The night air was freezing by now, and as it hit me in the face so did the reality of what was happening. Oh God, I thought, she wants me to pilot a spaceship, in the dark, and fly off to find help that might well not exist thousands of miles away on Mars.
It felt even more real and even more alarming when I actually saw the spaceship – well, technically it was barely a spaceship: it was another Flying Fox, which was only designed to zoom around sub-atmo but could have probably got us to Phobos if we’d wanted. But what was worrying me was that Josephine had managed to pilot it out of the hangar herself, but had promptly veered off the runway and crashed it into the obstacle course. The Flying Fox seemed to be OK, though the monkey-bar course didn’t.
‘Wait,’ I said, swallowing a cold feeling in my throat. ‘What about – how are we actually going to do this? What about supplies?’
‘I’ve got everything we need!’ insisted Josephine, swinging her shoulder bag, full as I knew of duct tape, rocks and lately a stock of highlighter pens.
‘What about food? What about oxygen?’
‘What about your biology textbooks?’ added the Goldfish, concerned.
‘Go away, Goldfish!’ I snapped, swatting at it.
‘Oh,’ said Josephine, deflating slightly. ‘Well, there’s an oxygen pump in the Flying Fox, but . . . I didn’t really think about food.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a whole crate hidden back by the Maggini airlock. Look, get in the ship and have some proper oxygen; I’ll go and grab it.’
Josephine looked a bit dubious, but she did as I said, and I scrambled off over the rocks and between the scrubby bushes of Beagle Base.
The Goldfish was still with me. I felt a bit mean about trying to shoo it off, because it had been nice to me in its own way while I was alone in the classroom, but it was clearly only going to be a nuisance.
‘What are you doing, Goldfish?’
‘I’m looking after you kids, Alice,’ it said, as perkily as ever. ‘That’s what I’m here to do!’
‘Well, not to be rude,’ I said, dragging the crate out from its hiding place, ‘but you haven’t done a very good job of it so far.’
The Goldfish sank in the air and the lights in its eyes got very dim indeed. I felt mildly awful, because the Goldfish and the other robots shouldn’t really have been expected to handle three hundred rioting kids all by themselves, but after the day I’d had and the lessons I’d been through I thought I had some excuse.
Then it brightened up, both literally and figuratively. ‘Then by golly I’m going to do better,’ it resolved, and stuck to me with even greater determination.
‘Alice!’ someone hissed, a few feet away.
‘Oh, what now?’ I said, having had quite enough of sudden surprises for one night.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Carl, appearing out of the dark. He looked pale and dishevelled. I wondered for the first time how I looked.
‘Never you mind,’ I sniffed, gathering up the crate.
‘But, you’re all right, though? They didn’t rough you up too bad?’
‘No thanks to you.’ I was not very happy about the way he’d disappeared when Lilly and Gavin’s lot jumped us.
Carl looked unhappy about it too. ‘I’m sorry! I had to get Noel out of there. I had to,’ he said. ‘I thought you were behind me, anyway. I’ve been looking for you, I swear.’
‘Well, fine,’ I said, in that disgruntled way when you see someone’s point but aren’t in the mood to be nice to them yet.
‘Are you running away?’ said Carl, looking me over. ‘You are, aren’t you? Awesome. Where are you going? How are you doing it?’
‘None of your business,’ I grumbled, trying to stalk away from him and finding myself hampered by the fact he’d taken hold of one end of the crate and was trying to help me carry it.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked. ‘Hold on a sec and I’ll get Noel. He’s in the soya dome; I’ll be two minutes.’
‘You’re not coming!’ I cried.
Carl skipped the ‘Yes we are’/‘No you’re not’ part of the conversation and just asked, ‘How are you going to stop us?’
‘We’ll all stick together,’ announced the Goldfish. ‘TEAM! It stands for Together Everyone Achieves More!’
‘Oh for God’s sake, go away, Goldfish,’ Carl ordered it. ‘We’re running away. That means not bringing teachers.’
‘Well, it’s like you said to Alice, Carl,’ said the Goldfish airily, though I felt there was a suggestion of menace in its voice: ‘How are you going to stop me?’
The two of them stared each other down for a moment before Carl seemed to decide that dealing with the Goldfish was my problem. ‘I’m getting Noel.’
I didn’t wait. I went hurrying on back to the Flying Fox with the Goldfish skimming along beside me, but I had to keep putting the crate down all the time to change my grip on it, so Carl and Noel caught up with me quite easily.
‘Hello, Alice. Goldfish,’ said Noel, politely, as if running away in the middle of the night was a perfectly routine thing to be doing.
‘Hi,’ I said, feeling there was something to be said for his attitude. Meanwhile Carl had taken the other end of the crate again and it was much easier that way.
Josephine popped out of the Flying Fox as we approached and scowled as she saw the crew of tag-alongs I’d picked up.
‘Why did you bring them?’ she demanded.
‘I didn’t bring anyone!’
‘She’s right,’ said Carl easily. ‘We invited ourselves.’ Josephine didn’t stop scowling.
‘Well, Carl is a good pilot,’ I sighed, ‘and the Goldfish . . . knows stuff.’
‘I know stuff,’ said Josephine, aggrieved.
‘Yes, of course you do,’ I agreed soothingly, ‘but you know the Sunflower was useful already.’
In a way, none of that mattered, because the Goldfish, Carl and Noel were all piling into the Flying Fox whether we liked it or not, and it would have taken a serious physical fight to even try to get them out, and I for one was not up for that.
Carl and I did fight a little over who got the controls of the Flying Fox. For some reason, I wanted to be the one to do this bit. An awful lot of things seemed to have happened to me recently, and I wanted something to be happening because I was doing it, for a change.
Finally Carl let me have the pilot’s seat. I backed the ship out of the obstacle course. Bits of it crunched worryingly around us and I had time for more elaborately detailed visions of fiery death than even the best simulator in the world could come up with.
‘You’re doing great, Alice,’ said the Goldfish, hovering behind my head. ‘You can fire the thrusters now.’
So I did, and for that second or so I could feel the ship fighting gravity – and it won; we won, and we took off into the dark sky. And then we were flying over the night-time valleys and hills of Mars.
13
I went very slowly for what the Flying Fox was capable of – which is to say, about four hundred miles an hour. I screamed only occasionally, even though there was a ferocious wet wind coming the other way, scouring over the Gulf of Chryse. The Goldfish helped me, and Carl tried to help me too. At least, that’s what he said he was doing, but in practice it was more that the Goldfish would suggest I do something and I would try to do it and Carl would say, ‘No, no, not like that,’ and, ‘are you sure you don’t want me to take over?’
Then Josephine sighed, leaned across and quietly did something to him I couldn’t see on account of not daring to take my eyes off the viewport, and Carl yelped, ‘OW,’ and, ‘What did you do that for, I’m only trying to help,’ and though he was not actually quiet after that, at least he wasn’t bothering me and I was able to tune him out.
But I was not going to keep this up for very long in the dark. It was about two in the morning or something equally awful by now. We were on our way, and far beyond Leon and Christa and Lilly and Gavin and that was the main thing.
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‘We’ve got to stop and rest. I need something nice and flat to land on, Goldfish,’ I warned, trying not to sound panicky about it. We were flying over something nice and flat at the time, but it was the sea.
‘That’s OK, Alice, just bear south-south west, forty k,’ it said soothingly. It was interfacing with the Flying Fox’s computer, which was handy.
I skimmed over the dark coast, activated the lifters and lumbered down on them before dropping the Flying Fox rather awkwardly on to something. It bounced around a bit before it stopped completely and we all yelled, except for the Goldfish, and Noel, who slept right through it.
Silence settled in around us.
‘Are we there yet?’ asked Noel, waking up.
I thought we would have to sleep wherever we could cram ourselves on the floor, but it turned out the Flying Fox was better equipped than that. You pressed a button and the hatch to outside popped open, and an egg-shaped pod with smooth, firm walls of glossy fabric ballooned itself out of a cavity in the wall, little legs unfolding to the ground to support it. Or rather, the Goldfish pressed the button with its nose; we’d never have found it otherwise. I thought the Goldfish looked even smugger than usual after that, which should have been impossible as its expression couldn’t really change and it always looked smug. The Goldfish called its discovery a Sleep Capsule and I called it an unusually impressive tent, but either way all we had to do was fasten some toggles and get the sleeping bags out of compartments under the seats – and the Goldfish had to tell us where they were, too.
We had Smeat bars and dried apricots for supper, and then we flopped into the tent. Carl dragged his sleeping bag over to the far wall and, with a dramatic huff, lay down as far from Josephine as possible.
‘What did you do to him earlier?’ I whispered to her when the Goldfish had turned out the lights and settled into standby mode for the night.
‘Nerve clusters,’ she replied darkly, and instantly went to sleep, leaving me wondering rather anxiously just why she knew about those.
But in the end I went to sleep too, without really having much of a clue where we were, besides hundreds of miles from the nearest human being.
When I woke up, I was alone in the tent, though I could hear Josephine’s harmonica nearby so I knew nothing too awful had happened.
Someone had opened a slit in the rear wall of the tent. I poked my head out of it.
Hundreds of perfectly round little lakes and ponds were scattered across the red plain, shining in the sunlight as though someone had dropped handfuls and handfuls of silver coins. And bright green moss was growing on the rocks.
The Goldfish was resting on a hump of moss in the sunshine. Noel was lying on his front, letting a beetle run across his ungloved fingers and talking to it softly. Josephine was perched on the wing of the Flying Fox, swinging her legs and playing the harmonica.
‘We thought we should let you sleep, seeing as you got so bashed up last night,’ Noel told me, as I lowered myself down to the ground.
‘Are you feeling better, Alice?’ the Goldfish asked.
In one way I was feeling worse, because all the places I’d been hit had got more achy in the night, but the sun and the solar mirrors were bright in the lilac sky, and the light was sparkling on the water, and I’d successfully avoided crashing the spaceship into anything the night before, and we could now be completely confident of being left alone by Gavin and Lilly and co., so I felt pretty good about life. ‘Yes, thanks,’ I said. Josephine tossed me a pack of crackers and dried fruit and I started my breakfast.
Carl walked up from behind the Flying Fox. ‘Where are we, Goldfish?’
The Goldfish was very happy to be asked. ‘This is the Acidalian Plain, Carl,’ it began.
‘The Acidalia Planitia,’ grumbled Josephine, who preferred the old Latin names.
‘And look, you see those ponds and lakes?’ the Goldfish went on. ‘Those are all craters left by meteor strikes, filled with water now because of terraforming! We’re still north of the Martian dichotomy line, which is why the ground was nice and smooth for Alice to land on. If we keep heading south, things are going to get a whole lot more bumpy.’
I started worrying about that, but Carl had other concerns. ‘Has anyone ever been here before us?’
The Goldfish tilted to one side. ‘Well, I don’t have articles about every exploratory trip before terraforming . . . but no, Carl, probably not.’
I might have had a nice little moment of awe about us being the first people ever to be there, but before I could really get it going, Carl flung his arms wide in triumph. ‘THEN I AM THE FIRST PERSON TO DO A WEE ON THE ACIDALIA PLANITIA,’ he announced to the universe.
Josephine dropped her harmonica to utter a scoff of disgust, which only made Carl even more pleased with himself.
The Goldfish, however, seemed to take this as a prompt to start being even more teacherly and motivational. ‘Right, gang,’ it said, ‘anyone else need to go? No? All got your teeth clean? Good. Then . . .’ It did a joyous swirl in the air. ‘Iiiiiiit’s History Time!’
‘Oh, not this again,’ I said.
‘Goldfish, if you can’t understand why it isn’t History Time, then you’d better go home,’ said Josephine, jumping down from the wing of the Flying Fox. ‘Our priority is survival. We can’t keep having this conversation.’
‘There’s always time for the fall of the Roman Empire,’ said the Goldfish, its cheerful tone somehow stiffening.
‘Look, none of that teacher stuff applies any more,’ said Carl. ‘We’re not doing lessons. You can’t make us.’
The Goldfish hung motionless for a moment, the light inside it quietly throbbing. ‘Can’t I?’
Then its eyes flashed red and we all jumped as something whipped through the air around the Goldfish and stung us like an electric shock.
‘Ow!’ we cried in unison, and then stood there staring at the Goldfish and at each other, and couldn’t believe that had actually happened.
‘Was that corporal punishment?!’ Josephine asked, incredulous.
‘That’s against the law!’ cried Carl.
‘Would you like to make a complaint?’ enquired the Goldfish sunnily.
‘Yes!’ I said.
‘Your complaint has been logged! Your feedback is important! NOW,’ roared the Goldfish, in a blaring robotic voice, stripped of all perkiness and about two octaves lower than normal, ‘YOU WILL DO YOUR HISTORY COURSEWORK.’
All we could really do was make outraged noises as we sat down on the ground and got out our tablets, or rather Josephine and Noel got out theirs because the kids back at Beagle had stolen Carl’s and mine.
‘I never said I didn’t want to do lessons,’ said Noel piously. ‘You didn’t need to zap me.’
I wondered if the Goldfish was planning to do a full seven-hour school day right there on the Acidalia Planitia, or if it would just carry on teaching forever, zapping us whenever we tried to escape until we all died of hunger or radiation. But after an hour, when Josephine groaned, ‘We’ve got to get moving, Goldfish,’ the Goldfish agreed brightly, ‘OK, time to go!’ and floated off into the Flying Fox, content.
An hour of schoolwork a day, then, I thought. It wasn’t an unreasonable price to keep it happy.
So we started packing up, and I looked into the food situation. There was still quite a lot left.
‘I guess we should be at Zond by this evening,’ Noel said.
‘We should save some of this stuff anyway,’ said Carl. ‘In case anything goes wrong.’
And it was just as well we did.
‘I wish there could be toast,’ I said.
‘I wish there could be champorado,’ said Carl.
I glanced at him. ‘Hmm?’
‘It’s this kind of chocolate rice porridge; you have it for breakfast with dried fish.’
‘Oh. That sounds nice!’ I said, trying to make a face like I meant it.
‘Yeah, I know, you think it sounds disgusting,’ sa
id Carl tolerantly. ‘All white people do, and you’re all wrong. We really only have it now when Auntie Marikit comes round. Well, we did have it then, I guess.’ He stirred around in the stock of Smeat bars and dried apricots, but there was nothing in there like Auntie Marikit’s champorado, and he sighed.
‘I miss popcorn,’ said Noel.
‘You’re kidding,’ Carl said. ‘Mars wouldn’t be far enough to get away from that stuff.’
‘I miss the smell,’ said Noel, a faint quaver in the back of his voice, and Carl’s expression tightened before he forced a grin and scrubbed his hand annoyingly over Noel’s hair.
‘Your parents work in a cinema?’ Josephine deduced.
‘They run the cinema,’ said Noel proudly.
‘Yeah, I’ve been sweeping popcorn off carpets since I was six, we all practically bleed the stuff now,’ said Carl. ‘Guess you can take the boy out of the cinema, but you can’t take the cinema out of the boy.’ He jostled Noel’s shoulder, then obviously remembered he was talking to Stephanie Dare’s daughter. He looked a little defensive. ‘Mum’s in the reserves too. And Dad’s a shockray warden. And Dad used to be in the regulars. But he got hit over the South Shetlands and it messed up his nervous system.’
I grimaced sympathetically.
‘It’s not that bad. He just shakes sometimes, can’t always hold stuff, that’s all. I’ll get the Morrors back for him, when I have the chance.’
He cleared his throat and frowned into space and we all went back to focusing firmly on packing up our supplies. We hadn’t got anything left to drink, though there were water-purifying tablets and a filtration kit (which was slightly disappointing to Noel, who had been looking forward to boiling drinking water over a fire, even though it’s really hard to get water hot in an atmosphere as thin as that).
We walked down with our empty bottles to the nearest lake. It was all so beautiful with the glitter on the water getting into the air and everything so new and untouched and quiet.
‘Has this got a name?’ wondered Carl, filling the bottle up.
‘Jerome Lake,’ said Josephine instantaneously.
Mars Evacuees Page 12
