Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘And they’re very behind with the syllabus !’ the Goldfish panicked.

‘This time, you really can’t make us do it,’ said Carl. ‘You can’t zap us.’

For a few seconds the Goldfish seethed silently in the air, eyes flashing red.

Then it started buzzing.

‘ Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt ,’ it went at the volume of a decent-sized road drill. ‘ Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt .’

‘Are you malfunctioning?’

‘Nope,’ said the Goldfish airily and carried on buzzing.

‘Aha. I see what you’re doing,’ said Carl. ‘It won’t work.’

‘ Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt ,’ said the Goldfish.

‘ Aaaaargh, ’ said Warth- raaa , waving their tentacles in frustration. ‘ Maaaaaake it stoooop , or we will breeeeeaak it!’

The Goldfish stubbornly kept buzzing.

‘Oh, FINE!’ cried Josephine. ‘But I’m not borrowing back my tablet from Dr Muldoon, she’s doing important work!’

The Goldfish practically evaporated in the force of its own smugness. Until Carl decided to liven things up by pretending to pass out.

And then we saw a pale bluish star that was brighter than the others, and it grew in the dark, like a flower.

‘ Oh ,’ I said, feeling tears come into my eyes. I wonder if maybe I’d been afraid it wouldn’t still be there.

‘Yes,’ said Swarasee- ee. ‘Home.’

We watched Earth in silence. From this distance it didn’t look as if it could possibly have any problems at all.

‘Swarasee- ee ,’ said Josephine. ‘Th saaa said something about humans stopping you building the Vuhalimath-laa . What is that?’

Swarasee- ee went yellow, purple and black, and said something to Warth- raaa , whose tendrils swished crossly. ‘Th saaa should not have spoken about that.’

‘They shouldn’t have spoken about lots of things,’ said Josephine, ‘and if they hadn’t you’d still be in the cave with the Vshomu on the way. Come on, it can’t make that much difference now.’

Swarasee- ee made a grumbling noise, and hesitated. Then they pointed. ‘ That is the Vuhalimath-laa .’

For a moment I thought they were pointing at the planet itself. It made sense: maybe they just meant the humans were stopping them building a home . But then I made out the first, faint glitter of the web of reflector discs that enveloped the world.

‘Oh, is that all?’ I said. ‘Just the light-shield. The big fridge you’ve shoved Earth in.’

‘“Big fridge”…? Ah, I understand. That is not all it is for,’ said Swarasee- ee . ‘If it was complete, it would be the same as our gowns, or our ships.’

‘An invisibility shield for a whole planet ,’ said Dr Muldoon, making frantic notes on her tablet. ‘It could hide us from the Vshomu?’

‘That was always our hope,’ said Swarasee- ee sadly. ‘Of course, we prayed it would never be needed. We thought we had run far enough.’

We fell silent again. You could have stared at the approaching Earth, hypnotised, for hours.

Except that just then a squadron of Flarehawks charged out from inside the Vuhalimath-laa and started trying to blow us up.

A torpedo skimmed past our port bow. The ship shuddered ominously.

‘Uncloak!’ screamed Dr Muldoon. ‘Go visible! We have to show them we’re not a threat!’

‘It is impossible,’ said Swarasee- ee , frantically working the controls. ‘The invisibility of our ships is inherent; it does not turn off .’

‘Open a channel! Let me talk to them!’

Swarasee- ee pulled at some leaf-like controls and an unpleasantly goopy, web-like device descended from the ceiling. Swarasee- ee spared two tentacles to fix this over Dr Muldoon’s head, while still steering the ship with the other four. ‘Speak.’

Warth- raaa said something urgent and went indigo and neon orange.

‘This is Dr Valerie Muldoon, I’m a – for God’s sake, don’t fire at them!’

But Warth- raaa did fire at them. In fairness, the humans had just fired at us. And it wasn’t just us, of course, there was a whole fleet of invisible Morror vessels behind us bristling with shockrays and that was all you needed to put together a perfectly respectable space-battle.

The ship dived. What with the artificial gravity we couldn’t really feel the motion, but we could see it on the viewport and that was an excellent way to make yourself space-sick, as if we hadn’t already got enough problems.

‘Can anyone hear me? I’m an EDF officer aboard a Morror vessel –’ shouted Dr Muldoon as something in the ship blared a warning.

The Flarehawks plunged after us, graceful as homicidal ballet dancers, flinging torpedoes like ribbons of light.

‘Oh, come on, we can’t get killed by our own side!’ groaned Carl, wrapping his arms round Noel.

Then there was a thud, and all the lights went out.

We went flying.

It took me a second – in which time some cold-blue backup lights had come up, and I bounced from wall to wall to ceiling and into the Goldfish – to work out that the torpedo must have damaged whatever made the artificial gravity work. I’d been flung into the air, and at first my brain couldn’t catch up with why I was staying there.

I grabbed the edge of one of the Morrors’ sleeping niches to anchor myself and looked around.

‘Dr Muldoon!’ shouted Josephine, launching off the floor to reach for her.

Dr Muldoon was floating limply just below the ceiling. Spherical drops of blood hung in the air like tiny planets.

The Morrors, having more limbs to hang on to things with, were doing rather better than we were: Warth- raaa had scrambled their way back to the helm and was doing their best to steer us out of danger; Swarasee- ee had opened a panel in the floor and was wrangling with the workings of the ship.

I heard Dr Muldoon groan softly. I kicked off the wall and swam through the air, bounced into the ceiling and crawled my way along it towards the helm. I dragged the goopy web-thing over my head.

‘Hello? Hello!’ I said, floating there above the control panel, watching the Flarehawk squadron-leader lunge straight towards us, the blue glow of the Earth framing it like a halo. ‘We’re human passengers on the Morror ship; please stop torpedoing us. We’ve got very important news and we swear we’re not trying to shoot anyone. We need safe passage to Earth.’

I found I’d screwed up my eyes towards the end of this in anticipation of being exploded. Nothing happened. I opened them a crack.

The Flarehawk had stopped moving. It didn’t fire. It seemed so close that, if we hadn’t been invisible, the pilot could almost have looked inside and seen me.

‘Oh, God,’ whispered a voice, over the channel. ‘Alice?’

Swarasee- ee fixed the gravity. I might have dropped to the ground even if they hadn’t. Everyone except the Goldfish landed in a series of thuds and groans.

I pulled myself up to my knees and steadied the communicator on my head. I breathed, ‘Mum?’

‘Alice… Alice. This is impossible – how can you be – have they hurt you? Are you all right?’

‘It’s really me, Mum,’ I said, ‘and I’m fine.’ That might not have been completely true but it would do for now. ‘I’m not a prisoner or anything. There’s a lot to explain. But the main thing is that there are these horrible things called Vshomu that ate the Morrors’ planet and they’re in our solar system now, Mum, and they’re absolutely awful; they ate bits of Mars and tried to eat us and we have to stop the war with the Morrors or they’ll eat Earth as well and—’