Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘I’m sorry,’ said Noel, crying some more. ‘I didn’t mean to. But after I got to the sea then there was this thing on the beach, Kuya – I was trying to get close enough to take a picture of it on my tablet, but it was too fast…’

‘I don’t care about your flaming animals! Oh, Jesus,’ Carl added, ‘don’t cry about it.’

‘It wasn’t a normal animal,’ said Noel. ‘Sir,’ he appealed, turning to the Colonel. ‘It wasn’t a normal animal.’

Carl went on alternating between yelling at Noel and being nice to him as we went along, and then we passed my little marker of stones. I wondered if I’d better tell the Colonel we needed to start another search party, but then Josephine emerged over the dunes. ‘Hi,’ she said to me, strolling up. ‘Hi, Noel, glad you’re OK.’

‘What are you doing on your own, Jerome?’ blazed the Colonel. ‘Because it looks a lot like defying a direct order.’

Josephine was not quite so unflappable as not to look a bit scared and start stammering, ‘Oh, I was only – it was just for a few—’

Carl sighed. ‘Don’t be too hard on her, sir,’ he said. He looked awfully tired now. ‘She was the one who worked out where Noel was.’

The Colonel looked meditatively at Josephine and growled, ‘I’ll overlook it. This time.’

Josephine fell into step beside me and Carl, the Colonel’s Beast treading slowly enough that we could keep up with it. ‘So what was the sea like?’ I asked.

‘Pink,’ said Josephine.

Carl had recovered enough to snort, ‘There, what did I say?’ and elbow me in the ribs.

We went along in silence for a while. The sun was setting. The sea would be pink, I thought, a bit wistfully.

‘What happened to your legs, sir?’ asked Noel, suddenly.

‘Noel!’ I said, scandalised. I didn’t mean to start him off crying again but unfortunately that looked as if it was going to be the effect.

‘What,’ said the Colonel irritably. ‘I’m a freaking cyborg and he’s not supposed to notice? You tell me, son – what do you think happened to them?’

‘Um. The Morrors?’ sniffed Noel.

‘No, no, this was thirty years ago. See, there was some local trouble in the Pacific back then, and one day I’m out on a patrol boat and we run into pirates. And so we tangle with them and as the pirates go down, they launch one last torpedo. Boat disintegrates around us. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, up comes a shark…’

‘A shark!’ Noel yelped involuntarily.

‘…and I fought that shark to the death. He got my legs, and a one-way ticket to the bottom of the sea.’

‘You killed the shark? Even when pirates sank your ship and the shark had… had…?’ asked Noel, too amazed to keep crying.

‘Oh yeah,’ said the Colonel. ‘Knife between its eyes.’

‘Wow,’ said Carl respectfully, and we were all silent.

‘Is that… actually true?’ asked Josephine tentatively.

‘Ah, you caught me,’ said Cleaver cheerfully. ‘No, no it wasn’t really a shark. It was back at the beginning of the war. I was on a spacefighter-carrier taking a consignment of the old Aurora models out to the Moon, and we took a shockray hit to the bow. Lost my legs in the explosion and, just before I was blasted out of the wreckage, I let all the air out of my lungs and used a fire extinguisher to propel myself through the vacuum of space. Then I managed to catch hold of one of those Auroras and pull myself inside before I passed out.’

I realised my mouth was hanging open. Josephine tilted her head slightly.

‘ Or ,’ said the Colonel, before any of us could say anything, ‘maybe it wasn’t a spaceship, now I think about it, maybe it was a fighter-plane and I was shot down over Tanzania during the Second Water War. Now, it wasn’t my plane blowing up that was the problem, I’m parachuting out of there, and everything seems OK – except then I realise I’m coming down miles from anywhere, straight into the middle of a pride of lions.’

‘And it was the lions…?’ I asked.

‘I spotted the biggest and toughest lion,’ said the Colonel, ‘and I steered around in the air and landed astride that lion’s back, grabbed its mane and rode it twenty miles across the Serengeti. But then we passed a river, and out of the river comes a crocodile, headed straight for us. Now, by that time, the lion was my buddy, so, to defend the lion …’

There was another pause, and a bit nervously, Carl began laughing. And then the rest of us started off as well.

The Colonel grinned quickly. ‘Something like that. I forget.’

We were nearing Beagle Base now and Noel was looking a lot better. ‘Carl,’ he said, ‘Carl. The animal I saw. It was kind of like a worm, but it could fly? But it didn’t have wings, it had segments that went round and round, like… like a drill . And it buzzed… and it was this big, and it was eating the sand…’

‘You’ll have to ask Doc Muldoon about that,’ said Colonel Cleaver. ‘She’s probably loosed a load of mutant freaks out here; it’s the sort of thing she’d do. Even those geese have had their genes messed with.’

He swung down from the Beast outside the gates of Beagle Base and deposited Noel on the ground.

‘I lost Enrique,’ said Noel forlornly. ‘My snail,’ he explained, when we looked at him.

‘We’ll get you another one,’ said Carl automatically, in the mindless tone of someone who’s said the same thing a thousand times before.

‘There aren’t any other snails on Mars,’ said Noel.

‘I wonder what that flying worm-thing he saw was?’ mused Josephine, when we were back in the dorm and had warmed up with hot showers.

‘He was probably making it up,’ I said. ‘I mean, maybe not on purpose, but he was pretty scared, and I’ve heard your brain can do weird things when you’re low on oxygen.’

‘He wasn’t making it up,’ said Josephine. ‘When I was on the beach, I saw the tracks it had made in the sand.’

Our room didn’t have windows except for the round skylights high in the ceiling, and for once I felt a little pleased that we couldn’t see the emptiness of Mars spreading around us into the dark. Because Josephine murmured, ‘There’s something out there.’

After all that happened, I started thinking of Carl as a friend. And Josephine went from despising him to having no views on him at all, so that was progress of a sort too.

She did get on well with little Noel, though. They had an interest in common – the creature Noel said he’d seen on the beach. Josephine wasn’t especially excited about animals in general, the way Noel was, but she did like things that were weird and unexplained, and flying worm-things that went round and round and might be unknown to science certainly qualified.

As Noel hadn’t managed to get a picture of the thing on his tablet, she made him draw it. But Noel was eight and not very good at drawing and Josephine did not consider the results good enough to be useful for further study. So the two of them spent a couple of evenings in our dorm with Josephine interrogating Noel and making him describe everything about it and taking notes and doing sketches.

I did not have much to contribute to this so I left them to it and killed some time customising my uniform in small, subtle, not-allowed ways, like gluing tiny pink jewels on to the EDF crest on the jacket.

Anyway, a few days later we were walking to the sim-deck for flight and combat training and Josephine said, ‘Look at this. Noel will have to check it again, but I think it’s as close as we’re going to get.’

‘Ugh,’ I said, shuddering. ‘Gross. You really think there’s one of those out there?’