually taken over the world by now and when we would find out if they had. And I also wondered if they’d killed my mum yet, but wondering about that wasn’t anything new.

  ‘Wakey wakey, Josephine,’ urged the Goldfish, nudging her arm with its nose, almost like a friendly dog.

  ‘Mmmh,’ Josephine said sleepily. ‘Urgh. What?’

  Gavin tittered nastily.

  ‘The Labyrinth of Night,’ prompted the Goldfish patiently.

  ‘Oh. Noctis Labyrinthus. It’s a system of canyons by the equator at the west end of Valles Marineris – Mariner’s Valley. It was formed by extensional tectonics in the Noachian Period and erosion by rivers and collapse of grabens in the late Hesperian and Amazonian Periods,’ said Josephine. Then she dropped her head on to her arms on the desk as if exhausted.

  Josephine was the sort of person who stumbles into a lesson without her books or tablet or any apparent idea of what’s going on, and almost never puts her hand up, but then seems to know more or less everything. It would have driven a human teacher at least slightly crazy, but being a robot the Goldfish had infinite patience.

  (Well, that’s what I thought. We found out eventually that it did have its limits, and it could snap, but I’ll come to that later.)

  ‘That’s great, Josephine, good job!’ it said, completely satisfied, skimming back to the front of the classroom. ‘A graben is what happens when a block of land falls down in an earthquake and becomes the flat bottom of a new valley,’ it told the rest of us.

  Josephine looked slightly mournful. It wasn’t that she did this sort of thing for dramatic effect, I don’t think, but she would have liked some reaction. ‘You can’t surprise it,’ she told me later.

  She’d at least managed to surprise Gavin, and not in a pleasant way, because he muttered, ‘Swot.’

  Josephine rolled her eyes magnificently and otherwise ignored him, but the Goldfish didn’t stand for that kind of thing at all. ‘Now, you cut that out, Gavin,’ it said sternly. ‘I’d like you to say sorry right now!’

  Scowling, Gavin did.

  ‘So, who else is out there?’ asked Carl. ‘There’s Zond Station, right? What are those guys up to?’

  ‘Good question, Carl!’ twinkled the Goldfish. It spun slightly to project a hologram of Mars from its mouth into the air. ‘Zond is aaaaaaaall the way over here by Mount Olympus, and that’s not just the tallest mountain on Mars, it’s the tallest mountain in the Solar System! Don’t you think that’s nifty?’ It zoomed in on the mountain to show that its peak rose right above the atmosphere, bare of snow and ice. ‘Zond Station is just a very small base for our brave Exo-Defence fighters! But there’s also Schiaparelli Outpost – who can guess where that is?’

  ‘Schiaparelli Crater,’ I said.

  ‘Good job, Alice!’ enthused the Goldfish, spinning the projection of Mars to show where that was. ‘And that’s where some clever scientists like our very own Dr Muldoon are working hard to see how the new ecosystem’s doing! Does anyone remember what an ecosystem is?’

  ‘So there’s only a few hundred people on the whole planet, and most of them are us,’ concluded Carl, ignoring this question.

  ‘That’s right, Carl! And of course there’s lots of my robot pals out there, enriching the soil and the air and planting seeds and making Mars a better place for you to enjoy!’

  ‘Well, no they’re not,’ I said gloomily. ‘Not for us. You pretty much just said so. We’ve got to go and fight the war with the Morrors.’

  There was a slight pause, and the Goldfish hovered where it was, its plastic blue eyes looking somehow more blank than usual.

  ‘Cheer up, Alice!’ it said eventually, in its sunniest and most robotic way.

  ‘So . . . we’re here, and there’s no one around for thousands and thousands of miles, except maybe some robots?’ said Carl. He thought for a second and then grinned. ‘Awesome.’

  After that lesson we had our supplements and stood under the UV lamp to stop the low gravity from doing bad things to our bone density, and played with the Goldfish. As well as projections of Mars and school things like that, there were a lot of decent games on it, and during breaks it would get us chasing holographic bumblebees or meteors around on the sports course, and it was quite fun although the Goldfish would keep wittering on about just how fun it was and how well we all were doing.

  There was a lot of other stuff on the Goldfish too – well, all the robots knew basically everything. And although we couldn’t get the proper internet across fifty million miles of space, Beagle Base did have its own network with email and books and the odd amusing cat video on it. But annoyingly all the robots and all the computers also knew exactly how old everyone was and so there was no way to get them to show you anything you were supposedly too young to see.

  But we didn’t get much time to think about it, what with all the lessons and all the exercising. The Goldfish made us run around a lot, and twice a week the Colonel had us for military training. And that was very different because, as you might have gathered, the Goldfish and the Colonel did not exactly see eye to eye on how to treat and motivate children. There was an assault course sprawled around the Cydonian hills, and it looked terrifying, like it had been made for giants – hurdles higher than your head and a climbing tower about the height of a skyscraper. But of course, in this gravity, it wasn’t as hard as it looked, though you did need the extra oxygen strapped to your back.

  One morning, I struggled up to the top of the tower and looked out over the lumpy hills. I pulled off my oxygen mask to get a better look – you weren’t supposed to do that too often but there was enough oxygen in the air that you could go easily twenty minutes before you even got dizzy. And after all, Mars was supposed to be Making Us Tough. The mirrors in the lavender sky were glittering icily behind rosy clouds, and against the near horizon there were a few dark pine trees. It was hard to tell if it was just the tighter curve of the planet or whether they really were impossibly tall, but against the sky their silhouettes looked something like a little kid’s drawing, everything out of proportion.

  ‘Hi, Alice,’ said Carl, climbing up beside me.

  I wasn’t sure if I had forgiven him over that Somnolum X stunt, but on the other hand I wasn’t sure I hadn’t, so I gave him a sort of half-strength glare and said, ‘Hello.’

  He looked out at the view. ‘This whole planet,’ he said, ‘is basically pink. You must be in heaven.’

  I went up to three-quarters-strength glare, and said, ‘It’s really more a kind of peach.’

  ‘Nah, it’s definitely pink. What it needs is for, like, a herd of unicorns to come galloping over the plain there . . .’
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  I decided not to bother responding to this, so Carl changed tack. ‘When your parents decided to name you Alistair . . .’

  Full-strength glare, on the spot. ‘If you call me that again I’ll push you off the tower.’

  Carl laughed and swung himself away from me, and at that point one of the Colonel’s Goads soared up to us and started yelling.

  ‘Get going, you lazy little snots! I bet you think you’re something special, just because you can jump a few feet higher than you could back on Earth. That’s not YOU, you little morons, that’s the gravity; you’re still all as weak and sloppy as a pile of wet spaghetti, and in danger of getting WORSE! Your muscles’ll get lazy if you don’t make ’em WORK! So MOVE!’

  He was kind of right – I’d never been very good at monkey bars before, say, and now it was almost pathetically easy, and Josephine had got into a habit of putting a book on the floor and reading it while standing effortlessly on her hands in a corner of the dormitory, and after a while of this you do start to feel rather smug and like you’re going to go back to Earth and show off what an amazing athlete you’ve become. But sometimes the Colonel went up the tower hand-over-hand, without his prosthetic legs on, just to show us what being tough was really like.

  Carl and I started clambering down the tower. Carl’s method of doing this was basically just to jump off, and catch himself by grabbing a rung from time to time as he fell slowly past them.

  ‘The sea’s just over that horizon,’ he said, waiting for me on a rung and pointing as I climbed down in my more cautious way. ‘If we were on Earth, we’d be able to see it from here.’

  ‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘So?’

  ‘So it must be cool, that’s all. The sea on Mars!’

  ‘Very cool,’ I said. ‘Partially frozen, actually. But you’re probably daft enough to go for a swim in it anyway.’