Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘No,’ said Josephine calmly. ‘I think there are several.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s not likely Noel would have stumbled on the only one on the whole planet, is it,’ said Josephine.

‘You don’t think they could be… actual Martians ?’ I said, feeling a bit stupid, because we knew there weren’t any Martians, not proper alien ones that hadn’t been genetically engineered by humans to make the terraforming work better.

But she didn’t answer that because then we reached the sim-deck, which was a big, semicircular chamber with a huge screen wrapped around its curved walls. Josephine suddenly looked alarmed and said, ‘Oh. Were we meant to do… some sort of homework for this?’

‘Flight and Combat Theory, yes,’ I said. We’d gone over the basics of flying with the Goldfish, but this was our first time doing combat flight with Colonel Cleaver.

‘Oh,’ said Josephine again, and began trying to make herself invisible by standing behind me.

This didn’t work very well, but she didn’t get yelled at, not then anyway. In fact, it didn’t seem fair that the very first thing that happened, as soon as we’d got all the saluting over with, was that the Colonel shouted, ‘Dare?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, worrying about the little pink jewels on my uniform. But the Colonel hadn’t noticed them. He was actually smiling at me in an odd way, sort of proud but a little bit sad.

‘You’re Stephanie Dare’s kid, aren’t you? She’s one damn brave fighter. Cadets, you all know about the Battle of Kara?’

The President of the EEC’s nephew is standing right there, I reminded myself, glancing at him. It’s not that big a deal.

There was a slightly groany chorus of yeses and the Colonel growled, ‘I can’t hear you: yes WHAT ?’

‘YES SIR,’ everyone bawled dutifully.

Sometimes I think being in the army is just a little bit like being in a pantomime.

‘Kara,’ sighed the Colonel to himself, and by now I was sure he was sad because of being stuck here with us, away from the real fighting. ‘That was some fine flying. Well, get up there, Dare. Show us how it’s done.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said stiffly.

I didn’t want to go first. And there was Carl practically levitating with longing to get behind the controls of anything remotely spaceship-like as soon as possible, so it was doubly unfair.

There were two simulator ships, but we were going one at a time to start off with. From outside they were big beige boxy things on a thick strut on which they could pivot and swing. But on the screen a perfect digital replica of a Flarehawk was waiting on an icy Earth launch platform, and I didn’t need to be told it would respond to everything I did in the cockpit. So everyone would be able to see exactly how I was doing.

Now, this was supposedly so we could all learn from each other and so the Colonel could comment, rather than for the purposes of ritual humiliation, but the army’s good at doing two things at the same time.

I climbed into a simulator, and of course inside it was just like being in the cockpit of an actual Flarehawk. Through the viewport, the icy launch platform and the bleak grey sky looked completely real. There were snow-covered hills in the background. It could have been Suffolk.

‘Hello, home,’ I said quietly.

‘Go ahead, Dare,’ said the Colonel through the radio.

I fired the thrusters and lifted the ship up. It wobbled a bit, and I realised I was being too tentative with the control yoke. The artificial gravity put on a very good imitation of that battering-spoons feeling as I rose through the atmosphere.

I wasn’t quite clear what I wanted to happen. I didn’t want to be bad at doing this. The Colonel and the EDF and my mum wanted Stephanie Dare’s talent for flying spaceships and shooting aliens to be hereditary; if it wasn’t, they’d all be disappointed. And, more to the point, being bad at fighting aliens would not bode well for my long-term survival.

But on the other hand, if I did turn out to be some sort of spaceship prodigy, then it would feel like another way in which my life was all about a woman I never even actually got to see . Like I was actually destined to be in the space army instead of it being just the way things were.

The first thing I was supposed to do was just fly around with the computer-generated squadron and not crash into any of them. That was fine. Then I had to use the torpedoes to pick off a few of the light-shields. I kind of missed the first one, which was embarrassing as it was hanging right in front of me, but at least I saw how I’d got the angle wrong and it didn’t happen again.

Then Morrors started attacking.

So this was my first taste of shooting aliens – although obviously it was really only a computer game. I remembered all the instructions about how in a dogfight, you had to get on top of the enemy. Still, when one of the other Flarehawks in the squadron blew up, my first instinct was to screech various words I hoped the Colonel wasn’t listening to while hauling blindly on the control yoke, so I actually flew straight into a shockray aimed at someone else. But the ship’s systems seemed to be telling me the ray had just skimmed across the tail, and though everything jumped around a bit apparently I was still in one piece.

OK, I thought, trying to pull myself together. Torpedoes. Aliens. Time to apply one to the other. And while I wrestled and flailed the Flarehawk around, I watched the pale glowing transparent shapes whizzing across the viewport and told myself, you’ve got to aim for where they’re going to be. And although even Mum’s special Morror-spotting sense wouldn’t have helped in a simulation, I got a little bit of a sense of what it was for , how you had to fill in the gaps in the technology yourself, because though the sensors were supposed to pick up the Morror ships and project ghostly outlines of them onto the viewport, they always seemed a little off from where the ships apparently really were.

Still, I got two of them. Then another one pounced on me and I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough and I got hit again. And I did think it was a bit mean of the people who designed the simulation to actually make the ship shake and scream while flames filled the viewport before everything went black. I mean, I would have got the point that I’d just died without that.

When the lights came back on the door opened and I got out. I felt rattled and I didn’t think I’d done very well, but no one was laughing and the Colonel said, ‘Good work, Dare,’ and even if I thought he did look slightly disappointed I hadn’t done anything spectacular, he also wasn’t the sort to say that if he didn’t mean it. Then he started talking about how I’d obviously panicked a bit when the Morrors came in, but recovered well, and taking out two of them was good, and getting blown up was normal.

‘You survived twelve minutes!’ said the Colonel. ‘Not bad! Work on your turn diameters and you’ll get that figure way up.’

I’d been starting to feel quite happy until he said that.

Then he said, ‘OK, Dalisay, you’re up,’ and Carl bounded up into the cockpit barely bothering with the rungs on the ladder. I swear you could’ve told who was in the simulator just by watching the screen: the ship jumped into the sky, and soon he was rampaging all over the Morror ships like a really lethal two-year-old kicking down sandcastles.

He was so ridiculously good at it, I couldn’t help thinking that was more how Stephanie Dare’s kid was supposed to fly.

‘He is going to be insufferable,’ whispered Josephine.