Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

She held up her hands, to show she didn’t mean any harm. ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’

I stared at her. From what she’d said about light wavelengths and passing exams I’d got the impression that she must be pretty clever, except with suitcases. So this was just a bizarre thing to say. ‘I’m going to be in the army,’ I said flatly.

‘I’m going to be an archaeologist,’ said Josephine dreamily, assembling her stones into another pattern. ‘And a composer. And a mum.’

‘Why are you saying this?’ I asked, baffled.

‘Why not?’

I folded my arms. ‘Well. I expect you could write some music, if you wanted. In your spare time. And you could possibly have a baby. In your spare time. But you’re not going to be an archaeologist. You’re going to be in the EDF like everyone else on this ship. Didn’t they tell you that part?’

Josephine’s hands went still on the objects and for a few seconds she didn’t look at me. Then she threw back her head and smiled again, but in a more complicated sort of way. She remarked, ‘You’re a fairly gloomy person, aren’t you?’

‘I am not gloomy,’ I said. ‘I’m realistic .’

‘The war can’t go on forever.’

‘But look,’ I said. ‘We’re twelve. We’re going out to Mars where we’re going to have military training . We won’t be able to use it until we’re sixteen or so. So the EEC plainly think the war’s going to go on for at least four years and then some! Because otherwise it wouldn’t be worth it! And it’s already been going on forever with no end in sight – certainly no sign that we’re winning —’

‘Fifteen years.’

‘A lifetime .’

‘But still. It has to end sometime. Wars always do. Everything has to end,’ said Josephine, eating another ginger biscuit and getting unexpectedly philosophical.

‘Yeah. Things like human civilisation ,’ I said.

She went still again. She bowed her face over her objects and asked, ‘Is that really what you think will happen?’

She said it in a very calm, neutral voice, as if she were just curious. But it was at this point, rather late I suppose, I realised I was actually upsetting her. ‘No,’ I said, trying to sound less… harsh. I felt suddenly very tired. I looked out of the window again. ‘I just think things are going to carry on the way they are for a really, really long time.’

‘Hmm,’ said Josephine, loading a book on to her tablet and slumping down on the seat-bed-thing with the patchwork cushion under her cheek.

Mum had been right. We could see the net of light-shields around the Earth now. From the outside of it, the reflectors shone brightly, beaming all that warmth back towards the sun. So many of them, it looked as if Earth was wrapped in a glittery spider’s web. But there were wide raggedy holes here and there, and I smiled and wondered if the gap in the net we were passing through was one Mum had made.

‘About your mum,’ murmured Josephine from across the table. ‘I shouldn’t worry about getting any hassle out here.’

‘I never said I was worried!’

‘Well, if you were ,’ said Josephine, patiently, ‘you’re not going to be the only VIP on board. If you’re here, then everyone in the Coalition cabinet must have sent their kids out.’

‘Oh,’ I said, feeling at once very relieved and rather stupid. ‘I guess so.’ I thought about it a bit more. ‘Thanks.’

We were on the Mélisande for about a week. By the end of the first day, Earth was just a little blue-and-green bead in the far distance. By the end of the second, Mars was an orange spot on the blackness ahead. Like a red lentil, then a copper penny, then like the amber light of a traffic signal. And now you could see how the terraforming was changing it from the bare red rock it had once been. The bruise-purple seas. The silvery clouds. The dark-green smudges of arctic grassfields. The red and turquoise blazes of algae lakes.

The view was not enough to content Christa Trommler, the Swedish girl I’d noticed before. ‘There’s been a mistake. I need a cabin to myself,’ she told Sergeant Kawahara on the first day. ‘My father’s contributed a lot to the war effort.’

‘There aren’t any cabins, miss,’ said Sergeant Kawahara.

Christa put her hands on her hips and stuck out her jaw. She could only have been fifteen or sixteen, but she was tall and square-shouldered in an impossibly crisp white blazer and looked easily twenty. ‘There are cabins for the crew; some of them will have to move out for me.’

Kawahara stared at her blankly.

‘My father would never have allowed me to come if he’d known I would be treated like this. This ship is practically mine, anyway.’

‘Well, your father isn’t here now, is he?’ snapped Kawahara at last, and Christa’s eyes bulged and her face got red and wobbly.

‘Who is her father?’ I asked Josephine. I was getting to assume she knew everything.

‘Rasmus Trommler. He owns Archangel Planetary,’ Josephine said.

‘But I can’t possibly sleep with all these people around,’ cried Christa. And for a moment she didn’t look grown-up at all. In fact, she looked about to burst into tears.

As it turned out, getting to sleep wasn’t a problem for anyone – or at least, not in the way Christa expected. At the end of each day, the ship would try to soothe us gently with the sound of wind chimes or waves lapping at a shore. But just to make completely sure, they also used to knock us out with sleeping gas. I mean, I could see their point, I guess, because there were only five crew to manage three hundred kids and those five crew were looking pretty rough and ragged by the end of day two. By then there were not only romances but tearful shouty break-ups going on, and there were tribal allegiances forming, and there were fights. And then there were also things like the fort some of the younger ones built out of suitcases in the exercise room, and the game where you tried to get around as much of the spaceship as possible without touching the floor. So I suppose the crew did value being able to blast us with Somnolum X and then getting nine hours or so when they could be sure no one was up to anything.

Still, we were all outraged after we woke up the first morning and remembered the crew putting on oxygen masks and the captain pressing a button on the wall with a sigh of relief, and then a sort of whooshing noise and a funny smell in the air and then…

‘This is completely unethical,’ said Josephine, the moment she opened her eyes.

‘What about our human rights,’ demanded Carl, who’d gathered a small deputation of kids within minutes.

‘There’s a war on ,’ said Crewman Devlin, shortly.

I wondered if this meant grown-ups actually listened to you when there wasn’t a war on, because somehow I was sceptical.

The best thing about being on the ship was that sometimes they’d turn off the artificial gravity in the exercise chamber, and let you float and glide and bounce off the walls. Though it did tend to make some people sick, which is not a good thing to happen during weightlessness.

Sorry, there is rather a lot of throwing up in this part of the story.

Josephine mostly liked to read in there, drifting through slow somersaults, past windows full of stars, her tablet in her hands. But then, she liked to read everywhere, lying with the curtain drawn round her bed, tablet held above her face and a heap of stones-with-holes-in-them piled on her chest like some weird prehistoric-ritual dead person. When she was not reading, she was the most fidgety person I had ever met. I think someone else must have clipped her hair back for her so neatly that first day, because after that she mainly used her hairgrips for arranging into patterns, and then lost nearly all of them. She made wild and wavy hand gestures when she was speaking and sometimes even when she wasn’t. She even twisted small screws out of their holes in the panelling on the walls (using one of her few remaining hairgrips) and at that point I said, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll get in trouble,’ and she gazed at me in that blank way of hers and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know I was doing it.’