Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘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.

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.