Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

Josephine gazed covetously at the people. I was rubbing my arms surreptitiously to make sure they were still normal.

‘Gills,’ said Dr Muldoon thoughtfully. ‘That’s my next ambition. Getting gills on people. Imagine the applications! So useful for exploration! Life-saving for our servicemen on the submarines!’

I supposed it might be useful for Dad to have gills, but I couldn’t say I liked the idea very much. Josephine, however, made a little moan of longing and looked as if she might be forgetting why we’d come in the first place, so Noel insisted, ‘My animal .’

‘The animal,’ agreed Josephine, turning reluctantly to her tablet.

Dr Muldoon squinted at the picture. ‘Are those eyes ? Good Lord, look at its teeth . You’ve got a nicely gruesome imagination, I’ll give you kids that – flying worms at the bottom of the garden, it’s brilliant, but…’

‘I didn’t make it up!’ Noel cried.

‘He didn’t,’ said Josephine. ‘And neither did I. I don’t do hoaxes . They’re unscientific. Listen, the risk is that this is a Morror animal. I wondered if it could be some sort of biological drone, for… spying, or sabotage or something.’

Dr Muldoon became more serious. ‘Hmm. It doesn’t look like any specimen I’ve seen. They haven’t introduced any flying animal into the biosphere that we know of – and I can’t see how this creature of yours could fly. And the Morrors have shown no interest in Mars…’

‘What if it came from here?’ I said. Dr Muldoon, Josephine, Noel and even a random passing scientist all looked at me in a pitying way. I felt my face get hot. ‘I just mean, suppose there was something here that we didn’t know about, and the terraforming sort of… woke it up?’

‘That couldn’t possibly happen,’ said Dr Muldoon flatly. ‘There was nothing on Mars before us.’

A section of the party near the back of the room got over-excited and something made of glass crashed to the ground. Someone called ‘Er… Valerie!’

Dr Muldoon took Josephine’s tablet and emailed the picture to herself. ‘Got to go,’ she said. ‘Send me the rough coordinates for where you saw it, and then don’t go hanging around in the open on your own again. And if you do see one, don’t try and get close to it, not until we’ve got this cleared up. I’ll look into it.’

‘I’m getting gills as soon as possible,’ said Josephine ruminatively as we walked back to the dorms. Noel and I shuddered. ‘Why would you not want gills? Gills. Definitely gills.’

The Goldfish spent the rest of that afternoon making us do things with the radiuses of circles. Later I started composing an email to Dad, because we were getting close to one of the days when Beagle Base’s computers opened up channels so you could send and receive messages from Earth. If we’d only known what was going to happen, we could have made a lot better use of that day, but we didn’t. So I just wrote about how I did not seem to be a space-pilot genius and how I preferred him not to get gills and how I missed him. It was nicer writing to Dad than to Mum because I was about eighty per cent certain most of the time that he was probably alive.

Meanwhile Josephine got started on her essay, moaning a lot about it too, and we all waited for Dr Muldoon to get back to us.

Only she didn’t. Because after that all the adults disappeared.

I know it sounds bad, but at first we didn’t actually notice.

We noticed when the Colonel went away, obviously – he wasn’t the sort of person who blends into the background and anyway, he told us he was going. In fact, he galloped through Beagle Base on his Beast yelling through the Goads that he was going on a short mission and would be back in a few days and everyone had better damn well remember they were EDF cadets and act as a credit to the force while he was gone.

Carl and I saw him soar away in his Flying Fox, off into the purple sky.

After that we had our flight and combat training with the Goldfish.

And that was just it. We were all so used to being looked after by the robots now. They got us up in the mornings (well, the walls started humming in a cheerful way at half past seven, and the Goldfish used to hover from room to room to encourage us) and they herded us into the mess room where more machines would dollop your food out on to trays, and they taught us our lessons, and broke up fights, and made sure everyone was more or less where they were supposed to be at night. There weren’t that many adults around to miss , and so when we didn’t see any we all just assumed they were off around the corner doing something else.

We did ask sometimes exactly when the Colonel was coming back and what he was doing, but the robots plainly didn’t know, so we stopped. In the meantime, it was quite nice having a break from being yelled at, even if it meant the Goldfish got to make us sing even more songs about teamwork and having a positive attitude.

I think I had a vague feeling of unease by the fourth day, but what with the war and being on another planet and there possibly being not one but several creepy flying worm-things out there in the Martian wilderness, that was fairly normal. Also we were getting closer and closer to the day the channels opened up, which meant another opportunity to maybe hear that my mum was dead, so that was another way I was distracted.

If only we’d realised a little bit earlier, it might not have been such a problem.

So, on this particular morning after lessons, we all got messages beamed to our tablets.

Mum’s email was very short, but it was there.

Darling – can’t write much – have to run! I hope you’re having a wonderful time and Mars is every bit as exciting as I imagine it. Let me know how your flight training’s going. Are you enjoying it? I hear Dirk Cleaver is training you – wonderful, the man’s a legend! But I hope he isn’t pushing you too hard. Everything’s been a bit hairy down here – the Morrors haven’t given us much rest lately. But I’m fine. Love you! Mum.

She was alive, anyway. Or had been two days ago. So that was good.

Dad’s was a bit longer.

Hello, love – hope Mars is treating you well. Funny to think of you so far away. You can’t remember things being any other way, I suppose, but if the day you were born someone had told me you’d be training as a soldier on Mars by the time you were twelve… Well. Hope you’re making lots of friends, anyway.

Things are all right on the old sub, I suppose; all rather dark and cold and boring. Though we ran across a big shoal of those Morror fish – well, of course they’re not fish, with all those legs. Though they’re not exactly legs either. But anyway, they were the prettiest thing any of us had seen for a while down here – transparent and all different colours. We must have given the poor things a terrible scare. Tried to catch a few for the scientists to look at but they were too fast. I suppose the Morrors must catch them for food, though – must taste nice if they’re worth bringing all the way to Earth.

I hear your mum’s still the talk of the town. We should be coming up for leave in a month or two so we might even get to see each other for an afternoon. Won’t be the same without you, though.

Meanwhile, Josephine read her messages, stared blankly at the screen, and then ran off crying. I could only think of one reason for anyone to react like that and I got a horrible cold feeling in my chest where all the relief had been. So of course I went after her.

She was faster than me. And she wasn’t in the loos, though there was someone else crying in there, which was awful, but at least there was a girl and a boy sitting on the floor outside the cubicle making sympathetic noises through the door. I hurried out. I went into some of the classrooms in case she was under any of the desks. She wasn’t. Then I went out into the big green space at the centre of the garden dome. All the usual robots were skittering among the plants but the only people I could see were Christa Trommler and a large, muscular boy, playing a messy game of tennis on the sports field. Neither of them had had any bad news, clearly; they were laughing breathlessly as they lunged for the ball, as it hurtled back and forth, as it squeaked and tried to get away…