Mars Evacuees

by Sophia McDougall

  Carl frowned, and brooded on this for a moment. ‘Fine,’ he said, and took a swooping leap to land boot-deep in the next pool. He called back, ‘But this is Dalisay Waterhole.’

  ‘And this one’s Dare’s Pond!’ I said.

  And then we were all boinging about and leaping from pool to lake and racing each other to name things. This game wasn’t as much fun for Noel because of course he and Carl had the same surname, and he couldn’t keep up with the rest of us that well, but then he got distracted by some shrimpy things he found in a puddle anyway.

  After claiming Jerome Lake, Josephine seemed to be making much slower progress than Carl and me, but the two of us mostly lost track of which ponds were supposed to be ours pretty quickly, and then it turned out that Josephine had been using the pens she’d stolen from the stationery cupboard to write her name on handy rocks before putting them back to mark the spot, as well as logging names, coordinates and pictures into her tablet for posterity.

  Carl looked down at the slogan ‘Loch Lena’ neatly printed on to the broad red rock at Josephine’s feet, and then gave her an aggrieved stare. ‘Lend us a pen, then,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ replied Josephine serenely.

  ‘Please,’ said Carl, making his eyes very big and sad.

  Josephine tapped a pen thoughtfully against her teeth. ‘All right. But on the understanding that this whole area –’ she waved her arm, ‘– is called the Jeromiana Waterlands. Except for whatever bit you peed on. I don’t want that.’

  So we took the pens and kept on boinging around until we’d given everything in sight names that got fancier and fancier, and then Carl wondered if the gravity was low enough to let you run across the water like a skimming stone, if you were fast enough.

  ‘It won’t work,’ said Josephine, and started to talk about gravity and velocity and stuff but then Carl splashed her so she pretty much had to retaliate. And we almost forgot about Morrors and missing grown-ups and everything but being free.

  This was all pretty absorbing so it was a while before us older ones noticed that Noel wasn’t playing any more. Instead he was waving and pointing at something in the sky and asking, ‘What’s that?’

  (OK, possibly we had noticed but weren’t paying much attention because he was the little one.)

  ‘All right, what’s what?’ said Josephine finally.

  ‘There,’ said Noel, and we looked up. I couldn’t see anything at first, just the mirrors tilting lazily on their slow drift past. Then I made out a streak of motion almost straight above us: five little dark specks falling out of the thin pastel sky.

  No, not falling, flying – sweeping in at a steep angle towards the ground.

  Spaceships? Maybe the adults had finally remembered about us?

  Then, I saw the colour of the things – a dull grey-green like the uniforms at Muckling Abbot – and my eyes worked out the perspective and I realised they were both a lot smaller and a lot closer than I’d thought and I took a step back on instinct. Foot-long, conical things – just a bit, I thought, like airborne marrows on the warpath. But then they were closer still and you could see the spinning segments and hear the dull grinding noise as they bored through the air.

  One of them plunged into Crystal Mirror (mine) and one into the Cauldron of Doom (Carl’s) and the splash sent up great white pillars of water into the air, descending in Martian slow motion. The other worm-things went straight into the ground – drilling into the rock as soon as they hit it as if it was as soft as sawdust. The Jeromiana Waterlands shook and we grabbed at each other so as not to fall over, but before we had much time to work out how to react to any of this, three crooked furrows spread out from the three holes where the things had landed, as if something was ploughing up the ground from underneath, and a buzzing sound was getting louder.

  The worm-things broke the surface, devouring everything in front of them, everything disintegrating under blunt, impossibly hard, impossibly revolving teeth.

  ‘Those are my animals,’ said Noel, with a faint air of triumph.

  We watched Noel’s Animals chewing up soil and plants and rock. A cloud of colourless dust rose behind them and floated away on the breeze.

  ‘I don’t like them,’ I said.

  ‘They’re interesting,’ insisted Noel loyally.

  The two animals that had landed in the water were not, apparently, any the worse for getting wet. They buzzed their way to land and began feasting on everything they found there. They were, I suppose, too hungry to be picky.

  ‘No,’ conceded Noel, tilting his head to one side. ‘I don’t like them either.’

  ‘Uh,’ said Carl, in a slightly strangled voice, pointing upwards. More specks were descending from the sky.

  We had all drawn closer together. ‘Well, we could be taking some fascinating pictures about now,’ remarked Josephine, ‘or we could be running away.’

  The nearest worm-thing reared up, and I could see a ring of tiny black eyes, motionless behind the whirring teeth. It was looking at us.

  ‘I vote run,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Josephine, ‘I think run.’

  ‘Why is this something we are talking about?!’ demanded Carl, grabbing Noel’s hand, just as Noel’s Animals decided that we were probably better to eat than rocks and stones, sprang into the air and flew straight at us.

  And so we ran. And thank God we were on Mars where running was easy, and thank God we’d all had such a lot of physical training. On the other hand, if only we hadn’t already been jumping about using up oxygen and energy so recklessly.

  And if only we’d packed the tent back into the spaceship. It was still standing on its struts, bulging out of the side of the ship.

  I didn’t look back, though the buzzing seemed to be practically in my hair now and my own breathing and my heartbeat were almost as loud. I bounded up and through the slit in the tent and Carl threw Noel up after me and I dragged him inside, and then Josephine and Carl climbed in too, neither of them yet missing any pieces but with Noel’s Animals right there behind them. We charged into the ship and Josephine and I started fiddling with the buttons to fold the tent back in, but at this point one of Noel’s Animals drilled through the wall of the Flying Fox, and buzzed and bounced around inside like a very large flesh-eating wasp and so we got more preoccupied with screaming and looking for things to hit it with.

  ‘Hey, what’s going on, guys?’ asked the Goldfish pleasantly, as the Animal bounced off the opposite wall, chewing a chunk out of it as it went.

  ‘KILL IT, KILL IT, DO THE ZAPPY THING,’ I howled, ducking as the Animal flew at my face.

  Carl hurled himself into the pilot’s seat, grabbed the controls and very rapidly got us out of there, which was great, except we were now lurching around in a small spaceship in the sky above Mars with:

  a) the door still open

  b) a big bulgy tent hanging out of one side

  c) a horrifying flying monster-thing inside and trying to eat us

  d) the rest of the horrifying flying monsters still coming after us.

  The Goldfish gamely started trying to zap the Animal but it isn’t easy shooting a moving target, in a confined space that is also moving, with a number of children you’re programmed to protect right there. The air filled with the smell of scorched metal and the Animal remained perfectly healthy. It lunged at Josephine and ate a hank of her hair as she dodged out of its way.

  ‘Get the tent in – I can’t steady her,’ yelled Carl, unaware that this wasn’t as much of a problem as the Animal on a beeline for his head. Josephine grabbed her bag and swung it by the strap and batted the creature away from him, and I was never going to complain about anyone carrying a bag full of rocks with them anywhere again. The Goldfish took another shot but the Animal was too fast for it. Then just to make everything even better, the ship swung over sideways so the wall became the floor, and Noel fell through the door into the tent, which was of course still open to the air at the far end.

 
; ‘Noel!’ I bawled, hurling myself towards it. Noel was still there, thank God, clinging to one of the dangling struts.

  ‘Noel? What’s happening?’ asked Carl anxiously, dragging the Flying Fox through a terrifying swerve that I was almost sure was going to shake Noel off but somehow didn’t. I heard the ship’s guns go off so I supposed Carl was firing at one of the Animals outside the ship.

  ‘Nothing! Everything’s fine!’ I said in a ridiculously cheerful way, feeling that giving the pilot anything more to worry about wouldn’t be productive.

  ‘Uh, help, please?’ said Noel, sounding vaguely embarrassed as the tent bounced and thrashed in the whirling air.

  I really couldn’t get near him. Fortunately we had somebody there who could fly.

  ‘Get him, Goldfish!’ I yelled, and the Goldfish stopped trying to shoot the Animal and dived into the tent.

  Which left me and Josephine to tackle the Animal on our own.

  Josephine swung her bag again and this time it exploded against those whirring teeth in a shower of interesting stones and highlighter pens.

  I swung a bottle of water (it was at least moderately heavy), and Josephine hurled one of her stones with excellent aim for someone who was so terrible at Flight and Combat Training. The Animal actually dropped to the ground for a second before bouncing back up at us again, and so for a while it was just a matter of us both yelling, ‘AAAAARGH!’ and throwing anything that wasn’t tied down. Most of what we threw got eaten, which at least slowed the Animal down. Then it came at me again, and as I threw myself out of the way I knocked into the food crate, which I grabbed, and emptied everything out. And then I threw the crate over the Animal and jumped on top of it.

  This happened so fast that even before I’d finished doing it, I was thinking, ‘I’m not sure I thought that through,’ because the crate was made of plastic and the thing could chew through rock. Still, I guess suddenly being in a small space, especially after having been bashed on the head with a number of stones, must have slightly confused the Animal, because it knocked about like a wasp in an upside-down glass for longer than I expected before it remembered its own killer spinning teeth. I had no idea what to do next when it bored through the side of the crate, but Josephine stepped on its back and pinned it to the floor, those awful teeth gnawing the air as it twisted and struggled and tried to get its maw to her feet. Then the Goldfish hovered back into the ship with Noel wrapped around it like a baby monkey, and I grabbed its nose and aimed it at the appalling thing under Josephine’s feet, and shouted ‘FIRE!’ and the Goldfish did exactly that.

  The Animal twitched mightily and went still.

  Josephine sat down abruptly on the floor. Someone, possibly me, must have finally got the tent inside but I don’t really remember much about that. The main thing was that Carl got proper control of the ship and we shot away at top speed with a flying worm from outer space lying dead in Josephine’s lap.

  14

  ‘Space Locusts,’ said Noel. ‘We should call them Space Locusts.’

  ‘That’s a good name for them,’ agreed Josephine. ‘Ow,’ she added, pulling her hand away from me.

  ‘I’ve got to disinfect it,’ I said. ‘It might have . . . space germs.’

  The spaceship had shaken and rattled its way through a few hundred miles of sky before Carl had to drop us on a flat-topped mountain above a maze of jagged rifts and canyons scribbled in an angry mess over the ground. I’d got the first-aid kit out and was doing my best to patch everyone up: we were all a bit bloody but the slice the Space Locust had taken out of Josephine seemed to be worst. And then there were the jaggedy tears it had made in our uniforms – special high-tech made-for-Mars fabric isn’t much good with holes in it. But duct tape turned out to be excellent for both problems.

  Meanwhile Noel, under Josephine’s direction, had laid the worm on a rock and was trying to dissect it. He had taken pictures of its eyes (seven) and segments (five) but the knife Josephine had found in the ship’s survival kit couldn’t get through the hard shell to find out what its insides were like.

  ‘OK, I admit I see the point of taking duct tape into space now,’ I said, using a piece of it to stick some gauze to the back of Josephine’s hand.

  ‘I told you, that was Lena’s idea. And she’s almost always right,’ said Josephine, sounding mildly disgruntled about it. ‘Goldfish, can you very carefully shoot a seam through the creature’s exoskeleton?’

  But the Goldfish couldn’t.

  We heard something go clank inside the spaceship, and Carl swearing. He had pulled off a panel (it was almost falling off anyway) and was burrowing around in the engines, so I guess it was a good thing he’d got some getting-into-the-guts-of-spaceships experience back on the Mélisande after all.

  Josephine gave up on cutting open the Space Locust with a sigh. ‘I wish I could see what was going on inside this thing. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter.’ She wrapped up the Space Locust in a towel and contented herself with patching the ruins of her bag together with duct tape and a staple gun, so that she had somewhere to put it. ‘Either the Morrors are breeding these things as weapons, or they aren’t, and this is a completely new problem. We’ve got to get it to the government.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s great,’ said Carl, dropping out of the bottom of the Flying Fox; ‘but I don’t know if we’re going anywhere in this thing.’

  I’d actually been avoiding looking at the spaceship, and I think Noel and Josephine had been too. It was fairly easy to do when there were people shaking and bleeding and a dead Space Locust there to concentrate on. But it turns out when Space Locusts eat holes in your spaceship, the spaceship does not like it very much.

  The Flying Fox was riddled with holes, and there were important-looking cables that had been chewed through sticking out of it all over the place, and it was giving off an unhappy singed smell.

  Carl went in and poked some buttons on the dashboard, and the ship whirred miserably and its lights flickered for a second before going out again.

  ‘Carl, are we . . . stuck?’ asked Noel. And being a bright but not particularly optimistic kid, he put the rest of it together pretty fast. ‘Are we going to run out of oxygen and die?’

  ‘We’re fine, Noel,’ said Carl grimly. ‘We’re going to be fine.’

  ‘But what are we going to do?’ asked Noel.

  ‘Math!’ blurted the Goldfish, but then it shook itself and said, ‘I have some tutorials on spaceship repair.’

  So the Goldfish projected plans and talked us through the things that needed to be welded together and the leaks that needed to be plugged. Our problems were twofold. Firstly, the people who made the tutorials had never really thought about being partially eaten by flying worms as a condition a spaceship might get into. Secondly, I soon got the idea that the main principle for learning spaceship repair is: don’t be crashed miles from anywhere on the surface of Mars when you need to do it.

  Still, we stuck everything back together that we could and Josephine worked out how to re-route the power around the broken bits, I guess, and the lights came on. Then Carl jiggled the controls around for about a thousand years and eventually worked out that you now had to hold the control yoke at a special angle, and we finally got back into the sky. We all cheered and the Goldfish covered us in sparkles. There is a limit to how pleased you can honestly feel about having to go flying in a ship that now resembles a colander more than anything else, but you have to take what you can get.

  But sure enough, about an hour later, smoke started wafting gently out of the panelling. And then we were heading for the ground at a few hundred miles an hour, out of control and on fire.

  Valleys gouged between jagged red rock walls blurred underneath us at a nasty angle. Carl wrenched at the controls, which had stopped working altogether, and yelled, ‘Somebody hold it.’ I crawled underneath the yoke and tried to hold it solidly at the special position so he could actually steer.

  We came within a second of flying s
traight into a cliff face. Somehow we hit the valley floor instead. Bounced with an awful noise of crunching metal. Skidded. Stopped.

  We sat there for a while hyperventilating and not looking at each other. Then, when we didn’t really have an excuse for not doing it any more, we got out to look at the damage.

  It was awful. There was a trail of blackened bits of Flying Fox strewn back along the valley and the ship was lying tilted over, propped on one fin, and even at a glance you could see three of its thrusters were crumpled like used crisp packets.

  ‘How far are we from Zond, Goldfish?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I make it one thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven miles, Alice,’ the Goldfish said.

  There didn’t seem to be much to say about that. ‘We’d better get started,’ I said. And we got out our meagre collection of tools and began again.

  The thing about trying to fix plasma compression engines with a staple gun, duct tape and highlighter pens is: you can’t.

  We kept trying, though. For hours. Even when the light faded and our fingers went numb, and we got weak and dizzy from the low-oxygen air and had to keep topping our canisters up from the ship’s supply. At least that was still working.

  ‘How long will that last?’ I asked the Goldfish airily, as though the answer wasn’t particularly important.

  ‘Five days, three hours, forty-seven minutes. Give or take,’ the Goldfish replied.

  I kept on trying to work out if the three chunks of twisted metal in my lap could be made to resemble an inertial compensator if I applied enough superglue.

  ‘Those things are still out there,’ muttered Noel.

  We looked at the sky. There didn’t seem to be any Space Locusts in it, but we’d seen how fast they could move.

  There didn’t seem to be much to say about that either.

  Eventually Carl said in a weird, forced, cheerful voice that didn’t sound like him at all: ‘Guess there’s nothing more we can do tonight! Let’s get some rest while we can. We’ll get straight back to it, come first light.’