Mars Evacuees

6

As the days went by, it became clear that it would be the older kids who got the brunt of the Colonel’s training regime, because they were going to be doing all this stuff for real in a year or two. So the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds were doing flight sims and weapons drills and climbing over the Cydonian hills every day, while we younger ones were mostly indoors doing Wordsworth or learning how to do comparisons in Spanish or mediaeval crop rotation with the Goldfish.

Sometimes, though, as a change from telling us about the French Revolution, it gave lessons about the planet we were actually living on.

‘Hey, kids,’ sang the Goldfish, glowing contentedly as it floated around the classroom. ‘Today we’re going to be talking about the Labyrinth of Night!’

The name sent a pleasant shiver down my spine. I imagined a huge, dark maze full of ghosts. There were all these strange and lovely names on Mars. Memnonia, Mariner’s Valley, the Golden Plain. And thinking about them made me wish I could go to those places and see if they looked anything like the way they did in my head.

‘Do you think we could go there?’ I said wistfully. ‘On a sort of… field trip?’

‘Oh, no, Alice,’ said the Goldfish. ‘You kids need to stay here at Beagle where it’s full of fun and oxygen! Until the terraforming’s finished, Mars is too dangerous for exploring!’

I thought crossly that the EDF weren’t so worried about keeping us safe once we’d successfully been turned into living weapons, and meanwhile the Goldfish hovered over to Gavin.

‘So Gavin, what can you tell us about the Labyrinth of Night?’

‘Uh,’ said Gavin, biting his lip. ‘I guess it’s… erm… on Mars. Somewhere.’

‘Aww,’ said the Goldfish sadly, after waiting in vain for more. ‘You need to put in more work by yourself, buddy! But never mind! See what you can learn in class today.’ It bustled over to Josephine. ‘Can you help us out, Josephine?’

Josephine didn’t notice the Goldfish was talking to her. She was leaning back in her chair, dreamily gazing up at a bee circling under the transparent roof of the dome. The bees got kind of everywhere on Beagle Base. Our classroom was in the inner ring around the garden dome, so there weren’t any windows in its high white walls, but you could see the clouds through the curve of the ceiling, and it had been raining heavily all morning – weird rain, falling so much more slowly than on Earth, making a purring, warbling noise on the roof. It was quite nice in a way, feeling hidden and safe, with no spaceships zapping each other overhead and nothing in the sky but rain. But on the other hand it made you feel shut in and very aware of how lonely Beagle Base was and how we really were very cut off from everything. We’d been on Mars nearly a month by now, and we hadn’t had any kind of contact from Earth. Sometimes I wondered if the Morrors could have actually taken over the world by now and when we would find out if they had. And I also wondered if they’d killed my mum yet, but wondering about that wasn’t anything new.

‘Wakey wakey, Josephine,’ urged the Goldfish, nudging her arm with its nose, almost like a friendly dog.

‘Mmmh,’ Josephine said sleepily. ‘Urgh. What?’

Gavin tittered nastily.

‘The Labyrinth of Night,’ prompted the Goldfish patiently.

‘Oh. Noctis Labyrinthus. It’s a system of canyons by the equator at the west end of Valles Marineris – Mariner’s Valley. It was formed by extensional tectonics in the Noachian Period and erosion by rivers and collapse of grabens in the late Hesperian and Amazonian Periods,’ said Josephine. Then she dropped her head on to her arms on the desk as if exhausted.

Josephine was the sort of person who stumbles into a lesson without her books or tablet or any apparent idea of what’s going on, and almost never puts her hand up, but then seems to know more or less everything. It would have driven a human teacher at least slightly crazy, but being a robot the Goldfish had infinite patience.

(Well, that’s what I thought. We found out eventually that it did have its limits, and it could snap, but I’ll come to that later.)

‘That’s great, Josephine, good job!’ it said, completely satisfied, skimming back to the front of the classroom. ‘A graben is what happens when a block of land falls down in an earthquake and becomes the flat bottom of a new valley,’ it told the rest of us.

Josephine looked slightly mournful. It wasn’t that she did this sort of thing for dramatic effect, I don’t think, but she would have liked some reaction. ‘You can’t surprise it,’ she told me later.

She’d at least managed to surprise Gavin, and not in a pleasant way, because he muttered, ‘Swot.’

Josephine rolled her eyes magnificently and otherwise ignored him, but the Goldfish didn’t stand for that kind of thing at all. ‘Now, you cut that out, Gavin,’ it said sternly. ‘I’d like you to say sorry right now!’

Scowling, Gavin did.

‘So, who else is out there?’ asked Carl. ‘There’s Zond Station, right? What are those guys up to?’

‘Good question, Carl!’ twinkled the Goldfish. It spun slightly to project a hologram of Mars from its mouth into the air. ‘Zond is aaaaaaaall the way over here by Mount Olympus, and that’s not just the tallest mountain on Mars, it’s the tallest mountain in the Solar System! Don’t you think that’s nifty?’ It zoomed in on the mountain to show that its peak rose right above the atmosphere, bare of snow and ice. ‘Zond Station is just a very small base for our brave Exo-Defence fighters! But there’s also Schiaparelli Outpost – who can guess where that is?’

‘Schiaparelli Crater,’ I said.

‘Good job, Alice!’ enthused the Goldfish, spinning the projection of Mars to show where that was. ‘And that’s where some clever scientists like our very own Dr Muldoon are working hard to see how the new ecosystem’s doing! Does anyone remember what an ecosystem is?’

‘So there’s only a few hundred people on the whole planet, and most of them are us,’ concluded Carl, ignoring this question.

‘That’s right, Carl! And of course there’s lots of my robot pals out there, enriching the soil and the air and planting seeds and making Mars a better place for you to enjoy!’

‘Well, no they’re not,’ I said gloomily. ‘Not for us. You pretty much just said so. We’ve got to go and fight the war with the Morrors.’

There was a slight pause, and the Goldfish hovered where it was, its plastic blue eyes looking somehow more blank than usual.

‘Cheer up, Alice!’ it said eventually, in its sunniest and most robotic way.

‘So… we’re here, and there’s no one around for thousands and thousands of miles, except maybe some robots?’ said Carl. He thought for a second and then grinned. ‘Awesome.’

After that lesson we had our supplements and stood under the UV lamp to stop the low gravity from doing bad things to our bone density, and played with the Goldfish. As well as projections of Mars and school things like that, there were a lot of decent games on it, and during breaks it would get us chasing holographic bumblebees or meteors around on the sports course, and it was quite fun although the Goldfish would keep wittering on about just how fun it was and how well we all were doing.

There was a lot of other stuff on the Goldfish too – well, all the robots knew basically everything. And although we couldn’t get the proper internet across fifty million miles of space, Beagle Base did have its own network with email and books and the odd amusing cat video on it. But annoyingly all the robots and all the computers also knew exactly how old everyone was and so there was no way to get them to show you anything you were supposedly too young to see.

But we didn’t get much time to think about it, what with all the lessons and all the exercising. The Goldfish made us run around a lot, and twice a week the Colonel had us for military training. And that was very different because, as you might have gathered, the Goldfish and the Colonel did not exactly see eye to eye on how to treat and motivate children. There was an assault course sprawled around the Cydonian hills, and it looked terrifying, like it had been made for giants – hurdles higher than your head and a climbing tower about the height of a skyscraper. But of course, in this gravity, it wasn’t as hard as it looked, though you did need the extra oxygen strapped to your back.

One morning, I struggled up to the top of the tower and looked out over the lumpy hills. I pulled off my oxygen mask to get a better look – you weren’t supposed to do that too often but there was enough oxygen in the air that you could go easily twenty minutes before you even got dizzy. And after all, Mars was supposed to be Making Us Tough. The mirrors in the lavender sky were glittering icily behind rosy clouds, and against the near horizon there were a few dark pine trees. It was hard to tell if it was just the tighter curve of the planet or whether they really were impossibly tall, but against the sky their silhouettes looked something like a little kid’s drawing, everything out of proportion.

‘Hi, Alice,’ said Carl, climbing up beside me.

I wasn’t sure if I had forgiven him over that Somnolum X stunt, but on the other hand I wasn’t sure I hadn’t, so I gave him a sort of half-strength glare and said, ‘Hello.’

He looked out at the view. ‘This whole planet,’ he said, ‘is basically pink. You must be in heaven.’

I went up to three-quarters-strength glare, and said, ‘It’s really more a kind of peach.’

‘Nah, it’s definitely pink. What it needs is for, like, a herd of unicorns to come galloping over the plain there…’

I decided not to bother responding to this, so Carl changed tack. ‘When your parents decided to name you Alistair…’

Full-strength glare, on the spot. ‘If you call me that again I’ll push you off the tower.’

Carl laughed and swung himself away from me, and at that point one of the Colonel’s Goads soared up to us and started yelling.

‘Get going, you lazy little snots! I bet you think you’re something special, just because you can jump a few feet higher than you could back on Earth. That’s not YOU, you little morons, that’s the gravity; you’re still all as weak and sloppy as a pile of wet spaghetti, and in danger of getting WORSE! Your muscles’ll get lazy if you don’t make ’em WORK! So MOVE!’

He was kind of right – I’d never been very good at monkey bars before, say, and now it was almost pathetically easy, and Josephine had got into a habit of putting a book on the floor and reading it while standing effortlessly on her hands in a corner of the dormitory, and after a while of this you do start to feel rather smug and like you’re going to go back to Earth and show off what an amazing athlete you’ve become. But sometimes the Colonel went up the tower hand-over-hand, without his prosthetic legs on, just to show us what being tough was really like.

Carl and I started clambering down the tower. Carl’s method of doing this was basically just to jump off, and catch himself by grabbing a rung from time to time as he fell slowly past them.

‘The sea’s just over that horizon,’ he said, waiting for me on a rung and pointing as I climbed down in my more cautious way. ‘If we were on Earth, we’d be able to see it from here.’

‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘So?’

‘So it must be cool, that’s all. The sea on Mars!’

‘Very cool,’ I said. ‘Partially frozen, actually. But you’re probably daft enough to go for a swim in it anyway.’

‘We should at least get to see it,’ insisted Carl blithely.

There was some kind of fuss happening on the ground among the little kids, who were supposed to be doing their own training exercises under the supervision of the Teddy and the Sunflower. At first Carl and I were too busy with bouncing down the climbing tower and being yelled at by the Goads to pay much attention. But when we got down, the Teddy was waddling around making a honking noise and bellowing: ‘NOEL DALISAY.’

‘What? Where’s Noel? What’s going on?’ Carl asked, that huge voice suddenly small and strangled. He went running. One of the Colonel’s Goads came whizzing after him and to my alarm Carl actually HIT it and said, ‘That’s my brother.’

Then the Colonel himself came pouncing out of nowhere on his robot beast and jumped down to the ground. Thankfully he ignored Carl and said, ‘You. Bear. What is this?’

‘NOEL DALISAY IS MISSING,’ explained the Teddy in its horrifying voice.