Mars Evacuees

5

Landing on a planet is worse than taking off, or at least I think so, because you’re basically falling. For the first time in days, everyone on the ship mostly shut up. Opposite me, Josephine was gripping the edge of her seat.

The windows filled with fire as we burned through the atmosphere, and then suddenly instead of blackness and stars around us we were plunging through a pale, purplish sky. The ship was once again urging us to breathe deeply and think of babbling brooks and sun-dappled beaches, and the being-hammered-by-tablespoons feeling was even worse than before.

The coppery ground flies up at you and the spaceship starts to slow down but it doesn’t seem like it can possibly slow down enough, so you’re still absolutely sure you’re going to crash and how on Earth – how both on and off Earth – can my mum do this all the time?

And then we stopped moving. Everything went weirdly quiet.

We were on Mars.

There was a floaty feeling that seemed as if it should wear off now we’d stopped moving, but it didn’t. It made you want to move. I was suddenly very, very impatient to get out of the spaceship and I wriggled against the seatbelt.

‘Ow,’ said Josephine, because I’d accidentally kicked her in the shin. My foot just came up a lot higher than I meant it to. This wasn’t the artificial gravity any more. This was Mars’ brand of the real thing, and there was a lot less of it.

Kayleigh led a round of slightly hysterical cheering – theoretically for the crew, though really everyone just felt like clapping and screaming. The crew lurched around the main passenger cabin looking completely exhausted, making sure we’d all got oxygen masks, for acclimatising. The oxygen canisters were pretty big, but they didn’t feel heavy.

There was a thump from the escape shuttle where Carl was still shut up in disgrace. I imagined that was him trying to get out, or at least doing an experimental jump around and hitting the ceiling.

When we had the oxygen masks fixed over our faces, the doors opened and a blast of thin air flowed in. It was cold but as you know, I was used to that. And slower than we wanted, but faster than the crew wanted, we all spilled down the ramp on to the surface of Mars.

Beagle Base was a cluster of domes and windmills and drum-shaped buildings on stilts. The hills above the base were smooth, abrupt lumps with polished red sides, still bald, though there was thin blackish-green arctic grass growing on the plain.

But we weren’t that bothered about where we were going to be living at first. What we saw at once was that you would never, ever for a single second be able to forget you were on a different world. The sun was too small and too pale. The horizon was too close, and too curved. I don’t think people would ever have thought the world was flat if they’d started off on Mars.

And the gravity. It was amazing. It felt like we’d suddenly got superpowers, because in a way we had. I jumped as high as I could. This turned out to be as high as my own head. It was almost as exciting as being able to fly, but kind of scary too, because that’s a long way to come down. But I descended slowly enough to see the red horizon settling lazily back into place around me, and Josephine looking up at me and then taking off herself. Soon everyone was doing it, three hundred kids all bouncing up and down on the alien plain like bubbles in a pan of boiling water.

Then there was a horrible blaring noise overhead and everyone jumped or shrieked or giggled or fell over according to character. Until then we hadn’t noticed the three little flying silver ball-things that had whooshed over from behind a cluster of red rocks and were now spinning around in a triangle formation above us. They shouted in one deep, annoyed, American voice: ‘You will get in a line! You will be silent! You are all Exo-Defence Force cadets now! You will act like it!’

So we did that, at least the getting-in-a-line part, and we were quick about it too because those things were scary.

‘EDF Goads,’ said Josephine. ‘I read about them…’

One of the Goads plunged down out of the pinkish sky and hovered in front of us, shimmering. In the shimmer we could see the face of an old, angry-looking man, who bawled at Josephine: ‘SILENCE!’ And then it swooped off along the line and bawled the same thing at a lot of other people, with variations like ‘STAND UP STRAIGHT!’ and ‘TAKE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE!’ and one of the other Goads swept along behind it translating into various languages and sounding just as furious whether it was yelling ‘SILENZIO!’ or ‘CHEN MO!’ even though it was automated.

A large, strange shape was emerging over one of the hills; something huge and black with four legs, a bit like a horse and a bit like a dog and a bit like a monkey – except that it didn’t have a head, because being a robot, it didn’t need one. Astride its back was the man whose face we’d seen in the Goad. He was actually robot himself from the knees down. You could see this because even though he had to be at least seventy-five, and even though we were on Mars and it was chilly to say the least, he was wearing very short shorts.

He looked down at us from his steed, which you almost expected to rear up dramatically against the skyline.

‘I AM COLONEL DIRK CLEAVER.’ He was very loud, even louder than Carl, but even if he hadn’t been, the three little Goads which were now whirling above him amplified his voice all over the Martian plain.

‘And there are some things you should know about me,’ he went on just as loudly. ‘I never wanted to wind up stuck on this rock, babysitting the likes of you, because some snivelling pen-pusher thinks I’m too old to fight. But since I am here, by God, YOU WILL BECOME THE FINEST FIGHTING FORCE OF SEVEN-TO-SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN. Those invisible scumbuckets will quail in terror of you. But first, you will quail in terror of me!’

I was already quailing, maybe not quite in terror, but certainly in general Oh-God-What-Is-This-ness. I sneaked a glance at Josephine. She was not quailing at all, but she was staring into the distance in a resigned kind of way, as if she was sizing up what the next four years were going to be like.

Dirk Cleaver pointed. ‘There are your barracks; I want you back out here in uniform in twenty minutes!’ For a moment he looked vaguely disgusted. ‘The civilian robots will show you what to do.’ He didn’t sound as if he thought much of the civilian robots. I was still keen to see what they’d be like; though the thing the Colonel was riding was exciting enough to be going on with. He shouted, ‘Yah!’ and the thing responded just as if it had been an animal; it charged down the hill with him sitting easily upright astride it. The headlessness was creepier when it moved – it could go in any direction without hesitating or looking where it was going. Sometimes, when there was a big rock or something in the way, it would go straight from galloping like a horse to moving sideways like a crab. Once he was down on the plain, the Colonel rode along the line of children with his whirling Goads sweeping after him, as we all tried to quail in suitable terror. ‘Go on! Get moving! March!’

So we marched off as best we could towards Beagle Base. Colonel Cleaver’s voice continued to yell at us out of the Goads, ‘Quick march! Left, right!’ while another robot came to meet us, hovering above the ground like the Goads. Except this one was shaped like a sunflower with a smiley face and playing a jingly tune.

‘Hi there!’ it said in a friendly way. ‘Hola chicos! Namaste doston! Nimen hao! Wow, you’re a long way from home! Welcome to Beagle Base! Why don’t we take a look around?’

‘You will become living weapons!’ roared the Colonel. ‘You will be disciplined! You will be strong! You will be ruthless!’

‘We’re going to have a fun time together!’ giggled the sunflower robot placidly.

‘I don’t think I like it here,’ said Josephine.

The Sunflower led us between a couple of buildings on stilts and down a tunnel into a huge, misty-looking transparent dome. Inside it was all green and warm and lovely, and full of growing things. Little robots skittered about between beds of plants, spraying stuff on them or picking cauliflowers and beans while bees hummed overhead. The Sunflower led us through the gardens, rocking gently from side to side as it hovered, talking in Mandarin and then Spanish in the same happy tone.

‘Look at all the healthy food we’re growing!’ it said when it went back to English. ‘And see, over there are some EDF scientists called ecologists! They’re helping to make Mars a safe, green, living planet for us all!’

It was true; on the other side of the dome, standing between banks of strange plants that didn’t look like anything I’d seen on Earth, there were some actual humans. Some of them were wearing lab coats and some were in overalls, but all had the Exo-Defence Force comet symbol on the chest. They were directing the little agricultural robots around or comparing results on their tablets. One of them was a woman riding a vehicle like a more delicate, spidery version of the Colonel’s Beast. It carried her over the crops by elegantly placing its pointed feet into tiny spaces between plants, not even bending a leaf. All these people ignored us completely – we were the Colonel’s and the robots’ responsibility. The beds of vegetables opened out around a big oval sports field framed by a running track. It had been such a long time since I had seen anything like that which wasn’t covered in snow.

‘Let’s meet my friends!’ cooed the Sunflower.

Our teachers and caretakers for the next four years were waiting for us in the middle of the sports field – standing or hovering. They came forwards, pleased to see us.

Like the Sunflower, they were designed to appeal to children, and they mostly looked like huge toys. There was a Cat and a Star and a Flamingo and a Goldfish. The older kids just had a plain hovering globe thing like a slightly less aggressive version of the Colonel’s Goads. But I think something had gone wrong with the design for the robot for the smallest kids, or maybe it had got a bit broken on the way to Mars. It was a six-foot-tall Teddy Bear that lumbered forwards and said, ‘HELLO LITTLE CHILDREN’ in a deep and awful voice and four seven-year-olds burst into tears on the spot.

Little Noel Dalisay didn’t cry, because he was too busy looking around for his brother.

‘They’ve forgotten Carl!’ I said to Josephine.

‘Huh,’ snorted Josephine bitterly. ‘Tragic.’ She’d only had her tablet and its library of books back for a couple of hours, so wasn’t in any mood to be forgiving.

The robots seemed to know exactly who we all were, and more importantly how old we all were. They roamed about, looking at our faces and calling out names, until for the first time we were divided up by age rather than by nationality or by whoever we felt like hanging around with. Josephine and I and the rest of the eleven- and twelve-year-olds got the Goldfish.

‘Hey, kids!’ it said to us. It had a livelier, jauntier way of talking than the Sunflower, which sounded permanently spaced out on the bliss of being a flower-shaped robot. ‘I can’t wait for us all to get to know each other and start learning and having fun! Gosh, it’s gonna be super.’

‘Um,’ I began. It felt weird to be talking to a fish. ‘I think Carl Dalisay should be in our year? And he’s still on the ship.’

‘Aww, don’t you worry, Alice!’ it said fondly, as if it had known me for ages. ‘We’ll find him!’

The Goldfish was a rather fascinating thing. It was orange and shiny and faintly translucent with a light inside that slowly pulsed from dim to bright, and big, glowing blue eyes. When it was talking English it had an American accent, and like the Goads and the Sunflower, it hovered above the ground. I thought it was programmed a bit too young for us, though. It hadn’t been talking for two minutes before it became clear it was very keen on sharing and everyone using their imaginations.

‘At some point,’ I whispered to Josephine, ‘that fish is going to make us sing.’

‘Well, I just bet you all want to know where you’re going to sleep, and what your new uniforms look like!’ chirped the Goldfish, as cheerfully as it said everything else. ‘Let’s go, kids!’

It led us off across the sports field, down a path through more banks of plants and to the edge of the dome, where we found there were classrooms and corridors looped all around the central garden in rings. We got occasional glimpses of smaller domes outside, clustered round the main one like little bubbles in bathwater clinging to a big one.

‘That’s where they’re growing wheat and soy!’ the Goldfish told us happily. ‘In here for Assessment and Processing, kids!’

I was a little scared of being Assessed and Processed, but it herded us into a wide, bright chamber full of little cubicles where you got blasted with an unexpected sonic shower and the floor weighed you and something in the walls scanned you to measure how tall you were, and I think maybe it was checking to see if you had any diseases too.

‘Hey,’ said somebody, while things whirred busily behind the walls. I turned. Lilly was in the cubicle with me.

‘Hello,’ I said, not too warmly.

But Lilly was smiling at me – a humble, earnest sort of smile, like I was a duchess and she was interviewing for a job as my butler. ‘I like the pink in your hair, I never said. I’d never dare to do that, but it looks awesome.’

I blinked. ‘Thank you.’

‘I think your mom’s totally amazing, by the way.’

‘Mmm-hm.’

Lilly stopped smiling and twisted her hands. ‘Look, I’m sorry about before, with the exam girl. We were all just joking around, and you know, I guess she can’t help it but she does come off as kind of strange, and maybe we got a little carried away.’

I looked at her. Up till then, Lilly-and-Gavin-and-Christa-and-various-hangers-on had all been one blob of unpleasantness to me. But on her own, Lilly was very harmless-looking. She was about my height, slim, dark-blonde hair, pretty but not so you’d notice the first time you looked. Her shoulders were tense and her fingernails were bitten down to the quick.

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what to think.

‘Christa’s actually really cool,’ added Lilly. ‘And I’m sure she wasn’t trying to be mean either. And I was so scared, those first few days on the spaceship. And she’s, like, used to people who are celebrities and stuff, and it was so nice of her to hang out with us. So, you know.’

‘…So, you were trying to impress Christa,’ I summarised.

‘I don’t know.’ Lilly looked harassed, and I wondered if I was being too hard on her. She’d just said she was scared, after all. ‘I wasn’t trying to do anything, I just… I really miss home and is it that big of a deal? Can we be cool?’

I considered this as two tightly folded uniforms came plonking out of a hole on to a shelf, like a packet of crisps out of a vending machine.

‘Well,’ I said cautiously. ‘We don’t need not to be. But it’s not me you should be apologising to. It wasn’t me you were picking on.’

She flinched a bit at me calling it that, but she said, ‘Oh, OK, I totally will.’

And I think, at the time, despite everything that happened later, she probably meant to.

Once everyone in our class had uniforms, we went off to the dorms to change. Girls and boys were divided up, and there were six of us to a room. Josephine and I stuck grimly to each other during this bit, because under these circumstances it seemed like a good idea to hang on to people and things that you know you like, or at least can put up with.

Our dorm on Vogel Corridor was obviously a lot more modern than what I was used to at Muckling Abbot, but really the general idea – a bed and a chest of drawers and a little pinboard to put posters on – is much the same whatever planet you’re on. The ceilings were very high, though, because in this gravity a decent jump would probably have brained you otherwise. The uniforms were at least slightly better than the sludge-green ones at Muckling Abbot, and they were the same for boys and girls. There were ordinary white T-shirts to wear next to your skin, but the jackets and trousers were black and glossy on the outside, with a weird smooth texture like flexible glass, and a kind of soft webbing inside that could adjust to the warmth inside the dome as well as the cold, thin Martian air, so you were never uncomfortable. Of course they had that comet crest on the left side of the chest, and the EDF motto, which was ‘RECLAIMING EARTH’.

Josephine had got the machines to give her a toothbrush and some things for her hair. She was pretty glad to change out of the clothes she’d been wearing all week, and she said she liked wearing black. But she didn’t like having to do her hair, which was very tangly now, because other than run her fingers through it and bundle it up in her scarf, she hadn’t done anything to it for the whole voyage. She sat on her new bed next to mine and began morosely trying to comb it. I tried to help but we weren’t getting anywhere, and then fortunately some older girls from next door wandered through and one of them was called Chinenye and she was from Nigeria and had similar-ish hair and a usefully bossy temperament. She took over.

‘What have you been doing to yourself ?’ she scolded Josephine. ‘Look at this mess. Don’t you know how to do your own hair?’

‘In principle, yes. In practice, it’s not one of my strengths,’ said Josephine, looking as if she was being martyred. She sighed and mumbled, ‘My sister does it, mostly.’

‘You never said you’d got a sister,’ I said. Actually, she hadn’t said anything about her family. And I hadn’t asked, not because I wasn’t interested, but because it’s a tricky subject in a war. Mostly people just don’t.

Josephine became slightly frosty. ‘Well, I’ve only known you a week,’ she replied.

I was a little bit hurt. But as I say, family’s a touchy thing when you’re in a war, or maybe even when you’re not, so I tried not to take it personally.

Chinenye hastily did Josephine’s hair into two buns on top of her head like mouse ears, and said, ‘There.’

‘You look nice,’ I said.

‘How can I think straight with my head all pulled tight?’ moaned Josephine. ‘Anyway, what about you? Are you allowed to have your hair dyed pink in the army?’

‘No one said I couldn’t,’ I said anxiously, and scraped my hair back so the pink bits didn’t show. This dampened my morale and I felt more sympathetic to Josephine’s gloom.

I’ve just realised I never said what I look like, though we’ve already covered that I like pink and that I’m good at glaring. Aside from that, my eyes are blue; my hair is short and brown. My face is rounder than it would be if I had got to design it myself, but I look nice enough in a sturdy kind of way.

‘Quick! We’ve got to run,’ said Chinenye, because the dorm room was empty by now except for us. I didn’t want to find out what Colonel Cleaver would do if we were late so we did run, across the gardens and the sports field and out of the dome on to the plain, and hastily lined up with the rest of our group. We already made a tidier, more military-looking formation than we had before – I suppose putting on a uniform does something to you. But we had the Goldfish hovering beside us this time.

‘Let me tell you this! Mars is tough! And it will MAKE YOU TOUGH!’ roared Colonel Cleaver. ‘You will learn to survive!’

‘Learning is fun!’ piped up the Goldfish in agreement. The Colonel scowled and one of his Goads came whooshing over to us with his face glaring out of it. The Goldfish gazed back with its unblinking blue plastic eyes. It was impossible to tell if it was actually aware of taking part in a staring competition, but in any case, it won, because the Goad bobbed irritably and flew back to the Colonel looking somehow disgruntled.

Then the Goldfish went swimming off towards the Mélisande and said something to the haggard-looking crew, who were standing there watching us assemble. There was a small kerfuffle and then Sergeant Kawahara went and opened the doors of the escape shuttle and Carl came soaring out.

The Colonel rode over on his Beast. ‘Ha!’ he said to the crew. ‘Looks like you nearly flew off with this one aboard!’

Captain Mendez shuddered visibly at the thought.

Carl was doing just what the rest of us had done as soon as we got outside – looking around and jumping up and down a lot. He didn’t mind doing this in front of an audience of three hundred, any more than he’d minded being dragged out of the sea with everyone watching.

‘STOP THAT!’ barked the Colonel. ‘STAND UP STRAIGHT!’

Carl obeyed instantly, even flinging the Colonel a salute.

‘I’m ready to learn how to fight aliens, sir,’ he announced, and then looked at the robot beast as if he’d just fallen in love. ‘Oh, sir,’ he said. ‘When do we get one of those?’

There was a pause while Colonel Cleaver looked Carl up and down.

‘I like you, kid,’ he announced, finally.

Beside me, Josephine quietly hit herself in the face.