Mars Evacuees

25

‘Alice… Alice. This is impossible – how can you be – have they hurt you? Are you all right?’

‘It’s really me, Mum,’ I said, ‘and I’m fine.’ That might not have been completely true but it would do for now. ‘I’m not a prisoner or anything. There’s a lot to explain. But the main thing is that there are these horrible things called Vshomu that ate the Morrors’ planet and they’re in our solar system now, Mum, and they’re absolutely awful; they ate bits of Mars and tried to eat us and we have to stop the war with the Morrors or they’ll eat Earth as well and—’

I was, I suddenly realised, getting slightly hysterical.

‘Alice,’ said Mum, sounding completely in control again. ‘Slow down. Now, these Vshomu. Would they be anything to do with the swarm of small flying objects coming up behind you?’

‘What? YES!’ I screamed, absurdly looking over my shoulder as if I’d be able to see them.

Mum’s ship pounced straight over ours like a cat and I saw the flash of her torpedoes light up the windows. ‘Squadron!’ I heard her saying over the channel. ‘Concentrate all firepower on the small incoming creatures! Do not attack the Morror vessels. Repeat, do not attack the Morror vessels.’

She always did understand things quickly. It had been so long; I’d forgotten that about her.

‘Mum, don’t let them touch you! They’ll eat right through your ship!’

I turned anxiously. Dr Muldoon was propping herself up on her elbows and groaning and Josephine was dabbing at a cut on her head with a Morror skirt. Carl and Noel were already pressed to the windows. I ran and joined them.

I could only see bits and pieces of the battle, but there was one ship that moved just beautifully – that was the only word for it – like a bird of prey sweeping through a flock of sparrows, and I was sure that was Mum’s.

I suddenly really wished I had a Flarehawk of my own. I felt sure I could have picked off a reasonable number of Vshomu given the chance; I was trained for this and it would have felt better than just sitting there waiting to see if Mum won or not. But I couldn’t have done a thing with the Morror ship, which seemed to be fairly broken anyway. And so was my arm, come to that.

Her ship was out of sight now. Some debris that might have been fragments of exploded Space Locust floated past the window. I ran back to the communicator. ‘Mum, Mum – are you all right?’

‘Well,’ said Mum’s voice, sounding slightly out of breath. ‘That was exciting.’

Swarasee-ee plucked the communicator from my head. ‘Good afternoon,’ they said, sounding for all the world like the kind of automated helpline my parents used to complain about back on Earth. ‘Am I right in thinking this is Captain Stephanie Dare?’

‘Who is this?’ asked my mum.

‘My name is Swarasee-ee.’

‘What…? A Morror. You don’t… sound like a Morror.’

‘I have a special knack for languages.’

‘You know who I am.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Swarasee-ee, rather grimly. ‘We know who you are.’ And there was a pause in which the atmosphere of the ship seemed even more icy than it had done before, with both of them just listening to each other’s silence and to the memory of fifteen years of war. ‘Our ship is damaged,’ said Swarasee-ee finally. ‘I doubt we can reach Earth without help.’

‘We can tow you in,’ said Mum. ‘But I can see there’s a whole fleet behind you; I can’t be responsible for escorting that many down to Earth.’

‘What do you mean you can see them… ?’ began Swarasee-ee, sounding faintly scandalised, but then shook it off. ‘It is of no importance. I agree the other ships can wait in orbit until terms are agreed.’

‘Off we go, then,’ said Mum briskly. And there was an odd feeling as if something was squeezing the ship, and then we were moving again, faster and faster.

Earth came rushing to meet us.

I was warm. I’d more or less forgotten what that was like.

I also felt as if someone had placed a large piece of furniture, possibly a chest of drawers or a big desk, on top of my chest. I groaned.

‘Alice. How do you feel?’

‘Urgh.’ I lifted one arm and watched it drop back on to the blankets in disgust. ‘…Heavy.’

Mum laughed. ‘Yes, shifting gravity that suddenly is a pain, isn’t it?’

‘Where are we?’

‘Earth.’

‘I know that, I mean which country?’

‘Oh. America. New York.’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I said. ‘Can we see the Statue of Liberty? It is still there, isn’t it?’

The main thing I remembered from landing was being knocked flat by the gravity, and a lot of people gasping at their first sight of visible Morrors. Then we’d been scooped into ambulances and whizzed off to hospital. Someone had put a cast on my arm, although by that time I’d had trouble keeping my eyes open, and after that I couldn’t remember a thing, except it had clearly involved going to bed.

‘It’s still there.’

I looked at Mum properly. She looked smaller and more ordinary than I remembered. I’d been finding it harder and harder to picture anything when I thought of her except that bloody poster.

‘Alice, you’ve had such a terrible time, and I nearly killed you.’

‘I’ve been being nearly killed all week,’ I said grandly. ‘Doesn’t bother me that much now.’

‘That is not a reassuring thing to say to your mother,’ Mum said, and crawled half on to the bed so as to hug me.

A very tiny, spiteful part of me thought it was only fair if she had to do some worrying now; I’d been doing it long enough. But mainly it was just wonderful to curl up against her and not have to pretend I wasn’t bothered about where she was or what she might be doing, because she was there and alive and not going anywhere for a bit, hopefully. And her arms were warm and her hair smelled of the coconut shampoo she always used, which I’d completely forgotten about but now I remembered.

‘It wasn’t all terrible,’ I said. ‘And I’m not dead. And I’m glad I got the chance to watch you fight. I mean, I can’t say I enjoyed it at the time, but still, you really are amazing at it.’

Mum sniffed a little. ‘You’ve done these incredible things.’

‘Oh, those,’ I said, trying to sit up. ‘What’s going on? Is the war over?’

‘Not quite, but—’

‘Why not?!’ I burst out, indignant.

‘It takes a long time to finish a war.’

‘I don’t see why. Everyone just has to stop fighting each other and start fighting the Vshomu. It’s not complicated.’

‘It is complicated,’ said Mum. ‘There’s the status of the territory the Morrors have occupied, the climate, the invisibility shield… a lot of loose ends. But there’s a ceasefire. The EEC president’s flown in; and there’s a Morror delegation in the UN now.’

‘So…’ I felt better for hearing the word ‘ceasefire’. ‘Do you think it will be OK?’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Mum. ‘At least, as OK as it can be when the solar system’s infested with planet-eating bugs. It’ll have to be OK. There’s no real choice, for humans or Morrors.’

‘No, that’s exactly it,’ I said. And I flopped back on to the pillows, but the wave of tiredness eased off sooner than I expected.

‘I don’t need to be in hospital,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing particularly wrong with me.’

‘You’ve got burns, cuts, a broken arm, hypothermia, gravitational readjustment syndrome and dehydration.’

‘Like I say,’ I said, waving a hand and feeling I could milk this grizzled old veteran act for a while yet: ‘Nothing.’ And this time I did succeed in making Mum laugh. ‘So, what about everyone else? The kids from Beagle…’

‘They’ve only just landed. Some of them will probably be turning up here later. Things got pretty bad out there, from what I hear…’

‘But…?’

‘But no fatalities, no.’

‘Oh.’ I’d known the news wouldn’t be any better than that, really, but it still wasn’t good. I thought about Kayleigh and Chinenye and everyone else, and how I had no real idea what they’d been through. And even though I knew I couldn’t have done anything useful, I started to feel bad about leaving them. I never even said goodbye.

‘They’re alive. And you saved their lives.’

‘I didn’t really. That was all Josephine; I’d never even have thought to go off on my own and… Mum, my friends, are they here? I want to go and see them.’

Mum didn’t try to stop me climbing out of the bed, and propped me up when I put my feet on the ground and got wobbly.

‘Why do we need so much gravity?’ I complained. ‘Completely over the top.’

We shuffled out of the room and into a corridor. I thought of something. ‘Can I,’ I said, ‘have tea and beans on toast?’

Mum laughed. ‘Well – in principle, of course you can. But finding the right kind of baked beans and tea in America…’

‘…has got to be easier than on Mars,’ I said.

‘True. Yes, then.’

‘Spaghetti carbonara would do in the meantime.’

A hovering hospital robot came round the turn of the corridor. Someone was hanging on to it with both hands, letting themselves be pulled along, bare feet skidding on the ground. The robot did not seem happy about having a passenger; it twitched as we saw it, and the person fell off. But they jumped up for another go, letting out a cry of, ‘WOOHOO…!’

It was Carl, obviously.

‘Leave the robot alone,’ said Mum. ‘You’ll break it.’

Carl saluted my mum, which was a weird thing to witness, but Carl seemed to get a strange kick out of saluting people. ‘A man from the EDF came into my room and told me I was a hero,’ he said. ‘In which case, a ride on a hospital robot is not that much to ask, is it?’

I couldn’t help but think that whoever had said that to Carl had been very, very unwise, but my mother only said, ‘You’ve got a point,’ and let him latch on to the robot for one more swoop along the corridor.

‘So hey,’ he said to me breathlessly, coming back. ‘You took forever to wake up.’

I suppose, compared to the kid I’d seen jumping into the ocean months ago, he looked terrible; too thin and too pale and covered in bruises where he wasn’t covered in bandages. Compared to me, though, he looked in unreasonably good shape. ‘How come you’re so lively?’ I said.

‘Because I am a hero,’ said Carl, grinning. ‘Eh, I was as limp as a rag a few hours ago, but you get over it. I’ve just been really bored. And my parents aren’t here yet. And the Goldfish’s been nosing about, and I don’t trust it not to give me a physics quiz. No respect for heroes, that fish.’

‘Where’s Noel?’

‘I’ll show you. He was knackered, though.’ Carl led us through a set of double doors to a room halfway down another stretch of corridor. ‘Oh, no, the Goldfish’s got him.’

I peered round the door. Noel was still curled up in bed. The Goldfish was hovering over him, but it wasn’t teaching him anything. It was singing gently, the Chinese song it had sung to me back on Beagle Base.

We tiptoed past so that we wouldn’t disturb Noel and the Goldfish wouldn’t notice we were there.

A soft play of coloured lights was marbling the white paint of a wall outside another room.

A crisp voice from inside said, ‘Interesting. But what is it for?’

‘It’s art, Lena, I already told you. Ow.’

‘It would be worth examining the internal workings.’

‘You will not take it to bits, it’s mine. Ow.’

Josephine’s fingers were clasped protectively over the Paralashath lying on her chest. She looked smaller in the bed, and even more battered and fragile than I’d remembered. It might have been partly that her hair was combed and styled and so took up less space. A sombre young woman was just finishing the last plait, Josephine wincing all the time.

‘This is Lena,’ she greeted us. ‘She has no soul and she tortures young girls.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ said Lena gravely, rising from her chair. She seemed to keep on rising for some time; she must have been six foot two at least. She wore little glasses and a dark suit, and her hair in a chignon, even though I knew she was only eighteen. She did look a bit like Josephine around the eyes and forehead, but I couldn’t imagine Josephine ever growing up to be that big, or that tidy, or so composed and still and unfidgety. Lena shook everyone’s hands.

‘Lena, this is Carl,’ said Josephine. ‘He can fly a spaceship through a cloud of Vshomu and come out the other side.’

‘And I am the first person to do a wee on the Acidalia Planitia,’ said Carl happily.

‘Oh, for God’s sake. He is also disgusting, but we have to put up with that. Noel is a lot less gross, but sadly he isn’t here right now to balance Carl out; he was the first one to spot a Vshomu.’

‘And he stopped the Goldfish hurting Thsaaa,’ I said.

Josephine smiled up at me. ‘This is Alice,’ she said more quietly. ‘She’s handy with duct tape when you’ve been partially eaten or exploded. But mainly she stops people going crazy or giving up.’

For a moment I had the weirdest feeling I was going to cry, and I didn’t know why.

‘Duct tape is always good,’ said Lena.

‘This is Josephine, Mum,’ I said. ‘She worked out why the Morrors were on Mars and she finds giant robot spiders and builds flamethrowers, and she’s my best friend.’

Lena frowned. ‘Josephine, you didn’t mention anything about a flamethrower.’

‘If you didn’t want me to build flamethrowers, you shouldn’t have taught me the basic principles when I was six,’ said Josephine. ‘It worked well.’

‘Everything seems to have worked out well,’ I said.

‘Of course it did,’ said Josephine serenely. ‘I was never in any doubt it would.’

And we laughed, because that was hysterically funny, and Josephine added, ‘Alice. Let’s go outside.’

So we did that. There was some talk of wheelchairs for both Josephine and me, which neither of us wanted. But I managed to shuffle along on my own feet leaning on Mum, and Lena simply hoisted Josephine over one shoulder and walked off with her. Josephine protested heartily. Lena ignored her until she gave up.

The hospital grounds weren’t particularly beautiful. There were a lot of military vehicles and tarmac. But there were some flower beds and roses growing in them. And the sky was bright blue.

‘Isn’t it sunnier than it used to be?’ I said as Lena plonked Josephine down on a low wall.

‘The Morrors,’ said Mum, tilting her face up to the sunlight. ‘They said they’d let more light through. They’re doing it. And it’s summer.’