Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

Not that the conversation got very far. Josephine got up, rubbing her shoulder and said, ‘ What ,’ and Carl said distractedly, ‘Oh hi, I’m Carl. Listen, I think I’ve kind of…’

And then there was a hiss and a whiff of Somnolum X in the air. And Josephine said, ‘Oh, you are kidding ,’ and promptly collapsed, and I yelled, ‘CREWMAN DEVLIN YOU NEED TO GET YOUR OXYGEN MASK ON RIGHT NOW.’

And then we were all unconscious.

‘I was only playing the Getting Around as Much of the Spaceship as Possible Without Touching the Floor game,’ said Carl later, when the three of us were outside the captain’s cabin, waiting to be called inside.

‘Oh,’ said Josephine, who had been trying to kill Carl using only her eyes and her brain for the last fifteen minutes. ‘You were just playing. In the ventilation system. Which carries certain gases that we breathe. Like Somnolum X. And oxygen .’

Carl spread his hands. ‘OK. I thought either I’d find a way to stop them, or I’d have an unbeatable Getting Around as Much of the Spaceship as Possible Without Touching the Floor score. Either way, a win. I mean knocking us out with Somnolum X is wrong , yeah? I saw what you wrote on my petition! It was great! So this is like I’m resisting , right? It’s like a revolution !’

‘I think it’s more like terrorism ,’ said Josephine icily.

Then Captain Mendez called us inside. He was probably about forty or so, but I had a sort of impression he’d looked rather younger when we started out.

‘Do you realise you could have poisoned or suffocated everyone on the ship?’ he asked.

‘ We didn’t do anything,’ said Josephine. ‘It’s not our fault he crashed out of the ceiling and nearly killed us.’

‘I don’t care who did what,’ said the Captain wearily.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I would have thought you really ought to.’

‘That’s enough out of you, Alistair; you’re in enough trouble as it is.’

‘MY NAME IS NOT ALISTAIR,’ I said, but Josephine elbowed me in the ribs and I shut up.

‘And Josephine, it’s no good pretending you weren’t involved. What about your little manifesto the other day?’

‘I agree with Carl’s goals ,’ said Josephine loftily. ‘I have serious problems with his methods.’

‘And Crewman Devlin says this isn’t the first time you’ve tried to sabotage the ship. You’ve been seen unscrewing fixings before.’

Josephine started a bit. ‘Oh. Not on purpose.’

‘It’s true,’ admitted Carl. ‘They didn’t have anything to do with this. No one else did. It was just me.’

Captain Mendez stared down at him. ‘How’d you end up on this ship, Carl? Exam, VIP or did someone pull your name out of a hat?’

Carl looked uneasy. ‘My brother’s name, actually,’ he said. That was how it worked. If your name came up in the lottery, your brother or sister got a place on the ship too.

‘It didn’t have to be that way, you know,’ said Captain Mendez. ‘When they were planning the evacuation lottery, not everyone thought they should take siblings. Some people thought it would be fairer if more families got a chance to have a kid out of the fighting.’

‘None of this is really fair either way, is it?’ Carl said shortly.

Not fair to be taken, not fair to be left behind. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d been thinking the same thing Josephine and I had from the beginning.

‘No, it’s not,’ agreed Mendez. ‘But suppose that vote had gone another way. Your brother would have been out here on his own.’

Carl paled. ‘You’re not going to… You wouldn’t send me back and leave Noel on Mars by himself ?’

‘I’m saying,’ said Mendez, ‘that we’re taking you all this way to keep you safe from the Morrors, and all those other kids on Earth have been left behind with the shockrays and the ice instead of you. It’s the most dangerous time humanity’s ever faced. And you seem to be doing the best you can to make it worse. I’m saying you’re here by a billions-to-one chance. And this is what you decide to do with it.’

Carl did look shaken by that. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Alice and Josephine really didn’t do anything.’

Captain Mendez must have kind of believed that, because he stuck Carl in the escape shuttle for the rest of the voyage and didn’t do the same thing to Josephine and me. But he must have also kind of not believed it, because he had all our tablets and games and stuff taken away, which caused Josephine to vow undying wrath against Carl.

‘Gassing us was wrong, though,’ Carl called defiantly as the door was shut on him. ‘I was trying to do the right thing.’

Mendez looked at him hard through the little window in the shuttle door. ‘You actually care about doing right?’ he asked. ‘Or do you just like the spotlight?’

I got a glimpse of Carl’s mouth falling open in indignation, but no words came out of it. Captain Mendez turned away. ‘You think about that.’

Carl had broken the Somnolum X system pretty thoroughly, it turned out, and so there was no more of it for the last two nights of the voyage. And frankly no one got any sleep at all.

‘Well, we’ll sleep on Mars,’ I said to Josephine, in the middle of the last night. I could just see her glowering by the starlight from the windows as people whooped and snogged and ran around and sang and Sergeant Kawahara groaned for everyone to be quiet.

‘You’re disturbing Dr Muldoon!’ she tried when everything else had failed.

‘Oh, this is all right by me,’ said Dr Muldoon airily, watching the chaos with detached curiosity. ‘I only sleep once a week anyway.’ She gestured at her temples and smiled. ‘Cortical implants!’

So that was why her eyes looked that little bit too sparkly.

‘What harm are they really doing?’ she asked indulgently, and Sergeant Kawahara looked as though she thought that was easy to say for someone who didn’t need sleep. ‘Let them have their fun,’ persisted Dr Muldoon more quietly. ‘When are they going to have another chance? Isn’t what we’re doing to their lives enough?’

The planet was filling the dark ahead now – red and purple and gold and silver.

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.