Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

Th saaa was talking and waving their tentacles too, but their colours didn’t seem to be meshing up with everyone else’s at all.

‘Are they saying, “Get out of the way so we can shoot your little human friends”?’ asked Carl.

‘That is not a helpful comment,’ said Th saaa.

‘Yeah, but are they?’

Th saaa didn’t seem to want to tell us, which I couldn’t help feeling was not a very good sign.

Josephine huffed impatiently. ‘Why are they keeping us standing around when the planet’s being eaten?’

‘I have told them,’ Th saaa insisted. ‘They’re discussing sending a party to see if the Vshomu are really there or if it is some human trick. Be patient .’

Josephine sighed enormously, was patient for two and a half seconds, then muttered, ‘Oh, to hell with this,’ and reached into her bag.

The Morrors raised their weapons, and one of them thundered, ‘KEEP YOUR HANDS VISIBLE,’ in startlingly perfect English.

Josephine lifted her arm.

She was holding the dead Vshomu that we’d killed in the first Flying Fox.

Some of the Morrors cried out – short, almost-human yelps or long rustling roars like faraway landslides. Some of them went silent and grey and half-transparent. I thought that along with Paralashath and shalvulu , I might possibly have picked up another word: it was au-laaa and it meant no .

Then several Morrors left, some of them possibly crying, and the ring around us broke into smaller, messier groups talking even more animatedly than before, but no one seemed to be pointing guns at us now, and Th saaa lowered their tentacles and looked at us nervously.

Then a stocky Morror – one of the mane-all-over-face ones – came up and whisked the Vshomu out of Josephine’s hands and took it back to the group to talk over.

Josephine said indignantly, ‘That was mine .’

‘How is a dead Vshomu yours ?’ I asked.

‘It was in my bag,’ Josephine grumbled.

A pair of Morrors came over to us. The first was very tall and one of those I found hard not to think of as ‘bald’ because they didn’t have tendrils, just colour patches. The other was dressed in a gold kilt with a triangular fin at the back, and had a cloud of curly tendrils standing out like an Elizabethan ruff around their face.

‘Hello,’ said the big one without the mane. ‘I am Swarasee- ee . This is Flath. Come with me, please, humans. Flath will look after Th saaa now.’

Swarasee- ee must have been the one who’d told Josephine to keep her hands up: they spoke incredibly good English with no Morror accent or long nouns like Th saaa had at all. In fact, if you shut your eyes you’d probably think you were talking to a Californian woman.

Flath didn’t talk to us, just towed Th saaa away. Th saaa looked back anxiously. ‘I hope it will be all right,’ they called plaintively.

‘What are your names?’ asked Swarasee- ee politely.

‘Josephine Jerome.’

‘Carl Dalisay, and this is Noel.’

‘…I can say my own name, why do you always have to go first?’ Noel grumbled.

‘Alice Dare,’ I said.

Swarasee- ee paused and looked at me in mild perplexity. ‘…Alistair?’ they repeated.

I sighed at considerable length, while Carl chuckled.

‘Terrific, that’s just terrific,’ I said.

Swarasee- ee led us down over the terraces, between what I was pretty sure were some invisible ships and under rows of rainbow-y lamps.

‘Where are you taking us?’ I asked. ‘This is a waste of time. We need to get back to Earth and warn everyone, or no one will get to live on it.’

Swarasee- ee said nothing, but their spots turned blue and orange by turns.

We were walking towards the rear wall of the chamber. There didn’t seem to be anything in particular over there, except it was a long way from all the other Morrors, and I was reminding myself that the Morrors hadn’t wanted to wipe out humans and so Swarasee- ee probably wouldn’t be taking children into a nice quiet corner to kill us without bothering anybody else.

Then, because I happened to look nervously at Josephine to see if she was thinking the same thing, I noticed how shimmery the back of the cavern was.

‘Oh!’ I said.

Swarasee -ee stretched out their tentacles to the wall, which rippled faintly as they peeled aside a panel of invisible fabric.

‘In you go!’ they said, sounding almost as perky as the Goldfish.

There didn’t seem much point in making a fuss about this, as there were enough Morrors around to put us anywhere they pleased. So in we went, though it was hard not to keep worrying about how stupid we’d feel if it turned out we were being led to our doom, and Swarasee- ee sealed it up from outside.

Wide steps led down into another chamber of bare, red stone – a bit warmer than the one outside, which was nice, and wide and almost as empty as a sports field. But not quite, because about fifty human adults were sitting or lying about in groups in the middle of it, looking thoroughly fed up.

‘Dr Muldoon!’ Josephine cried. ‘You are alive!’

Dr Muldoon stood out because of her long red hair. There was a field-hospital area over to one side, with about ten people covered in bandages or attached to drips and so on. Dr Muldoon was among them helping out, even though I knew she wasn’t that sort of doctor. She was in full military uniform, something we’d never seen before, though of course the Morrors had taken all weapons off her. She looked as if she should be tired, with her hair all loose and dirty-looking around her shoulders, but she still seemed far more awake than anyone else.

‘Josephine,’ she gasped, and came running. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Kids!’ cried Colonel Cleaver as he came rolling up from the back of the group. I say rolling because he hadn’t got his robot legs; he was sitting on a bit of metal panelling that looked as if it might once have been part of a Flarehawk, with wheels clumsily attached, and he was pushing himself along with his hands.

‘They took your legs?!’ exclaimed Noel, horrified. ‘That’s awful.’

‘Never mind that. Did they capture Beagle Base? Are you OK? Where are the others?’

‘They’re still there. We didn’t exactly get captured,’ said Carl, and after that of course we had to explain everything, which got quite complicated. I was not used to either Colonel Cleaver or Dr Muldoon being apologetic. But they were now – in fact not just them but a load of other adults we didn’t even know bustled up to say how they were very, very sorry about everything that had happened to us, and how they hadn’t been there to stop it. And that’s before they even knew more than ten percent of what had happened to us, and while I’m not going to say I was against receiving a bit of adult sympathy and attention, I wasn’t sure this was a good use of our time.

So I thought maybe we’d better not tell them everything until later, and I glanced at the others and saw that Carl and Josephine had already got the same idea. But Noel was completely oblivious and went on saying things like, ‘And then when the spaceship crashed for the second time…’ which made everyone wring their hands and fall over themselves to say they hadn’t meant things to turn out like that some more. Then Colonel Cleaver hugged us all and most of us said ‘ow’ and that’s how they found out my arm was broken and that Josephine had cuts and Carl was singed and everyone was generally the worse for Space Locusts. The grown-ups were in the process of getting even more upset when Carl bawled, ‘ANYWAY. The planet’s being eaten and is there any food ?’