Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘James, get them some food !’ snapped Dr Muldoon at a poor man with the photosynthetic patches on his arms from Beagle Base, as if he should have known to do it already.

We sat down on the floor of the chamber to eat and carry on explaining. There was a mix of human and Morror food (‘The light-blue spirally stuff is better than it looks,’ said James apologetically), some Smeat, some raisins, but no tea. Dr Muldoon put my arm in a sling and cleaned us up a bit.

‘Of course, our actual medical doctor had to be hit by a shockray rebound,’ she said, sighing, dabbing on disinfectant.

A woman waved feebly from one of the beds. ‘You’re doing fine, Valerie.’

‘Why did they take your legs, Colonel Cleaver?’ asked Noel, timidly.

‘Ah, it’s no big deal. I can get around without them,’ said the Colonel.

‘He kept climbing the walls,’ said Dr Muldoon, looking slightly tired at last. ‘Literally. Trying to disable that seal.’ She stared glumly at the curtain we’d come through, which was back to looking like a bare stone wall.

‘You say that like I stopped,’ said Colonel Cleaver, grinning, and I remembered him climbing up the tower at the base using just his arms.

‘We’ve tried pulling it down, and digging under it, and cutting through it,’ said Dr Muldoon. ‘And frankly, we’ve been doing it more for entertainment value than anything else, because even if we got through there’d still be the small matter of the Morrors on the other side.’

‘Weirdo invisible no-good clowns that they are,’ said Colonel Cleaver. ‘Forget my legs – it’s her you should be worried about.’

‘The one that speaks such good English knows who I am,’ Dr Muldoon said. ‘It keeps asking me about accelerated terraforming.’

‘They haven’t hurt you?’ I asked.

‘They’re not stupid. You can’t get a scientist to do anything useful by torturing her. But they started hinting they might separate me from the others or take me off the planet altogether. And I can’t understand why they’re so interested; they’re already altering Earth to suit them, they don’t need my help with that. But I don’t imagine they’re asking just out of sheer curiosity.’

‘We know why they’re interested in terraforming,’ said Josephine.

Dr Muldoon looked at us keenly. ‘Do you? And what did you mean, “The planet’s being eaten”?’

And finally we managed to get them to listen to a decent account of why the Morrors had come to Earth, and what the Vshomu were. Josephine didn’t have the dead one any more, but she did have some pictures she’d taken of it on her tablet.

‘…And they eat planets,’ said Dr Muldoon flatly, in the end.

‘Yes.’

‘They’re eating Mars.’

‘Yes.’

‘Mars.’

‘With us on it, yes.’

‘ My life’s work ,’ thundered Dr Muldoon, springing to her feet with fire in her eyes. ‘My home. I create scientific miracles out of rock and dust , and vermin come along and eat it .’

‘…We’re actually pretty worried about Earth as well,’ I said, but I’m not sure Dr Muldoon really heard me, seeing as she was racing up the steps towards the seal at the time.

‘Morrors!’ she shouted. ‘Let me out! I need specimens! I need my lab! I need to kill them all .’

‘There are millions of them, you know; you probably can’t kill them all yourself,’ said Noel as we followed her up the steps.

‘We’ve gotta evacuate, Muldoon,’ said Cleaver. ‘I’ve got to get those kids out of Beagle right now. HEY, MORRORS,’ he bellowed at the wall. ‘Are you going to let us out of here? Or are you leaving kids and prisoners of war to be eaten alive?’

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s a good idea to annoy them,’ Noel moaned anxiously.

‘Yeah, Morrors!’ boomed Carl at the wall. ‘What are you doing out there? We have places to be!’

Dr Muldoon raised her fists and would probably have pounded them against the wall if it had actually been a wall, but as it was more of a kind of holographic curtain-thing, she ended up just grabbing handfuls of it and yanking them around as best she could.

‘Morrors!’ she yelled. ‘Are you listening? Are you still even there?’

‘Morrors!’ Josephine joined in. ‘We’ve got to get back to Earth! We have to warn the government! We have to start cooperating.’

‘Morrors!’ I shouted, dragging at the seal in my turn. ‘You can’t fight the Vshomu and us at the same time! And if you couldn’t get rid of the Vshomu on your own before, what chance have you got this time? You need humans now. You have to talk to us so we can help each other!’

‘Morrors!’

‘Morrors!’

Then quite suddenly, the wall fell. It detached from its fastenings high above with a hissing sound and crumpled, shimmering and glitching as it dropped, until it lay in a weird, half-invisible pile at our feet. All the Morrors were there on the other side, looking at us. And all the other humans gasped at the sight of them – all that time shut up inside the mountain, and they’d never seen the Morrors uncloaked.

‘Yes,’ said Swarasee- ee . ‘We agree.’

Being stuck in the middle of an alien evacuation procedure might have been less bewildering if we could at least see the ships that teams of Morrors kept vanishing into. But we couldn’t, and we couldn’t understand what the Morrors were saying to each other either, except when Swarasee- ee or one of the others took the time to say something to us in English, which was mostly, ‘Wait.’ So we just stood around feeling rather awkward and vulnerable, and wondering if Th saaa had already gone, except for Colonel Cleaver, who’d got his legs back and was striding around amid the Morrors, talking to them and looking ready to go and trample Vshomu beneath his robotic feet.

‘This is it, cadets,’ he said at last. ‘A couple of our Day-Glo pals here are taking me out to Beagle to get the rest of the kids.’

‘Oh, aren’t we going with you?’ asked Noel, dismayed.

‘Their biggest carrier will only take fifty,’ said Cleaver. ‘They say they’re calling more ships in for the rest. Don’t know how far we can trust them, but doesn’t seem we’ve got a lot of choice. So you’d just take up space, and this way you’ll get home sooner, and you all need decent medical attention.’

I nodded. I was sorry he was leaving so soon, but I found I didn’t want to go back to Beagle anyway; I wanted to see Kayleigh and Chinenye and Mei, but too much had happened, both when we were there and afterwards. And just hearing the words ‘ you’ll get home ’ made me feel slightly dizzy.

‘We’re really glad you’re all right,’ I said. ‘We were worried.’

‘Seems like these Vo-sho-whatevers would have eaten the lot of us if it weren’t for you kids,’ said the Colonel, cheerfully. ‘And I’ve had enough of things eating me to last a lifetime. So. Good work, cadets.’

He threw us a salute. We all saluted back except for Josephine, who being a genius had been looking at something else and then got confused as to which arm to use. Cleaver scrutinised her thoughtfully until she started squirming, then he said gruffly, ‘Good soldiering, Jerome, knew you had it in you,’ and dropped a big hand on to her shoulder.

‘Thank you,’ said Josephine, as the Colonel walked away. When he’d gone she muttered to me, ‘None of this changes anything, I’d still be an absolutely awful soldier.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if this works out, perhaps you won’t have to be.’