Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Right,’ he said. ‘This has gone too far.’

We both knew what he meant, even before we saw what was on the trays.

Spinach.

Now, back at Muckling Abbot, all the dinner ladies (except Mrs Skilton, who usually just snarled) were always going on about how there was a war on and we couldn’t be fussy, and you know, in principle, that’s fair enough. And it’s not that I hate spinach, because it can be all right. But lately some programme in the kitchen computers had got completely fixated on spinach and we’d been having little processed bricks of it, sort of half-dry and half-soggy, at every meal for days . And if you didn’t eat it, you only got more at the next meal and the robots sang even more songs about nutrition at you. And it wasn’t as if we didn’t have other vegetables growing in the garden.

‘I mean, does anyone seriously think the grown-ups are eating this?’ Carl said. ‘I don’t see any of them here, do you? Hey, are you OK?’ he asked Josephine, whose eyes were still rather red.

Josephine gave a non-committal growl.

‘Good. You’re in, then, right?’ said Carl and bounced up to stand on his chair and announced passionately: ‘They can’t make us eat this! Not over and over again. That’s not fair!’

‘Sit down, Carl, please,’ said the Goldfish pleasantly but firmly.

‘I want to talk to a person ,’ said Carl. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘He’s right; the adults can’t really be putting up with this,’ I said. ‘Some of them had champagne .’

That caused a discontented grumble to ripple across the tables.

‘Please sit down, Carl,’ said the Goldfish and the Sunflower in mildly sinister unison, and then when Carl didn’t, the Goldfish and the Sunflower and the Star and the other floating robots sort of slowly closed in and hung there on each side of him, uncomfortably close, staring at him with their glowing plastic eyes.

I couldn’t imagine they were really going to hurt him, but it was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen the robots do, and for a moment everyone in the mess room went quiet. Carl might have sat down and done as he was told, I think, and if he had maybe everything would have gone differently, at least for a while.

But then Kayleigh jumped up and it all kicked off. ‘I want to talk to a person too!’ she said. ‘It was my birthday yesterday! And the computers still won’t let me watch Untying Paolo and you robots are still making me go to bed at ten, and I’m not fifteen, I’m sixteen , and if they’re going to send me off to fight Morrors next year I should at least get to watch whatever I like!’

All Kayleigh’s friends applauded and went, ‘Wooo!’ and jumped up as well. And Kayleigh had a lot of friends.

The Sunflower went whooshing over to stare creepily at Kayleigh – but that was a mistake, because it left a space between the other robots for Carl to slip through. And when they tried to close in around him again, Josephine reached up and yanked on the Goldfish’s tail and said grimly, ‘He’s asking to talk to a person, what’s wrong with that?’ And everyone started yelling, and there plainly weren’t enough robots to surround all of us. So instead, the robots all made a nasty high-pitched shrieking noise that I think was meant to subdue us, but it just made us more annoyed and feel more justified in making a lot of noise of our own. So Carl yelled, ‘Come on!’ and we all ran out of the mess room.

We carried on running.

The loudspeakers weren’t making jolly little fanfares any more; the robots must have signalled them and now they were whooping angrily. I think a few of the older teenagers decided the whole thing was beneath them, but otherwise it was all three hundred cadets of Beagle Base, the finest fighting force of seven-to-fifteen-year-olds in the solar system, on the rampage.

Carl stayed in the lead, though he’d managed to fish Noel out of the melee and was steering him along beside him. We went into the dorms, and then we tried to get into some of the labs but they all turned out to be locked.

Theoretically we were looking for A Person, but really we expected A Person to find us: I think we all assumed that someone – somebody scary and in charge and human – would appear and we would all be in very serious trouble. And the more we expected it and the more it didn’t happen the more worked up all of us got.

We spilled across the garden dome, bouncing along in swooping Martian leaps, and the Teddy appeared and lumbered after us, honking, as if catching one or two of us would do any good. The kids it reached out for darted easily out of the way, then surged back and knocked the Teddy over. It turned out the Teddy couldn’t get up again after that, and it lay there waggling its plastic legs like an upturned tortoise, and we all shrieked and laughed and bounced onwards.

Nothing happened. Nobody came.

We zipped up our uniform jackets and went outside. Some of us grabbed oxygen cylinders but not everyone bothered. The sky was dull and powdery, and there was a scouring pinkish wind sweeping between the hills. We could still hear the hooting of the alarms from inside but it sounded a lot further away than it really was.

We went round to the hangar where the spacecraft were kept. The huge doors were firmly shut but there was a row of thick windows, and the mass of kids spread along the nearest wall, peering inside.

A couple of Flying Foxes were still there, but…

‘The Flarehawks are gone,’ breathed Josephine.

All the fighter-craft were missing.

‘You know what?’ said Carl, turning to face all three hundred cadets, and his voice rang even there, out in the wind. ‘There isn’t anyone here. They’ve all gone and left us.’

There was a breathless pause, then a soft flurry of voices – no one really reacting yet, just repeating it, translating it, into Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish…

‘What are we going to do?’ whispered a girl.

For a second Carl looked wide-eyed and tight-lipped and just scared. But then he grinned.

He said: ‘ Anything we want .’

Look at it this way. We were stuck on an alien planet with no parents or teachers. We could go out of our minds with terror, or we could just, well, go out of our minds.

Kayleigh’s birthday party lasted three days.

Obviously the first thing we wanted to do was stop those stupid alarms. Of course it ended up being Carl who was hanging from one hand up among the struts at the top of the dome, whacking at the speaker with a broken chair leg. Finally it went quiet and we all cheered, and Carl hooked his knees over the strut and swung upside down with his arms outstretched, whooping.

Then we celebrated. We raided the kitchen to find something nicer to eat than spinach, and though the best we could find was some vaguely chocolate-flavoured gludge and some under-ripe raspberries from the garden, it was certainly an improvement on the meal we’d been having when everything went down. Some of the older kids broke into the offices and labs to see if they could find any alcohol. They didn’t find any champagne, only a couple of bottles of beer in a fridge, so no one got more than a mouthful but it was the principle of the thing, I guess.

Josephine stood there in the middle of all this, looking like a computer program crashing, or like a person who does not have to do any flight and combat training for the immediate future, but who also does not like it when alarms go off and mobs of people run around shouting. That is to say she didn’t move or say anything much, until eventually when pressed she said, ‘Arrgh,’ and ran off again.