Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

Th saaa hesitated for so long I wasn’t sure they were going to answer, but then said, ‘Yes. There is nothing left of it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was before I was born,’ whispered Th saaa. ‘Whole nations annihilated, so many yeeeeeeears of searching, so many died from the hardship of travel, before they came to somewhere we could live.’

‘And Earth had the magnetic core… and it was too warm, but not by so much you couldn’t work with it,’ said Josephine.

‘Yes.’

Josephine sighed, and looked at her bag in her lap. I think one or two of the strange things she had in there might have been from her mum: maybe the little cushion, or the Christmas tree star?

‘Does it make you feel better, now that you know why?’

I could see Josephine thinking about it, warily testing herself the way you might press on a bruise to see how much it still hurts. ‘No,’ she said in the end, very calmly. ‘But thank you for asking.’

I knew something then, or maybe realised I’d known it for ages, and it made me feel even more tired than I already was. If winning the war meant getting the Morrors off Earth, we were never going to do it. And whether it was fair, or how much of a right we had to be angry about it, wouldn’t make a speck of difference. It was just how it was. Morrors weren’t going to be a weird little blip in Earth’s history after which everything went back to normal, any more than Victorians turned into Tudors or Tudors into Romans. The Morrors were going to stick around forever. It was just a question of how many people got killed before we found some way of handling that.

It was just as well that I’d never really been able to imagine a way of life without Morrors anyway.

‘What happened to your planet?’ asked Carl. ‘Why’s there nothing left of it?’

Again there was a long hesitation, presumably because Th saaa wasn’t supposed to talk about any of this to humans, or maybe not at all. ‘…The Vshomu. ’

We would have asked what the Vshomu was, except that was when we first got a glimpse of Zond Station.

And there was nothing left of that either.

OK, technically that’s not true. There was plenty left in the way of rubble and ash and mangled Flarehawks, and there were even some buildings that were more or less in one piece. But that there’d been a battle at Zond pretty recently, and that it hadn’t gone very well for the home team, was not something you could miss.

It was also pretty noticeable that there didn’t seem to be anyone around, either to pick up the pieces or to welcome in battered and bedraggled fugitive children.

‘Oh God,’ whispered Josephine, looking at it through a pair of binoculars from the Flying Fox. Then, through gritted teeth: ‘ Faster. Make her go faster, Goldfish.’

The Goldfish’s eyes flashed and Monica lumbered on quickly enough that the wind ripped at our hair or tendrils and we were too busy clinging on to really talk to each other. Which was perhaps for the best.

Zond Station sat on a plateau amid the foothills of Olympus. The empty plains of Mars stretched away below, and above it the gentle, bare slope of the mountain went on and on until its peak disappeared above the atmosphere.

We climbed off Monica. ‘Oh, kids…’ said the Goldfish helplessly, sagging in the air.

I found that even though I had this heavy, empty feeling, like Earth-gravity had suddenly slammed back on inside me, I wasn’t actually surprised. Of course I’d hoped there’d be people at Zond to help us, and I hadn’t wanted to think about the possibility there might not be. But it’d been there with us all along, the chance that maybe we weren’t running to anything so much as running away from something that was always bound to catch up. It had nearly caught us once in the Labyrinth of Night, and now it was really here.

Josephine was beginning to shake beside me. ‘We’re not finished yet,’ I said to her. Somehow it came out sounding quite calm and sincere, which was odd as it didn’t seem to have a lot to do with what I’d been thinking and I hadn’t known I was going to say it.

‘HALLO!’ Carl boomed, in that enormous voice of his. ‘There must be somebody here… HALLO!’

But no one answered.

Zond Station was much smaller than Beagle Base, and clearly a lot less science had been going on here, though there were a few algae pools and things doing their bit for the terraforming effort. Otherwise, there were a couple of barracks buildings with roofs on and the blackened remains of a couple more. There was a single farm dome with a wheat field, but it was broken open and nearly everything inside was black and dead.

‘The comms tower,’ breathed Josephine, pointing. It was snapped in two like a breadstick. No wonder the Goldfish hadn’t been able to contact Zond at all.

Th saaa was changing colour rapidly, grey-black-blue-purple, tendrils rippling and swaying.

‘Did you know it was going to be like this?’ I blurted out.

‘You know I did not,’ Th saaa hissed. ‘I am no better off than you.’

‘But Morrors did this. You know what’s happening. You know why they came here, don’t you? You’d never tell us.’

‘Do you think they tell me everything? I am only thirteen. What do your adults tell you?’ cried Th saaa . ‘My parents had been reassigned, I was being transported to a training centre nearer the Earth. But something happened and we were called to this awful place.’

‘That’s really it? That’s all you know.’

Th saaa said nothing.

‘We need to know when this happened,’ said Josephine in a thin, breathy voice.

‘What difference does it make when ?’ asked Carl.

Josephine ignored him. ‘Everything’s dry. But nothing’s smoking any more. It was recent, but not that recent… Some of the lights are still on… Goldfish – can you get any information off the life-support system? When did the main doors last open?’

The Goldfish obediently darted off into the command centre. It came back, and told us the date.

‘A week ago. When the grown-ups vanished,’ whispered Josephine. ‘So that’s it. Something started here, and everyone at Beagle went to help.’

‘But they couldn’t,’ I said, and it felt like the silent thing that had chased us here from Beagle was roaring so loud I could hardly hear myself.

‘ Guys ,’ said Carl urgently, grabbing Noel and turning him against his chest. ‘Don’t look.’

There was the wreck of an Aurora lying in the ruins of the comms tower. Maybe a shockray had sent it smashing into the tower, I’m not sure. The cockpit was ripped open and you could see there were people still in there.

There was a moment where we all stood there frozen in a huddle. Then Josephine set her jaw, and started walking towards them.

‘ Don’t ,’ I said.

‘I have to see who they are,’ she said, in a voice like stone. ‘Dr Muldoon came here.’ And I went stumbling along too, though I wasn’t sure I could make it all the way.

We didn’t go that close in the end. Just close enough to see that neither was Dr Muldoon or the Colonel.

But they were still somebody. And I thought, Oh God, are we going to have to look at every body to see if it’s someone we know? Because I assumed there would be lots.

But there weren’t, as it turned out. We picked our way through the ruins, into the farm dome, across the spacepad, past the ranks of unmanned guns. There were places where it was hard to be sure; some of the buildings were so badly collapsed or burned that we couldn’t really tell if there were people under the rubble. But we didn’t see anyone else dead. Josephine was moving like a sleepwalker, stumbling and staring. I only noticed that in a dazed, distant kind of way, so maybe that was how I was moving too.