Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Never thought Morrors would be so festive ,’ I said.

‘If those are chairs, there should be a crew of three,’ said Josephine, looking at some hexagonal plinth-like things. She said this close to her tablet for the benefit of the film. For the benefit of me, she added, ‘Just because it can take that many, doesn’t necessarily mean it did.’

Somehow I did get the feeling our Morror was on its own; the way it’d been hanging around by itself and the way no one seemed to be trying to rescue it. Still, the possibility of lots of Morrors running around, when a minute ago you hadn’t been expecting any, isn’t something you just get over.

Carl pulled himself up into the ship. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what can we nick?’

The idea of pinching stuff from the Morrors was bizarrely cheering. It felt like getting a little of our own back, even though you’d think having a real, live Morror prisoner was a much better way of doing that, but that wasn’t fun at all as it involved a lot more responsibility.

So we poked around very thoroughly and Carl got himself sprayed with some sort of bright-blue liquid, which terrified us for a while but did not seem to do anything when wiped off except leave him a little cleaner. Eventually it turned out the Morror approach to storage was to have lots of hexagonal compartments built into the floor and walls.

We found some green-and-brown lumpy things, and some blue shredded stuff, all of which we decided was almost certainly food. One of the compartments was full of frozen lumps of meat – at least in the sense that we were somehow pretty sure it was bits of animal, despite being bluey-grey – though whether the animals were more like fish or more like mammals we weren’t sure. This raised the ‘what if it’s poisonous to humans’ issue again, and also made me feel weird because suddenly I was imagining Morrors getting squirted with blue stuff and sitting around eating, which wasn’t something I’d ever been able to do before.

We also found weapons. Some of them were easy to recognise as such: semicircular blades with a hole presumably for Morrors to slot their tentacles into; and a couple of curvy staffs, which Carl poked and prodded and ended up shockraying a hole into the roof with.

We left the food for the time being but thought we’d hang on to the weapons, what with all the alarming things we’d encountered lately.

‘The most important thing is the oxygen,’ said Josephine, because the ship was full of the stuff and we were breathing perfectly happily without our masks on. ‘Look, why don’t we make camp here? We can’t go much further anyway and that way we won’t use up any of our own supply overnight.’

‘It’s too cold,’ I said. ‘And too weird. But mainly too cold.’

‘I didn’t mean we’d actually sleep in the ship. But we could trap the Morror in here and put the tent up outside and channel the oxygen in from here.’

So that’s what we did. Putting up a tent is no mean feat when it was never designed to stand up without being attached to a spaceship and has been partially eaten by Space Locusts, and getting an alien spaceship to blow oxygen into it is also pretty difficult. But we were becoming increasingly good at taking things apart and putting them together again in ingenious ways. We pitched the tent over two of Monica’s legs, and the Morror ship’s ventilation system turned out to be another thing that wasn’t that different from anything we were used to.

The Morror didn’t make a sound when we marched it into the ship, and it didn’t seem to have anything you’d call a facial expression. Its changing colours were a little hypnotic, though; I kept finding myself staring at it, and then I got scared that perhaps it was some kind of psychological weapon meant to make you dopey so it could attack. I tried not to look at it so directly after that.

‘Hey! Keep your… tentacles where I can see them,’ said Carl, brandishing his shockray staff as the Morror lifted a length of one finger-arm beneath the bindings round its torso. The Morror paused, stared blankly at Carl and then squirted some blue stuff from the wall on to itself, which it then started flicking and smoothing over its tendrils as best it could, and even though it was pretty awkward being tied up, the effect was like a bird preening itself or a cat washing.

Then it suddenly managed to fold itself into one of the padded alcoves and sat there, roosting like an owl. It gazed at us disconcertingly for a while, then it murmured some more whispery syllables to itself and closed its eyes.

Noel tried to feed the Morror some of the stuff we’d found, but it didn’t want any. Carl was dead keen to try some of the Morror food, but we persuaded him we should only resort to that on the brink of actual starvation as we weren’t equipped to deal with a medical emergency. So, trying to pretend the Morror wasn’t there, we ate some of our own stuff and eventually we got into our tattered sleeping bags and bundled up together for warmth. It was our third night out on the surface of Mars.

Of course we knew the Goldfish would have zapped it silly and screamed the place down if the alien made a wrong move. Just as I’d expected, though, none of us slept very well.

It wasn’t just that it was there. It was that we still had no real plan for what to do with it.

‘OK, everyone try not to freak out,’ I said, the next morning, ‘but I think there are more of them.’

Everyone commenced freaking out.

We’d been in the process of discussing what to do with the one Morror we already had. We were leaning towards just taking careful note of the coordinates and leaving it tied up where it was. It wouldn’t die before we got to Zond, and then we could tell someone to go back and get it.

Noel, of course, thought this was cruel.

Anyway, now I’d got everyone scared of extra Morrors. ‘Where? How many? What are they doing?’ they all said, and Josephine and Carl brandished their new-found weapons. Carl still had the shockray staff, and Josephine had taken the curved blades and looked more piratical than ever.

‘Over there, and nothing – there are three or four of them, I can’t be sure, just lying down. I think they might be dead.’

We hesitated, everyone trying to look at the things I’d pointed out and no one actually succeeding.

‘It might be a trap,’ Noel said.

Josephine shook her head. ‘If they were alive they’d have done something while we were asleep.’

Carl lowered the shockray staff a little. ‘Well, let’s have a look.’

Then the Morror – our Morror, obviously – lurched out of the invisible spaceship making a wailing noise and waggling its tentacles as best it was able.

Josephine and Carl had their weapons raised in a second and the Goldfish was plainly gearing up for a good hard zap. The Morror stopped in its tracks and spread the ends of its tentacles.

‘ Leeeeee-eeee ,’ sigh-wailed the Morror. ‘ Leeeeeee m’alooooooo .’ Then it seemed to make an effort, pull itself together, and it said much more clearly; ‘ Leave them alone .’

There was a pause. Carl said flatly, ‘What.’

‘ Leeeeeve them alooone ,’ repeated the Morror. ‘They aaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaahhhrrrr already deaaaaad. Leeeeeeeeeeee in peeeeeeeeeece …’

‘You talk English!’ crowed Noel.

No one else was as pleased about it as that, but Josephine’s eyebrows jumped with intrigue.

‘Yeeeeee- eeeessss ,’ the Morror sighed, then shook itself slightly. ‘Yes. We are trained in your languages.’

‘What an interesting development,’ Josephine said softly.