Mars Evacuees

8

After all that happened, I started thinking of Carl as a friend. And Josephine went from despising him to having no views on him at all, so that was progress of a sort too.

She did get on well with little Noel, though. They had an interest in common – the creature Noel said he’d seen on the beach. Josephine wasn’t especially excited about animals in general, the way Noel was, but she did like things that were weird and unexplained, and flying worm-things that went round and round and might be unknown to science certainly qualified.

As Noel hadn’t managed to get a picture of the thing on his tablet, she made him draw it. But Noel was eight and not very good at drawing and Josephine did not consider the results good enough to be useful for further study. So the two of them spent a couple of evenings in our dorm with Josephine interrogating Noel and making him describe everything about it and taking notes and doing sketches.

I did not have much to contribute to this so I left them to it and killed some time customising my uniform in small, subtle, not-allowed ways, like gluing tiny pink jewels on to the EDF crest on the jacket.

Anyway, a few days later we were walking to the sim-deck for flight and combat training and Josephine said, ‘Look at this. Noel will have to check it again, but I think it’s as close as we’re going to get.’

‘Ugh,’ I said, shuddering. ‘Gross. You really think there’s one of those out there?’

‘No,’ said Josephine calmly. ‘I think there are several.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s not likely Noel would have stumbled on the only one on the whole planet, is it,’ said Josephine.

‘You don’t think they could be… actual Martians?’ I said, feeling a bit stupid, because we knew there weren’t any Martians, not proper alien ones that hadn’t been genetically engineered by humans to make the terraforming work better.

But she didn’t answer that because then we reached the sim-deck, which was a big, semicircular chamber with a huge screen wrapped around its curved walls. Josephine suddenly looked alarmed and said, ‘Oh. Were we meant to do… some sort of homework for this?’

‘Flight and Combat Theory, yes,’ I said. We’d gone over the basics of flying with the Goldfish, but this was our first time doing combat flight with Colonel Cleaver.

‘Oh,’ said Josephine again, and began trying to make herself invisible by standing behind me.

This didn’t work very well, but she didn’t get yelled at, not then anyway. In fact, it didn’t seem fair that the very first thing that happened, as soon as we’d got all the saluting over with, was that the Colonel shouted, ‘Dare?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, worrying about the little pink jewels on my uniform. But the Colonel hadn’t noticed them. He was actually smiling at me in an odd way, sort of proud but a little bit sad.

‘You’re Stephanie Dare’s kid, aren’t you? She’s one damn brave fighter. Cadets, you all know about the Battle of Kara?’

The President of the EEC’s nephew is standing right there, I reminded myself, glancing at him. It’s not that big a deal.

There was a slightly groany chorus of yeses and the Colonel growled, ‘I can’t hear you: yes WHAT?’

‘YES SIR,’ everyone bawled dutifully.

Sometimes I think being in the army is just a little bit like being in a pantomime.

‘Kara,’ sighed the Colonel to himself, and by now I was sure he was sad because of being stuck here with us, away from the real fighting. ‘That was some fine flying. Well, get up there, Dare. Show us how it’s done.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said stiffly.

I didn’t want to go first. And there was Carl practically levitating with longing to get behind the controls of anything remotely spaceship-like as soon as possible, so it was doubly unfair.

There were two simulator ships, but we were going one at a time to start off with. From outside they were big beige boxy things on a thick strut on which they could pivot and swing. But on the screen a perfect digital replica of a Flarehawk was waiting on an icy Earth launch platform, and I didn’t need to be told it would respond to everything I did in the cockpit. So everyone would be able to see exactly how I was doing.

Now, this was supposedly so we could all learn from each other and so the Colonel could comment, rather than for the purposes of ritual humiliation, but the army’s good at doing two things at the same time.

I climbed into a simulator, and of course inside it was just like being in the cockpit of an actual Flarehawk. Through the viewport, the icy launch platform and the bleak grey sky looked completely real. There were snow-covered hills in the background. It could have been Suffolk.

‘Hello, home,’ I said quietly.

‘Go ahead, Dare,’ said the Colonel through the radio.

I fired the thrusters and lifted the ship up. It wobbled a bit, and I realised I was being too tentative with the control yoke. The artificial gravity put on a very good imitation of that battering-spoons feeling as I rose through the atmosphere.

I wasn’t quite clear what I wanted to happen. I didn’t want to be bad at doing this. The Colonel and the EDF and my mum wanted Stephanie Dare’s talent for flying spaceships and shooting aliens to be hereditary; if it wasn’t, they’d all be disappointed. And, more to the point, being bad at fighting aliens would not bode well for my long-term survival.

But on the other hand, if I did turn out to be some sort of spaceship prodigy, then it would feel like another way in which my life was all about a woman I never even actually got to see. Like I was actually destined to be in the space army instead of it being just the way things were.

The first thing I was supposed to do was just fly around with the computer-generated squadron and not crash into any of them. That was fine. Then I had to use the torpedoes to pick off a few of the light-shields. I kind of missed the first one, which was embarrassing as it was hanging right in front of me, but at least I saw how I’d got the angle wrong and it didn’t happen again.

Then Morrors started attacking.

So this was my first taste of shooting aliens – although obviously it was really only a computer game. I remembered all the instructions about how in a dogfight, you had to get on top of the enemy. Still, when one of the other Flarehawks in the squadron blew up, my first instinct was to screech various words I hoped the Colonel wasn’t listening to while hauling blindly on the control yoke, so I actually flew straight into a shockray aimed at someone else. But the ship’s systems seemed to be telling me the ray had just skimmed across the tail, and though everything jumped around a bit apparently I was still in one piece.

OK, I thought, trying to pull myself together. Torpedoes. Aliens. Time to apply one to the other. And while I wrestled and flailed the Flarehawk around, I watched the pale glowing transparent shapes whizzing across the viewport and told myself, you’ve got to aim for where they’re going to be. And although even Mum’s special Morror-spotting sense wouldn’t have helped in a simulation, I got a little bit of a sense of what it was for, how you had to fill in the gaps in the technology yourself, because though the sensors were supposed to pick up the Morror ships and project ghostly outlines of them onto the viewport, they always seemed a little off from where the ships apparently really were.

Still, I got two of them. Then another one pounced on me and I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough and I got hit again. And I did think it was a bit mean of the people who designed the simulation to actually make the ship shake and scream while flames filled the viewport before everything went black. I mean, I would have got the point that I’d just died without that.

When the lights came back on the door opened and I got out. I felt rattled and I didn’t think I’d done very well, but no one was laughing and the Colonel said, ‘Good work, Dare,’ and even if I thought he did look slightly disappointed I hadn’t done anything spectacular, he also wasn’t the sort to say that if he didn’t mean it. Then he started talking about how I’d obviously panicked a bit when the Morrors came in, but recovered well, and taking out two of them was good, and getting blown up was normal.

‘You survived twelve minutes!’ said the Colonel. ‘Not bad! Work on your turn diameters and you’ll get that figure way up.’

I’d been starting to feel quite happy until he said that.

Then he said, ‘OK, Dalisay, you’re up,’ and Carl bounded up into the cockpit barely bothering with the rungs on the ladder. I swear you could’ve told who was in the simulator just by watching the screen: the ship jumped into the sky, and soon he was rampaging all over the Morror ships like a really lethal two-year-old kicking down sandcastles.

He was so ridiculously good at it, I couldn’t help thinking that was more how Stephanie Dare’s kid was supposed to fly.

‘He is going to be insufferable,’ whispered Josephine.

And indeed Carl didn’t get killed even once and popped out of the simulator at the end muttering, ‘Awesome!’ The Colonel didn’t say anything, just patted him on the back, smiling quietly and looking about fifteen years younger from sheer pride.

Then it was Gavin’s turn, and gratifyingly he wasn’t very good at it. Then it was Lilly, who was better than I had been, which was annoying.

‘Did she ever apologise to you?’ I asked.

Josephine snorted a little. ‘No.’

‘She said she was going to.’

Then the Colonel yelled, ‘JEROME,’ and charged over to where Josephine was lurking behind me. Josephine took a deep breath and accepted her fate. ‘You’d better be about to tell me I’ve gotta call EDF command and say I’ve got a kid here who’s just escaped a Morror kidnapping and spent the last week struggling her way across space to make it to my class on time. Because that’s the only reason I can think of why your Flight and Combat Theory wouldn’t be on my tablet right now.’

‘I’ve been busy with something,’ said Josephine, though she didn’t look particularly hopeful that saying this would help matters.

The Colonel stared at her coldly for a while, then said, ‘Well, you show us what happens when you don’t prepare.’

Josephine set her jaw and went and climbed into a simulator. On the screen, her Flarehawk rose lopsidedly from the ground and lumbered into the air.

She looked a little clumsy up there, but I thought there was a fair chance she might surprise the Colonel. She was always stumbling into lessons half-asleep and then revealing she already knew the whole subject backwards or working it all out on the spot.

The Flarehawk spurted backwards into the ground and burst into a cruelly well-rendered digital fireball.

Everyone laughed. I wanted to be loyal but even I couldn’t help smiling a bit.

‘Again, Jerome,’ said the Colonel into one of his Goads.

Josephine got a bit further off the ground this time, and promptly bashed into one of the other Flarehawks. They both exploded.

On her third try, being in the army got even more like a pantomime because I could see the Morror ships closing in on her and I found myself yelling, ‘THEY’RE BEHIND YOU!’ but she couldn’t hear me because the simulator was soundproofed. Josephine just kept on exploding. I mean, I honestly started wondering if she was doing it on purpose, but when she came out of the simulator and I saw her face, I didn’t think it was that funny any more.

But plenty of other people did.

‘How did you manage to torpedo yourself ?’ I couldn’t help asking. ‘Twice?’

Josephine made a wordless growling noise.

‘Jerome, I’d better have your Flight and Combat Theory and an essay on the importance of preparation and focus on my tablet by tomorrow,’ Colonel Cleaver said at the end. ‘Dare, you put up a damn good fight. Just keep at it and you’ll be as good as your mom.’

As we left the sim-deck Josephine loomed up behind me, as much as a small person can do that, and said darkly, ‘You never will be as good as her, you know.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. I knew she wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t in a good mood myself, despite the Colonel saying nice things to me. He had paired us up and made us fight each other one-on-one in the simulators, and Carl had killed me quite a lot.

‘Your mum loves it,’ explained Josephine. ‘You don’t.’

Gavin started making exploding noises at Josephine at lunch and after about a second’s hesitation, Lilly joined in.

‘Oh, come on, Lilly,’ I said.

‘Come on, Lilly!’ echoed Gavin in a stupid baby voice. He clasped his hands. ‘Pwease, stop being mean to my wickle fwend, Lilly, or I’ll go and tell a gwown-up!’

I stared wearily at Lilly but she just sniggered like that conversation in the Processing chamber had never happened at all. I think even my full-strength glare was a bit weakened by the strain of the flying lesson, because I couldn’t get them to stop. In fact, a few others joined in and started flicking bits of sweetcorn at us and tweaking Josephine’s hair and so on. So we cleared out of the mess room as soon as we could.

‘Let’s do something nice,’ I said.

‘Let’s get a proper scientific opinion on the flying worm-thing,’ said Josephine.

This wasn’t necessarily my idea of a stress-relieving activity, but I wasn’t going to argue. We rounded up Noel when he came out of the mess room and took him with us to the research section.

‘Why do those kids have such a problem with you?’ asked Noel, as we walked through the gardens.

‘Because I’m weird,’ replied Josephine stoically.

‘No!’ I snarled. ‘It is not because of what you’re like, it’s because of what they’re like.’ And I might have stamped my foot except that stamping looks particularly silly in low gravity.

Dr Muldoon and all the other scientists turned out to be having some kind of party. It was very, very bright in their laboratory, with UV lamps around the walls and mirrors casting a cone of light into the middle of the dome. As we sidled in, something happened in the middle of the throng of scientists and there was a lot of clapping.

‘Not now,’ said Dr Muldoon absently, when we went and pulled at her sleeve and said we had to show her something.

‘It’s important and Colonel Cleaver is making me spend the rest of the day writing an essay on being prepared and focused,’ said Josephine plaintively.

I think Dr Muldoon might already have had quite a lot of the champagne, because she said, ‘Ahhh, mean old Colonel Cleaver,’ and suddenly became quite friendly. She wandered over to a bench, swept aside a tray of peculiar algae, perched herself on the edge and sat there swinging her legs. ‘All right, what have you got?’

Josephine showed her the picture of the worm-thing, and Dr Muldoon screwed up her face and said violently, ‘Euurgh,’ which none of us thought was a very scientific sort of reaction to have.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s completely hideous. What is it?’

‘That’s what we wanted to ask you,’ said Josephine.

‘It’s not hideous,’ interrupted Noel. ‘It’s interesting.’

‘Noel doesn’t think any animals are ugly,’ I explained.

Dr Muldoon frowned at him thoughtfully. ‘Not even maggots?’

‘Not even maggots,’ said Noel piously.

Dr Muldoon shrugged and drank her champagne.

‘All right, we can assume you didn’t make it, then,’ Josephine said.

‘I’d hope I’d make a handsomer class of monster than that,’ said Dr Muldoon.

‘It’s not a monster,’ protested Noel. ‘It’s an animal.’

‘Well, whatever you want to call it. We’ve engineered a few species of worm to live out there to help enrich the soil. But definitely nothing that goes grrr. That’s the main thing I’ve been working on lately.’

She pointed and we saw what the party was about. There were two men and one woman standing in the middle of all the light, also drinking champagne and looking very pleased. They were wearing sleeveless tops that revealed diamond-shaped patches of shiny, emerald-green skin all over their arms and on their shoulders. And they also looked very muscular, in a slightly weird way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

‘Are they… photosynthesising?’ asked Josephine, sounding awed.

Dr Muldoon grinned and nodded. ‘That and a few other enhancements. How does it feel, Angela?’ she called.

The woman spread her arms, tilting the bright-green patches to the light. ‘Lovely,’ she said.

Josephine gazed covetously at the people. I was rubbing my arms surreptitiously to make sure they were still normal.

‘Gills,’ said Dr Muldoon thoughtfully. ‘That’s my next ambition. Getting gills on people. Imagine the applications! So useful for exploration! Life-saving for our servicemen on the submarines!’

I supposed it might be useful for Dad to have gills, but I couldn’t say I liked the idea very much. Josephine, however, made a little moan of longing and looked as if she might be forgetting why we’d come in the first place, so Noel insisted, ‘My animal.’

‘The animal,’ agreed Josephine, turning reluctantly to her tablet.

Dr Muldoon squinted at the picture. ‘Are those eyes? Good Lord, look at its teeth. You’ve got a nicely gruesome imagination, I’ll give you kids that – flying worms at the bottom of the garden, it’s brilliant, but…’

‘I didn’t make it up!’ Noel cried.

‘He didn’t,’ said Josephine. ‘And neither did I. I don’t do hoaxes. They’re unscientific. Listen, the risk is that this is a Morror animal. I wondered if it could be some sort of biological drone, for… spying, or sabotage or something.’

Dr Muldoon became more serious. ‘Hmm. It doesn’t look like any specimen I’ve seen. They haven’t introduced any flying animal into the biosphere that we know of – and I can’t see how this creature of yours could fly. And the Morrors have shown no interest in Mars…’

‘What if it came from here?’ I said. Dr Muldoon, Josephine, Noel and even a random passing scientist all looked at me in a pitying way. I felt my face get hot. ‘I just mean, suppose there was something here that we didn’t know about, and the terraforming sort of… woke it up?’

‘That couldn’t possibly happen,’ said Dr Muldoon flatly. ‘There was nothing on Mars before us.’

A section of the party near the back of the room got over-excited and something made of glass crashed to the ground. Someone called ‘Er… Valerie!’

Dr Muldoon took Josephine’s tablet and emailed the picture to herself. ‘Got to go,’ she said. ‘Send me the rough coordinates for where you saw it, and then don’t go hanging around in the open on your own again. And if you do see one, don’t try and get close to it, not until we’ve got this cleared up. I’ll look into it.’

‘I’m getting gills as soon as possible,’ said Josephine ruminatively as we walked back to the dorms. Noel and I shuddered. ‘Why would you not want gills? Gills. Definitely gills.’

The Goldfish spent the rest of that afternoon making us do things with the radiuses of circles. Later I started composing an email to Dad, because we were getting close to one of the days when Beagle Base’s computers opened up channels so you could send and receive messages from Earth. If we’d only known what was going to happen, we could have made a lot better use of that day, but we didn’t. So I just wrote about how I did not seem to be a space-pilot genius and how I preferred him not to get gills and how I missed him. It was nicer writing to Dad than to Mum because I was about eighty per cent certain most of the time that he was probably alive.

Meanwhile Josephine got started on her essay, moaning a lot about it too, and we all waited for Dr Muldoon to get back to us.

Only she didn’t. Because after that all the adults disappeared.