Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

It wasn’t a ball, of course. It was a little hovering robot, and sometimes it would manage to catch itself in mid-volley and bounce in the air as if half stunned, uttering confused chirps, until one of them hit it again.

‘What are you staring at?’ demanded the boy.

I was staring. I’d stopped dead without quite noticing. I wasn’t sure the little robot was exactly alive – it probably wasn’t, surely? – but it looked and sounded so much as if it was in pain, and that was exactly what they seemed to be laughing at…

‘Leave it alone,’ I said, and my voice came out small and feeble.

But the large boy heard me all right. ‘You want to mind your business, or you want to come here and join the game?’ he said, and shifted his grip on the racquet in a way I didn’t like at all. Christa stopped to gaze at him, still panting, her eyes shiny with devotion.

Then the little robot made a desperate spring into the air and Christa pounced on it, giggling. ‘Leon, help! It’s getting away.’

The boy turned back to the game with one last meaningful swing of his racquet in my direction and I hurried into the gardens before they could take any more notice of me. I didn’t find Josephine but I did find the Teddy, which was clumping awfully down the path between the runner beans, singing, ‘OLD MACDONALD HAD A FARM,’ in an extremely menacing way.

‘HALLO ALICE,’ it said when it saw me.

‘Uh… hi,’ I replied, looking up at it. The Teddy was mostly blue, with a pattern of pink hearts on its tummy. Its face was fixed in a sinister grin. It freaked me out even more close up and I gained new respect for the seven-year-olds who hadn’t lost their minds completely since we’d arrived. ‘You haven’t seen Josephine Jerome, have you?’

‘YES. JOSEPHINE JEROME IS CRYING IN THE MARROW PATCH,’ said the Teddy. ‘I SANG HER A SONG. IT DIDN’T HELP.’

‘Right. No. I can see how that might have happened. I’ll have a go instead, then, shall I?’

The Teddy tried to come with me but I managed to get rid of it.

The marrows were genetically engineered to be enormous, and Josephine was very well hidden under their leaves, and she wasn’t answering when I called her name, but I still did find her after a while.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Go away,’ said Josephine. But I didn’t. After a while, Josephine sighed and wiped her nose. ‘No one’s died,’ she told me.

I sat down beside her in a tent of marrow leaves, wondering what else could be so awful. ‘Then what is it?’

Josephine sobbed a bit more and thrust the tablet at me. The email on the screen went like this:

Jrdigqwfi, X’cm zelz xte lrjbmzvum gfc ekisx fgb. M zngy bdm flpz arva taxkis. El rsl ajc oqaii, tdiekl oiik uoaikgk fbx xkj kfkzi oweui A enu ekyehtgf mcms wpr fwepxmzj avivlug xvbivpdak…

And it went on like that.

‘…What?’

‘Oh,’ said Josephine wearily, taking the tablet back. ‘Sorry. I forgot. It’s a code Lena and I use.’

‘Right,’ I said, managing not to yelp why . ‘Lena’s your sister, then, is she?’

Josephine smiled crookedly at me. ‘Yes. She’s eighteen. She’s a bit… odd. But very clever. She mostly looked after me when I was little. She thought learning cryptography would help develop my brain. She also thinks it’s very important to always carry duct tape.’

I tried to imagine someone who was odd even by Josephine’s standards, but I didn’t say anything. Josephine rubbed her eyes and then read out the message as easily as if it had been in proper English:

‘Josephine,

‘I’ve made the inquiries you asked for. I wish the news were better.

‘As you are aware, things have changed for the worse since I was accepted into the military science programme: back then, of course, no one seriously thought that evacuating children to Mars would ever become necessary. Now, with pressure from the Morrors so severe and the advance of the ice so extensive, the feeling is that no hand can be spared. Unfortunately, barring some dramatic change in the direction of the war, it’s now most unlikely you’ll be allowed to continue academic studies or to serve as a scientist without completing at least some time in active duty first.

‘This strikes me as a short-sighted policy, but there appears to be little either of us can do about it.

‘I can only hope you have found flight and weapons training more congenial than you expected when you left us, as I must advise you to master these skills as swiftly and fully as possible.

‘Father is well and sends his regards.’

I wasn’t absolutely sure I understood all of this even translated, but I already knew Josephine had hoped she’d be able to do science for the EDF rather than any actual Morror-fighting once she graduated in four years’ time. And according to Lena, that wasn’t going to work out.

‘You’ve seen what I’m like,’ she choked. ‘What do you think’s going to happen when I have to do it for real? It’s dangerous enough for people who are any good at it.’

‘It’s a long way off yet,’ I said. ‘And you could do fine if you tried.’

Josephine made a despairing snorting sound.

‘You could! I don’t think you’re used to trying. I think normally either you’re just good at things, or you don’t do them at all, right?’

Josephine looked rather angry for a second, but then sighed. ‘Maybe. I will try, I suppose. But I’ve already tried to try and I hate it so much. And it’s not just flying the ships and shooting and being so bad at it – it’s being in the army. I’ll lose my mind if I have to live like that.’

‘Maybe the war will be over by then, like you said,’ I said, as confidently as I could.

‘I always try to think it will,’ Josephine said, but her voice was all wobbly.

We sat there for a while. ‘Hey, I don’t think you translated everything,’ I said, eventually. ‘What’s that underlined bit?’

At the end of the message from Lena, it said: ‘CRXF PQID IYWL’

Josephine rolled her eyes and started to look a bit more like herself. ‘It says COMB YOUR HAIR.’

A little fanfare played over the PA system, which meant it was lunch, and we could hear the cheerful calls of robots herding children to the mess room. Josephine groaned but she got up and we emerged from under the marrow leaves.

As we made our way across the garden dome, I saw the broken remains of the little robot, smashed on the asphalt of the running track.

In the mess room, the walls were singing a happy song about vitamins.

I suppose you couldn’t say the trouble started that lunchtime, as the trouble had actually been going on for days, but this was when it started coming out. It was all because of what happened with the spinach.

‘Maybe Dr Muldoon would help,’ I said, when we’d found a couple of places together at one of the long tables. ‘Maybe she’d take you on as a sort of assistant, and then you could become indispensible, and then she’d do some sort of appeal so she could keep you, and then you wouldn’t have to go.’

‘I could let her do experiments on me,’ said Josephine, sounding faintly hopeful. Then she looked at me in a wondering way. ‘But you’ll still have to go. Don’t you ever mind about it at all?’

‘Well, of course. But I don’t hate it like you do, and I’m not bad at it…’ I shrugged. ‘And I never expected I might get to do anything else, so it’s different.’

‘Don’t you ever even think about what you could be, if you didn’t have to be in the army?’

‘No,’ I said firmly.

Then the trays of food started gliding down the conveyer belts on the tables, and everyone started groaning, just as Carl arrived suddenly and emphatically in the seat in front of us.