Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

The Morror sat up and wrapped its tentacles around itself. It looked at us in silence.

‘We’re army cadets and this is our Goldfish, and I’m not going to let it hurt you any more, but you’re our prisoner so we’re taking you to the nearest military base, and we won’t hurt you either but don’t try anything,’ Noel summarised helpfully, running out of breath a bit towards the end.

More silence.

‘Do they… talk?’ asked Noel uncertainly, and I figured that they must do, because clearly they’d communicated with humans at the start of the invasion and we must have got the name ‘Morror’ from somewhere, but I didn’t think they’d had anything to say in all the time I’d been alive.

The Morror said something. And meanwhile it changed colour. Blues and turquoises and yellows and reds quivered across its spots and tendrils, and its voice sounded like wind in trees and all the syllables sounded like sighing. It said – and this is the closest I can manage and really there could easily be more ‘a’s in there – ‘ Haaaa ’thr aaaa v saaaa Mo- raaa uha- raaa …’

There was a pause. ‘Well, let’s tie it up,’ said Carl briskly.

The Morror did not want to be tied up. It was very wriggly and its tentacles flapped and whipped and it changed colour a lot. We were a bit worried about touching it, because for all we knew it was poisonous. But it was four against one – five against one, really, because the Goldfish was still hovering there as menacingly as it could, so eventually we got its tentacles bound to its chest in duct tape. We’d tried to make some kind of handcuffs to tie the ends of its tentacles together behind it, but we didn’t have enough tape left. And as far as we could tell we hadn’t been poisoned, so that was something.

‘Damn, where’s the invisible suit?’ Carl said after we were finished. Everyone looked at me.

‘ I don’t know,’ I protested. ‘It’s getting dark, anyway, how am I supposed to…’ But they made me turn round and round trying to see it out of the corner of my eye until I started feeling wobbly again. I didn’t find it, actually; Noel did by walking into it so the tip of his boot disappeared.

‘How are we not going to lose this,’ I said. The Goldfish suddenly sprang open a compartment we hadn’t known it had in its side, but didn’t say anything. I don’t know if it was trying to overcome the moral conflict between its programming and our decision, or if it was just sulking.

We put the cloak inside and the compartment snapped shut.

‘It is getting dark, though,’ I repeated. The rum had helped but I didn’t feel I could face travelling much further. Still, I wondered how anyone was going to get much rest around a silent tied-up Morror changing colour like a set of traffic lights all the time.

‘I assume that was its ship you found, Goldfish?’ said Josephine. ‘Let’s go and look at that.’

We tried to tie the Morror to Monica’s leg, but we didn’t have enough duct tape left to do that either. So in the end we left the Goldfish to make sure the Morror didn’t get up to anything, and Noel to make sure the Goldfish didn’t get up to anything, and the rest of us started scrambling over the rocks towards the plume of steam.

Something occurred to me on the way. ‘Does your dad know you’ve got his hip flask?’ I asked Josephine.

‘Yes, he’s probably worked it out by now,’ Josephine said.

The Morror ship, obviously, didn’t seem to be there. The steam just poured out of empty air, into empty air, about fifteen feet above the bottom of the little valley. Except – and they were subtle enough that you might not have seen them normally – here and there were these little transparent patches of crusted ice, on the invisible contours of nothing , and cold was rolling off it.

The ground was a bit flatter – just where you’d aim for if you were crashing and trying to find somewhere to do an emergency landing. But I was pretty sure it had bashed into the high rocks we were standing on anyway.

Thinking about Morrors crashing and trying to save themselves made me feel a bit weird. Then I wondered if our Morror was the pilot, and rather belatedly asked myself how big the ship was and if it was likely to have more Morrors inside it waiting to spring to the defence of their crewmate.

‘How do we “take a look at this” exactly?’ I said, regardless.

‘You tell us, magic-eye girl,’ said Carl.

So I had to do my corner-of-the-eye trick again. ‘It’s about a third again bigger than a Flarehawk, I guess,’ I told the others, after waggling my head around and swivelling my eyes until I felt like a total moron. ‘It’s shaped sort of like… well, it’s in two round bits joined together in the middle, like an hourglass. But I also think it’s kind of spiky. Or… hairy. The front bit is all caved in.’

‘And can you see a door?’

‘No!’ I said crossly. ‘I can’t really see the stupid thing at all!’

I told myself I couldn’t reasonably be frightened of touching a Morror spacecraft after touching an actual Morror, so I went and cautiously patted at mid-air. I felt something surprisingly ridged and slightly damp, and continued stroking my way along the side of the thing. Then my hand suddenly pushed empty space and, from the point of view of everyone outside including me, vanished.

I yelped and pulled my hand back, freaked out even though I could feel it hadn’t actually ceased to exist or anything and I knew I’d really just found the door.

The others started getting down from Monica as I stuck my head through, and I heard Carl saying, ‘ Christ that looks awful,’ at my apparently headless body from outside, which was more than a little hypocritical.

I blundered into some kind of ramp, hurt my leg, and climbed up inside.

It was cold, but not that much colder than outside. Some sort of machinery was croaking to itself in an unhappy way, which made me think the steam we’d seen was coming from the ruins of whatever was supposed to keep the ship at a Morror-friendly temperature.

The chamber lit up to greet me. After seeing the Morror, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at how colourful everything was. The walls were rounded and banded with stripes of colour that whorled and curved like the lines in a fingerprint, mostly icy blues and sea-greens on the left, giving way via some purples near the door to flamey reds and orange on the right. Some of the colours lit up, some didn’t.

Josephine followed me first. She was still filming everything in this ultra-detached way that was becoming slightly scary. She lingered over some coils of white sigils in a swirl of dark red and said, ‘It’s writing.’

There were these oval alcove things set into the walls, each about two-foot high and padded.

‘Do you think this is for passengers?’ I said. ‘I guess the front bit must be for piloting.’

We leaned into the wreck of what must have been the helm. The view screen was all smashed and half the control deck was caved in. What remained of the controls were all spaced and angled in such a way that they’d be horrible for a human to work, but you could see that they were controls: there were more wheely-slidy things, and banks of spongy leaf-like things, where we’d have had banks of screens and buttons, but still. And whereas all the business parts of a human ship tend to come in sensible black or grey with maybe a bit of blue or orange backlighting if you’re lucky, these were as colourful as everything else in the ship. It almost looked like someone had dumped their jewellery collection on a counter and then decided to fly a spaceship with it.