That annoyed me. ‘I wasn’t going to brag ,’ I said, feeling less sorry for her. Honestly, didn’t she realise I had enough trouble with people like Juliet Maitland and Annabel Stoker lurking around the school whispering, ‘Alice Dare thinks she’s so special just because of her mum,’ and Finty Carmichael reminding me all the time that before my mum’s exploits became so fashionable , she was just a bank teller and my dad was a plumber and really I was a charity case.
That was one of the reasons I did not like Muckling Abbot. The others were these:
1) Even with a desperate battle for the survival of humanity going on, we were still all supposed to be highly ladylike and virtuous and proper, which meant: that you should not run in any circumstances except after a ball or away from an alien, that you should prefer to die rather than wear a hairband of an incorrect colour, and that you should act at all times as if you had completely failed to notice that certain aspects of our situation maybe kind of sucked.
2) Horrifying sludge-green uniforms in which we were all slowly dying of hypothermia while the teachers could wear as many jumpers and coats as they liked.
3) We were all divided up into houses with stupid names like Windsor and Plantagenet and expected to have House Spirit on top of School Spirit, and get really upset if our house didn’t win trophies for punctuality or tennis. Which I thought amounted to an incredibly obvious trick being played on us, as it does not benefit you personally at all if your Head of House is allowed temporary custody of a small silver cup with a picture of a Tudor Rose on it. But no one else seemed to agree.
4) Lots of singing .
Finty Carmichael was perfectly right that back in the good old days which none of us could remember, I wouldn’t have ended up at a posh school like Muckling Abbot. But I had to go somewhere; Gran’s health wasn’t great so she couldn’t look after me very well any more, and after the Battle of Kara there was this Emergency Earth Coalition programme about the education and care of the dependents of front-line fighters (especially the dependents of people who got made into posters, though obviously they didn’t say that). So the government was already in the way of sending me places, even before this Mars thing.
‘Good luck, then, Alice,’ said Miss Clatworthy, at last.
‘Good luck to you too, Miss Clatworthy,’ I said, and wondered if I ought to salute, if I was going to be in the army now.
What I was supposed to do after seeing Miss Clatworthy was go to the main hall with everyone else to sing the school song a few hundred times and listen to encouraging speeches and broadcasts from the EEC President and so on. But I didn’t feel like going and, in the circumstances, I thought there was a limit to how much trouble I could get into if I dodged it. So I went up on to the school battlements – yes, there were battlements – and read Mum’s letter.
Darling, so exciting that you’ll be exploring Mars! I wish I could go too! Maybe one day if the Morrors give us a break. I’ve just come back from my first run in one of the new spacefighters. They’re called Flarehawks – had you heard about them? Wonderful machines, much faster than the old Auroras. Mine handles so beautifully I feel as if she knows what I want to do almost before I think it. As soon as I climbed into the cockpit I knew we were going to do some great flying together.
So out we went, and I was glad because we’ve had a boring few weeks sub-atmo just blasting up invisibility generators on Morror bases near New Zealand; I couldn’t wait to get out into space again.
You never quite get used to seeing that net of light-shields round the planet, Alice, you’ll see it on your way to Mars. And I can’t tell you how much I hope one day you’ll get to see the world without it. But we made some nice big holes in it – before the Morrors caught up with us.
You know I’ve got a sort of sense about these things – even before the sensors pick them up, I can tell when a pack of Morror ships are on to me. Sometimes I almost forget they’re invisible. I was sweeping up the reflector discs 2000 miles somewhere over the Pacific, when I got that feeling and swung round as fast as I could and sure enough the sensors started going wild and when I launched a spray of torpedoes into the dark and it lit up the Morror ships for a split second, horseshoe-shaped and glowing in the sparks. And there were a lot of them.
So I charged straight into the midst of them where it would be hard to get a shot at me and we tussled and dodged and eventually I managed to soar up and pounce down on them, and I took out three before my wingman came in to help me out. Then I went diving back towards Earth with the last two behind me and I pulled out just before I hit the atmosphere. One of them went straight through, the other one hit at the wrong angle and I could see its outline again for a second in the burning air before it was ripped apart. Then I dipped through into the atmosphere to find the last ship – and we fought it out one-to-one over Antarctica.
The best woman won, I hope! The poor Flarehawk took some knocks – sad when it looked so new and shiny when I went out – but the mechanics’ll soon have patched it up and I’ll get back to work. And right now a few more kilowatts of sunlight are keeping Earth warm and even if victory’s still a long way off, I hope we got a little closer.
DON’T WORRY about me. I’m fine!
I miss you lots. All my love – Mum.
I sighed a little bit. It’s not that I wanted Mum to be unhappy, of course, but I couldn’t help wishing she didn’t enjoy the war quite so much. She had to be one of the only people in the world who did.
I don’t want to give you the wrong idea about her. If, as she merrily swooped around the planet terrorising the invading aliens, some sort of genie with time-travelling powers had whooshed up in front of her and said, ‘Look, Stephanie Dare. Say the word and the war will NEVER HAVE HAPPENED and everyone who got killed in it will still be alive and your daughter will actually get to live with you and everything will be FINE – but you will have to be a bank teller again and never get to charge around in a spaceship blowing things up, or be on a poster or anything’ – then of course she would have said, ‘Go ahead.’ Because she is a good person. But some people never find out what they want to do, or what they’re good at. And even if my mum had somehow worked out, when sitting behind her counter at the bank, that what she really wanted to do and was really good at was being an alien-fighting, flying-ace space pilot, you can see how the knowledge would not have been all that useful to her.
I hoped Dad at least knew where I was going. He was an engineer on a submarine laying mines under the ice cap, so there wouldn’t be a letter from him for a while. I hadn’t seen him for even longer than I hadn’t seen Mum, but apart from some interest in getting to see the various odd creatures that the Morrors had released into the oceans, he had never given the impression he was having a nice time.
The sea was thick with clots of ice, a few loose bergs drifting along in the distance. I could just hear the purr of wings from a flight of heatships hovering low over the North Sea, and when I looked I could see them; the giant round lamps fixed underneath them glowing cherry-red through the plumes of steam from the water. They were crawling northwards, trying to slow the march of the ice, and they left curling streaks of clear dark water behind them. But the air was stinging cold on my face and ahead of those few ships there was so much white.
It was a good time in Earth’s history to be a polar bear. Unless the rumours were true about the Morrors eating them.
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