Mars Evacuees

17

‘You killed it!’ said Noel. ‘It wasn’t doing anything! That’s not fair!’

I would have told him to shut up, except that I still felt too sick and trembly from having touched the thing. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been too unhappy if the Morror was dead, because even if it was unfair, it wouldn’t have been our fault. It wouldn’t even have been the Goldfish’s fault really, seeing as it’s a robot and was only trying to protect us. And we wouldn’t have been stuck with a Morror that could go invisible when it wanted and might do anything. And what with being lost on the wrong planet already because of these guys, I don’t think it’s exactly surprising if I didn’t feel very friendly.

But then the Morror moved and I thought, Oh, this isn’t going to be that easy.

‘Oh, you only stunned it,’ said Noel, relieved.

‘MY AIM WAS NOT TO STUN IT, MY AIM WAS TO ELIMINATE IT,’ said the Goldfish, sounding completely deranged. And then it zapped it again.

This time nothing much happened, the Morror just made a sound like it was in pain, because it obviously was, and the Goldfish beeped in confusion and zapped it another time, and by this point it was fairly clear that the Goldfish was trying as hard as it could and only succeeding in hurting the thing.

‘We could probably kill it with rocks,’ suggested Carl.

So I said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, we are not killing anything with rocks; I’m pretty sure that is actually a war crime.’

‘It’s helpless, Goldfish,’ said Josephine quietly. ‘And it’s true: we’re soldiers. It’s a prisoner of war.’

‘You’re children,’ insisted the Goldfish, still sounding pretty scary.

‘Exo-Defence Force cadets,’ said Carl, grudgingly.

The Goldfish thought for a moment. ‘TEACHER ROBOTS ARE NOT SUBJECT TO INTERNATIONAL MILITARY LAW,’ it concluded, and was about to have another zap before Noel flung himself in front of the Morror.

‘Stop it!’ he cried. ‘Stop hurting it! You’re being horrible!’

‘Killing it would be a waste,’ said Josephine. Her voice was oddly expressionless. ‘No one’s ever even seen a Morror before. And we’re going to leave the first live captive rotting somewhere on Tharsis? Without learning anything about it?’

The Goldfish made a frustrated electronic groaning sound and its eyes went back from red to blue. ‘Well kids, I think you might be biting off more than you can chew,’ it said brightly. ‘But it’s great to see you all compromising and working as a team! And if that Morror takes one step out of line…!’

There was a brief red flash in its eyes, but it backed off a bit.

‘Well, what now?’ said Carl.

So we stood there and stared at it. Or rather at its fallen, disembodied head, which was not getting any less creepy to look at.

‘We should get the rest of the invisible thing off,’ I said eventually. ‘We can’t have it running off in that thing.’

The invisible suit seemed more like a kind of sack than anything else; heaven knows how the Morror managed to walk around in it without tripping over all the time. I could sort of not quite see it out of the corner of my eye (the effect was starting to make me feel slightly sick), and the others couldn’t at all, but of course we could all feel it. It was very fine and silky and clingy under our hands as we dragged it off.

‘So that’s what they look like,’ breathed Carl.

‘That’s what this one looks like,’ corrected Josephine.

There was the first Morror human eyes had ever seen. The translucent mane covered its newt-like head, extended over its neck and shoulders, and stretched across its cheeks into tapering panels of shorter strands beneath its eyes. The mane wasn’t really fur, of course, it was made up of tendril-things, sort of like what sea anemones have. The strands of the mane got shorter and shorter as they approached bare skin, until they were just glossy round dots that spotted the Morror all over like a leopard, covering its chest and the six long, slender tentacles – three on each side – that hung from its shoulders. Between the dots… I suppose you’d have to call it grey, but such a complicated, mottled grey, sort of bluish or greenish or purplish, depending on how you looked at it. Each tentacle might have reached its knees, assuming it had them. But we couldn’t see what it had in the way of legs, because though it was bare from the waist up it was wearing a kind of long skirt made from stiff dark-red papery stuff.

Its eyes were shut, but I’d already seen them: as big as my fists, glossy and transparent round the edges and wells of deep black in the middle.

The Morror was still moaning quietly. It flicked up a couple of tentacles to cover its face, but it didn’t seem to be actually awake.

‘So, does this work on humans?’ Carl wondered, and put a fold of the invisibility cloak over his head and went, ‘Wooo. Wooo.’ It worked very well, but it turned out that a headless boy capering about was one more thing than I could properly cope with right now.

‘Oh, bloody hell, don’t,’ I said. Everything around me got swimmy and floaty and I realised I might possibly be falling over. Then someone had got their arms round me and was making me sit down on a mossy rock.

‘You’re all right,’ said Josephine firmly. ‘You’re just in shock. Drink some of this.’

She was holding that silver bottle of perfume I’d seen on the Mélisande.

‘What’re you making me drink perfume for?’ I croaked, the higher intellectual functions being beyond me at present.

‘It’s not perfume,’ said Josephine. ‘It’s rum. It’s my dad’s hip flask. Have some, there’s a good girl.’

I did as I was told and Josephine patted my head approvingly, while Carl laughed in a way that suggested he might be a bit in shock himself. ‘We’ve got a Morror prisoner,’ he giggled, ‘and Josephine’s a twelve-year-old alkie…’

‘I’m nothing of the sort. I’m just extremely well prepared,’ sniffed Josephine, hugging her bag of peculiar objects proudly to her side. She passed Carl the little flask. ‘You’ll note it’s full.’

Carl had a little swig and then Josephine took it back and did the same, and Noel looked at her expectantly.

‘You’re not having any,’ Carl said flatly.

‘So, what, I’ve got to just stay in shock?’ Noel asked in indignation.

‘Yes,’ said the rest of us.

Something strange happened to the Morror. The tendrils of its mane rippled and flared, and colour pulsed through them, bands of purple and deep flame-orange that welled up in its leopard dots and swept across its skin. This freaked us all out except for Josephine, who put her chin into her hands and watched for a moment, then got out her tablet and started filming it.

‘Is it meant to do that?’ asked Noel anxiously.

‘Hey,’ said Carl. ‘Hey, Morror.’

The Morror keened quietly, and opened its eyes. There were faint threads of orange and purple in the transparency around its pupils.

‘Are you all right, Morror?’ Noel enquired.

The Morror sat up and wrapped its tentacles around itself. It looked at us in silence.

‘We’re army cadets and this is our Goldfish, and I’m not going to let it hurt you any more, but you’re our prisoner so we’re taking you to the nearest military base, and we won’t hurt you either but don’t try anything,’ Noel summarised helpfully, running out of breath a bit towards the end.

More silence.

‘Do they… talk?’ asked Noel uncertainly, and I figured that they must do, because clearly they’d communicated with humans at the start of the invasion and we must have got the name ‘Morror’ from somewhere, but I didn’t think they’d had anything to say in all the time I’d been alive.

The Morror said something. And meanwhile it changed colour. Blues and turquoises and yellows and reds quivered across its spots and tendrils, and its voice sounded like wind in trees and all the syllables sounded like sighing. It said – and this is the closest I can manage and really there could easily be more ‘a’s in there – ‘Haaaa’thraaaa vsaaaa Mo-raaa uha-raaa…’

There was a pause. ‘Well, let’s tie it up,’ said Carl briskly.

The Morror did not want to be tied up. It was very wriggly and its tentacles flapped and whipped and it changed colour a lot. We were a bit worried about touching it, because for all we knew it was poisonous. But it was four against one – five against one, really, because the Goldfish was still hovering there as menacingly as it could, so eventually we got its tentacles bound to its chest in duct tape. We’d tried to make some kind of handcuffs to tie the ends of its tentacles together behind it, but we didn’t have enough tape left. And as far as we could tell we hadn’t been poisoned, so that was something.

‘Damn, where’s the invisible suit?’ Carl said after we were finished. Everyone looked at me.

‘I don’t know,’ I protested. ‘It’s getting dark, anyway, how am I supposed to…’ But they made me turn round and round trying to see it out of the corner of my eye until I started feeling wobbly again. I didn’t find it, actually; Noel did by walking into it so the tip of his boot disappeared.

‘How are we not going to lose this,’ I said. The Goldfish suddenly sprang open a compartment we hadn’t known it had in its side, but didn’t say anything. I don’t know if it was trying to overcome the moral conflict between its programming and our decision, or if it was just sulking.

We put the cloak inside and the compartment snapped shut.

‘It is getting dark, though,’ I repeated. The rum had helped but I didn’t feel I could face travelling much further. Still, I wondered how anyone was going to get much rest around a silent tied-up Morror changing colour like a set of traffic lights all the time.

‘I assume that was its ship you found, Goldfish?’ said Josephine. ‘Let’s go and look at that.’

We tried to tie the Morror to Monica’s leg, but we didn’t have enough duct tape left to do that either. So in the end we left the Goldfish to make sure the Morror didn’t get up to anything, and Noel to make sure the Goldfish didn’t get up to anything, and the rest of us started scrambling over the rocks towards the plume of steam.

Something occurred to me on the way. ‘Does your dad know you’ve got his hip flask?’ I asked Josephine.

‘Yes, he’s probably worked it out by now,’ Josephine said.

The Morror ship, obviously, didn’t seem to be there. The steam just poured out of empty air, into empty air, about fifteen feet above the bottom of the little valley. Except – and they were subtle enough that you might not have seen them normally – here and there were these little transparent patches of crusted ice, on the invisible contours of nothing, and cold was rolling off it.

The ground was a bit flatter – just where you’d aim for if you were crashing and trying to find somewhere to do an emergency landing. But I was pretty sure it had bashed into the high rocks we were standing on anyway.

Thinking about Morrors crashing and trying to save themselves made me feel a bit weird. Then I wondered if our Morror was the pilot, and rather belatedly asked myself how big the ship was and if it was likely to have more Morrors inside it waiting to spring to the defence of their crewmate.

‘How do we “take a look at this” exactly?’ I said, regardless.

‘You tell us, magic-eye girl,’ said Carl.

So I had to do my corner-of-the-eye trick again. ‘It’s about a third again bigger than a Flarehawk, I guess,’ I told the others, after waggling my head around and swivelling my eyes until I felt like a total moron. ‘It’s shaped sort of like… well, it’s in two round bits joined together in the middle, like an hourglass. But I also think it’s kind of spiky. Or… hairy. The front bit is all caved in.’

‘And can you see a door?’

‘No!’ I said crossly. ‘I can’t really see the stupid thing at all!’

I told myself I couldn’t reasonably be frightened of touching a Morror spacecraft after touching an actual Morror, so I went and cautiously patted at mid-air. I felt something surprisingly ridged and slightly damp, and continued stroking my way along the side of the thing. Then my hand suddenly pushed empty space and, from the point of view of everyone outside including me, vanished.

I yelped and pulled my hand back, freaked out even though I could feel it hadn’t actually ceased to exist or anything and I knew I’d really just found the door.

The others started getting down from Monica as I stuck my head through, and I heard Carl saying, ‘Christ that looks awful,’ at my apparently headless body from outside, which was more than a little hypocritical.

I blundered into some kind of ramp, hurt my leg, and climbed up inside.

It was cold, but not that much colder than outside. Some sort of machinery was croaking to itself in an unhappy way, which made me think the steam we’d seen was coming from the ruins of whatever was supposed to keep the ship at a Morror-friendly temperature.

The chamber lit up to greet me. After seeing the Morror, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at how colourful everything was. The walls were rounded and banded with stripes of colour that whorled and curved like the lines in a fingerprint, mostly icy blues and sea-greens on the left, giving way via some purples near the door to flamey reds and orange on the right. Some of the colours lit up, some didn’t.

Josephine followed me first. She was still filming everything in this ultra-detached way that was becoming slightly scary. She lingered over some coils of white sigils in a swirl of dark red and said, ‘It’s writing.’

There were these oval alcove things set into the walls, each about two-foot high and padded.

‘Do you think this is for passengers?’ I said. ‘I guess the front bit must be for piloting.’

We leaned into the wreck of what must have been the helm. The view screen was all smashed and half the control deck was caved in. What remained of the controls were all spaced and angled in such a way that they’d be horrible for a human to work, but you could see that they were controls: there were more wheely-slidy things, and banks of spongy leaf-like things, where we’d have had banks of screens and buttons, but still. And whereas all the business parts of a human ship tend to come in sensible black or grey with maybe a bit of blue or orange backlighting if you’re lucky, these were as colourful as everything else in the ship. It almost looked like someone had dumped their jewellery collection on a counter and then decided to fly a spaceship with it.

‘Never thought Morrors would be so festive,’ I said.

‘If those are chairs, there should be a crew of three,’ said Josephine, looking at some hexagonal plinth-like things. She said this close to her tablet for the benefit of the film. For the benefit of me, she added, ‘Just because it can take that many, doesn’t necessarily mean it did.’

Somehow I did get the feeling our Morror was on its own; the way it’d been hanging around by itself and the way no one seemed to be trying to rescue it. Still, the possibility of lots of Morrors running around, when a minute ago you hadn’t been expecting any, isn’t something you just get over.

Carl pulled himself up into the ship. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what can we nick?’

The idea of pinching stuff from the Morrors was bizarrely cheering. It felt like getting a little of our own back, even though you’d think having a real, live Morror prisoner was a much better way of doing that, but that wasn’t fun at all as it involved a lot more responsibility.

So we poked around very thoroughly and Carl got himself sprayed with some sort of bright-blue liquid, which terrified us for a while but did not seem to do anything when wiped off except leave him a little cleaner. Eventually it turned out the Morror approach to storage was to have lots of hexagonal compartments built into the floor and walls.

We found some green-and-brown lumpy things, and some blue shredded stuff, all of which we decided was almost certainly food. One of the compartments was full of frozen lumps of meat – at least in the sense that we were somehow pretty sure it was bits of animal, despite being bluey-grey – though whether the animals were more like fish or more like mammals we weren’t sure. This raised the ‘what if it’s poisonous to humans’ issue again, and also made me feel weird because suddenly I was imagining Morrors getting squirted with blue stuff and sitting around eating, which wasn’t something I’d ever been able to do before.

We also found weapons. Some of them were easy to recognise as such: semicircular blades with a hole presumably for Morrors to slot their tentacles into; and a couple of curvy staffs, which Carl poked and prodded and ended up shockraying a hole into the roof with.

We left the food for the time being but thought we’d hang on to the weapons, what with all the alarming things we’d encountered lately.

‘The most important thing is the oxygen,’ said Josephine, because the ship was full of the stuff and we were breathing perfectly happily without our masks on. ‘Look, why don’t we make camp here? We can’t go much further anyway and that way we won’t use up any of our own supply overnight.’

‘It’s too cold,’ I said. ‘And too weird. But mainly too cold.’

‘I didn’t mean we’d actually sleep in the ship. But we could trap the Morror in here and put the tent up outside and channel the oxygen in from here.’

So that’s what we did. Putting up a tent is no mean feat when it was never designed to stand up without being attached to a spaceship and has been partially eaten by Space Locusts, and getting an alien spaceship to blow oxygen into it is also pretty difficult. But we were becoming increasingly good at taking things apart and putting them together again in ingenious ways. We pitched the tent over two of Monica’s legs, and the Morror ship’s ventilation system turned out to be another thing that wasn’t that different from anything we were used to.

The Morror didn’t make a sound when we marched it into the ship, and it didn’t seem to have anything you’d call a facial expression. Its changing colours were a little hypnotic, though; I kept finding myself staring at it, and then I got scared that perhaps it was some kind of psychological weapon meant to make you dopey so it could attack. I tried not to look at it so directly after that.

‘Hey! Keep your… tentacles where I can see them,’ said Carl, brandishing his shockray staff as the Morror lifted a length of one finger-arm beneath the bindings round its torso. The Morror paused, stared blankly at Carl and then squirted some blue stuff from the wall on to itself, which it then started flicking and smoothing over its tendrils as best it could, and even though it was pretty awkward being tied up, the effect was like a bird preening itself or a cat washing.

Then it suddenly managed to fold itself into one of the padded alcoves and sat there, roosting like an owl. It gazed at us disconcertingly for a while, then it murmured some more whispery syllables to itself and closed its eyes.

Noel tried to feed the Morror some of the stuff we’d found, but it didn’t want any. Carl was dead keen to try some of the Morror food, but we persuaded him we should only resort to that on the brink of actual starvation as we weren’t equipped to deal with a medical emergency. So, trying to pretend the Morror wasn’t there, we ate some of our own stuff and eventually we got into our tattered sleeping bags and bundled up together for warmth. It was our third night out on the surface of Mars.

Of course we knew the Goldfish would have zapped it silly and screamed the place down if the alien made a wrong move. Just as I’d expected, though, none of us slept very well.

It wasn’t just that it was there. It was that we still had no real plan for what to do with it.