Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

And then, in one of the launching bays, we found a big splash of blood on the ground and some empty bandage wrappings scattered about. Someone had been hurt, and someone had tried to help them, but neither of them was here now.

‘…That’s good, though?’ Noel said. ‘I mean, maybe they’re still alive.’

‘When did your ship crash, Th saaa ? You’d been there a few days when we found you – long enough to lay the bodies out and cover them. Was it the same day this happened?’ Josephine sounded almost like someone in a trance now.

‘Perhaps. I cannot be sure,’ said Th saaa .

‘You said something happened and your ship was called here. This was what happened. Your ship was called to help. Wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Th saaa.

Josephine took in a long, long breath and let it out in a sigh. She said, in a strange, faraway little voice: ‘I do.’ She closed her eyes and then opened them, and when she spoke again all the haze and shock had gone and she sounded cold and sure: ‘The people here got into a fight with so many Morror ships they couldn’t handle it themselves; they had to call in reinforcements from Beagle Base, and even then it wasn’t enough. Of course, your side was calling for backup too. Maybe the humans had no idea there were Morrors on Mars until they were under attack, or maybe they found Morrors here and hit first. Either way, you’re here. They lost. Humans don’t have control of Mars any more. The Morrors do.’ She was looking at Th saaa hard enough to bore a hole in them. ‘But the Morrors don’t want Mars. It’s no good to you because it hasn’t got a magnetic field. And there’s nothing here that’s much of a target. OK, a few hundred kids being trained to fight you, but you’ve never gone for kids like that before, and you didn’t attack Beagle Base. So it wasn’t that.

‘So why would Morrors come to Mars when the humans here weren’t threatening you, when they were getting out of your way . Unless… that’s why . Your planet is gone. You need the Earth, and its magnetic field. But humans don’t need such particular conditions , and after all, we’re so blank , aren’t we? You saw a place humans were going voluntarily, where we can live and you can’t, where we were millions of miles away from the thing you want most. The only thing wrong was that it wasn’t all of us.

‘You’re going to resettle humans here. So you can have Earth to yourselves.’

The wind rasped across the wreckage of Zond Station and there was no other sound. Then Th saaa whispered, ‘It seemed the kindest way.’

‘ Kind! ’ Carl exploded.

‘We did not want to wipe out an intelligent species entirely! We could not allow you to stop us building the Vuhalimath - laa for another fifteen years!’ said Th saaa . ‘What else could we do?’

‘What else ? Oh, rack off,’ said Carl.

Josephine cocked her head. ‘You were building what?’

Th saaa’s tendrils trembled and fluttered and they didn’t say anything.

I felt an almost overpowering urge to curl up in a ball until someone else came along to sort everything out, but I tried to make myself focus. ‘This isn’t helping us,’ I said. ‘We need a new plan. There’s got to be something here we can use. Food. Oxygen. Goldfish, do you have the plans for this base?’

‘Forget that – what we need is a ship ,’ said Carl.

No arguing with that. So we went looking for one.

The hangar doors were wide open. And right at the back, looking small and lonely, there was a single, untouched Flying Fox.

Carl let out a sigh when he saw it, which was probably mostly relief, but maybe exhaustion too.

‘There was a science post at Schiaparelli Crater, wasn’t there?’ I said. ‘Or back to Beagle?’

‘Want to just lift it straight out of the atmo? Maybe we’ll find a nice space-cruiser wandering past,’ Carl said, managing almost to smile.

‘Let’s find supplies first,’ I said.

Then Th saaa moved.

They were completely without colour now. Just dark grey dappled with black and frost-white. They turned and those six tentacles whipped out – four of them hooking round our ankles and yanking, or simply knocking us off balance, so within a split second we were all on the ground. And at the same time, two tentacles stabbed straight into the Goldfish, knocking in one plastic eye. The light went out inside the Goldfish and it crashed to the ground. Th saaa dragged out the invisible suit from inside it and ran for the Flying Fox, throwing on the suit as they did so.

‘Th saaa !’ wailed Noel, sounding more heartbroken over this than anything else we’d seen on Mars, and that made me furious. I scrambled up and chased after them, and Carl and Josephine were soon charging along with me.

But we couldn’t see Th saaa . Even though we knew they were heading for the hatch of the Flying Fox, we couldn’t see how close they were or what they were doing. I tried to grab for the hatch myself and something knocked me away. And then it was too late: the hatch opened and closed before we could do anything.

Inside I had a glimpse of controls moving, as if by themselves. I jumped up and banged on the door and screamed, but the ship began to move with me still clinging to the outside.

Th saaa must have had some trouble working out how to actually fly a human craft; they just taxied out of the hangar and wove around awkwardly in the launch bay for a while, which must have looked ridiculous with me helplessly spreadeagled across the side of the ship. But then it began to move faster and faster until I dropped off. The others came running up as the ship finally lumbered into the air and swooped away.

‘They just left us!’ cried Noel. ‘They left us to die .’

‘It’s not that bad,’ I said mechanically. ‘Maybe it’s not that bad. There’s stuff here. Shelter. At least enough oxygen for a couple of weeks. Not all the plants are dead. We can just kind of… live here for a while.’

‘But how could Th saaa do that?’ Noel cried.

‘We’re the enemy,’ Josephine said flatly.

‘But we weren’t! Not us !’

I wondered if maybe you couldn’t really blame Th saaa . If I was taken prisoner by some Morror kids and saw a chance to get away from them, it would probably seem moronic not to take it. But that didn’t change anything, or make me feel any better.

I’m going to give up, I thought. I’m going to just give up completely.

But only for a few minutes.

So I did that. I stayed on the ground, hugging my knees. Carl kept yelling and swearing at the horizon where Th saaa had vanished. Josephine sat down heavily next to me and I turned my forehead against her shoulder and shut my eyes.

‘We’ll work something out. We will,’ I said.

Then Carl stopped shouting. He backed up a few paces closer to us. ‘Oh Christ,’ he whispered. ‘Look.’

I lifted my head. I looked along the line of his pointing arm. A dark cloud had risen on the horizon. Whirling pillars of dust scoured the land ahead of it.

The Space Locusts were coming.

Thousands, millions of Space Locusts now, the dark mass of them seething and heaving high into the purple sky. Already we could hear their buzzing on the wind.

‘We need to get under cover,’ I said. ‘Gol— oh.’

I’d forgotten for a second. I’d been going to ask again if the Goldfish had plans of the base so we knew where to look for basements or bunkers. But the Goldfish was lying lifeless on the floor of the hangar. I got a burning feeling in the back of my eyes and throat.