Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Oof !’ said Noel, landing and sliding and scrabbling. ‘So,’ he added conversationally, ‘what should I do now?’

‘Hit it with something!’ I yelled, and, ‘Shoot it, Goldfish!’ shouted Josephine.

‘I don’t have anything to hit it with,’ Noel complained.

‘We didn’t really think this through,’ I said breathlessly, throwing myself into another leap after the spider. Even at its slower pace, we’d have lost it by now if it hadn’t stopped from time to time to plant its seeds.

Carl picked up a stone and threw it. Noel looked surprised and completely failed to even try to catch it.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Carl, and tried again. This time Noel caught it, nearly slithered off the spider’s back again, and then started banging hopefully at the smooth plastic.

‘Isn’t it going to notice?’ I asked anxiously.

‘Hope not… doesn’t seem as if it’s got any pressure sensors up there,’ Josephine said, though she was biting her lip again.

The spider spurted forwards and we had another breathless struggle to keep up with it. When we did, we found Noel had managed to bash a hole in the casing. ‘Ow. Ow,’ he said, pulling at sharp bits of broken plastic. ‘OK! I can see… computer stuff !’

The Goldfish promptly spat out a cable. It hung from its mouth (I hadn’t even noticed there was actually a hole there) like a long noodle. Of course, having its mouth full didn’t affect its talking, though the effect was somehow weirder than usual.

‘Good going, Noel!’ it said. ‘Now, you should be able to see a cable port in there somewhere.’

‘Well maybe I should, but I can’t!’

The Goldfish ducked closer and glowed as hard as it could into the hole Noel had made, and muttered more instructions while Noel grabbed the cable and felt around inside the cavity with it.

‘I think I got it!’ he crowed at last.

For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then Noel was yelling, ‘ Aaaah !’ as the spider collapsed in a heap underneath him.

‘We didn’t want you to break it!’ protested Carl as Noel bounced free of the sad-looking pile of black metal legs. We all skidded to a stop. It seemed like we’d been in constant motion for a long time and I started to feel the lack of oxygen. Josephine sucked in an anxious breath and held it.

‘Poor spider,’ said Noel regretfully.

‘I’m rebooting it, guys,’ said the Goldfish patiently, and a humming noise started up somewhere inside the spider. The spider slowly rose from the ground. It was oddly creepy, like watching something rise from the dead. ‘ Zombie robot spider,’ I muttered.

‘Can you control it now?’ Josephine asked the Goldfish, her voice taut with anticipation. Her hands were locked into fists.

‘Let’s see,’ the Goldfish said. Its eyes flashed. The spider lumbered forwards. It swung to the right, then to the left. It ran round us in a circle.

‘You’re doing it!’ Josephine cried.

‘Not quite there yet…’ the Goldfish said. It sucked away the cable. The spider stopped moving and stood, trembling weirdly for a second or two. Then it extended one foreleg, then another. It bounced cautiously, as if doing squats, then ran in another circle, before crouching in front of us.

‘Well, what are you waiting for, kids? Climb aboard!’ the Goldfish exclaimed.

We cheered. It was ragged and breathless but it was only an hour or so ago that we thought we’d never cheer about anything again. ‘Back to the ship, Goldfish,’ commanded Josephine, settling cross-legged on the spider’s back. ‘We need to salvage as much as we can carry. Especially the oxygen cells.’ She proved her point by swaying somewhat alarmingly as the spider lurched into a crawl. Carl and I grabbed her at the same time and somehow that turned into a general, messy, celebratory hug.

‘I’m going to call her Monica,’ said Noel, patting the spider’s back.

Monica carried us back towards the Labyrinth of Night, while Noel sang reedily, ‘ She swallowed the bird to catch the spider… that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her .’

In the far distance, I could see Space Locusts dropping from the purple sky, a scattered dark haze like backwards smoke pouring towards the ground. They looked a long way off, but then I remembered things about calculating distance and how close the horizon was on Mars and I wished the Goldfish wasn’t such a good teacher.

But nobody said anything about them. What was there to say?

Riding Monica wasn’t the smoothest way to travel. She could crawl over just about anything, which was all very well, but sheer drops and vertical walls didn’t mean a thing to her and made quite a difference to us. The Goldfish did get better at steering her after we all fell off the first few times, but that didn’t do anything to fix the fact that it was really cold , with nothing between us and the wind whipping past, and what with that and the light-headedness from not enough oxygen we were all on the point of toppling off yet again by the time we reached the wreck of the Flying Fox. We had to spend quite a long time just flopping around inside and breathing and getting as close to warm as the circumstances would allow before we could even start on the work of getting everything we needed out of the ship and on to Monica in a way that had a chance of staying put.

Taking the spaceship apart was a lot easier than trying to mend it, but still not actually easy; we didn’t have anything like enough tools and we were rapidly running out of duct tape. Still, eventually we’d built a sort of rickety platform on to Monica’s back for us to sit on with the food crates and oxygen canisters. We hacked the remains of the tent-capsule thing in two: one part to wad around us on the platform so we weren’t so cold, and the other slung underneath like a hammock to hold the rest of the dry oxygen rods and some of the other things. The platform fell apart and the hammock fell off several times before we were finished and the friends-forever, group-hugs mood got badly eroded. In fact we came fairly close to a general massacre, but at last, nursing our various broken nails and hurt feelings, we were on our way, even if Josephine was not speaking to anyone, unless you count occasionally muttering to herself that she was the one who’d thought of catching a robot in the first place so you’d think she’d get more respect.

I couldn’t be that bothered about it: I was so knackered that we hadn’t been moving for very long before I went to sleep, which I wouldn’t have expected to even be possible. When I woke up the mood had at least thawed enough for someone to put my oxygen mask over my face. I pushed it off and sat up. Josephine was leaning over the side, making quiet retching sounds.

‘You all right?’ I asked blurrily.

‘Travel-sick,’ she said. ‘God, I’ve had enough of this spider.’

‘There, there, Monica,’ said Noel, patting her consolingly.

‘Where are we?’

‘Just getting into Tharsis,’ said Carl.

We were crossing an ancient lava field. It was just as well we had Monica; on foot it would have taken forever – there wasn’t a patch of level ground anywhere. Around us were the remains of small, strangely blobby volcanoes. The rock below Monica’s scuttling feet had been whipped into curlicues and swirls and bubbles, then cracked and broken like meringue. But now everything was green and velvety with moss, and there were little streams of rainwater snaking through the gullies and cracks. And to the west the horizon swelled weirdly, like it was having a bad allergic reaction to something, and that was the bulge of Tharsis, where the biggest volcanoes in the solar system were.