When the polar ice advanced as far as Nottingham, my school was closed and I was evacuated to Mars.

Miss Clatworthy called me into her office to tell me about it. I’d had in the back of my mind that she might be going to say the aliens had finally shot down my mother’s spacefighter, so on the whole I took the actual news fairly well. And that’s even though I knew Mars wasn’t really ready for normal people to live on yet. They’d been terraforming it for years and years, but even after everything they’d squirted or sprayed or puffed at it, and all the money they’d spent on toasting it gently like a gigantic scone, you could still only sort of breathe the air and sort of not get sunburned to death. So you can see that the fact someone had decided I would be safer there than say, Surrey, was not a sign that the war with the aliens was going fantastically well.

Still, after eight months of Muckling Abbot School for Girls, I thought I could probably cope. It was one of those huge old posh schools that are practically castles, and must have been pretty draughty even before the Morrors came along in their invisible ships and said, ‘Oh we’re going to settle on your planet! We only need the poles, which are more suitable for our needs! Don’t worry; you will hardly know we’re here! And as a sweetener we will reverse global warming!’ (Because that was a bad thing back then, apparently.) And of course, it turned out ‘the poles’ meant rather more of Earth than we were entirely happy about, and that they could reverse global warming rather more thoroughly than we liked.

‘Of course,’ Miss Clatworthy said, ‘it’s an Emergency Earth Coalition project and an Emergency Earth Coalition school up there. So it’s somewhat taken for granted you will enrol as a cadet in the Exo-Defence Force.’

Well that was a bit sooner than I expected, but I’d got the general idea of my future a long time ago, and whether I liked it or not it was always going to involve shooting things.

‘Of course,’ I agreed.

Now I knew what was really going on I thought I might as well relax, and I could even enjoy the fact the office was warmer than most of the school. We were on the coast and about fifty miles south of the worst of the ice, but that wasn’t saying much, what with the snow scouring across the playing fields in July and icicles the size of your leg dangling off everything and there never being enough power to keep anywhere properly warm. But there have got to be some perks to being the headmistress, I suppose, and Miss Clatworthy had a tiny coal fire going. I inched towards it and hoped she’d keep talking for a while.

She did. ‘And they’ll have those new robots teaching you, I dare say! No more boring old fuddy-duddy human teachers!’ she said, all tight-lipped and fake-jolly even though she obviously didn’t think it was a good thing.

I nodded. I was quite looking forward to seeing those. We only had a couple of robots for cleaning at Muckling Abbot and they were really old and didn’t even talk.

Miss Clatworthy sighed. ‘It’s all such a different world from when I was your age! But I’m sure you’ll be a credit to Muckling Abbot, and you’ll be following in dear Captain Dare’s footsteps. Your mother is such an inspiration to us all, Alice.’

‘Of course,’ I said again. There was actually a framed poster of my mother on the wall. This wasn’t as odd as it sounds. That particular shot of Mum, tossing back her hair in front of the Union Jack on the fin of her spacefighter, was very popular. She’d just blown up a lot of Morror ships at the Battle of Kara and that picture ended up all over the newspapers and that was when she started to become famous. Miss Clatworthy’s poster was one of those ones with ‘FOR EARTH! FOR ENGLAND!’ printed on them.

I didn’t like looking at it very much.

‘There’s a letter for you – I think it must be from her,’ said Miss Clatworthy rather wistfully, as if she wished a small nugget of Mum’s war-hero glory would fall out of the envelope and make everything a little bit better.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘You must be so proud of her.’

‘Yes,’ I said. And I was. But Miss Clatworthy looked at me in a vaguely discontented way. Teachers often thought being Stephanie Dare’s daughter meant I ought to march around the school setting a splendid example of morale and patriotism, and sometimes took me aside to tell me so. The other girls tended to think it meant I was in constant need of taking down a peg or two, and sometimes took me aside to tell me that.

This time Miss Clatworthy had other things on her mind, though. ‘And when you’re old enough,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you’ll give those fiendish creatures what for! Those cowardly, invisible brutes! Teach them to come and freeze over our planet as if they own the place!’

That was when I noticed it wasn’t just because of the cold that she was trembling and that her eyes were watery and pink. I felt sort of awful. She really must love the school, I thought. She was always telling us in assembly how we were supposed to, but it hadn’t occurred to me anyone actually could.

Later I wished I’d thought of saying something plucky and full of School Spirit like, ‘Oh, Miss Clatworthy, it’ll take more than a few invisible aliens to shut down Muckling Abbot School for Girls forever! We’ll soon be back – and more ladylike than ever!’ But I’m not very good at that sort of thing, and at the time all I could think was that I wanted to say sorry. I mean not just, ‘I’m sorry you’re sad,’ but sorry as if it was partly my fault. I don’t know why, unless it was because of being twelve and not being able to remember what it was like not to have fiendish creatures freezing over our planet as if they owned the place. Sometimes I did feel like that when adults got upset and homesick for how things were before. It made me feel as if the aliens and kids my age were all part of the same thing. We all happened at around the same time.

Obviously I was scared of the Morrors, because you can’t see them and they can kill you, and obviously I really wished they would go away. But I don’t think it ever bothered me so much that they exist, the way it bothers adults. When we did history I could imagine Romans, or Vikings, or Victorians – but I couldn’t imagine fifteen years ago and everyone running around being almost normal, but with no Emergency Earth Coalition and no one even knowing what Morrors were and hardly anyone being in the army at all.

I couldn’t say any of that, so I just said, ‘Yes, I’ll try to kill lots of aliens, Miss Clatworthy.’ And that didn’t seem to cheer her up much.

Now, you’ll have noticed Miss Clatworthy wasn’t making this announcement to the whole school. I certainly had. ‘It’s just me going, then,’ I said. ‘Just me from Muckling Abbot.’

‘There are only a few hundred places open for now. Maybe they’ll send more later,’ said Miss Clatworthy. ‘The rest of us will just head south to wherever will take us. There are the evacuee programmes on the South Coast… and the Channel Islands… and closer to the Equator for those who’ve got the connections and money, I suppose. So you are a very lucky girl, Alice,’ she finished. ‘And it might be wise if you don’t brag about this to the other girls.’

That annoyed me. ‘I wasn’t going to brag,’ I said, feeling less sorry for her. Honestly, didn’t she realise I had enough trouble with people like Juliet Maitland and Annabel Stoker lurking around the school whispering, ‘Alice Dare thinks she’s so special just because of her mum,’ and Finty Carmichael reminding me all the time that before my mum’s exploits became so fashionable, she was just a bank teller and my dad was a plumber and really I was a charity case.

That was one of the reasons I did not like Muckling Abbot. The others were these:

1) Even with a desperate battle for the survival of humanity going on, we were still all supposed to be highly ladylike and virtuous and proper, which meant: that you should not run in any circumstances except after a ball or away from an alien, that you should prefer to die rather than wear a hairband of an incorrect colour, and that you should act at all times as if you had completely failed to notice that certain aspects of our situation maybe kind of sucked.

2) Horrifying sludge-green uniforms in which we were all slowly dying of hypothermia while the teachers could wear as many jumpers and coats as they liked.

3) We were all divided up into houses with stupid names like Windsor and Plantagenet and expected to have House Spirit on top of School Spirit, and get really upset if our house didn’t win trophies for punctuality or tennis. Which I thought amounted to an incredibly obvious trick being played on us, as it does not benefit you personally at all if your Head of House is allowed temporary custody of a small silver cup with a picture of a Tudor Rose on it. But no one else seemed to agree.

4) Lots of singing.

Finty Carmichael was perfectly right that back in the good old days which none of us could remember, I wouldn’t have ended up at a posh school like Muckling Abbot. But I had to go somewhere; Gran’s health wasn’t great so she couldn’t look after me very well any more, and after the Battle of Kara there was this Emergency Earth Coalition programme about the education and care of the dependents of front-line fighters (especially the dependents of people who got made into posters, though obviously they didn’t say that). So the government was already in the way of sending me places, even before this Mars thing.

‘Good luck, then, Alice,’ said Miss Clatworthy, at last.

‘Good luck to you too, Miss Clatworthy,’ I said, and wondered if I ought to salute, if I was going to be in the army now.

What I was supposed to do after seeing Miss Clatworthy was go to the main hall with everyone else to sing the school song a few hundred times and listen to encouraging speeches and broadcasts from the EEC President and so on. But I didn’t feel like going and, in the circumstances, I thought there was a limit to how much trouble I could get into if I dodged it. So I went up on to the school battlements – yes, there were battlements – and read Mum’s letter.

I sighed a little bit. It’s not that I wanted Mum to be unhappy, of course, but I couldn’t help wishing she didn’t enjoy the war quite so much. She had to be one of the only people in the world who did.

I don’t want to give you the wrong idea about her. If, as she merrily swooped around the planet terrorising the invading aliens, some sort of genie with time-travelling powers had whooshed up in front of her and said, ‘Look, Stephanie Dare. Say the word and the war will NEVER HAVE HAPPENED and everyone who got killed in it will still be alive and your daughter will actually get to live with you and everything will be FINE – but you will have to be a bank teller again and never get to charge around in a spaceship blowing things up, or be on a poster or anything’ – then of course she would have said, ‘Go ahead.’ Because she is a good person. But some people never find out what they want to do, or what they’re good at. And even if my mum had somehow worked out, when sitting behind her counter at the bank, that what she really wanted to do and was really good at was being an alien-fighting, flying-ace space pilot, you can see how the knowledge would not have been all that useful to her.

I hoped Dad at least knew where I was going. He was an engineer on a submarine laying mines under the ice cap, so there wouldn’t be a letter from him for a while. I hadn’t seen him for even longer than I hadn’t seen Mum, but apart from some interest in getting to see the various odd creatures that the Morrors had released into the oceans, he had never given the impression he was having a nice time.

The sea was thick with clots of ice, a few loose bergs drifting along in the distance. I could just hear the purr of wings from a flight of heatships hovering low over the North Sea, and when I looked I could see them; the giant round lamps fixed underneath them glowing cherry-red through the plumes of steam from the water. They were crawling northwards, trying to slow the march of the ice, and they left curling streaks of clear dark water behind them. But the air was stinging cold on my face and ahead of those few ships there was so much white.

It was a good time in Earth’s history to be a polar bear. Unless the rumours were true about the Morrors eating them.

I did have some friends at Muckling Abbot, though I might have given you the impression I hadn’t. And it was just now hitting me that I wouldn’t be seeing them again for years, if at all.

I found Dot and Lizzy in our dorm. They’d had the same idea as me about skipping assembly and were sitting on the beds and watching videos on their tablets.

‘Are you OK?’ asked Lizzy. ‘What did Miss Clatworthy want?’

‘She wasn’t ghastly, was she?’ asked Dot, who said things like ‘ghastly’ on account of being just as posh as Annabel and Finty, without ever being so snotty about it.

‘It was just army stuff,’ I said, looking at the floor and the ceiling and the video of patriotic cats rather than at my friends’ faces.

‘Do you at least know where you’re going yet?’ asked Dot.

‘Oh… haha, sort of…’ I said. ‘What about you?’

Lizzy snorted glumly. ‘In the government programme. Staying with some random family in Cornwall.’

‘Cornwall’s supposed to be nice!’ I said rather too brightly.

‘Still don’t know for sure,’ said Dot. ‘But I’ve got cousins in the south of France.’

‘Oh, that’s brilliant!’ I said. ‘It’s still even sunny there, isn’t it?’

‘Sometimes. Supposedly. But Alice, where are you being evacuated?’

So I told them. There was a pause and then they both started being nice about it.

‘Well, that’s… cool,’ said Lizzy. ‘You’ll probably see some really interesting stuff.’

‘And the robots,’ Dot said.

‘Yeah, the robots,’ I said. ‘But it won’t be that great being stuck on a rock with hardly any oxygen and no way home. They’re using us for an experiment, really.’ Which was true but I said it because I didn’t want it to seem like this amazing special treatment I was getting and they weren’t. But that didn’t work very well because it was amazing special treatment I was getting and they weren’t. Although I would have preferred to go to the south of France.

Dot and Lizzy said they wouldn’t tell anyone and I don’t think they did. But it didn’t really make much difference, because the next morning a lot of buses turned up at the school gates and it became rather conspicuous that I was not getting on to any of them. People started looking at me in a suspicious and accusing way and I could hardly stand it. Of course, they guessed something was up and that it must be something to do with who my mum was. And I almost felt glad Annabel Stoker and Finty Carmichael used to give me a hard time, because in the end the EEC thought my life was worth more than theirs and it wasn’t fair. And so they’d kind of been right about me all along.

Finally the last bus pulled away and everyone had gone, except for the people boarding up the windows and Mrs Skilton, who seemed to be the person who’d got stuck with me until someone from the EEC came. Mrs Skilton was my favourite dinner lady, not because she was nice but because she was gloomy and dour and silent and didn’t prance around the dining hall chirruping about how everyone who did not eat up every scrap was basically evil because think of the starving Canadians.

Mrs Skilton grunted with vague contempt – either for me or for the universe in general – and then stood there on the terrace smoking a cigarette and glowering balefully into the icy distance. Which was pretty much what I’d been doing the day before on the battlements, so I didn’t judge and wandered off on my own, and she didn’t stop me.

It was sort of interesting seeing Muckling Abbot with no one in it, although lonely too, and I went into all the places I hadn’t been allowed before. I went into the staffroom and ate some biscuits I found there. I drew a little picture of the Earth on the wall in green biro with an arrow pointing to it and next to it I wrote, ‘ALICE DARE WAS HERE.’ And I wondered if anyone would ever find it or if the school would fall down under all the snow and ice before that happened.

Then Mrs Skilton bawled that the EEC man was here and I went down to the drive and there was a jeep painted in whitish-grey camouflage and a young soldier waiting for me.

Mrs Skilton dragged on her cigarette and announced fiercely, ‘I don’t hold with messing about on other planets,’ which rather took me aback, and then she grimaced in farewell and stomped off.

I got into the jeep and we drove away and I knew I’d never see Muckling Abbot again. And I never did.

The soldier’s name was Harris and amazingly he did not say a single thing about my mum and I quite liked him. He glanced back at Muckling Abbot’s icy towers and grinned and said, ‘Wow, my school was mainly portakabins,’ and I said my primary school in Peterborough had been much more like that too, but presumably on Mars it would be something else altogether.

‘So, you’ll be safe out of the fighting for four years,’ he said, when I’d finished explaining the new arrangements for my future.

‘Yes. Well. In theory.’ I tried not to think about all the various things that could go wrong between Lincolnshire and Mars. ‘It’s a privilege, I’m very lucky,’ I added dutifully.

‘But, in return, you have to join the army.’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though you’re twelve.’

‘Yes.’ It sounded awfully grim put like that, for all Miss Clatworthy’s cooing about how brilliant it was. ‘They’re only going to be training us,’ I said. ‘It’s just, we’ve got to start young so we can be this new wave of special fighters or whatever. I won’t be actually up against Morrors until I’m oh, at least sixteen.’

‘Hmm,’ said Harris, and made a face as if something smelled bad.

‘Everyone’s in the army,’ I said. ‘You’re in the army.’

‘I wasn’t when I was twelve. And I did have a choice.’

‘Well, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?’ I said. Because he was grown up.

This did not cheer Harris up particularly, so I asked him what he’d been doing in the war and he sighed and said he hadn’t been doing anything for a long time because he’d been hurt by Morror shockrays over Norway and had only just got better. ‘And after all that, look what they’ve got me doing. Ferrying little kids about.’

He smiled and I got the impression he was actually pretty pleased to be ferrying kids about, compared to some of the stuff he could have been up to.

We drove through a few little villages, some of which were completely abandoned to the cold, but some still busy and pretty with their snow-covered roofs, and except for the queues outside shops everything looked as if there was no war with aliens going on at all.

‘Still, seeing Mars, though,’ mused Harris, as if he’d been carrying on a debate about it in his head. ‘That’s something. Are you excited?’

I said, ‘Yes,’ automatically because life is generally easier if you answer such questions the way the person asking them obviously wants you to, but I really hadn’t been excited until then because I’d been busy thinking about Lizzy and Dot and Miss Clatworthy and Mum and about having to be in the army myself and other such considerations. Still it was a good question because it made me wonder for the first time if I could be excited. After all, I was going to be one of the first children living on another planet; anyone ought to be at least mildly excited about that. So I cheered up a bit and made an effort to stay that way.

We drove for about three hours or so, and eventually the snow thinned out and the landscape was mostly brown and grey instead of just white, and there were hundreds and hundreds of greenhouses growing food, and it was still pretty bleak but at least it was easier to play I Spy.

Then we got to an airbase in a valley somewhere in Suffolk, where there were planes and heatships and even some Auroras and Flarehawks standing around the muddy runways. And Harris said, ‘Well, have fun up there,’ and rather stupidly I said, ‘You too,’ and he smiled but his face was tight and he said he would be going north again soon and it would be good to see the rest of his squadron. But he didn’t look as if he expected it to be fun.

So he drove away and a lady led me into a rec room in one of the boxy buildings where there was a snooker table and a television and a games screen.

Through the rest of the afternoon other kids turned up looking dazed and lost, until by dinner time there were fourteen of us. There were a couple of little kids and a lot of teenagers, who monopolised the games screen and the TV, so I felt a bit stuck on my own and I thought, Oh God, is it going to be like this for the next four years? Because I didn’t know how many of us were going altogether.

But there was this girl called Kayleigh who was fifteen and very excited about everything in a slightly desperate way and she had multi-coloured hair and a bag full of all sorts of things she wasn’t meant to have. Most of it got taken off her later, but not before she and some of the other teenagers got fairly drunk after supper and Kayleigh had helped me dye pink streaks into my hair, which my mum probably wouldn’t have let me do and Muckling Abbot definitely wouldn’t. And that made me feel bold and intrepid and up for adventure. Well, relatively speaking, anyway.

So there was some unpleasantness when the soldiers found out what was going on and a corporal shouted at us for being so irresponsible and a disgrace to the Exo-Defence Force uniforms we were going to end up wearing, and after various people burst into tears because of that and other reasons, and when the boys and girls had been sorted back into their separate dormitories, we all went to sleep. And the next morning we were all packed on to a distressingly battered-looking plane and off we went to the middle of the Atlantic.

Kayleigh had cried a lot the night before, but she seemed to change mood very quickly and now she got everyone singing. And while endless cheery singalongs generally rather annoy me, I had to admit hers were better than the songs at Muckling Abbot.

They played some films on the flight but I was feeling too nervous to concentrate on them and so mainly I looked out the window a lot. Underneath the plane, the world turned green and then blue and it was the most colour I’d seen in ages. Even now I’m not exactly sure where we went, but I saw what had to be the coast of Africa rolling past all huge and golden, and once a scattering of islands. And I remembered my little green biro drawing on the wall in the Muckling Abbot staffroom and my heart started pounding too hard as I thought, But that’s where I’m from. And there’s so much I don’t know about it yet and what if I never come back.

At last we landed on a platform in the middle of the ocean like a small round metal island, maybe two hundred metres across. And crouching on this platform was a large spaceship shaped something like a stick insect with the name Mélisande on its bow. There were soldiers stationed around to stop people climbing on it, although nothing could stop the seagulls from perching all over it and pooing, which I thought was quite amusing because it made Kayleigh’s song almost prophetic.

Even with all the seagull poo, I thought it was an amazing place. There was no ice at all and the water and the sky were blue and sparkling and it was so warm.

Planes kept swooping down and dumping loads of children on the platform until there were about three hundred of us rattling around. There were some international games and sandwich-swapping, in the spirit of comradeship and standing united against a common foe. And there was also some international fighting, which was more in the spirit of history and tradition. But it was so sunny that after a while a lot of us just sprawled around on the painted steel, feeling completely dopey and blissful in the heat and really not wanting to go anywhere.

I was lying near the edge of the platform gazing dreamily at the glittery water, thinking that what I really wished I could do was go for a swim, when a pair of bare feet whisked right over my head and I looked up just in time to see someone leap up on to the barrier and go catapulting over it. It was too fast and the light was too bright for me to get a good look at this person, but I heard a yell like a kind of war cry and, a second later, an equally loud splash as he hit the water.

I jumped up, wondering if someone really objected to our looming Martian exile so much that he was prepared to drown himself over it. With several other kids and nearby alarmed crew members, I looked over the side. What I saw was a big fizzing patch of white bubbles, and in the middle of it a pair of legs in jeans was waving idly in the air. Then the legs tipped over with another splash and up came the head of a stubbly-haired boy about my age, who looked maybe Malaysian or Filipino or something. He bellowed: ‘EVERYONE COME IN, THE WATER’S AWESOME!’

He was Australian. He had an amazingly loud voice. I don’t know how there was even room for the lungs he must have had to produce that kind of noise. And all the crew had to react pretty quickly to stop about fifty of the nearest kids from doing exactly what he said and plunging into the water right then and there. And… well, I guess I might have been one of them. Although I did also think that kid was an idiot. I don’t know. I was torn.

So the platform crew were ordering us in their scariest military voices to get back from the edge while a forlorn little boy with tously hair was hopping about, clutching what must have been the older boy’s abandoned shirt and shoes and shouting, ‘Kuya…! Kuya…!’

And meanwhile the kid was happily turning another somersault and whooping and spitting spouts of water into the air until an extremely annoyed soldier stomped down a ladder to the ocean, jumped in after him and fished him out.

By the time the kid was sploshing across the deck, we were all lined up in our National Groups to stop us from acting on any more clever ideas. But I was still fairly close and honestly, I think even people in orbit could have seen that here was someone who wasn’t the least embarrassed at being hauled out in front of a couple of hundred people soaking wet with no shirt on. On the other hand the little boy clutching his shoes, who was now lined up with the other Australian kids, looked mortified.

The wet soldier turned the boy over to a sergeant who roared at him, ‘NAME?’

Even when the boy wasn’t actually yelling, his voice had a bit of a boom to it. He said, ‘Carl Dalisay,’ which was a little confusing to me because of the ‘Kuya’ thing.

‘You think you’re funny, do you, Dalisay?’

Carl Dalisay just gazed up at the sergeant with wide earnest eyes and said, ‘Come on! It’s my last chance to go for a swim on my own planet!’

The EDF people were all so angry I almost thought the sergeant might shoot Carl Dalisay right there as an example to the rest of us, and tell his family he unfortunately fell off the spaceship. But instead he just made him do push-ups, which Carl did, sploshily, while giggling the whole time.

After that he bounded over to the little kid, who was clearly his brother, and wrapped a damp arm round his head just to be annoying. The little one wriggled away and lamented, ‘Why’d ya have to do things like that, Kuya?’

‘Oh, what was going to happen? There was a ladder right there! I’m not a moron.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said the little kid. ‘And are there hammerhead sharks? A big metal beam under the water? You don’t know! And you’re in massive trouble!’

‘Yeah, well,’ Carl-or-Kuya said. ‘It was worth it.’

The little one sighed heavily and went off to try and feed a seagull.

Before any of us had really got our breath back from this incident, there was a cascade of noise from overhead – sonic boom after sonic boom – and people started pointing excitedly upwards, where sure enough a small flight of spacefighters had just punched through the atmosphere and were blazing down across the blue sky. And evidently they weren’t alone up there, because as they plunged they were wheeling and swooping and dodging and firing into what looked like a completely empty sky. Except that sometimes, just for a shaving of a second when they took a hit, you could see the outline of the Morror ships – U-shaped and transparent in the rays, flickering like ghosts. A Flarehawk looped backwards from a shockray blast. There was a mixture of cheers and screams from the kids on the platform, depending on how often they’d seen this sort of thing before.

In my case? Often enough that I didn’t make any noise. Not so often that my chest didn’t get tight either. Spaceship battles would be very pretty, if you could forget you might be about to watch someone die.

The EDF seemed to agree that it was time to get us off the planet. All the doors of the Mélisande sprang open and soldiers started hurrying us inside one National Group at a time, which meant Carl and the other Australians were soon on board but there was a lot of hanging about for those of us from countries down at the bottom of the alphabet like ‘United Kingdom’.

‘This is ridiculous! You are going to get us all killed!’ burst out a tall blonde girl in expensive sunglasses in the Swedish section. None of the EDF officers took any notice, and she subsided into complaining loudly to the few other Swedish kids.

At last I got jostled down an aisle and into a seat by a window, and at first I was too busy trying to look out to take in much about the inside of the ship. We could still hear the battle shrieking and booming, but no matter how uncomfortably I strained against my seat belt and pressed to the window I couldn’t see it, which somehow made it a lot more nerve-wracking and no one was cheering at all any more.

A trio of EDF officers assembled at the front of the cabin. ‘I’m Captain Mendez,’ said the man in the middle. ‘Everyone stay calm. You’re perfectly safe. The walls of this ship are strong enough to withstand any stray shockrays.’

He had a nice reassuring voice, but the effect was rather undermined by the crewwoman next to him nodding vigorously and adding, ‘Mostly strong enough.’

Forty or so hands went up at that, but no one seemed to be in the mood to be taking questions. Captain Mendez just scowled and said, ‘Thank you, Sergeant Kawahara,’ to the crewwoman and, ‘We’ll be leaving very shortly,’ to us and then he strode away again.

And yet we didn’t move. The windows flashed with the Morrors’ shockrays and we just sat there. I twisted around in my seat belt trying to see what the hold-up was. The Mélisande must have been some kind of luxury tourist liner before the war. It was all curved pearly surfaces and on the wall beside my head was a faded poster of a couple with champagne glasses in their hands, gazing soppily back at the Earth with the slogan ‘Archangel Planetary: Taking You to the Stars!’ But the shiny walls were lined with scars where the luxurious private cabins had been ripped out and sensible military fixtures had been bolted in. Now the ship was crammed with padded benches for both sitting and sleeping on. They were arranged in pairs with a table and a little curtain that could go around the two of you, and that was all the privacy you got.

But there wasn’t anyone on the bench opposite me.

Why wouldn’t there be someone on the bench opposite me?

The few crew members who seemed to be in charge of us kept stalking around looking tense with their communicators beeping all the time. I heard one of them whispering to another. ‘We’re just going to have to go without them!’

‘Who’s missing?’ Kayleigh was saying, a few seats back from me. ‘What’s happened to them? Have the Morrors got them?’

‘Come on, we have to move,’ yelled the angry Swedish girl from before.

Instead of actually talking to us, the EDF people let the ship do it. And apparently the ship’s idea of a useful contribution was to start playing twinkly music and waterfall noises. ‘Please relax and stay in your seats,’ crooned a soothing, automated voice. ‘Imagine a stream of healing energy flowing through you…’

Outside, something – one of our ships or one of theirs, we didn’t know – exploded. I was hurting the palms of my hands by digging my fingernails into them. I tried to remind myself that there was no particular reason the Morrors should bother with a passenger ship trying to LEAVE the planet.

Then there was a roaring sound very close that rattled everyone, but it was just an ordinary plane landing on the platform. All the crew’s communicators started beeping even more furiously and finally a door opened, and twenty kids ran up into the cabin, looking rather agitated to say the least.

Before they’d even sat down, the door had slammed itself shut and there was a whirr and a lurch as the spaceship’s legs retracted. And then we were moving, skimming low over the Atlantic: I looked out and saw it melt into a dark-blue blur. Already the artificial gravity was working against the drag of the natural stuff, which meant you didn’t fall about as much as you would have done otherwise but felt very odd. None of us was used to it and some people were sick into the bags provided. Luckily I don’t throw up very easily, but it made me feel as if I was being hit lightly but persistently all over with tablespoons.

And then we were beginning to climb. One of the new arrivals came staggering down the aisle and toppled into the seat opposite me, panting. ‘Hello,’ she said. To my surprise, she was English too.

‘Nice to meet you,’ I said, as we shot upwards into the flashing blue sky.

Earth fought to hold on to us – we could feel its pull in our bones, and in the way the ship shivered. But we dragged stubbornly on, and the planet dropped away. And then there’s that moment when the surface you’re leaving curves in on itself and the horizon bends into a circle and you see the world really is round after all. Even though you know it’s going to happen, it’s still like the biggest, most shocking conjuring trick ever.

Now we could see the bands of white at the poles, pressing in on the bright stripe of colour in the middle. Here and there, the world glittered with little sparks which were explosions and shockray fights.

The girl opposite me whispered, ‘Beautiful,’ with a sort of break in her voice.

She was pressed as close to the window as she could get. The ship, mercifully, had stopped advising us all to imagine we were relaxing in a sunlit glade and everything felt strangely quiet and still. I don’t think I answered; I just stared back as the Earth got smaller and smaller behind us.

Then she added thoughtfully, ‘I’ve forgotten my suitcase.’

I was appalled. ‘What?’ I cried. ‘Oh my God!’ And I actually started a little out of my seat as if I could run back to Earth and get it for her.

She seemed much less worried than I was. ‘Oh well. It only had clothes in it.’

‘But – what, you’ve got nothing?’

She looked reproachful. ‘There was a lot going on,’ she said. ‘And no, I didn’t forget anything important.’ Now I saw there was a large shoulder bag slumped open on the seat beside her, the stuff inside it on the point of spilling out. So she began to take things out of it and set them on the table between us.

‘This is all you’ve got in the entire world?’

She shrugged, vastly. The shrug went all the way to the tips of her fingers and up into her hair. ‘We’re not in the world any more.’

She had: a battered tablet, which was almost the only thing that had an obvious point. A tangle of string. A magnifying glass. A gold wire star that looked as if it came from a Christmas tree. A harmonica. A square silk scarf. A thick roll of duct tape. A little round silver bottle. A small patchwork cushion, which might have started out as dark red but was now mainly grey and worn. A tiny wooden sculpture of a cat. And lots of stones, some with holes in them.

‘You have rocks,’ I pointed out. ‘In your bag. Which you’re taking into outer space. Rocks. And no clothes or a toothbrush.’

She stared at me blankly as if this was what everyone should be doing.

I did some minor flailing and said, ‘You can borrow things of mine.’

She seemed surprised, and sort of amused. ‘That’s nice of you. You don’t even know my name yet.’

‘Oh,’ I said, flustered by this point. ‘Well.’

‘It’s Josephine Jerome. Have a ginger biscuit.’

She shook a packet of them at me. Well, that was one more thing I could see the point of. ‘Alice,’ I said.

Any of my clothes would be too big on her though, I thought, looking at her. She was small and black and spindly with a pointy chin and a wide bulgy forehead. She had an explosive cloud of hair, held tightly back from her face with grips, and her large starey eyes gave her the look of being in a mild state of shock the whole time. Though just then, it occurred to me, she actually might have been.

‘What happened?’ I asked her. ‘How come you were all so late? And you’re English – why weren’t you on the same flight with us?’

Josephine slotted her thumb through the hole in one of the stones. ‘We should have been. But, uh, there were some shockray hits in London yesterday. Everything shut down.’

‘In London?’ I said, shocked, and angry no one had told us. Despite everything the Morrors got up to, direct attacks on major cities were pretty rare. They were more about freezing everything over and zapping the hell out of anyone who tried to stop them.

Josephine nodded grimly and gripped the stone more tightly. ‘They could flatten the whole city if they wanted; they must just want people to leave. And now we are.’

I was quiet. It hadn’t quite struck me before that at this rate the whole of Britain would probably be gone by the time I came back to Earth, if I ever did.

‘So the flight out from Belgium got diverted to pick us up. Anyway, we made it in the end. And they’ll have toothbrushes,’ she added, reassuringly. ‘They couldn’t expect us to use the same ones for years and years, could they?’

At this point we were interrupted by a demonstration of what to do if the spaceship came under attack or got into an accident (though clearly the real answer was: die). And then a man came round with a register to make sure they’d got all the right people, although it was a bit late to do anything about it if they hadn’t.

‘Alice Dare,’ I said, after Josephine had given her name.

The crewman’s eyes lifted slowly from his tablet and he looked at me. He said doubtfully, ‘Alistair…?’

‘ALICE. DARE!’ I said, possibly rather loudly. Now, I did once know a boy called Lauren so anything is possible, but I do NOT look as if my name should be Alistair. I was wearing a skirt and as well as the pink streaks in my hair, I also had some glitter.

I always speak very clearly too, so the reason this keeps happening is that people do not listen.

A few people looked around at us and the crewman grimaced and moved on quickly.

‘I think you scared him,’ said Josephine, grinning, and she leaned forwards to study me quite blatantly in a way that some people might think a little rude. ‘Dare, huh,’ she said. ‘No relation…?’

I thought, I’ve got one second to say no and come up with a whole new identity and maybe not have to deal with any of that she-thinks-she’s-so-special-because-of-her-mum stuff. And then I realised I hadn’t got that long at all, because immediately Josephine said, ‘Ohhh…’ and sat back in her seat with her eyes even wider than usual. In a lower voice she asked, ‘What’s that like?’

I sighed. ‘It’s like nothing at all,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen her in over a year.’

‘But that’s why you’re here,’ she went on, relentlessly. ‘Too demoralising if people heard the Morrors got you. They’d never look at that poster the same way again.’

‘Yes, well,’ I said, rather irritably. ‘What are you in for?’

‘Oh…’ said Josephine, biting her lip. ‘I sort of… well, there was this exam, and… not that they told us why they were setting it, but…’

We looked at each other and grinned sort of shiftily. And I knew we were both thinking that there just wasn’t a reason to be chosen for this ship that wasn’t kind of dodgy and unfair, whether it was doing well in an exam or having a famous mum or even being chosen at random (because that was the other way they did it). But there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. We were twelve.

‘Is it true your mum’s seen a Morror?’ asked Josephine, because except for some singed tentacles that had been picked out of a wreck in Minnesota, and some bits of what might have been a head found floating in the Pacific, no one had seen a Morror back then. They were really good at staying invisible even when they were dead.

‘No. She’s got this… sense about them – you know, it’s been on the news. Sometimes she says it’s as if she can see their ships, like she forgets they’re invisible. But she doesn’t know what they look like or anything.’

‘I thought so,’ Josephine said. She put down her stone and looked at her collection of objects on the table for a moment, wriggling her fingers absently in the air. She picked up the bottle. ‘This is a Morror ship, right? The invisibility shield guides light all the way round it.’ She slid her forefinger over the silver surface. ‘But maybe some does scatter off. Maybe your mum is sensitive to some wavelength of light most people can’t pick up consciously.’

I thought about this. Most people – Mum included, actually – seemed to think her special Morror-finding sense was practically magic. I never said so, but secretly I had always assumed it was just good luck. I liked the idea of it being something science-y like that instead. It made it seem more likely it would go on working.

‘What’s in the bottle?’ I asked.

She squirreled the bottle away back into the bag and answered, ‘Perfume.’

I wondered why someone who evidently didn’t care about clothes at all cared about perfume, but I didn’t press it. Maybe it was her mum’s or something.

She had another look at me, and grinned again. ‘You like pink, huh?’

‘Yes,’ I said, a little menacingly, because I thought she might be laughing at me.

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.

Landing on a planet is worse than taking off, or at least I think so, because you’re basically falling. For the first time in days, everyone on the ship mostly shut up. Opposite me, Josephine was gripping the edge of her seat.

The windows filled with fire as we burned through the atmosphere, and then suddenly instead of blackness and stars around us we were plunging through a pale, purplish sky. The ship was once again urging us to breathe deeply and think of babbling brooks and sun-dappled beaches, and the being-hammered-by-tablespoons feeling was even worse than before.

The coppery ground flies up at you and the spaceship starts to slow down but it doesn’t seem like it can possibly slow down enough, so you’re still absolutely sure you’re going to crash and how on Earth – how both on and off Earth – can my mum do this all the time?

And then we stopped moving. Everything went weirdly quiet.

We were on Mars.

There was a floaty feeling that seemed as if it should wear off now we’d stopped moving, but it didn’t. It made you want to move. I was suddenly very, very impatient to get out of the spaceship and I wriggled against the seatbelt.

‘Ow,’ said Josephine, because I’d accidentally kicked her in the shin. My foot just came up a lot higher than I meant it to. This wasn’t the artificial gravity any more. This was Mars’ brand of the real thing, and there was a lot less of it.

Kayleigh led a round of slightly hysterical cheering – theoretically for the crew, though really everyone just felt like clapping and screaming. The crew lurched around the main passenger cabin looking completely exhausted, making sure we’d all got oxygen masks, for acclimatising. The oxygen canisters were pretty big, but they didn’t feel heavy.

There was a thump from the escape shuttle where Carl was still shut up in disgrace. I imagined that was him trying to get out, or at least doing an experimental jump around and hitting the ceiling.

When we had the oxygen masks fixed over our faces, the doors opened and a blast of thin air flowed in. It was cold but as you know, I was used to that. And slower than we wanted, but faster than the crew wanted, we all spilled down the ramp on to the surface of Mars.

Beagle Base was a cluster of domes and windmills and drum-shaped buildings on stilts. The hills above the base were smooth, abrupt lumps with polished red sides, still bald, though there was thin blackish-green arctic grass growing on the plain.

But we weren’t that bothered about where we were going to be living at first. What we saw at once was that you would never, ever for a single second be able to forget you were on a different world. The sun was too small and too pale. The horizon was too close, and too curved. I don’t think people would ever have thought the world was flat if they’d started off on Mars.

And the gravity. It was amazing. It felt like we’d suddenly got superpowers, because in a way we had. I jumped as high as I could. This turned out to be as high as my own head. It was almost as exciting as being able to fly, but kind of scary too, because that’s a long way to come down. But I descended slowly enough to see the red horizon settling lazily back into place around me, and Josephine looking up at me and then taking off herself. Soon everyone was doing it, three hundred kids all bouncing up and down on the alien plain like bubbles in a pan of boiling water.

Then there was a horrible blaring noise overhead and everyone jumped or shrieked or giggled or fell over according to character. Until then we hadn’t noticed the three little flying silver ball-things that had whooshed over from behind a cluster of red rocks and were now spinning around in a triangle formation above us. They shouted in one deep, annoyed, American voice: ‘You will get in a line! You will be silent! You are all Exo-Defence Force cadets now! You will act like it!’

So we did that, at least the getting-in-a-line part, and we were quick about it too because those things were scary.

‘EDF Goads,’ said Josephine. ‘I read about them…’

One of the Goads plunged down out of the pinkish sky and hovered in front of us, shimmering. In the shimmer we could see the face of an old, angry-looking man, who bawled at Josephine: ‘SILENCE!’ And then it swooped off along the line and bawled the same thing at a lot of other people, with variations like ‘STAND UP STRAIGHT!’ and ‘TAKE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE!’ and one of the other Goads swept along behind it translating into various languages and sounding just as furious whether it was yelling ‘SILENZIO!’ or ‘CHEN MO!’ even though it was automated.

A large, strange shape was emerging over one of the hills; something huge and black with four legs, a bit like a horse and a bit like a dog and a bit like a monkey – except that it didn’t have a head, because being a robot, it didn’t need one. Astride its back was the man whose face we’d seen in the Goad. He was actually robot himself from the knees down. You could see this because even though he had to be at least seventy-five, and even though we were on Mars and it was chilly to say the least, he was wearing very short shorts.

He looked down at us from his steed, which you almost expected to rear up dramatically against the skyline.

‘I AM COLONEL DIRK CLEAVER.’ He was very loud, even louder than Carl, but even if he hadn’t been, the three little Goads which were now whirling above him amplified his voice all over the Martian plain.

‘And there are some things you should know about me,’ he went on just as loudly. ‘I never wanted to wind up stuck on this rock, babysitting the likes of you, because some snivelling pen-pusher thinks I’m too old to fight. But since I am here, by God, YOU WILL BECOME THE FINEST FIGHTING FORCE OF SEVEN-TO-SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN. Those invisible scumbuckets will quail in terror of you. But first, you will quail in terror of me!’

I was already quailing, maybe not quite in terror, but certainly in general Oh-God-What-Is-This-ness. I sneaked a glance at Josephine. She was not quailing at all, but she was staring into the distance in a resigned kind of way, as if she was sizing up what the next four years were going to be like.

Dirk Cleaver pointed. ‘There are your barracks; I want you back out here in uniform in twenty minutes!’ For a moment he looked vaguely disgusted. ‘The civilian robots will show you what to do.’ He didn’t sound as if he thought much of the civilian robots. I was still keen to see what they’d be like; though the thing the Colonel was riding was exciting enough to be going on with. He shouted, ‘Yah!’ and the thing responded just as if it had been an animal; it charged down the hill with him sitting easily upright astride it. The headlessness was creepier when it moved – it could go in any direction without hesitating or looking where it was going. Sometimes, when there was a big rock or something in the way, it would go straight from galloping like a horse to moving sideways like a crab. Once he was down on the plain, the Colonel rode along the line of children with his whirling Goads sweeping after him, as we all tried to quail in suitable terror. ‘Go on! Get moving! March!’

So we marched off as best we could towards Beagle Base. Colonel Cleaver’s voice continued to yell at us out of the Goads, ‘Quick march! Left, right!’ while another robot came to meet us, hovering above the ground like the Goads. Except this one was shaped like a sunflower with a smiley face and playing a jingly tune.

‘Hi there!’ it said in a friendly way. ‘Hola chicos! Namaste doston! Nimen hao! Wow, you’re a long way from home! Welcome to Beagle Base! Why don’t we take a look around?’

‘You will become living weapons!’ roared the Colonel. ‘You will be disciplined! You will be strong! You will be ruthless!’

‘We’re going to have a fun time together!’ giggled the sunflower robot placidly.

‘I don’t think I like it here,’ said Josephine.

As the days went by, it became clear that it would be the older kids who got the brunt of the Colonel’s training regime, because they were going to be doing all this stuff for real in a year or two. So the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds were doing flight sims and weapons drills and climbing over the Cydonian hills every day, while we younger ones were mostly indoors doing Wordsworth or learning how to do comparisons in Spanish or mediaeval crop rotation with the Goldfish.

Sometimes, though, as a change from telling us about the French Revolution, it gave lessons about the planet we were actually living on.

‘Hey, kids,’ sang the Goldfish, glowing contentedly as it floated around the classroom. ‘Today we’re going to be talking about the Labyrinth of Night!’

The name sent a pleasant shiver down my spine. I imagined a huge, dark maze full of ghosts. There were all these strange and lovely names on Mars. Memnonia, Mariner’s Valley, the Golden Plain. And thinking about them made me wish I could go to those places and see if they looked anything like the way they did in my head.

‘Do you think we could go there?’ I said wistfully. ‘On a sort of… field trip?’

‘Oh, no, Alice,’ said the Goldfish. ‘You kids need to stay here at Beagle where it’s full of fun and oxygen! Until the terraforming’s finished, Mars is too dangerous for exploring!’

I thought crossly that the EDF weren’t so worried about keeping us safe once we’d successfully been turned into living weapons, and meanwhile the Goldfish hovered over to Gavin.

‘So Gavin, what can you tell us about the Labyrinth of Night?’

‘Uh,’ said Gavin, biting his lip. ‘I guess it’s… erm… on Mars. Somewhere.’

‘Aww,’ said the Goldfish sadly, after waiting in vain for more. ‘You need to put in more work by yourself, buddy! But never mind! See what you can learn in class today.’ It bustled over to Josephine. ‘Can you help us out, Josephine?’

Josephine didn’t notice the Goldfish was talking to her. She was leaning back in her chair, dreamily gazing up at a bee circling under the transparent roof of the dome. The bees got kind of everywhere on Beagle Base. Our classroom was in the inner ring around the garden dome, so there weren’t any windows in its high white walls, but you could see the clouds through the curve of the ceiling, and it had been raining heavily all morning – weird rain, falling so much more slowly than on Earth, making a purring, warbling noise on the roof. It was quite nice in a way, feeling hidden and safe, with no spaceships zapping each other overhead and nothing in the sky but rain. But on the other hand it made you feel shut in and very aware of how lonely Beagle Base was and how we really were very cut off from everything. We’d been on Mars nearly a month by now, and we hadn’t had any kind of contact from Earth. Sometimes I wondered if the Morrors could have actually taken over the world by now and when we would find out if they had. And I also wondered if they’d killed my mum yet, but wondering about that wasn’t anything new.

‘Wakey wakey, Josephine,’ urged the Goldfish, nudging her arm with its nose, almost like a friendly dog.

‘Mmmh,’ Josephine said sleepily. ‘Urgh. What?’

Gavin tittered nastily.

‘The Labyrinth of Night,’ prompted the Goldfish patiently.

‘Oh. Noctis Labyrinthus. It’s a system of canyons by the equator at the west end of Valles Marineris – Mariner’s Valley. It was formed by extensional tectonics in the Noachian Period and erosion by rivers and collapse of grabens in the late Hesperian and Amazonian Periods,’ said Josephine. Then she dropped her head on to her arms on the desk as if exhausted.

Josephine was the sort of person who stumbles into a lesson without her books or tablet or any apparent idea of what’s going on, and almost never puts her hand up, but then seems to know more or less everything. It would have driven a human teacher at least slightly crazy, but being a robot the Goldfish had infinite patience.

(Well, that’s what I thought. We found out eventually that it did have its limits, and it could snap, but I’ll come to that later.)

‘That’s great, Josephine, good job!’ it said, completely satisfied, skimming back to the front of the classroom. ‘A graben is what happens when a block of land falls down in an earthquake and becomes the flat bottom of a new valley,’ it told the rest of us.

Josephine looked slightly mournful. It wasn’t that she did this sort of thing for dramatic effect, I don’t think, but she would have liked some reaction. ‘You can’t surprise it,’ she told me later.

She’d at least managed to surprise Gavin, and not in a pleasant way, because he muttered, ‘Swot.’

Josephine rolled her eyes magnificently and otherwise ignored him, but the Goldfish didn’t stand for that kind of thing at all. ‘Now, you cut that out, Gavin,’ it said sternly. ‘I’d like you to say sorry right now!’

Scowling, Gavin did.

‘So, who else is out there?’ asked Carl. ‘There’s Zond Station, right? What are those guys up to?’

‘Good question, Carl!’ twinkled the Goldfish. It spun slightly to project a hologram of Mars from its mouth into the air. ‘Zond is aaaaaaaall the way over here by Mount Olympus, and that’s not just the tallest mountain on Mars, it’s the tallest mountain in the Solar System! Don’t you think that’s nifty?’ It zoomed in on the mountain to show that its peak rose right above the atmosphere, bare of snow and ice. ‘Zond Station is just a very small base for our brave Exo-Defence fighters! But there’s also Schiaparelli Outpost – who can guess where that is?’

‘Schiaparelli Crater,’ I said.

‘Good job, Alice!’ enthused the Goldfish, spinning the projection of Mars to show where that was. ‘And that’s where some clever scientists like our very own Dr Muldoon are working hard to see how the new ecosystem’s doing! Does anyone remember what an ecosystem is?’

‘So there’s only a few hundred people on the whole planet, and most of them are us,’ concluded Carl, ignoring this question.

‘That’s right, Carl! And of course there’s lots of my robot pals out there, enriching the soil and the air and planting seeds and making Mars a better place for you to enjoy!’

‘Well, no they’re not,’ I said gloomily. ‘Not for us. You pretty much just said so. We’ve got to go and fight the war with the Morrors.’

There was a slight pause, and the Goldfish hovered where it was, its plastic blue eyes looking somehow more blank than usual.

‘Cheer up, Alice!’ it said eventually, in its sunniest and most robotic way.

‘So… we’re here, and there’s no one around for thousands and thousands of miles, except maybe some robots?’ said Carl. He thought for a second and then grinned. ‘Awesome.’

After that lesson we had our supplements and stood under the UV lamp to stop the low gravity from doing bad things to our bone density, and played with the Goldfish. As well as projections of Mars and school things like that, there were a lot of decent games on it, and during breaks it would get us chasing holographic bumblebees or meteors around on the sports course, and it was quite fun although the Goldfish would keep wittering on about just how fun it was and how well we all were doing.

There was a lot of other stuff on the Goldfish too – well, all the robots knew basically everything. And although we couldn’t get the proper internet across fifty million miles of space, Beagle Base did have its own network with email and books and the odd amusing cat video on it. But annoyingly all the robots and all the computers also knew exactly how old everyone was and so there was no way to get them to show you anything you were supposedly too young to see.

But we didn’t get much time to think about it, what with all the lessons and all the exercising. The Goldfish made us run around a lot, and twice a week the Colonel had us for military training. And that was very different because, as you might have gathered, the Goldfish and the Colonel did not exactly see eye to eye on how to treat and motivate children. There was an assault course sprawled around the Cydonian hills, and it looked terrifying, like it had been made for giants – hurdles higher than your head and a climbing tower about the height of a skyscraper. But of course, in this gravity, it wasn’t as hard as it looked, though you did need the extra oxygen strapped to your back.

One morning, I struggled up to the top of the tower and looked out over the lumpy hills. I pulled off my oxygen mask to get a better look – you weren’t supposed to do that too often but there was enough oxygen in the air that you could go easily twenty minutes before you even got dizzy. And after all, Mars was supposed to be Making Us Tough. The mirrors in the lavender sky were glittering icily behind rosy clouds, and against the near horizon there were a few dark pine trees. It was hard to tell if it was just the tighter curve of the planet or whether they really were impossibly tall, but against the sky their silhouettes looked something like a little kid’s drawing, everything out of proportion.

‘Hi, Alice,’ said Carl, climbing up beside me.

I wasn’t sure if I had forgiven him over that Somnolum X stunt, but on the other hand I wasn’t sure I hadn’t, so I gave him a sort of half-strength glare and said, ‘Hello.’

He looked out at the view. ‘This whole planet,’ he said, ‘is basically pink. You must be in heaven.’

I went up to three-quarters-strength glare, and said, ‘It’s really more a kind of peach.’

‘Nah, it’s definitely pink. What it needs is for, like, a herd of unicorns to come galloping over the plain there…’

I decided not to bother responding to this, so Carl changed tack. ‘When your parents decided to name you Alistair…’

Full-strength glare, on the spot. ‘If you call me that again I’ll push you off the tower.’

Carl laughed and swung himself away from me, and at that point one of the Colonel’s Goads soared up to us and started yelling.

‘Get going, you lazy little snots! I bet you think you’re something special, just because you can jump a few feet higher than you could back on Earth. That’s not YOU, you little morons, that’s the gravity; you’re still all as weak and sloppy as a pile of wet spaghetti, and in danger of getting WORSE! Your muscles’ll get lazy if you don’t make ’em WORK! So MOVE!’

He was kind of right – I’d never been very good at monkey bars before, say, and now it was almost pathetically easy, and Josephine had got into a habit of putting a book on the floor and reading it while standing effortlessly on her hands in a corner of the dormitory, and after a while of this you do start to feel rather smug and like you’re going to go back to Earth and show off what an amazing athlete you’ve become. But sometimes the Colonel went up the tower hand-over-hand, without his prosthetic legs on, just to show us what being tough was really like.

Carl and I started clambering down the tower. Carl’s method of doing this was basically just to jump off, and catch himself by grabbing a rung from time to time as he fell slowly past them.

‘The sea’s just over that horizon,’ he said, waiting for me on a rung and pointing as I climbed down in my more cautious way. ‘If we were on Earth, we’d be able to see it from here.’

‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘So?’

‘So it must be cool, that’s all. The sea on Mars!’

‘Very cool,’ I said. ‘Partially frozen, actually. But you’re probably daft enough to go for a swim in it anyway.’

‘We should at least get to see it,’ insisted Carl blithely.

There was some kind of fuss happening on the ground among the little kids, who were supposed to be doing their own training exercises under the supervision of the Teddy and the Sunflower. At first Carl and I were too busy with bouncing down the climbing tower and being yelled at by the Goads to pay much attention. But when we got down, the Teddy was waddling around making a honking noise and bellowing: ‘NOEL DALISAY.’

‘What? Where’s Noel? What’s going on?’ Carl asked, that huge voice suddenly small and strangled. He went running. One of the Colonel’s Goads came whizzing after him and to my alarm Carl actually HIT it and said, ‘That’s my brother.’

Then the Colonel himself came pouncing out of nowhere on his robot beast and jumped down to the ground. Thankfully he ignored Carl and said, ‘You. Bear. What is this?’

‘NOEL DALISAY IS MISSING,’ explained the Teddy in its horrifying voice.

‘Well, how did you let that happen?’ yelled the Colonel, and then looked disgusted at himself for talking to a six-foot teddy bear, and stalked off.

‘NOEL,’ boomed Carl. ‘NOEL.’

‘He can’t have gone far,’ I said. But I got a horrid cold watery feeling because since we got to Mars, we’d all had it drummed into us that Wandering Off On Your Own had replaced Getting Into Cars With Strangers as top of the list of things it was incredibly bad to do. Mostly because you’d run out of oxygen, somewhat because you’d die of hypothermia, and a little because the atmosphere was still too thin to filter out the radiation that gives you cancer.

‘I promised Mum and Dad I’d look after him,’ said Carl, his eyes unfocused.

The Colonel mounted a little rise; his Goads sprang into the air and he bawled, ‘Stop what you’re doing!’ through them. ‘This is now a search and rescue operation. All you with the –’ he grimaced as if he felt sick, ‘– the flower-thing and that damn bear, get inside, look for him there. Everyone else, I want you in pairs or groups of three. No one make a move on your own! I want you to spread out slowly, in a circle. If you do get separated, stop moving and yell. But you DON’T get separated, UNDERSTAND?

‘Don’t worry, Dalisay,’ the Colonel’s voice added to Carl via one the Goads, while the Colonel himself went bounding off over the rocks. ‘Got heat-vision on these things – he’ll show up.’ And the Goads went spiralling about overhead, scanning the ground.

But half an hour later we still hadn’t found him, and it was getting awfully cold. I had run out of ways to say that Noel would totally be fine, and Carl had gone very quiet, which was particularly unnerving because it was him.

Then we heard sad, swoopy music, like the Martian tundra had somehow turned into a pavement outside a Parisian cafe from the olden days. Of course, it was Josephine, who was sitting cross-legged on a rock gazing thoughtfully at the sky and playing her harmonica.

Carl stared at her. ‘You’re not even going to help?’

‘No point carrying on that way,’ said Josephine. ‘He’s not there. We’d see his tracks in the salt crust – you can see ours. And I am helping.’ She took a swig of oxygen from her canister and went on playing.

‘How is that racket going to help?’ Carl cried.

‘It’s Clair de Lune,’ said Josephine reproachfully.

‘This isn’t really the time,’ I said. ‘And you’re supposed to be in a group.’

‘I don’t want to be in a group,’ said Josephine.

‘Well, you’re in one now,’ I told her firmly.

Rather to my surprise, she sighed and got up and joined us. But though she gave up on Clair de Lune she kept playing, her hands fluttering over the harmonica and a brisk bluesy soundtrack accompanying us as we bobbed and glided along our worried way.

‘You shouldn’t use up your breath like that out here; you’ll run out of oxygen,’ I said.

‘Hmm,’ said Josephine vaguely. ‘It’s actually quite an interesting feeling.’

I was worried her lungs would swell up and she’d get pneumonia, and I also wondered if she’d decided to get her own back on Carl by being as annoying as possible in her own particular style, and thought her timing was pretty mean if she had. Although I was actually quite glad of the music because it was so quiet without it, and it was true – she was good.

Carl was mainly too worried to pay all that much attention to Josephine either way. At least he started talking again. ‘Stupid little tick!’ he cried, leaping over a crater thinly lined with arctic grass. ‘I’m going to kill him!’

‘It wouldn’t be that hard to get lost,’ said Josephine. ‘You don’t burn energy so fast in this gravity, so you can go a long way without feeling it. And then with the horizons being closer—’

‘Yes, I know,’ snapped Carl. ‘I bet, when we find him, it turns out he was following a bird or something.’ A snow-goose flapped slowly past above our heads. ‘Yeah. One of those. An actual wild goose chase! Him and his animals!’

Abruptly, Josephine stopped playing the blues, turned off to the left, and started marching away from us.

‘Oh, what now?’ I cried.

‘He’s been gone long enough to have realised he’s come too far and tried to walk back,’ said Josephine. ‘But no one’s found him, so he must have gone the wrong way. He can’t be anywhere to the north of us because someone would have found his tracks. The geese are flying that way, towards the sea. Carl, you just said he might have followed one. They’re certainly the most obvious animals around. And something must be stopping the Goads finding him. So if he started off towards the sea and went wrong when he tried to come back and ended up somewhere where he wouldn’t leave obvious footprints and where the Goads’ thermal imaging can’t see him, where could he be? He’s over there among those hills. They look enough like the ones around Beagle to have confused him. There’s really nowhere else he can possibly be.’

There was a pause and then I started yelling and waving my arms to get the attention of one of the Goads.

‘There,’ said Josephine rather maddeningly. ‘Music helps me think.’

‘You don’t really know that’s where he is,’ said Carl dubiously, while I tried to summarise to the Goad what Josephine had just said. Soon we saw the Colonel hurtling towards us on his Beast.

Josephine suddenly seemed to lose interest in the whole business. ‘Well, that’s sorted,’ she said. ‘Actually, I think I’m going to have a look at the sea.’

‘No! You know you can’t go off on your own!’ I protested, which didn’t have any effect whatsoever.

‘It’s only over the dunes. I’ll be back in a minute,’ Josephine said, and wandered off playing Clair de Lune again. Then the Colonel galloped past us towards the cluster of knobbly hills with just a quick nod and Carl went running off after him. And I couldn’t stick with both Josephine and Carl at once, and I did want to see if Noel was OK, so I sighed, and made a roughly arrow-shaped heap of stones pointing the way Josephine had gone in case she did collapse from oxygen deprivation or anything and we needed to find her, and went after Carl.

It took me a while to catch up with him, and by the time I did the Colonel was coming back towards us. He had Noel in front of him on the Beast, wrapped up in a silver blanket, and Noel was shivering and apologising and looking a bit weepy.

The Colonel slowed beside us and Carl bounded six feet in the air and exploded: ‘You stupid little dipstick! You’ve got the whole base looking for you, you know! Don’t you realise you’re in the middle of woop-woop on bleeding Mars? Why are you so fantastically moronic?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Noel, crying some more. ‘I didn’t mean to. But after I got to the sea then there was this thing on the beach, Kuya – I was trying to get close enough to take a picture of it on my tablet, but it was too fast…’

‘I don’t care about your flaming animals! Oh, Jesus,’ Carl added, ‘don’t cry about it.’

‘It wasn’t a normal animal,’ said Noel. ‘Sir,’ he appealed, turning to the Colonel. ‘It wasn’t a normal animal.’

Carl went on alternating between yelling at Noel and being nice to him as we went along, and then we passed my little marker of stones. I wondered if I’d better tell the Colonel we needed to start another search party, but then Josephine emerged over the dunes. ‘Hi,’ she said to me, strolling up. ‘Hi, Noel, glad you’re OK.’

‘What are you doing on your own, Jerome?’ blazed the Colonel. ‘Because it looks a lot like defying a direct order.’

Josephine was not quite so unflappable as not to look a bit scared and start stammering, ‘Oh, I was only – it was just for a few—’

Carl sighed. ‘Don’t be too hard on her, sir,’ he said. He looked awfully tired now. ‘She was the one who worked out where Noel was.’

The Colonel looked meditatively at Josephine and growled, ‘I’ll overlook it. This time.’

Josephine fell into step beside me and Carl, the Colonel’s Beast treading slowly enough that we could keep up with it. ‘So what was the sea like?’ I asked.

‘Pink,’ said Josephine.

Carl had recovered enough to snort, ‘There, what did I say?’ and elbow me in the ribs.

We went along in silence for a while. The sun was setting. The sea would be pink, I thought, a bit wistfully.

‘What happened to your legs, sir?’ asked Noel, suddenly.

‘Noel!’ I said, scandalised. I didn’t mean to start him off crying again but unfortunately that looked as if it was going to be the effect.

‘What,’ said the Colonel irritably. ‘I’m a freaking cyborg and he’s not supposed to notice? You tell me, son – what do you think happened to them?’

‘Um. The Morrors?’ sniffed Noel.

‘No, no, this was thirty years ago. See, there was some local trouble in the Pacific back then, and one day I’m out on a patrol boat and we run into pirates. And so we tangle with them and as the pirates go down, they launch one last torpedo. Boat disintegrates around us. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, up comes a shark…’

‘A shark!’ Noel yelped involuntarily.

‘…and I fought that shark to the death. He got my legs, and a one-way ticket to the bottom of the sea.’

‘You killed the shark? Even when pirates sank your ship and the shark had… had…?’ asked Noel, too amazed to keep crying.

‘Oh yeah,’ said the Colonel. ‘Knife between its eyes.’

‘Wow,’ said Carl respectfully, and we were all silent.

‘Is that… actually true?’ asked Josephine tentatively.

‘Ah, you caught me,’ said Cleaver cheerfully. ‘No, no it wasn’t really a shark. It was back at the beginning of the war. I was on a spacefighter-carrier taking a consignment of the old Aurora models out to the Moon, and we took a shockray hit to the bow. Lost my legs in the explosion and, just before I was blasted out of the wreckage, I let all the air out of my lungs and used a fire extinguisher to propel myself through the vacuum of space. Then I managed to catch hold of one of those Auroras and pull myself inside before I passed out.’

I realised my mouth was hanging open. Josephine tilted her head slightly.

‘Or,’ said the Colonel, before any of us could say anything, ‘maybe it wasn’t a spaceship, now I think about it, maybe it was a fighter-plane and I was shot down over Tanzania during the Second Water War. Now, it wasn’t my plane blowing up that was the problem, I’m parachuting out of there, and everything seems OK – except then I realise I’m coming down miles from anywhere, straight into the middle of a pride of lions.’

‘And it was the lions…?’ I asked.

‘I spotted the biggest and toughest lion,’ said the Colonel, ‘and I steered around in the air and landed astride that lion’s back, grabbed its mane and rode it twenty miles across the Serengeti. But then we passed a river, and out of the river comes a crocodile, headed straight for us. Now, by that time, the lion was my buddy, so, to defend the lion…’

There was another pause, and a bit nervously, Carl began laughing. And then the rest of us started off as well.

The Colonel grinned quickly. ‘Something like that. I forget.’

We were nearing Beagle Base now and Noel was looking a lot better. ‘Carl,’ he said, ‘Carl. The animal I saw. It was kind of like a worm, but it could fly? But it didn’t have wings, it had segments that went round and round, like… like a drill. And it buzzed… and it was this big, and it was eating the sand…’

‘You’ll have to ask Doc Muldoon about that,’ said Colonel Cleaver. ‘She’s probably loosed a load of mutant freaks out here; it’s the sort of thing she’d do. Even those geese have had their genes messed with.’

He swung down from the Beast outside the gates of Beagle Base and deposited Noel on the ground.

‘I lost Enrique,’ said Noel forlornly. ‘My snail,’ he explained, when we looked at him.

‘We’ll get you another one,’ said Carl automatically, in the mindless tone of someone who’s said the same thing a thousand times before.

‘There aren’t any other snails on Mars,’ said Noel.

After all that happened, I started thinking of Carl as a friend. And Josephine went from despising him to having no views on him at all, so that was progress of a sort too.

She did get on well with little Noel, though. They had an interest in common – the creature Noel said he’d seen on the beach. Josephine wasn’t especially excited about animals in general, the way Noel was, but she did like things that were weird and unexplained, and flying worm-things that went round and round and might be unknown to science certainly qualified.

As Noel hadn’t managed to get a picture of the thing on his tablet, she made him draw it. But Noel was eight and not very good at drawing and Josephine did not consider the results good enough to be useful for further study. So the two of them spent a couple of evenings in our dorm with Josephine interrogating Noel and making him describe everything about it and taking notes and doing sketches.

I did not have much to contribute to this so I left them to it and killed some time customising my uniform in small, subtle, not-allowed ways, like gluing tiny pink jewels on to the EDF crest on the jacket.

Anyway, a few days later we were walking to the sim-deck for flight and combat training and Josephine said, ‘Look at this. Noel will have to check it again, but I think it’s as close as we’re going to get.’

‘Ugh,’ I said, shuddering. ‘Gross. You really think there’s one of those out there?’

‘No,’ said Josephine calmly. ‘I think there are several.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s not likely Noel would have stumbled on the only one on the whole planet, is it,’ said Josephine.

‘You don’t think they could be… actual Martians?’ I said, feeling a bit stupid, because we knew there weren’t any Martians, not proper alien ones that hadn’t been genetically engineered by humans to make the terraforming work better.

But she didn’t answer that because then we reached the sim-deck, which was a big, semicircular chamber with a huge screen wrapped around its curved walls. Josephine suddenly looked alarmed and said, ‘Oh. Were we meant to do… some sort of homework for this?’

‘Flight and Combat Theory, yes,’ I said. We’d gone over the basics of flying with the Goldfish, but this was our first time doing combat flight with Colonel Cleaver.

‘Oh,’ said Josephine again, and began trying to make herself invisible by standing behind me.

This didn’t work very well, but she didn’t get yelled at, not then anyway. In fact, it didn’t seem fair that the very first thing that happened, as soon as we’d got all the saluting over with, was that the Colonel shouted, ‘Dare?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, worrying about the little pink jewels on my uniform. But the Colonel hadn’t noticed them. He was actually smiling at me in an odd way, sort of proud but a little bit sad.

‘You’re Stephanie Dare’s kid, aren’t you? She’s one damn brave fighter. Cadets, you all know about the Battle of Kara?’

The President of the EEC’s nephew is standing right there, I reminded myself, glancing at him. It’s not that big a deal.

There was a slightly groany chorus of yeses and the Colonel growled, ‘I can’t hear you: yes WHAT?’

‘YES SIR,’ everyone bawled dutifully.

Sometimes I think being in the army is just a little bit like being in a pantomime.

‘Kara,’ sighed the Colonel to himself, and by now I was sure he was sad because of being stuck here with us, away from the real fighting. ‘That was some fine flying. Well, get up there, Dare. Show us how it’s done.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said stiffly.

I didn’t want to go first. And there was Carl practically levitating with longing to get behind the controls of anything remotely spaceship-like as soon as possible, so it was doubly unfair.

There were two simulator ships, but we were going one at a time to start off with. From outside they were big beige boxy things on a thick strut on which they could pivot and swing. But on the screen a perfect digital replica of a Flarehawk was waiting on an icy Earth launch platform, and I didn’t need to be told it would respond to everything I did in the cockpit. So everyone would be able to see exactly how I was doing.

Now, this was supposedly so we could all learn from each other and so the Colonel could comment, rather than for the purposes of ritual humiliation, but the army’s good at doing two things at the same time.

I climbed into a simulator, and of course inside it was just like being in the cockpit of an actual Flarehawk. Through the viewport, the icy launch platform and the bleak grey sky looked completely real. There were snow-covered hills in the background. It could have been Suffolk.

‘Hello, home,’ I said quietly.

‘Go ahead, Dare,’ said the Colonel through the radio.

I fired the thrusters and lifted the ship up. It wobbled a bit, and I realised I was being too tentative with the control yoke. The artificial gravity put on a very good imitation of that battering-spoons feeling as I rose through the atmosphere.

I wasn’t quite clear what I wanted to happen. I didn’t want to be bad at doing this. The Colonel and the EDF and my mum wanted Stephanie Dare’s talent for flying spaceships and shooting aliens to be hereditary; if it wasn’t, they’d all be disappointed. And, more to the point, being bad at fighting aliens would not bode well for my long-term survival.

But on the other hand, if I did turn out to be some sort of spaceship prodigy, then it would feel like another way in which my life was all about a woman I never even actually got to see. Like I was actually destined to be in the space army instead of it being just the way things were.

The first thing I was supposed to do was just fly around with the computer-generated squadron and not crash into any of them. That was fine. Then I had to use the torpedoes to pick off a few of the light-shields. I kind of missed the first one, which was embarrassing as it was hanging right in front of me, but at least I saw how I’d got the angle wrong and it didn’t happen again.

Then Morrors started attacking.

So this was my first taste of shooting aliens – although obviously it was really only a computer game. I remembered all the instructions about how in a dogfight, you had to get on top of the enemy. Still, when one of the other Flarehawks in the squadron blew up, my first instinct was to screech various words I hoped the Colonel wasn’t listening to while hauling blindly on the control yoke, so I actually flew straight into a shockray aimed at someone else. But the ship’s systems seemed to be telling me the ray had just skimmed across the tail, and though everything jumped around a bit apparently I was still in one piece.

OK, I thought, trying to pull myself together. Torpedoes. Aliens. Time to apply one to the other. And while I wrestled and flailed the Flarehawk around, I watched the pale glowing transparent shapes whizzing across the viewport and told myself, you’ve got to aim for where they’re going to be. And although even Mum’s special Morror-spotting sense wouldn’t have helped in a simulation, I got a little bit of a sense of what it was for, how you had to fill in the gaps in the technology yourself, because though the sensors were supposed to pick up the Morror ships and project ghostly outlines of them onto the viewport, they always seemed a little off from where the ships apparently really were.

Still, I got two of them. Then another one pounced on me and I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough and I got hit again. And I did think it was a bit mean of the people who designed the simulation to actually make the ship shake and scream while flames filled the viewport before everything went black. I mean, I would have got the point that I’d just died without that.

When the lights came back on the door opened and I got out. I felt rattled and I didn’t think I’d done very well, but no one was laughing and the Colonel said, ‘Good work, Dare,’ and even if I thought he did look slightly disappointed I hadn’t done anything spectacular, he also wasn’t the sort to say that if he didn’t mean it. Then he started talking about how I’d obviously panicked a bit when the Morrors came in, but recovered well, and taking out two of them was good, and getting blown up was normal.

‘You survived twelve minutes!’ said the Colonel. ‘Not bad! Work on your turn diameters and you’ll get that figure way up.’

I’d been starting to feel quite happy until he said that.

Then he said, ‘OK, Dalisay, you’re up,’ and Carl bounded up into the cockpit barely bothering with the rungs on the ladder. I swear you could’ve told who was in the simulator just by watching the screen: the ship jumped into the sky, and soon he was rampaging all over the Morror ships like a really lethal two-year-old kicking down sandcastles.

He was so ridiculously good at it, I couldn’t help thinking that was more how Stephanie Dare’s kid was supposed to fly.

‘He is going to be insufferable,’ whispered Josephine.

And indeed Carl didn’t get killed even once and popped out of the simulator at the end muttering, ‘Awesome!’ The Colonel didn’t say anything, just patted him on the back, smiling quietly and looking about fifteen years younger from sheer pride.

Then it was Gavin’s turn, and gratifyingly he wasn’t very good at it. Then it was Lilly, who was better than I had been, which was annoying.

‘Did she ever apologise to you?’ I asked.

Josephine snorted a little. ‘No.’

‘She said she was going to.’

Then the Colonel yelled, ‘JEROME,’ and charged over to where Josephine was lurking behind me. Josephine took a deep breath and accepted her fate. ‘You’d better be about to tell me I’ve gotta call EDF command and say I’ve got a kid here who’s just escaped a Morror kidnapping and spent the last week struggling her way across space to make it to my class on time. Because that’s the only reason I can think of why your Flight and Combat Theory wouldn’t be on my tablet right now.’

‘I’ve been busy with something,’ said Josephine, though she didn’t look particularly hopeful that saying this would help matters.

The Colonel stared at her coldly for a while, then said, ‘Well, you show us what happens when you don’t prepare.’

Josephine set her jaw and went and climbed into a simulator. On the screen, her Flarehawk rose lopsidedly from the ground and lumbered into the air.

She looked a little clumsy up there, but I thought there was a fair chance she might surprise the Colonel. She was always stumbling into lessons half-asleep and then revealing she already knew the whole subject backwards or working it all out on the spot.

The Flarehawk spurted backwards into the ground and burst into a cruelly well-rendered digital fireball.

Everyone laughed. I wanted to be loyal but even I couldn’t help smiling a bit.

‘Again, Jerome,’ said the Colonel into one of his Goads.

Josephine got a bit further off the ground this time, and promptly bashed into one of the other Flarehawks. They both exploded.

On her third try, being in the army got even more like a pantomime because I could see the Morror ships closing in on her and I found myself yelling, ‘THEY’RE BEHIND YOU!’ but she couldn’t hear me because the simulator was soundproofed. Josephine just kept on exploding. I mean, I honestly started wondering if she was doing it on purpose, but when she came out of the simulator and I saw her face, I didn’t think it was that funny any more.

But plenty of other people did.

‘How did you manage to torpedo yourself ?’ I couldn’t help asking. ‘Twice?’

Josephine made a wordless growling noise.

‘Jerome, I’d better have your Flight and Combat Theory and an essay on the importance of preparation and focus on my tablet by tomorrow,’ Colonel Cleaver said at the end. ‘Dare, you put up a damn good fight. Just keep at it and you’ll be as good as your mom.’

As we left the sim-deck Josephine loomed up behind me, as much as a small person can do that, and said darkly, ‘You never will be as good as her, you know.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. I knew she wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t in a good mood myself, despite the Colonel saying nice things to me. He had paired us up and made us fight each other one-on-one in the simulators, and Carl had killed me quite a lot.

‘Your mum loves it,’ explained Josephine. ‘You don’t.’

I know it sounds bad, but at first we didn’t actually notice.

We noticed when the Colonel went away, obviously – he wasn’t the sort of person who blends into the background and anyway, he told us he was going. In fact, he galloped through Beagle Base on his Beast yelling through the Goads that he was going on a short mission and would be back in a few days and everyone had better damn well remember they were EDF cadets and act as a credit to the force while he was gone.

Carl and I saw him soar away in his Flying Fox, off into the purple sky.

After that we had our flight and combat training with the Goldfish.

And that was just it. We were all so used to being looked after by the robots now. They got us up in the mornings (well, the walls started humming in a cheerful way at half past seven, and the Goldfish used to hover from room to room to encourage us) and they herded us into the mess room where more machines would dollop your food out on to trays, and they taught us our lessons, and broke up fights, and made sure everyone was more or less where they were supposed to be at night. There weren’t that many adults around to miss, and so when we didn’t see any we all just assumed they were off around the corner doing something else.

We did ask sometimes exactly when the Colonel was coming back and what he was doing, but the robots plainly didn’t know, so we stopped. In the meantime, it was quite nice having a break from being yelled at, even if it meant the Goldfish got to make us sing even more songs about teamwork and having a positive attitude.

Look at it this way. We were stuck on an alien planet with no parents or teachers. We could go out of our minds with terror, or we could just, well, go out of our minds.

Kayleigh’s birthday party lasted three days.

Obviously the first thing we wanted to do was stop those stupid alarms. Of course it ended up being Carl who was hanging from one hand up among the struts at the top of the dome, whacking at the speaker with a broken chair leg. Finally it went quiet and we all cheered, and Carl hooked his knees over the strut and swung upside down with his arms outstretched, whooping.

Then we celebrated. We raided the kitchen to find something nicer to eat than spinach, and though the best we could find was some vaguely chocolate-flavoured gludge and some under-ripe raspberries from the garden, it was certainly an improvement on the meal we’d been having when everything went down. Some of the older kids broke into the offices and labs to see if they could find any alcohol. They didn’t find any champagne, only a couple of bottles of beer in a fridge, so no one got more than a mouthful but it was the principle of the thing, I guess.

Josephine stood there in the middle of all this, looking like a computer program crashing, or like a person who does not have to do any flight and combat training for the immediate future, but who also does not like it when alarms go off and mobs of people run around shouting. That is to say she didn’t move or say anything much, until eventually when pressed she said, ‘Arrgh,’ and ran off again.

By this time the robots had stopped hooting or staring, and instead started following us around pitifully like unloved dogs, if unloved dogs were constantly trying to teach you algebra.

‘Aww, kids, equations can be fun,’ pleaded the Goldfish, bobbing unhappily in the air.

‘No, they can’t,’ said Carl firmly, but not unkindly. Then he charged ahead without having to worry too much about whether anyone was following. And pretty soon we’d herded all the teacher robots into classrooms or cupboards and barricaded them shut. There was just the Teddy still lying on the sports field and flashing its eyes and waggling its legs. It wasn’t particularly trying to teach us anything but looking at it got kind of depressing so we dragged it off to one side and threw gym mats over it.

But when things quietened down a bit I took a plate of the chocolate gludge and wandered around listening for the sound of a doleful harmonica until I found Josephine, in the rhubarb patch this time.

‘Here,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you come out and play that? We need some music.’

She looked dubious, but followed me over to the sports field where a hundred or so assorted kids were now sprawled in a daze of disbelief and accomplishment, and she never stopped playing, just gradually shifted the tone to something more cheerful. ‘Wooo, Josephine!’ yelled Kayleigh, lazily raising an arm, and a lot of kids who normally weren’t sure what to make of Josephine gave her a round of applause. Josephine didn’t look up but smiled cautiously around the harmonica, and some of the other musical kids joined in. There weren’t many musical instruments at Beagle, because you weren’t allowed to take very much with you on the spaceship. But I guess the President of the EDF ’s nephew was a special case, because he had a guitar that he went and got, and there was a girl who said she was a drummer in a band back on Earth and she started whacking plastic chairs because we didn’t have any drums. Kayleigh started dancing, and everyone joined in, and that was the nicest part of the adult-free phase on Beagle Base.

Over in the garden dome, Carl’s lot, which meant about fifty kids, mostly younger than thirteen, had built a camp in the middle of the sports field with mattresses and crash mats and a few tents made out of blankets and gym horses and things. It was a bit smellier and messier than it had been the day before, but it still looked festive, like some sort of carnival, what with the flags and paintings people had made. But I did notice there didn’t seem to be as many kids around any more, and there was a row going on between the ones who were left.

‘We can’t sit on our bums here forever, where’s the fun in that?’ Carl was saying.

‘It’s a bad idea to go anywhere,’ said a boy called Ramesh. ‘We’ve got to protect our territory.’

‘We’re not dogs,’ objected Carl, who was looking much more harassed than I’d ever seen him.

‘I just don’t think Christa and Leon were kidding about wanting us out of the dome,’ said Ramesh.

‘Well, so we’ll leave guards,’ said Carl.

But though several people seemed not to want to go down to the sea, nobody wanted to sit around and be a guard either, especially since guarding anything implies you’re expecting to be attacked.

‘Let’s draw lots,’ Carl proposed.

‘I notice you’re not volunteering to stay,’ grumbled a girl called Mei.

‘This whole thing with the boat is my idea!’ cried Carl in exasperation. But he still grinned when he saw me. ‘Oh hey, Alice, welcome to Carltopia,’ he greeted me. ‘You and Jo not joined at the hip after all then?’

‘I wouldn’t call her that where she can hear you,’ I said. And I suppose I should have sat down for a sensible discussion about what we were going to do about Christa and Leon and Gavin and Lilly and all the horribleness that was brewing at Beagle Base. But I still couldn’t really believe things could be all that bad after just three days without adults and robots, and after all, nothing dramatically dreadful was happening right there where I could see it. I didn’t want to be thinking about territory and factions and guarding things any more than Carl did, so I said, ‘What about building this boat?’

‘Good question. What about it?’ he asked the rest of the assembled kids. ‘Because I’m going to the sea. The rest of you can do what you like.’

So it started out as a bad-tempered, muddled expedition, without anyone making any decisions about guarding the camp and people just going or staying depending on what they felt like. And those of us who were going fought quite a lot about what we would make the raft out of and whether or not we should take sheets to make a sail with.

Noel said something about driftwood, but of course there wasn’t any; the seas of Mars were too new for that. And though there must have been some hammers and nails and things in Beagle Base somewhere, we hadn’t found them. But we did find plenty of empty barrels near the hangar that had once held liquid oxygen, and we had a table and some strips of plastic panelling that had been torn off a wall at some point in all the excitement. Then Carl found some tough plastic-covered string stuff in the garden and decided we were ready.

‘Cavemen could make boats without nailing things,’ he said to the slightly demoralised band he was leading across the Martian countryside. ‘And so can we.’

Somewhere between Beagle Base and the sea, the faraway little sun came out from behind a purple-grey sheet of cloud. The wind had died down and though it wasn’t warm, it wasn’t freezing either. Cydonia was having its spring. Mei squeaked, ‘Rabbits!’ and Noel corrected, ‘Arctic hares!’ And whatever you called them, they were white and fluffy and adorable and hopping about the Martian tundra.

‘They’re there so their droppings add biomass to the soil,’ said Noel happily.

‘And so we can hunt them,’ said Carl.

‘Oh my God, I want one,’ said Mei, and we all agreed catching a baby one and keeping it as a pet would be the next order of business.

By the time we dragged our raw materials to the dunes we were all much more cheerful, and the actual raft-building was just as lovely as I’d hoped it would be.

‘WE ARE THE FIRST MARINERS OF MARS!’ yelled Carl, into the silent lavender sky, as soon as the amethyst sea opened before us. And I’ve never read about any of the earlier scientists or explorers using boats on the Borealian or the Utopian seas, so he was probably right. We dropped everything and ran down to the water to start kicking it about and shrieking at how cold it was. I found tiny white flowers growing among the red rocks and thought it was wonderful that even with a gigantic war going on, humans could make flowers grow on a planet that used to be dead.

Obviously, when we lashed the table to the barrels with the string, the resulting raft was not particularly seaworthy and it fell apart before very long, but it did last until everyone had had a go on it, and when I was lying on the tabletop, looking up at the passing snow geese, with Carl using a cane from the gardens to punt through the shallows, I thought that being kids alone with an entire kids’-sized planet to play with really wasn’t so bad.

Then I wondered what Josephine was doing and that made me feel uneasy and a bit guilty, so I tried to stop.

The string holding the raft together came undone again and no one felt like mending it this time and we left its ruins on the shore as a monument to the expedition. Even then, although we’d all started shivering a bit and Mei said her hands had gone numb even inside her gloves, we weren’t in a great rush to head back. No one wanted to say that we were scared we wouldn’t like what we’d find. And anyway, Noel wouldn’t let us leave until everyone had had a look for his flying worm-thing, but we didn’t find any sign of it.

But eventually it started to get dark. We were all very cold and wet, despite the fact that our suits and boots were supposed to be waterproof, and we were also a little bit oxygen-deprived, which might have been why we got slightly lost on the way back to Beagle Base. It didn’t last all that long but it was enough to spook us, and even when we did see the domes rise over the horizon at last, the relief felt unsatisfactory and achy because we weren’t really home, everything was sort of a mess, and we didn’t actually know what would be going on inside.

I looked up at the communications tower. Josephine couldn’t really be planning to spend the night up there, could she? I decided I’d look for a decent spot on a crash mat somewhere in ‘Carltopia’ and get something to eat and then try to find her, though I really didn’t fancy climbing the mast in the dark.

The sliding doors opened for us the same as ever and we got a nice head-clearing rush of oxygen and warmth.

Then we smelled the smoke.

In the middle of the sports field, Carltopia was a wreck – all torn apart and scattered, and to make a point someone had set fire to one of the crash mats, which was pouring awful-smelling smoke everywhere.

Carl gave a yell of indignation and rushed straight for his ruined kingdom, and at that a lot of unfriendly-looking kids appeared, namely Gavin and Lilly and plenty of others, all of whom seemed remarkably much bigger than us, though that might have been the effect of the chair legs – and the limbs of dismembered garden robots – that they were carrying as weapons.

‘Hey, idiots,’ said Gavin. ‘New rules. None of you lot gets to come in the dome any more.’

‘Yeah, that’s totally something you get to decide,’ scoffed Carl. But he sounded uncertain.

‘Leon made a list; you’re not on it,’ said Gavin.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, and they all sniggered. ‘Lilly – Lilly, let’s just go and talk, OK?’

But she looked at me as if she didn’t know who I was, as if something awful had got inside her and eaten away the person I’d thought so normal-looking the first day we arrived on Mars. She didn’t look normal any more, none of them did. They all had an expression I’d never seen before, but it was a little like the look on Christa’s and Leon’s faces when they were hitting that little robot until they broke it – flushed and breathless like that, but much wilder and more desperate, and I wasn’t sure they could stop now even if they wanted to.

‘Lilly,’ I tried again, backing away as the gang advanced.

‘Wait, not yet,’ said Lilly to Gavin, and for a moment I thought it might be all right. But then she said, ‘Get their tablets and stuff off them first.’

The next part wasn’t pleasant. By the time it was finished I was missing my tablet along with a clump of my hair, and my shin was bleeding where Lilly had hit me with a robot’s leg. I would have thought Carl would stay and fight like anything, but when at last Lilly shoved me back and the gang laughed and withdrew, Carl and Noel had already vanished. Mei and the rest were scattering too.

I limped after them at first. But then we passed the communications tower and I broke off and called, ‘Josephine!’ up at it.

It came out sounding feeble. The wind was picking up again and I didn’t think she’d have heard. I climbed a few experimental steps up the frame but my leg hurt such a lot and I couldn’t even see the top of the tower. I mostly thought Josephine probably wasn’t up there anyway. So I came back down.

Mei and everyone else had disappeared into the dark by this time. I supposed the sensible thing would be to camp in the wheat dome or the soya dome and hope things looked better in the morning. Some kids were sleeping there already and I knew it was all right, if kind of scratchy. Or maybe someone had managed to get into the grown-ups’ block and then we could really be comfortable, at least until Leon and Christa kicked us out of there too. But had they really taken over the whole centre of the base – the ring with its segments, as well as the dome? And what about the kitchen and the food storage buildings?

I was getting extremely hungry, apart from anything else.

What I decided I’d do was creep around the external doors and see how things looked, and if I could get in without being seen and find any food.

And I did still have the idea that if it came to it, everyone else might start being sensible if I could just be sensible enough at them. I could find Kayleigh, I thought, or maybe Chinenye. Kayleigh wasn’t necessarily that sensible all the time but she was older and probably on my side and she had a lot of friends, and she had managed to get Gavin and Lilly to back down when we were all on the Mélisande. The scarier kids wouldn’t have things nearly so easy if all the reasonably nice people stuck together and looked after each other. Maybe the scarier kids would see that and they’d settle down and be vaguely normal.

Although, if they didn’t, that did sound a bit like two rival gangs poised for something close to the civil war Josephine had predicted…

I went back to the door Josephine had dragged me out through hours before, and after peering warily through the windows I put my hand on the sensor panel and went inside.

No one was about. It felt so wonderfully warm after being outside. Finding a bathroom was equally welcome. Then I ran on tiptoe through Beagle Base, peeking round corners and through doors as I went.

There was some kind of noisy fight going on in the garden dome, and while I hadn’t run into anyone unpleasant, I wasn’t finding the confident crew of nice people I’d been hoping for, either.

In a classroom on Sarabhai Corridor, a group of girls were sitting on desks and chatting, but none of them was Kayleigh or Chinenye and I thought I’d seen at least a couple of them hanging out with Christa, so I didn’t talk to them. And though I did find nice, safe-looking hideaways in dorm rooms and laundry blocks, I kept thinking I didn’t fancy it on my own and that if anyone did find me there I’d be trapped.

That made me think of the simulation deck, which I was pretty sure had a door of its own to the outside. I crept down the dark corridor, expecting the deck would probably be locked, but when I got close enough I saw someone had jammed the door open with a fire extinguisher. Without moving it, I poked my head through the gap and looked inside.

I had the immediate impression of furtive whispers going quiet, so I called, ‘Um, hello? It’s just Alice.’

Somebody shrieked, and Kayleigh scrambled out from behind a bank of seating. She looked dirty and red-eyed even before she hugged me and burst into tears.

‘I thought you were Christa or someone,’ she said. She started back to look at my injuries. ‘Oh my God, you poor thing. Are they looking for you?’

‘Shhh!’ hissed someone else from behind the seats.

‘Shhh!’ repeated Kayleigh to me unnecessarily, looking around with exaggerated caution, and we crept behind the seating, where Kayleigh and Chinenye and four others had made a kind of camp. It wasn’t a very good camp, just a pile of blankets and a few empty food wrappers, and the dim glow of a tablet for light, and a dismal unwashed smell in the air. Kayleigh looked pale and flinchy and Chinenye was curled in an exhausted ball with one of the Russian boys mechanically patting her hair.

‘I was looking for you,’ I said.

‘Oh, wow,’ said Kayleigh, dragging her hands through her hair. ‘That’s nice. But you’re sure they don’t know where you are? We really can’t take any more trouble. Not after today.’

I stared at her, feeling all my bruises start aching again. ‘Do you want me to go, then?’

‘Oh, no,’ Kayleigh said, and she hugged me again and even tousled the pink bits she’d put in my hair. ‘Of course not. You can hide with us if you want. Alice can stay here, can’t she?’

None of the others looked wildly enthusiastic, although

Chinenye did manage to look up and sort of smile at me.

‘You’ll have to bring your own food, though,’ said one of the boys. ‘We haven’t got any.’

‘I was thinking of getting some food anyway,’ I said.

‘Oh God!’ said Kayleigh fretfully, twisting her fingers. ‘Be careful.’

‘Maybe you could come with me?’ I suggested. ‘Or someone else.’

There was an awkward silence. Chinenye dropped her head back into the Russian boy’s lap. ‘We just can’t,’ she said, without opening her eyes. ‘We can’t go out again tonight. It’s not worth it.’

‘We think lying low here until the Colonel gets back is our best bet,’ Kayleigh explained.

‘Even if you starve?’ I said, beginning to get irritated with them all. They didn’t answer. ‘I was thinking we should start making plans for if nobody does come back.’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ Kayleigh said, starting to cry again. ‘They will. They have to.’

I wondered if I’d somehow been imagining her as bigger than she was, because now she seemed sort of shrunken.

‘I’ll come back later,’ I told her. And then added, ‘Maybe,’ and I went back to the corridor. I’d get into the food store from outside, I decided. That would be safer, and then I’d take whatever I could find over to the wheat dome, and maybe somehow everything would look a bit better in the morning.

I went back to the airlock. There was an oxygen pump there so I refilled my canister and put the mask on before I went outside.

It was black and cloudy and I only had the glow of the dome to find my way by, but I managed to get into the food store beside the kitchens. I couldn’t find the lights at first, and a couple of larder robots whirred past my shoulder in the dark, carrying a tub of soybean oil over to a shelf, and I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from yelling out in shock.

When I’d got my breath back, I collected some dried Smeat bars and fruit, a block of cheese, some noodles and a tub of chocolate gludge, and then a few slightly more random things that had survived the other kids’ raids, like a tub of hundreds and thousands and some tomato ketchup. I put everything in a wire crate I found in a rack, and carried it awkwardly outside and hid it behind one of the twisty pine trees near the Maggini entrance to the base. Even though I could lift such a lot in the low gravity, it was annoyingly bulky and the things inside kept sliding around, so it was too awkward to carry much further on my own.

I should have gone straight to the wheat dome and got someone to help me carry everything. Unfortunately I decided I’d make another scouting trip and try and get some wipes and toothbrushes.

I went back in through the food store and the kitchens. They were close to the Processing Chamber where we’d had our uniforms dispensed to us on the first day, and with a bit of luck I thought I might be able to make it and get something out of the machines. But this time, just as I was opening the door from the kitchen to Vogel Corridor, I heard someone coming.

All the internal doors on Beagle Base were old-fashioned ones with hinges and door handles like back at Muckling Abbot, so that no one got stuck if there was ever a power cut. It was only the doors to the airlocks and the outside that slid open and shut. I drew back into the kitchen, and the door clicked.

‘What’s that?’ said a girl’s voice.

‘Just one of the kitchen robots,’ said a boy.

‘No, it wasn’t. It’s one of those kids trying to hide. Come on.’ Their footsteps sped up.

It was Christa and Leon, wanting a snack, I supposed.

I retreated further into the kitchen in the beginnings of a panic. I was sure they were coming inside, but there wasn’t time to run back through the food store. I decided I didn’t want to be found hiding in a cupboard, so I set my shoulders, pushed the door open and walked out. ‘Hello,’ I said.

‘You don’t take a hint, do you,’ said Christa.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I said reasonably. ‘I know we’ve never got on that well, but things are different now. We’ve got to cooperate. We don’t know if the grown-ups are even coming back.’

‘We’re the grown-ups now,’ said Leon. ‘And you’d better learn to do as you’re told.’

‘We need to at least work out how we’re going to organise the food,’ I pleaded, backing away as they came closer. Not that I meant to be pleading, but pleading seemed to be what came out. ‘We’ve got to make sure the wheat and soy and everything gets harvested. We don’t even know how long the robots will keep going or how to fix them if they break and if this goes on for weeks people could starve.’

Leon grabbed my arm and dragged me down Vogel Corridor towards the garden dome. It was horrible how easy it was for him, that I was fighting as hard as I could and it didn’t really do a thing. I’d had all that training to toughen me up. But so had he.

At this point Lilly and Gavin and all their gang came running to see what the noise was about, and they brought their chair legs and bits of robots.

‘Hey, Lilly?’ shouted Christa. ‘Isn’t this a friend of yours?’

I did manage at this point to kick Leon in the knee as hard as I could. And he let me go – by throwing me towards Gavin and Lilly, and what with the gravity I went flying a scarily long way down the passage, even if I didn’t land as hard as I would have on Earth.

This time, when they started hitting and kicking me, it was even worse than before, in that for a while I ended up on the floor with my arms over my head thinking about what Josephine had said about people are going to start killing each other. But it didn’t go on that long, I suppose, although it felt like it, and when they backed off I was not dead. They did not stop, there, though. I scrambled up and tried to break away and Lilly and Gavin laughed at me for running, but Leon grabbed me and said, ‘No, no, you wanted to get in, didn’t you?’

He grabbed me again, just as easily as before. He hauled me a way down the passage and pulled out an old scaffolding pole or something jammed into the frame of a door, and he flung me inside a dark classroom. I could hear them all laughing outside as they wedged the pole back in place to hold the door shut.

The classroom was a mess, all tumbled desks and chairs and burned gym mats someone had thrown in there. Not that I spent much time looking at any of that. I did what people trapped in rooms usually do: start banging on the door and shouting, ‘Let me out!’ even though I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere.

After a while, I stopped and considered my situation. I reflected it was just as well I’d been to the loo recently, but it wouldn’t be much fun if I was still in here by the time I needed to go again.

Also I was still very hungry, and thirsty too.

I told myself they wouldn’t actually leave me in there until I died, but I wasn’t absolutely convinced. Even if they didn’t really mean to do that they might wander off to a different part of the base and forget I was there.

At this point I was standing with my forehead against the door and my eyes shut, and just coming to the conclusion that I might as well have a little cry, when something came up behind me and boomed, ‘HEY THERE, ALICE,’ in my ear. I screamed.

It was the Goldfish. It was hovering delightedly right in front of my face.

I flopped limply against the door and swore, at length.

‘Now, EDF cadets don’t use language like that, do they, Alice,’ the Goldfish scolded me, but it seemed too excitable to stick to the subject. ‘I sure am glad to see you, Alice!’ it rejoiced. ‘We have so much to catch up on! Say! What about those quadratic equations?’

‘Please,’ I groaned. ‘Please stop.’

I was lying on my back on a desk. I would have been staring hopelessly at the ceiling, but the Goldfish was bouncing about in the air above me and it shone algebra problems into my eyes whenever I opened them.

It was also singing.

‘Sing with me, Alice!’

It wasn’t the Goldfish’s fault that it was programmed to teach children the EEC standard syllabus, or that, in its robot-y way, it seemed to feel terrible whenever it couldn’t. On the whole I was glad it was there. For one thing, it glowed, and it would have been very dark in the classroom without it as someone had smashed the lights. And it took my mind slightly off how long it would take to die of hunger and thirst, and made me instead focus on just how well-educated a person could be before she died of hunger and thirst.

It was very annoying though.

‘Can’t you just try and get us out of here?’ I begged, picking idly at a plaster on my hand. The Goldfish had at least helped me find the first-aid kit. I had patched up my various injuries very thoroughly, because it was something to do and because the Goldfish didn’t try to teach me anything while I was doing it.

‘I already have, Alice,’ said the Goldfish sadly. ‘But hey! At least we’ve got plenty of time to learn! Now, what do you think that x might be?’

‘Four,’ I said sulkily, screwing my eyes shut.

‘Aww, come on, Alice! I know you can do better than that.’

I sighed, and opened my eyes a crack. ‘Nine,’ I admitted.

‘Great work, Alice!’ the Goldfish cheered, and emitted a stream of sparkling stars over me like confetti. ‘So, let’s try another equation…’

‘Oh God, please,’ I said desperately. ‘Please, can’t we at least do something else? Can’t we do… biology? I like biology.’

The Goldfish seemed to hesitate. It tilted slightly in the air, as if it was putting its head on one side.

‘Biology?’ it repeated, almost warily, as if I might be playing a trick on it.

‘Yes,’ I begged. ‘What about… cells. You know, the difference between plant and animal cells, and, and DNA and everything. Because I think all that’s fantastic.’

The light behind the Goldfish’s eyes pulsed thoughtfully. ‘Fine,’ it said in a very grim voice for such a cheerful robot, and the glowing equations hanging in the air vanished and were replaced by friendly diagrams of eukaryotic cells.

I felt pathetically grateful. I really do like biology, even if it came fairly low down the list of things I wanted to be doing just then.

‘Can I go to sleep afterwards?’ I asked. ‘It’s ever so late.’

‘OK, Alice,’ said the Goldfish, sounding a little mournful, and I wondered if it was thinking about how neither biology nor quadratic equations was going to give us a better morning to wake up to.

‘And Goldfish,’ I said forlornly, ‘when we’ve done the parts of the cell, and if I really concentrate, could you maybe… tell me a story? Or even sing a song, so long as it’s not about algebra?’

The Goldfish came closer and I actually leaned my face against it. ‘Sure,’ it said gently.

Half an hour and plenty of organelles and cytoplasm later, I was curled up on the desk while the Goldfish glowed and sang softly in Mandarin.

This is going to be embarrassing if anyone finds out about it, I thought. But then I figured that if I was ever in a position where getting teased for asking a robot fish to sing me a lullaby was my most pressing problem, life would have improved immeasurably and I’d have no business complaining.

‘What does it mean, Goldfish?’ I murmured sleepily, hoping it wouldn’t see that as an opportunity to be educational.

The Goldfish obligingly projected subtitles into the air without stopping singing, and I was too tired to read them all the way through but it was something about the moon and a river and being a long way from home.

And so I fell asleep.

I went very slowly for what the Flying Fox was capable of – which is to say, about four hundred miles an hour. I screamed only occasionally, even though there was a ferocious wet wind coming the other way, scouring over the Gulf of Chryse. The Goldfish helped me, and Carl tried to help me too. At least, that’s what he said he was doing, but in practice it was more that the Goldfish would suggest I do something and I would try to do it and Carl would say, ‘No, no, not like that,’ and, ‘are you sure you don’t want me to take over?’

Then Josephine sighed, leaned across and quietly did something to him I couldn’t see on account of not daring to take my eyes off the viewport, and Carl yelped, ‘OW,’ and, ‘What did you do that for, I’m only trying to help,’ and though he was not actually quiet after that, at least he wasn’t bothering me and I was able to tune him out.

But I was not going to keep this up for very long in the dark. It was about two in the morning or something equally awful by now. We were on our way, and far beyond Leon and Christa and Lilly and Gavin and that was the main thing.

‘We’ve got to stop and rest. I need something nice and flat to land on, Goldfish,’ I warned, trying not to sound panicky about it. We were flying over something nice and flat at the time, but it was the sea.

‘That’s OK, Alice, just bear south-south west, forty k,’ it said soothingly. It was interfacing with the Flying Fox’s computer, which was handy.

I skimmed over the dark coast, activated the lifters and lumbered down on them before dropping the Flying Fox rather awkwardly on to something. It bounced around a bit before it stopped completely and we all yelled, except for the Goldfish, and Noel, who slept right through it.

Silence settled in around us.

‘Are we there yet?’ asked Noel, waking up.

I thought we would have to sleep wherever we could cram ourselves on the floor, but it turned out the Flying Fox was better equipped than that. You pressed a button and the hatch to outside popped open, and an egg-shaped pod with smooth, firm walls of glossy fabric ballooned itself out of a cavity in the wall, little legs unfolding to the ground to support it. Or rather, the Goldfish pressed the button with its nose; we’d never have found it otherwise. I thought the Goldfish looked even smugger than usual after that, which should have been impossible as its expression couldn’t really change and it always looked smug. The Goldfish called its discovery a Sleep Capsule and I called it an unusually impressive tent, but either way all we had to do was fasten some toggles and get the sleeping bags out of compartments under the seats – and the Goldfish had to tell us where they were, too.

We had Smeat bars and dried apricots for supper, and then we flopped into the tent. Carl dragged his sleeping bag over to the far wall and, with a dramatic huff, lay down as far from Josephine as possible.

‘What did you do to him earlier?’ I whispered to her when the Goldfish had turned out the lights and settled into standby mode for the night.

‘Nerve clusters,’ she replied darkly, and instantly went to sleep, leaving me wondering rather anxiously just why she knew about those.

But in the end I went to sleep too, without really having much of a clue where we were, besides hundreds of miles from the nearest human being.

‘Space Locusts,’ said Noel. ‘We should call them Space Locusts.’

‘That’s a good name for them,’ agreed Josephine. ‘Ow,’ she added, pulling her hand away from me.

‘I’ve got to disinfect it,’ I said. ‘It might have… space germs.’

The spaceship had shaken and rattled its way through a few hundred miles of sky before Carl had to drop us on a flat-topped mountain above a maze of jagged rifts and canyons scribbled in an angry mess over the ground. I’d got the first-aid kit out and was doing my best to patch everyone up: we were all a bit bloody but the slice the Space Locust had taken out of Josephine seemed to be worst. And then there were the jaggedy tears it had made in our uniforms – special high-tech made-for-Mars fabric isn’t much good with holes in it. But duct tape turned out to be excellent for both problems.

Meanwhile Noel, under Josephine’s direction, had laid the worm on a rock and was trying to dissect it. He had taken pictures of its eyes (seven) and segments (five) but the knife Josephine had found in the ship’s survival kit couldn’t get through the hard shell to find out what its insides were like.

‘OK, I admit I see the point of taking duct tape into space now,’ I said, using a piece of it to stick some gauze to the back of Josephine’s hand.

‘I told you, that was Lena’s idea. And she’s almost always right,’ said Josephine, sounding mildly disgruntled about it. ‘Goldfish, can you very carefully shoot a seam through the creature’s exoskeleton?’

But the Goldfish couldn’t.

We heard something go clank inside the spaceship, and Carl swearing. He had pulled off a panel (it was almost falling off anyway) and was burrowing around in the engines, so I guess it was a good thing he’d got some getting-into-the-guts-of-spaceships experience back on the Mélisande after all.

Josephine gave up on cutting open the Space Locust with a sigh. ‘I wish I could see what was going on inside this thing. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter.’ She wrapped up the Space Locust in a towel and contented herself with patching the ruins of her bag together with duct tape and a staple gun, so that she had somewhere to put it. ‘Either the Morrors are breeding these things as weapons, or they aren’t, and this is a completely new problem. We’ve got to get it to the government.’

‘Yeah, that’s great,’ said Carl, dropping out of the bottom of the Flying Fox; ‘but I don’t know if we’re going anywhere in this thing.’

I’d actually been avoiding looking at the spaceship, and I think Noel and Josephine had been too. It was fairly easy to do when there were people shaking and bleeding and a dead Space Locust there to concentrate on. But it turns out when Space Locusts eat holes in your spaceship, the spaceship does not like it very much.

The Flying Fox was riddled with holes, and there were important-looking cables that had been chewed through sticking out of it all over the place, and it was giving off an unhappy singed smell.

Carl went in and poked some buttons on the dashboard, and the ship whirred miserably and its lights flickered for a second before going out again.

‘Carl, are we… stuck?’ asked Noel. And being a bright but not particularly optimistic kid, he put the rest of it together pretty fast. ‘Are we going to run out of oxygen and die?’

‘We’re fine, Noel,’ said Carl grimly. ‘We’re going to be fine.’

‘But what are we going to do?’ asked Noel.

‘Math!’ blurted the Goldfish, but then it shook itself and said, ‘I have some tutorials on spaceship repair.’

So the Goldfish projected plans and talked us through the things that needed to be welded together and the leaks that needed to be plugged. Our problems were twofold. Firstly, the people who made the tutorials had never really thought about being partially eaten by flying worms as a condition a spaceship might get into. Secondly, I soon got the idea that the main principle for learning spaceship repair is: don’t be crashed miles from anywhere on the surface of Mars when you need to do it.

Still, we stuck everything back together that we could and Josephine worked out how to re-route the power around the broken bits, I guess, and the lights came on. Then Carl jiggled the controls around for about a thousand years and eventually worked out that you now had to hold the control yoke at a special angle, and we finally got back into the sky. We all cheered and the Goldfish covered us in sparkles. There is a limit to how pleased you can honestly feel about having to go flying in a ship that now resembles a colander more than anything else, but you have to take what you can get.

But sure enough, about an hour later, smoke started wafting gently out of the panelling. And then we were heading for the ground at a few hundred miles an hour, out of control and on fire.

Valleys gouged between jagged red rock walls blurred underneath us at a nasty angle. Carl wrenched at the controls, which had stopped working altogether, and yelled, ‘Somebody hold it.’ I crawled underneath the yoke and tried to hold it solidly at the special position so he could actually steer.

We came within a second of flying straight into a cliff face. Somehow we hit the valley floor instead. Bounced with an awful noise of crunching metal. Skidded. Stopped.

We sat there for a while hyperventilating and not looking at each other. Then, when we didn’t really have an excuse for not doing it any more, we got out to look at the damage.

It was awful. There was a trail of blackened bits of Flying Fox strewn back along the valley and the ship was lying tilted over, propped on one fin, and even at a glance you could see three of its thrusters were crumpled like used crisp packets.

‘How far are we from Zond, Goldfish?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I make it one thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven miles, Alice,’ the Goldfish said.

There didn’t seem to be much to say about that. ‘We’d better get started,’ I said. And we got out our meagre collection of tools and began again.

The thing about trying to fix plasma compression engines with a staple gun, duct tape and highlighter pens is: you can’t.

We kept trying, though. For hours. Even when the light faded and our fingers went numb, and we got weak and dizzy from the low-oxygen air and had to keep topping our canisters up from the ship’s supply. At least that was still working.

‘How long will that last?’ I asked the Goldfish airily, as though the answer wasn’t particularly important.

‘Five days, three hours, forty-seven minutes. Give or take,’ the Goldfish replied.

I kept on trying to work out if the three chunks of twisted metal in my lap could be made to resemble an inertial compensator if I applied enough superglue.

‘Those things are still out there,’ muttered Noel.

We looked at the sky. There didn’t seem to be any Space Locusts in it, but we’d seen how fast they could move.

There didn’t seem to be much to say about that either.

Eventually Carl said in a weird, forced, cheerful voice that didn’t sound like him at all: ‘Guess there’s nothing more we can do tonight! Let’s get some rest while we can. We’ll get straight back to it, come first light.’

There was a big hole in the tent and none of us had the heart to try and get it set up anyway, so we just packed together for warmth into an unhappy pile of people at the bottom of the spaceship and tried to sleep.

I dreamed Mum flew down into the valley in her Flarehawk and said she’d been looking for us for ages. It seemed so real that though I woke up a lot of times during the night, I found that I could shut my eyes and go on dreaming that we were on our way back to Earth and then landing on a sunny base somewhere in Africa, and Josephine was showing some military scientists the Space Locust, and Dad was there and we were drinking tea while I told them about everything that had happened…

(I didn’t go as far as dreaming the war was over and everything was completely fine. I guess that would have seemed too unrealistic and I’d have woken up.)

But eventually I did have to wake up properly, because something was making a pounding noise, sharp and ringing like someone hammering metal, annoyingly close.

‘Whassat,’ I groaned into a grubby fold of Space-Locust-chewed sleeping bag.

‘That’s Carl,’ said Josephine dully. I sat up and looked at her. She was sitting in the pilot’s seat, motionless. She somehow looked as if she’d been there a long time and I wondered if she’d slept at all. ‘He’s been doing it for hours.’

I went outside to look. It was barely light. The two little moons were still pale in the sky, and the valley was striped with weird shadows from the columns of twisted rock that stood along its walls. Carl was kneeling on the ground, using a flat rock as an anvil and trying to bang some part of the engine back into shape with a stone.

‘Are any of you going to help, or what?’ he exploded as soon as he realised I was watching.

Josephine appeared at my side, soundless as a ghost. ‘It’s hopeless, Carl,’ she said softly.

Carl let out a strangled yell and hurled the bit of engine at the rock wall with all his strength so it bounced off with a noise like SPANG and the echoes clattered around the valley. Carl swiped one hand across his eyes. Then he turned round and said so brightly he sounded almost like the Goldfish, ‘OK! So we’re going to have to get rescued.’

Josephine put her oxygen mask on and quietly wandered away along the valley. I don’t think Carl paid much attention. It wasn’t Josephine he was talking to. He was talking to Noel, even though he couldn’t quite look at him; Noel, who was sitting on the edge of the Flying Fox’s wing, very still and huge-eyed and quiet. Carl went and pushed him off and wrestled with him a bit in a pointedly brotherly way. ‘Kind of embarrassing. We’re never going to hear the end of it when we get home.’ His voice was even louder than usual. ‘What we need to do is work out how to get attention. There’s probably a mirror somewhere in the ship we can use, to flash in Morse code or something.’

‘Goldfish, can you send out a signal that we’re here and we need help?’ asked Noel.

‘Already doing it, Noel,’ said the Goldfish. Carl looked briefly deflated.

‘So there’s nothing to do but wait,’ whispered Noel, looking at the ground.

Carl gave him what I guess was supposed to be an affectionately boisterous shove, and yelled, ‘We’re not going to just wait. That’d be… that’d be feeble! Let’s make a sign. You know. Belt and braces. Just in case no one picks up what the Goldfish is doing.’

We gathered stones and laid them on the ground to spell out ‘HELP’ in big letters. Then we thought of adding an arrow pointing to where we were.

Then we ate a dismal lunch of Smeat and energy bars. Carl kept talking breathlessly the whole time: ‘This stuff is gross. What do they get paid for in those labs? I bet you I could synthesise something better out of sawdust, or… or Blu-Tack. I could murder a hamburger made of actual dead cow, I don’t care what you say, Noel.’

Noel was in fact saying nothing, so I felt I had to fill in some of the gaps. ‘You know, what I’d really like is spaghetti carbonara. I haven’t had decent pasta in forever, they couldn’t do it properly at Muckling Abbot either. My gran makes it with cream…’

I wished I hadn’t thought about my gran. Or about spaghetti carbonara, come to that. And Noel still didn’t say anything, until at last we were finished and he looked over at our sign and asked, ‘What shall we do now?’

‘Add an exclamation mark?’ I said.

‘Nothing left but to pass the time, until they get here,’ said Carl, shrilly.

So we played cricket. That was Carl’s idea, obviously. Carl had a tennis ball, it turned out, but cricket does not work very well with three people in low gravity with broken bits of spaceship for bats and wickets, and Carl was blatantly letting Noel win, which was so unnerving that I got worried about Josephine and went looking for her.

She was perched on top of a twisted stack of red rock, high above the valley floor, her legs dangling. Her harmonica was lying on her lap, but she wasn’t playing it. She was just staring into the distance.

‘Um, hi,’ I yelled up at her.

‘It’s so huge,’ she said blankly. ‘You can’t see from down there.’

‘Huh?’

‘The Labyrinth. It goes on for miles.’

The Labyrinth of Night. I hadn’t quite realised we were in it.

‘Come back,’ I said. ‘There might be Space Locusts.’

Josephine hung her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Pretend to Noel that we’re not going to die.’

I felt a bit like kicking her and a bit like screaming. I did know, in one way, that this was what Carl was doing, and what I was doing too since I’d gone along with it. You don’t want an eight-year-old to work out that he’s part of a small group of people who are all going to run out of oxygen soon. You probably don’t want twelve-year-olds to work it out either, but unfortunately no one was in a position to do much about that. But I didn’t like her just saying it. ‘Well someone might find us,’ I said desperately. ‘Where there’s life there’s hope.’

Josephine sort of half smiled and gazed at nothing.

‘It’s cold out here,’ I said.

She climbed down and walked back with me in silence. We found Carl on the brink of volcanic overreaction to Noel having lost the tennis ball and Noel possibly about to burst into tears, and Josephine shut her eyes at the sight of them before strolling over and saying with forced energy, ‘Let’s get back inside; I know a game.’

Actually she knew about a million extremely complicated word games, which I guess Lena had taught her on long car journeys or whatever. Josephine got very eye-rolly when we forgot the rules, but she kept us occupied and this was about as perfect for our horrible situation as anything could have been. She managed to keep typing something on her tablet while we were struggling to come up with a three-word phrase made up of words beginning with S in the form of a question, and eventually Noel curled up into a ball of half-shredded sleeping bags and went to sleep.

Carl looked at him and said, ‘Oh, God’, and then lurched out of the ship. Josephine and I went too and next thing I knew, Carl and Josephine were both collapsed against the wreck practically cuddling each other.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks for all of that. I couldn’t. I can’t.’ He put his head in his hands and said in a broken little voice, ‘Mum and Dad are going to be so angry with me.’

‘They’re not,’ said Josephine. ‘They’ll think you were amazing. I’ve written down everything that happened.’

She showed him her tablet. Carl grinned shakily. ‘I see you’re guilting them into making “Jeromiana Waterlands” official.’ He paused, reading on. ‘…That’s nice. Thank you.’

‘Your parents will be proud of you,’ said Josephine. ‘They’ll be right to be.’

Carl smiled again, but he was crying again too. ‘They’re going to be wrecked.’

Josephine swallowed. ‘I’m sorry. I was the one who wanted to run away. I stole the ship. This is all because of me. We should have stayed back at Beagle.’

‘Oh, that’s bull, Jo, everything had gone to hell back there, you didn’t make that happen. You didn’t munch a load of holes in the spaceship either. Everything was messed up to start with: you tried to do something about it. It’s not your fault it worked out like this.’

Josephine gave a crumpled laugh. ‘I guess at least it looks like I won’t have to be in the bloody army.’

‘Ahh, if they gave you a chance and a decent laboratory or whatever, you’d probably win the whole war in like a day.’

They went on telling each other in heartfelt terms how awesome the other was and I didn’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to be part of this conversation. A bit of me wanted to go and hug them and tell them they were amazing and that whatever happened, I was glad I was with them. But somehow I also felt like knocking their heads together.

The Goldfish was a little way off, hovering twenty feet above the valley floor, and I decided I’d go and chat. ‘How’s the signalling going?’ I called up.

The Goldfish’s glow was very dull and even its permanent smile seemed like a kind of torture, like someone had forcibly carved it on to its plastic cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry, Alice,’ it whispered.

‘And evidently you can’t think of anything to get us out of this,’ I added.

The Goldfish waggled dolefully in the air, and I understood it was shaking its head. ‘I guess I’m just not programmed for this.’

‘Me neither,’ I growled and stomped back past Carl and Josephine, climbed back into the spaceship, lay down and pulled the sleeping-bag rags over my head.

‘Alice,’ whispered Noel. ‘We’re not getting out of here, are we?’

I knocked my head gently against the floor. ‘Of course we are,’ I said brightly.

‘It’s all right. You don’t have to pretend right now. Except… except please go on doing it when Carl’s around,’ whispered Noel. ‘I don’t want him to know I know.’ And he burrowed into an even smaller ball.

I knocked my head against the floor more vigorously.

All that work we’d put in trying to fool him, and apparently the only person still being fooled was me.

And that was even though, in the far distance beyond the hovering Goldfish, I’d seen many high, drifting plumes of dust, which probably marked the destruction the Space Locusts left in their wake.

In the morning (three days, sixteen hours, seven minutes of oxygen left) Josephine started playing her harmonica again. I’d never heard a harmonica sound so beautiful before, or so despairing. It was as though all the emptiness and shadow in the Labyrinth of Night was mourning for itself through her, using her mouth and lungs and the little metal box she held to pour itself into heartbroken sound.

And very annoying it was too.

‘You’re using up oxygen,’ I said.

Josephine gave a one-shouldered shrug and a sad smile, and might as well have yelled I PREFER TO DIE A LITTLE FASTER DOING SOMETHING I LOVE for how subtle it was.

And somehow that did it. ‘OH FOR GOD’S SAKE,’ I said. ‘OW,’ I added, because I happened to have kicked the spaceship rather hard at the same time.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Noel, who’d been listlessly absorbed in some game on his tablet. By now I was shouldering my oxygen canister and wrapping up the nearest odds and ends and Smeat bars in a sleeping bag.

‘I have had enough,’ I announced. ‘You can all sit around being tragic if you want, I am going… THAT WAY, to look for a way out of this. So.’ A little hiccup of mad laughter found its way up my throat. ‘Yes. I’m going outside. I may be some time.’

‘What the hell, Alice,’ Carl said. But I jumped out of the spaceship and started marching off in what I thought was the direction of Zond.

The others tagged along, trying to reason with me or point out that I was an idiot.

‘You can’t walk a thousand miles on one tank of oxygen,’ Josephine snapped.

‘Well, I’m going to give it a try,’ I said. ‘You can do what you like. You can come along and be useful if you want. But –’ I waved my arms, ‘– I’m done with this entire doom thing.’

Josephine sighed. ‘Carl,’ she said apologetically and quietly, as if having gone loony I wouldn’t be able to hear her, ‘I don’t want her to go on her own. All right, Alice,’ she said more loudly, in a patient and noble sort of way. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No!’ I yelled. ‘You can come with me if you’re going to help. If all you’re going to do is trail along looking like you just dropped your ice cream then you’re not allowed!’

‘What do you want me to do?’ snapped Josephine, and sounded just a bit more alive.

‘Think,’ I said. ‘You’re some sort of bloody genius, aren’t you? What’s the use of that if you just sit there and wait to die? Just try, can’t you?’

‘I can’t!’ Josephine cried. ‘It’s not fair to put that on me. What do you think I can do that you can’t? You haven’t got any ideas either!’

‘Yes, I have!’ I said. ‘I’ve got the idea of walking that way until I somehow bump into something that’ll help. And if you think that’s stupid then you could at least try and think of something better!’

‘There isn’t anything better!’ shouted Josephine. ‘God! Just because I’m not bad at exams – doesn’t mean I can do magic, Alice. We don’t have any oxygen, we don’t have enough food – there was hardly anyone or anything to help on this planet even before they all ditched us and now there’s nothing out here except –’

And she stopped. There was total silence.

‘…Except?’ I breathed.

‘Except…’ said Josephine again, though I don’t think she even heard herself or knew she was still talking. She turned slowly, eyes wide and unfocused, facing back the way we’d come.

‘What?’ Carl asked, ear-splittingly.

‘Robot pals,’ whispered Josephine. ‘Robot pals! Goldfish!’ She started jumping and waving and the Goldfish swooped down from its signalling station above the valley floor. ‘That lesson,’ she went on breathlessly. ‘Do you remember? We were learning about Noctis Labyrinthus and… Goldfish! Carl said there were only a few hundred people on the planet, most of them us, and Goldfish, you said there were plenty of your robot pals.’

‘Sure, Josephine,’ said the Goldfish, startled out of its gloom and as happy she’d remembered a lesson as if we were all still back in the classroom.

Josephine grabbed the Goldfish and stared into its plastic eyes. ‘Are there any of your robot pals near here now, Goldfish? Big robots—?’

Lights flickered in the Goldfish’s eyes as it thought – or rather, I supposed, scanned – for nearby robots. ‘There are some seed-planters and soil-testers and earth-movers about ten miles off…’

‘HA!’ yelled Josephine. She kissed the Goldfish’s plastic face and turned an unexpected cartwheel.

‘We’re going to do what, exactly, with the robot pals?’ asked Carl, in a slightly sarky way that was obviously the result of trying not to be too hopeful.

Josephine came right side up again, eyes shining. She said, ‘We’re going to catch one.’

The Goldfish raced along, as if it was swimming downstream with a strong current behind it, and we chased after it.

We slogged along the twisting valleys and climbed black-red slopes of gravel and razor-edged walls of stone, up on to the broken islands of rock called ‘horsts’ and then, dishearteningly, we’d have to scramble down the other side and do it all again. Finally we found ourselves standing on a flat roof of rock with such a deep crevasse between us and the (apparently) unbroken ground we wanted to get to that Josephine, all keyed up and jittery on hope and adrenaline, said, ‘Oh, to hell with it,’ and backed up before launching into a run and soaring off the edge of the precipice into a horrifying leap that carried her thirty feet to land in a little puff of dust on the other side. JUST.

While I dealt with my minor heart attack, Carl was only irritated that he hadn’t done it first and went right after her. He teetered for a moment on the edge but a second later he’d recovered his cool completely, and then he and Josephine were just hanging out over there, as if being worried about jumping across chasms was so last year.

Noel and I looked at each other. ‘Er,’ I said.

‘Well,’ Noel said, and shrugged, and then almost went for it before I grabbed his collar. ‘Yeah, no,’ I said firmly.

Josephine and Carl gazed back at us with what looked awfully like smugness. ‘You can climb down with him, right? We can wait,’ Carl called airily across the gap.

‘Typical,’ I grumbled. ‘No, I flipping won’t!’ I yelled back. ‘Here, Goldfish… you carried him before?’

The Goldfish was hanging in the middle of the gap, three hundred feet above the canyon bottom. It was funny: despite the fact that it almost never touched the ground, so long as it was hovering around head-height I’d never really thought of what it did as flying. But it flew obligingly back, though it did say, ‘I’m not really built for riding, kids,’ as it let Noel crawl on to its back.

Noel’s previous flight, into a spaceship besieged by Space Locusts, hadn’t exactly been an experience to savour. This time, after a nervous squeak as the Goldfish took off, he grinned and waved and yelled, ‘WOOO!’ and I felt a bit envious. I was already pretty sure I was too heavy for the Goldfish to carry.

Carl hadn’t seen Noel riding the Goldfish before and winced, but Noel landed safely at his side and I realised I had committed myself to getting across by the long-jump method.

‘You can do it, Alice! Yay, Alice!’ Carl yelled.

‘Oh, shut up,’ I said irritably, backed off for as much of a run-up as possible, and resisted a ridiculous temptation to close my eyes.

I was in the air for unnaturally long; more than long enough to think how stupid this was and just barely long enough for it to be exciting. I only just got one foot on the very edge of the damn cliff but Josephine and Carl grabbed my arms and I managed not to collapse in a little heap. And there we all were, out of the Labyrinth of Night and on, as the Goldfish immediately informed us, The Plain of Syria, which is a stupid name because Syria is a country on Earth with nothing to do with Mars. But there you go, they weren’t consulting me when they named it.

The Goldfish skimmed forwards over the plain and we ran after it again. The ground was pocked with craters and scars, but in the distance it bulged into wide, low hills like bubbles in heating porridge. The valley we’d crashed into had seemed as bare and lifeless as if Mars had never been terraformed at all. Now we began to see little signs of life again: patches of purple lichen and emerald moss on rocks, and tufts of arctic grass.

‘Look!’ cried Carl, pouncing on something.

A small robot, about the size of a chicken, was crawling doggedly across the ground on four angular legs. Carl picked it up and its legs waggled pitifully in the air.

‘What?!’ Josephine was already breathless from running, but now her breathing hitched with panic. ‘I said big robots, Goldfish…’

‘I don’t mean that little guy, Josephine,’ the Goldfish said indulgently. ‘Come on, gang!’

‘Don’t call us that,’ muttered Josephine, but we followed it over a rise and it jabbed forwards with its nose in the air, pointing.

There, roaming placidly across the tundra like grazing bison, were the Goldfish’s robot pals.

Or, as you and I would call them, ‘the giant metal spiders’.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Perfect,’ breathed Josephine.

‘Really?!’ asked Carl.

The robot spiders were easily as big as elephants. Technically, I suppose, they had six legs rather than eight, projecting from black metal bodies about the size of a car. But I don’t believe anyone could look at the way they moved, one poky black leg at a time, and not think ‘giant spiders’. Sometimes they would stop moving and lower that boxy abdomen towards the ground – raising huge, multi-jointed knees towards the sky – and plop seeds into the soil as if they were laying eggs. Some of them sprayed out finer clouds of seeds or puffs of liquid from dispensers on their flanks. Sometimes they’d scoop up little samples of soil on long spoony things that then retracted back into the body.

‘What’s their top speed, Goldfish?’ asked Josephine in a tense whisper, as if afraid of disturbing wild animals.

‘Well… I don’t actually have that information in my system,’ said the Goldfish. ‘But looking at them, I guess twenty-five miles per hour?’

‘Then we’d only have to travel fifteen hours a day and we could make it to Zond within three days!’ cried Josephine. She pointed to the nearest spider as it ambled southwards, sowing seeds and minding its own business. ‘That one’s ours,’ she decided fiercely, and went running after it, as intent on her prey as a caveperson hunting down a woolly mammoth.

We followed, although I don’t think any of us were very clear about what we were going to do with a giant spider even if we caught up with one.

The spider did not recognise the Goldfish as a Robot Pal, or us as something that shouldn’t be run over. Josephine dodged a huge foot as it crashed down almost on top of her.

‘Goldfish!’ she ordered. ‘Fly up there and interface with it – make it do what you say!’

‘I’ll try,’ said the Goldfish, and maybe it was my imagination but its perky voice had begun to sound a little harassed. Still, it did as she said – flew up to hover above the spider’s thorax, and its eyes flashed rapidly as it beamed an invisible flow of information into the other robot’s computer.

The spider was just as keen on doing its job as the Goldfish was on teaching us maths. So I guess it wasn’t surprising that it seemed confused and suspicious about the stream of new data telling it to stop what it knew it was supposed to be doing. It slowed down for a moment, but then twitched crossly and stamped its way onwards. The Goldfish bobbed wearily in the air in a way that somehow suggested a visible sigh, then flew after it and tried again.

This time the spider stopped moving, reached up irritably with a foreleg and flicked the Goldfish away. The Goldfish hit the ground at high speed with a resounding smack. The spider scuttled away, covering us in a fine dust of scratchy, sneezy seeds like ink from an escaping squid.

‘Goldfish!’ cried Noel, running to the fallen robot.

‘I’m OK, kids!’ said the Goldfish indefatigably, as it bounced up from the ground. But there was a nasty scuff along its side and a dent in its cheerful face.

‘Oh, Goldfish,’ Noel said sadly, stroking the battered place.

‘What’s going wrong?’ demanded Josephine.

‘Well guys, that is not a very sophisticated robot!’ said the Goldfish, and might have said it through its teeth if it’d had any. ‘I can’t get through its firewall. It just thinks I’m a threat.’

‘What if we could open up the casing – get into the CPU? Could you do a direct link?’ Josephine asked.

‘Well, sure, I might be able to force a reboot,’ said the Goldfish. ‘But…’

‘But it won’t exactly hold still for us to do that,’ Carl finished.

Josephine gnawed her lip anxiously as the spider and its central processing unit stomped away at a very brisk twenty-five miles an hour, but whether she would have come up with some new idea we never found out, because Noel announced, ‘I can get up there! Come on, Goldfish!’ And he jumped astride the Goldfish’s back and made a sort of giddy-up clack against its sides with his heels. Now I might have expected the Goldfish not to be totally thrilled with this, but I suppose it really did know how few options we had left because it took off like a rocket. There was just the echo of Noel’s excited whoop left behind.

‘Bloody Noel,’ said Carl.

‘He’s really getting into this Goldfish-riding thing,’ I said, thinking also that the Dalisay brothers had more in common than I’d thought.

We ran and leaped to catch up. Ahead, we saw the Goldfish tip Noel carefully onto the spider’s back. Frankly at the rate it was going it might have carried Noel off into the sunset without us getting anywhere near it, but I guess after a while, when it realised no one seemed to be trying to reprogram it again, it relaxed a bit and slowed down and we managed to catch up.

Noel was rattling and sliding about on top of the spider and saying silly things like, ‘Oh, wow. This is, erm, yeah, wow.’

‘You all right?’ Carl called up anxiously.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Noel. ‘There’s nothing to hold on to?’

‘Grip with your knees!’ Carl suggested.

‘They don’t bend that way!’

‘Get into the central processing unit!’ Josephine bawled.

Noel was now lying spreadeagled on the spider’s thorax, trying to grip the sides. ‘I can’t – I don’t see anything to open! It’s just smooth!’

The Goldfish ducked between the spider’s legs, under its belly and up the other side.

‘The access panel is underneath,’ it informed us.

‘Well, then it’s just badly designed!’ exploded Josephine.

‘It wasn’t designed for these circumstances,’ said the Goldfish.

‘Well, maybe I could reach under there,’ mused Noel, who was clearly very determined to be helpful now.

‘No, don’t be an idiot,’ Carl told him. But Noel didn’t listen – he tried to lean under the spider’s belly, and sure enough, nearly toppled straight off. In this gravity, falling from that height probably wouldn’t have hurt him much, but going under one of the spider’s massive feet certainly would.

‘Noel!’ Carl shouted, helpless.

Noel managed to grab one of the spider’s legs. There was an awful few seconds where there was nothing we could really do but make hissing noises through our teeth and watch him dangle as the spider thundered along, before the Goldfish flew in and somehow nudged him back on to the spider’s back.

‘Oof !’ said Noel, landing and sliding and scrabbling. ‘So,’ he added conversationally, ‘what should I do now?’

‘Hit it with something!’ I yelled, and, ‘Shoot it, Goldfish!’ shouted Josephine.

‘I don’t have anything to hit it with,’ Noel complained.

‘We didn’t really think this through,’ I said breathlessly, throwing myself into another leap after the spider. Even at its slower pace, we’d have lost it by now if it hadn’t stopped from time to time to plant its seeds.

Carl picked up a stone and threw it. Noel looked surprised and completely failed to even try to catch it.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Carl, and tried again. This time Noel caught it, nearly slithered off the spider’s back again, and then started banging hopefully at the smooth plastic.

‘Isn’t it going to notice?’ I asked anxiously.

‘Hope not… doesn’t seem as if it’s got any pressure sensors up there,’ Josephine said, though she was biting her lip again.

The spider spurted forwards and we had another breathless struggle to keep up with it. When we did, we found Noel had managed to bash a hole in the casing. ‘Ow. Ow,’ he said, pulling at sharp bits of broken plastic. ‘OK! I can see… computer stuff !’

The Goldfish promptly spat out a cable. It hung from its mouth (I hadn’t even noticed there was actually a hole there) like a long noodle. Of course, having its mouth full didn’t affect its talking, though the effect was somehow weirder than usual.

‘Good going, Noel!’ it said. ‘Now, you should be able to see a cable port in there somewhere.’

‘Well maybe I should, but I can’t!’

The Goldfish ducked closer and glowed as hard as it could into the hole Noel had made, and muttered more instructions while Noel grabbed the cable and felt around inside the cavity with it.

‘I think I got it!’ he crowed at last.

For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then Noel was yelling, ‘Aaaah!’ as the spider collapsed in a heap underneath him.

‘We didn’t want you to break it!’ protested Carl as Noel bounced free of the sad-looking pile of black metal legs. We all skidded to a stop. It seemed like we’d been in constant motion for a long time and I started to feel the lack of oxygen. Josephine sucked in an anxious breath and held it.

‘Poor spider,’ said Noel regretfully.

‘I’m rebooting it, guys,’ said the Goldfish patiently, and a humming noise started up somewhere inside the spider. The spider slowly rose from the ground. It was oddly creepy, like watching something rise from the dead. ‘Zombie robot spider,’ I muttered.

‘Can you control it now?’ Josephine asked the Goldfish, her voice taut with anticipation. Her hands were locked into fists.

‘Let’s see,’ the Goldfish said. Its eyes flashed. The spider lumbered forwards. It swung to the right, then to the left. It ran round us in a circle.

‘You’re doing it!’ Josephine cried.

‘Not quite there yet…’ the Goldfish said. It sucked away the cable. The spider stopped moving and stood, trembling weirdly for a second or two. Then it extended one foreleg, then another. It bounced cautiously, as if doing squats, then ran in another circle, before crouching in front of us.

‘Well, what are you waiting for, kids? Climb aboard!’ the Goldfish exclaimed.

We cheered. It was ragged and breathless but it was only an hour or so ago that we thought we’d never cheer about anything again. ‘Back to the ship, Goldfish,’ commanded Josephine, settling cross-legged on the spider’s back. ‘We need to salvage as much as we can carry. Especially the oxygen cells.’ She proved her point by swaying somewhat alarmingly as the spider lurched into a crawl. Carl and I grabbed her at the same time and somehow that turned into a general, messy, celebratory hug.

‘I’m going to call her Monica,’ said Noel, patting the spider’s back.

Monica carried us back towards the Labyrinth of Night, while Noel sang reedily, ‘She swallowed the bird to catch the spider… that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.’

In the far distance, I could see Space Locusts dropping from the purple sky, a scattered dark haze like backwards smoke pouring towards the ground. They looked a long way off, but then I remembered things about calculating distance and how close the horizon was on Mars and I wished the Goldfish wasn’t such a good teacher.

But nobody said anything about them. What was there to say?

Riding Monica wasn’t the smoothest way to travel. She could crawl over just about anything, which was all very well, but sheer drops and vertical walls didn’t mean a thing to her and made quite a difference to us. The Goldfish did get better at steering her after we all fell off the first few times, but that didn’t do anything to fix the fact that it was really cold, with nothing between us and the wind whipping past, and what with that and the light-headedness from not enough oxygen we were all on the point of toppling off yet again by the time we reached the wreck of the Flying Fox. We had to spend quite a long time just flopping around inside and breathing and getting as close to warm as the circumstances would allow before we could even start on the work of getting everything we needed out of the ship and on to Monica in a way that had a chance of staying put.

Taking the spaceship apart was a lot easier than trying to mend it, but still not actually easy; we didn’t have anything like enough tools and we were rapidly running out of duct tape. Still, eventually we’d built a sort of rickety platform on to Monica’s back for us to sit on with the food crates and oxygen canisters. We hacked the remains of the tent-capsule thing in two: one part to wad around us on the platform so we weren’t so cold, and the other slung underneath like a hammock to hold the rest of the dry oxygen rods and some of the other things. The platform fell apart and the hammock fell off several times before we were finished and the friends-forever, group-hugs mood got badly eroded. In fact we came fairly close to a general massacre, but at last, nursing our various broken nails and hurt feelings, we were on our way, even if Josephine was not speaking to anyone, unless you count occasionally muttering to herself that she was the one who’d thought of catching a robot in the first place so you’d think she’d get more respect.

I couldn’t be that bothered about it: I was so knackered that we hadn’t been moving for very long before I went to sleep, which I wouldn’t have expected to even be possible. When I woke up the mood had at least thawed enough for someone to put my oxygen mask over my face. I pushed it off and sat up. Josephine was leaning over the side, making quiet retching sounds.

‘You all right?’ I asked blurrily.

‘Travel-sick,’ she said. ‘God, I’ve had enough of this spider.’

‘There, there, Monica,’ said Noel, patting her consolingly.

‘Where are we?’

‘Just getting into Tharsis,’ said Carl.

We were crossing an ancient lava field. It was just as well we had Monica; on foot it would have taken forever – there wasn’t a patch of level ground anywhere. Around us were the remains of small, strangely blobby volcanoes. The rock below Monica’s scuttling feet had been whipped into curlicues and swirls and bubbles, then cracked and broken like meringue. But now everything was green and velvety with moss, and there were little streams of rainwater snaking through the gullies and cracks. And to the west the horizon swelled weirdly, like it was having a bad allergic reaction to something, and that was the bulge of Tharsis, where the biggest volcanoes in the solar system were.

‘Where’s the Goldfish?’ I asked.

‘It’s up there,’ said Carl soberly, pointing to the sky. ‘Watching for Space Locusts.’

The Goldfish was no bigger than a grain of rice among the clouds, which I noticed were worryingly dark – less purple and more a deep and bloody umber. Just as I looked up, it plunged down to hover close above us.

‘So hey, kids, there’s something kind of quirky about half a mile north,’ it said, with the particular type of cheeriness we’d come to understand meant trouble.

‘Space Locusts?’ I asked.

‘Not exactly. Not now,’ said the Goldfish. ‘But I think it might be where they’ve been.’

‘Let’s go around it, then,’ I said.

‘Well, sure! We can do that! But here’s the thing,’ said the Goldfish, apologetically. ‘It’s a little on the large side. If we go around it’s probably going to add more than an hour.’

‘We’ve got to get another hundred miles closer to Zond before dark,’ said Josephine at once.

So we went straight on. Before we even saw the scale of what the Space Locusts had done, we felt the traces of it in the air. Fine dust came sweeping over us on the wind, such thick clouds of it that we had to put our masks on again just to breathe and see. And all the vegetation gave out. There were pale scars gouged into the rock where moss or flowering lichen or little shrubs had been torn up.

Then we came to it: an enormous wound in the surface of the planet. The chaos of rocks and streams gave way to great banks of dust, sloping down, down, down into nothing. You couldn’t see the other side of that awful gap. It must have been easily the size of the Grand Canyon, but instead of being full of inner peaks and cliffs carved by a river over millions of years, there was nothing in it but eddies of dust and pools of red mud where the little new Martian streams had leaked into it. One day, I thought hopefully, perhaps it would be an enormous lake, and people could sail boats and fish could live in it. But it was just horrible to look at now, and we were the only things alive there.

‘Get her to speed up, will you, Goldfish,’ Carl said after we stared at it for a while. Monica carried us down the scarp. Agile as she was, she foundered from time to time and I wondered what on earth we’d do if she got stuck. The wind picked up and dust whipped around us like smoke, so before we even reached the bottom it got so dark I could only just see the blue glow of the Goldfish’s eyes through the murk and I hoped it really knew where were we going.

No one said much until we were out the other side of it. I’m sure the Goldfish and Monica tried their best, but we couldn’t go close to top speed, so it took easily an hour.

The faraway sun had dipped a lot lower while we’d been down there in the dust, so we emerged into twilight.

‘Maybe we should have gone round after all,’ said Josephine when finally Monica scuttled us up the other side.

‘There must be such a lot of them now,’ I said.

Josephine made faces. ‘The question is, are they arriving, or are they breeding?’

‘Ugh… brrr…!’ I shuddered.

There was nothing we could do but keep on, of course. Josephine felt better enough to play her harmonica for a bit, but then Noel rather tactlessly wondered aloud how far the sound carried and if maybe the Space Locusts could hear her. So she stopped.

The signs of the Space Locusts faded away from the landscape. Patches of green reappeared on the rocks and eventually they were fuzzy and mossy again.

‘We should make camp,’ I said.

‘When we find somewhere flat enough,’ agreed Carl.

Then we saw something else up ahead – something pale, streaming up into the purplish air.

‘Is that them?’ asked Noel anxiously, all of us thinking of the plumes of dust we’d seen rising from the ground where the Space Locusts had been.

‘That looks more like steam,’ said Josephine. And indeed the column of vapour seemed to wisp into nothing in a way that wasn’t like rising dust.

‘Maybe there’s somebody here!’ said Noel excitedly.

Somehow, even though we’d come all this way and had so many bad things happen to us expressly so we could try to find somebody, this was surprisingly unnerving. We were used to having miles and miles of emptiness all to ourselves, and this wasn’t where we were expecting to find any people. We were silent, watching the steam.

‘Can you see what’s causing that?’ Josephine asked the Goldfish.

The Goldfish soared up to have a better look, but soon dipped back down to us. ‘Darndest thing, it looks as though it’s coming right out of thin air. I’m going to check it out, kids. You wait here,’ it said, and bustled away.

We were left kicking our heels on Monica’s back.

‘Christ, it’s freezing,’ said Carl.

‘It’s Mars,’ I said. ‘It’s always freezing.’

‘It wasn’t this bad before,’ Carl grumbled. ‘Not even with the wind going.’

He was right. The moss on the rocks around us was crusted with frost. I noticed little white pockets of ice in the hollows between them. Our breath misted the dry, cold air like the white thread of steam up ahead.

We decided we’d get down from Monica and move around a bit to warm up, so we were stamping and blowing into our hands and then someone blurted out: ‘What’s that?’ and to my surprise I realised it was me.

‘What’s what?’ asked Noel, reasonably enough.

‘I… thought I saw someone, just there by those rocks. But obviously there isn’t. Ha ha.’ I didn’t like how babbly and weird I sounded and was in the process of shutting up when there was – or at least, I thought there was – this flickering on the edge of my vision. I said, ‘Oh, there, it moved! Wait, no. Sorry. Having a funny turn, apparently! Oh dear.’

‘You do sound a bit oxygen-deprived,’ Noel said sympathetically. ‘Put your mask back on for a while.’

‘Alice,’ said Josephine quietly. ‘Can you still see it?’

Josephine was making herself look and sound extremely calm, but I knew she wasn’t. She had gone very still, except for how she was breathing faster than normal and her hands were screwed into fists. I looked over at the perfectly ordinary patch of Martian ground. ‘Nope. Nothing,’ I said decidedly.

But Josephine reached out and took hold of my shoulders, to make me face her.

‘Alice,’ she said firmly, ‘look at me. Do you see it now? Out of the corner of your eye?’

The iciness in the air wormed its way under my skin, gnawing and wriggling like the Space Locusts chewing up soil. I wanted to squirm away. I whispered, ‘Sort of.’

‘And what’s it doing?’ Josephine asked impassively.

‘Standing on the rock,’ I stuttered. ‘Watching us. No.’

Carl breathed, ‘It couldn’t be…’ and he and Josephine exchanged a look. I wasn’t an idiot, I knew what they were thinking. They were thinking that even if Mum’s genius for flying spaceships wasn’t particularly hereditary, maybe other things about her were. In which case…

‘No it couldn’t,’ I agreed, and I lurched forwards, bounded off the rock and stumbled straight towards what wasn’t, couldn’t possibly be there and so it had to be my imagination that something had seen me coming and was backing away.

‘Alice, wait!’ Carl called, and he and Josephine came hurrying after me.

But they couldn’t stop me in time, and the thing that wasn’t there couldn’t get away from me. There was nothing, there had to be nothing, I had to prove there was nothing – so I ran into it, something solid and invisible and very cold. I almost fell over and grabbed on instinct, and felt swathes of smooth, icy fabric under my fingers, which slid away from the shape underneath.

For a moment, I was face-to-face with something like a salamander with a mane of glassy fur, its head hanging impossibly in mid-air where the invisible fabric still cloaked the rest of it. Its eyes were huge and transparent and veined with subtle colour, like glass paperweights.

Then the Goldfish swooped down like the wrath of God. It came flashing and making a howling noise I would never have thought it could make. And it did the zapping thing it had done to us, only much, much harder.

The Morror fell over and didn’t get up.

‘You killed it!’ said Noel. ‘It wasn’t doing anything! That’s not fair!’

I would have told him to shut up, except that I still felt too sick and trembly from having touched the thing. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been too unhappy if the Morror was dead, because even if it was unfair, it wouldn’t have been our fault. It wouldn’t even have been the Goldfish’s fault really, seeing as it’s a robot and was only trying to protect us. And we wouldn’t have been stuck with a Morror that could go invisible when it wanted and might do anything. And what with being lost on the wrong planet already because of these guys, I don’t think it’s exactly surprising if I didn’t feel very friendly.

But then the Morror moved and I thought, Oh, this isn’t going to be that easy.

‘Oh, you only stunned it,’ said Noel, relieved.

‘MY AIM WAS NOT TO STUN IT, MY AIM WAS TO ELIMINATE IT,’ said the Goldfish, sounding completely deranged. And then it zapped it again.

This time nothing much happened, the Morror just made a sound like it was in pain, because it obviously was, and the Goldfish beeped in confusion and zapped it another time, and by this point it was fairly clear that the Goldfish was trying as hard as it could and only succeeding in hurting the thing.

‘We could probably kill it with rocks,’ suggested Carl.

So I said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, we are not killing anything with rocks; I’m pretty sure that is actually a war crime.’

‘It’s helpless, Goldfish,’ said Josephine quietly. ‘And it’s true: we’re soldiers. It’s a prisoner of war.’

‘You’re children,’ insisted the Goldfish, still sounding pretty scary.

‘Exo-Defence Force cadets,’ said Carl, grudgingly.

The Goldfish thought for a moment. ‘TEACHER ROBOTS ARE NOT SUBJECT TO INTERNATIONAL MILITARY LAW,’ it concluded, and was about to have another zap before Noel flung himself in front of the Morror.

‘Stop it!’ he cried. ‘Stop hurting it! You’re being horrible!’

‘Killing it would be a waste,’ said Josephine. Her voice was oddly expressionless. ‘No one’s ever even seen a Morror before. And we’re going to leave the first live captive rotting somewhere on Tharsis? Without learning anything about it?’

The Goldfish made a frustrated electronic groaning sound and its eyes went back from red to blue. ‘Well kids, I think you might be biting off more than you can chew,’ it said brightly. ‘But it’s great to see you all compromising and working as a team! And if that Morror takes one step out of line…!’

There was a brief red flash in its eyes, but it backed off a bit.

‘Well, what now?’ said Carl.

So we stood there and stared at it. Or rather at its fallen, disembodied head, which was not getting any less creepy to look at.

‘We should get the rest of the invisible thing off,’ I said eventually. ‘We can’t have it running off in that thing.’

The invisible suit seemed more like a kind of sack than anything else; heaven knows how the Morror managed to walk around in it without tripping over all the time. I could sort of not quite see it out of the corner of my eye (the effect was starting to make me feel slightly sick), and the others couldn’t at all, but of course we could all feel it. It was very fine and silky and clingy under our hands as we dragged it off.

‘So that’s what they look like,’ breathed Carl.

‘That’s what this one looks like,’ corrected Josephine.

There was the first Morror human eyes had ever seen. The translucent mane covered its newt-like head, extended over its neck and shoulders, and stretched across its cheeks into tapering panels of shorter strands beneath its eyes. The mane wasn’t really fur, of course, it was made up of tendril-things, sort of like what sea anemones have. The strands of the mane got shorter and shorter as they approached bare skin, until they were just glossy round dots that spotted the Morror all over like a leopard, covering its chest and the six long, slender tentacles – three on each side – that hung from its shoulders. Between the dots… I suppose you’d have to call it grey, but such a complicated, mottled grey, sort of bluish or greenish or purplish, depending on how you looked at it. Each tentacle might have reached its knees, assuming it had them. But we couldn’t see what it had in the way of legs, because though it was bare from the waist up it was wearing a kind of long skirt made from stiff dark-red papery stuff.

Its eyes were shut, but I’d already seen them: as big as my fists, glossy and transparent round the edges and wells of deep black in the middle.

The Morror was still moaning quietly. It flicked up a couple of tentacles to cover its face, but it didn’t seem to be actually awake.

‘So, does this work on humans?’ Carl wondered, and put a fold of the invisibility cloak over his head and went, ‘Wooo. Wooo.’ It worked very well, but it turned out that a headless boy capering about was one more thing than I could properly cope with right now.

‘Oh, bloody hell, don’t,’ I said. Everything around me got swimmy and floaty and I realised I might possibly be falling over. Then someone had got their arms round me and was making me sit down on a mossy rock.

‘You’re all right,’ said Josephine firmly. ‘You’re just in shock. Drink some of this.’

She was holding that silver bottle of perfume I’d seen on the Mélisande.

‘What’re you making me drink perfume for?’ I croaked, the higher intellectual functions being beyond me at present.

‘It’s not perfume,’ said Josephine. ‘It’s rum. It’s my dad’s hip flask. Have some, there’s a good girl.’

I did as I was told and Josephine patted my head approvingly, while Carl laughed in a way that suggested he might be a bit in shock himself. ‘We’ve got a Morror prisoner,’ he giggled, ‘and Josephine’s a twelve-year-old alkie…’

‘I’m nothing of the sort. I’m just extremely well prepared,’ sniffed Josephine, hugging her bag of peculiar objects proudly to her side. She passed Carl the little flask. ‘You’ll note it’s full.’

Carl had a little swig and then Josephine took it back and did the same, and Noel looked at her expectantly.

‘You’re not having any,’ Carl said flatly.

‘So, what, I’ve got to just stay in shock?’ Noel asked in indignation.

‘Yes,’ said the rest of us.

Something strange happened to the Morror. The tendrils of its mane rippled and flared, and colour pulsed through them, bands of purple and deep flame-orange that welled up in its leopard dots and swept across its skin. This freaked us all out except for Josephine, who put her chin into her hands and watched for a moment, then got out her tablet and started filming it.

‘Is it meant to do that?’ asked Noel anxiously.

‘Hey,’ said Carl. ‘Hey, Morror.’

The Morror keened quietly, and opened its eyes. There were faint threads of orange and purple in the transparency around its pupils.

‘Are you all right, Morror?’ Noel enquired.

The Morror sat up and wrapped its tentacles around itself. It looked at us in silence.

‘We’re army cadets and this is our Goldfish, and I’m not going to let it hurt you any more, but you’re our prisoner so we’re taking you to the nearest military base, and we won’t hurt you either but don’t try anything,’ Noel summarised helpfully, running out of breath a bit towards the end.

More silence.

‘Do they… talk?’ asked Noel uncertainly, and I figured that they must do, because clearly they’d communicated with humans at the start of the invasion and we must have got the name ‘Morror’ from somewhere, but I didn’t think they’d had anything to say in all the time I’d been alive.

The Morror said something. And meanwhile it changed colour. Blues and turquoises and yellows and reds quivered across its spots and tendrils, and its voice sounded like wind in trees and all the syllables sounded like sighing. It said – and this is the closest I can manage and really there could easily be more ‘a’s in there – ‘Haaaa’thraaaa vsaaaa Mo-raaa uha-raaa…’

There was a pause. ‘Well, let’s tie it up,’ said Carl briskly.

The Morror did not want to be tied up. It was very wriggly and its tentacles flapped and whipped and it changed colour a lot. We were a bit worried about touching it, because for all we knew it was poisonous. But it was four against one – five against one, really, because the Goldfish was still hovering there as menacingly as it could, so eventually we got its tentacles bound to its chest in duct tape. We’d tried to make some kind of handcuffs to tie the ends of its tentacles together behind it, but we didn’t have enough tape left. And as far as we could tell we hadn’t been poisoned, so that was something.

‘Damn, where’s the invisible suit?’ Carl said after we were finished. Everyone looked at me.

‘I don’t know,’ I protested. ‘It’s getting dark, anyway, how am I supposed to…’ But they made me turn round and round trying to see it out of the corner of my eye until I started feeling wobbly again. I didn’t find it, actually; Noel did by walking into it so the tip of his boot disappeared.

‘How are we not going to lose this,’ I said. The Goldfish suddenly sprang open a compartment we hadn’t known it had in its side, but didn’t say anything. I don’t know if it was trying to overcome the moral conflict between its programming and our decision, or if it was just sulking.

We put the cloak inside and the compartment snapped shut.

‘It is getting dark, though,’ I repeated. The rum had helped but I didn’t feel I could face travelling much further. Still, I wondered how anyone was going to get much rest around a silent tied-up Morror changing colour like a set of traffic lights all the time.

‘I assume that was its ship you found, Goldfish?’ said Josephine. ‘Let’s go and look at that.’

We tried to tie the Morror to Monica’s leg, but we didn’t have enough duct tape left to do that either. So in the end we left the Goldfish to make sure the Morror didn’t get up to anything, and Noel to make sure the Goldfish didn’t get up to anything, and the rest of us started scrambling over the rocks towards the plume of steam.

Something occurred to me on the way. ‘Does your dad know you’ve got his hip flask?’ I asked Josephine.

‘Yes, he’s probably worked it out by now,’ Josephine said.

‘OK, everyone try not to freak out,’ I said, the next morning, ‘but I think there are more of them.’

Everyone commenced freaking out.

We’d been in the process of discussing what to do with the one Morror we already had. We were leaning towards just taking careful note of the coordinates and leaving it tied up where it was. It wouldn’t die before we got to Zond, and then we could tell someone to go back and get it.

Noel, of course, thought this was cruel.

Anyway, now I’d got everyone scared of extra Morrors. ‘Where? How many? What are they doing?’ they all said, and Josephine and Carl brandished their new-found weapons. Carl still had the shockray staff, and Josephine had taken the curved blades and looked more piratical than ever.

‘Over there, and nothing – there are three or four of them, I can’t be sure, just lying down. I think they might be dead.’

We hesitated, everyone trying to look at the things I’d pointed out and no one actually succeeding.

‘It might be a trap,’ Noel said.

Josephine shook her head. ‘If they were alive they’d have done something while we were asleep.’

Carl lowered the shockray staff a little. ‘Well, let’s have a look.’

Then the Morror – our Morror, obviously – lurched out of the invisible spaceship making a wailing noise and waggling its tentacles as best it was able.

Josephine and Carl had their weapons raised in a second and the Goldfish was plainly gearing up for a good hard zap. The Morror stopped in its tracks and spread the ends of its tentacles.

‘Leeeeee-eeee,’ sigh-wailed the Morror. ‘Leeeeeee m’alooooooo.’ Then it seemed to make an effort, pull itself together, and it said much more clearly; ‘Leave them alone.’

There was a pause. Carl said flatly, ‘What.’

‘Leeeeeve them alooone,’ repeated the Morror. ‘They aaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaahhhrrrr already deaaaaad. Leeeeeeeeeeee in peeeeeeeeeece…’

‘You talk English!’ crowed Noel.

No one else was as pleased about it as that, but Josephine’s eyebrows jumped with intrigue.

‘Yeeeeee-eeeessss,’ the Morror sighed, then shook itself slightly. ‘Yes. We are trained in your languages.’

‘What an interesting development,’ Josephine said softly.

‘So you can spy on us,’ I said. ‘Lovely.’

‘It’s good that you understand,’ said Carl, ‘because now I can tell you what bumkettling invisible gits I think the lot of you are.’

The Morror’s colours rippled purple-black-blue. It said, ‘That is a natural response. You could not comprehend our reasons.’

This did not endear it to us very much; even Noel snorted angrily.

‘Why don’t you find out for yourself whether we can comprehend?’ asked Josephine. ‘Go on. Explain.’

The Morror rippled orange and pink and reverted to the way of talking it evidently found more comfortable: ‘Leee-heeeeeeeeve meeee. I aaaam ooo ooonly one Mo-raaa uha-raaa, I aaaaaam nooooot a threeeeeeaaaattt…’

Then it scuttled back inside the spaceship, and thereby disappeared.

‘Guard it, Goldfish,’ Josephine ordered, while gesturing fiercely at the rest of us to come out of Morror earshot.

‘Fill the oxygen tanks and carry on towards Zond,’ she hissed at us when we’d put thirty feet or so between us and the Morror ship. ‘I’m staying here with it.’

‘What?!’ I exclaimed.

‘We have to be realistic,’ Josephine said. ‘We’ve got limited oxygen, there’s a bunch of Space Locusts trying to eat us; we can’t be certain there’s anyone at Zond. We could all be dead in a few days, the Morror too. But we’ve got the first Morror anyone’s ever seen. If I die I want to find out as much as possible first. I want to leave a record. It could be crucial to the war and to science.’ She looked at us to see if we were getting the point and judged that we weren’t. ‘I want to interrogate it,’ she finished.

‘Do you have to be so grim, Jo?’ complained Carl.

‘Yes,’ said Josephine, inevitably.

‘Well, we’re not going to waltz off and leave you stranded alone with it. You can forget that right now.’

‘It’s tied up and I’m armed! I’ll cope perfectly well.’

‘Yeah, this is not a thing that’s getting negotiated,’ said Carl, ‘is it, Alice.’

‘No, it is not,’ I agreed. And because Josephine looked as if she could probably keep arguing for a while: ‘And no one’s dying. We’ll bring it with us. You can interrogate it as we go, if you have to. And if, that is when, we find people… if we find Dr Muldoon, she’ll know what to do with it.’

‘What wonderful company it’s going to be,’ said Carl, sighing.

Noel on the other hand was thrilled, and scampered back towards the spaceship, calling, ‘Morror! We going to take you with us, Morror, and we’ll feed you and look after you and make sure you’re OK!’

The Morror was even less keen on this than Carl, and made the long waily ‘Leeeeeeee’ sounds that came out when it couldn’t get its mouth around ‘Leave me alone’. However, once the Goldfish had prodded it out of the ship and it saw Monica, it seemed to become resigned to its fate. Possibly it reflected that while it might not like being a prisoner of war, being the stranded survivor of a spaceship crash wasn’t necessarily a better bet.

We did go and have a look at the dead Morrors before we left, just in case there was any funny business going on. But they really were dead, lying under one large sheet of the invisible fabric, in a neat row. One looked more or less like the living Morror in the spaceship; same newt-face and tendrils, though it was bigger and the face was squarer and the mane was longer and straighter. The other two were different; one had a much frillier mane and the last was about twice the size of the others and didn’t have a mane at all, just larger patches and spots over a rounder head.

The dead Morrors didn’t have any colours. Their skins were dark grey, their glassy tendrils empty. But there were coloured pebbles strewn all over the ground around them.

After we’d looked at them, Carl, without saying anything, quietly put the invisible sheet back.

So we packed everything else up and refilled our oxygen canisters from the ship, climbed on to Monica and lurched west with our prisoner.

For a few horrible seconds, all we could do was try to hang on and hope Monica didn’t overturn completely. The Goldfish reeled through the air above us in a white haze of water as the rain bounced off its flanks, its eyes flashing as it tried to keep Monica under control. Monica’s legs flailed and thrashed, but giant robot spiders do not make good swimmers.

We collided with a spur of rock, and stuck there for a bit, though we could feel the current trying to drag us loose.

‘Untie me, please,’ said Thsaaa urgently. It had the ends of its tentacles coiled around what had been a pipe in the Flying Fox, but with its upper tentacles bound to its torso it couldn’t get a good grip.

I was clinging to the same thing too and worrying that I could feel it coming loose.

Carl reacted while I was still thinking; he grabbed one of Josephine’s Morror blades and hacked through Thsaaa’s duct-tape bindings. Of course, this left him only one hand to hang on with himself, and his immediate reward was a surge of floodwater that coursed over Monica’s back and swept him off before he could even yell.

One set of Thsaaa’s tentacles wrapped tight around the pipe, the other around Carl’s arm, both at once.

Carl and everyone else made up for lost time on yelling. The Morror didn’t say anything, but didn’t let him go.

And that was all well and good but then we came loose from the outcrop of rock and went swerving downhill again. This time, the Goldfish had Monica tuck her legs in so we were riding something more like a sledge if still not like a boat, and then we were hurtling towards another mound of rock and I thought, Oh, God, this is it, but then Monica got her legs around it and gripped and we were more or less stable, though with the flood still surging around us and the rain beating down.

Everyone except the Morror had started trembling. ‘We’ve got to get out of this,’ I shouted into the roar of the rain. ‘Goldfish. Can’t breathe properly. And the cold. Hypothermia. Pneumonia.’

‘Can you go and look for any kind of shelter?’ Josephine gasped.

‘I’ll do my best,’ it replied, and vanished into the rain. I missed it immediately; with the air and the ground brown and churning around us, it was all too easy to imagine it wouldn’t make it back.

I started checking to see what we might have lost to the floodwater, but once I’d got oxygen masks on to everyone I was too cold and wet to go on. With some hesitation I handed over an oxygen mask to Thsaaa, who then proved that we still had Josephine’s bag of strange things, because it whipped its tentacles like a lasso across the platform and snatched its shiny object out of it.

Josephine looked indignant but didn’t demand it back, because you can’t expect prisoners to actually hand you the means to interrogate them.

‘I saved your life,’ it reminded Carl.

‘Yeah, I guess you did,’ Carl said. ‘Uh. Thanks.’

‘I hope you will bear that in mind if you should succeed in taking me to your superiors. I suppose you do not have the concept of ushaal-thol-faa, but you do at least have crude approximations like dhan’yavāda and gratitude in your languages, which I believe should have some influence on your behaviour.’

‘Yeah, all right. At least you’re honest about why you did it,’ said Carl, shivering, clearly beginning to feel rather less grateful.

But Noel wasn’t. ‘THANK YOU SO MUCH, THSAAA,’ he exclaimed, even though his teeth were chattering. ‘He’s my brother. I know he’s kind of an idiot, but still I’m really, really glad you didn’t let him drown.’

The Morror peered down at Noel and looked a little startled, or at least I thought it did.

‘I was only in trouble because I went and untied you,’ grumbled Carl. ‘Where’s your usha-whatever?’

Thsaaa ignored him. It ran the very tips of its tentacles over the surface of its object in an intricate, swirling pattern, and then placed it in the centre of the platform. Josephine could’ve grabbed it again but she didn’t, just looked at it warily.

‘So come on, what is that?’ I asked.

‘It is a Paralashath,’ said Thsaaa, which of course told us nothing at all. But then the Paralashath came to life again and started glowing, and this time it was giving off not only coloured light but heat.

‘Oh! Is that what it’s for?’ I cried, eagerly shifting closer to it.

‘No,’ said Thsaaa rather snottily, like it would have rolled its eyes if it had been human. It might not be a fan of our words for gratitude but ‘no’ was one human word it seemed quite happy with.

‘Isn’t that too hot for you?’ asked Carl. ‘I thought you guys were all about the cold.’

‘This is pleasant for short periods. In these conditions, I am not at risk of overheating.’

‘Is this about engendering more ushaal-thol-faa?’ asked Josephine sourly. Of course she had memorised the word on one hearing.

‘In part,’ said the Morror. ‘If you die of cold I doubt your robot companion would help me reach safety. Or refrain from… hurting me.’

I noticed for the first time a couple of blackened streaks on its chest and head, where the Goldfish had zapped it.

After that we just focused on breathing oxygen and trying to keep our hands warm. Monica’s back was still a horrible place to be in that storm, but it felt a bit less likely to be fatally bad.

Gradually the rain started to subside, and then I saw something glowing through the curtains of water around us. The Goldfish was back.

‘OK, kids, the good news is I think I found someplace,’ it said. ‘Bad news is I don’t think it’s safe to move Monica yet.’

It seemed particularly unfair that we couldn’t get to shelter until the thing we needed shelter from calmed down, but there it was. Everyone who wasn’t Thsaaa huddled closer together around the Paralashath and Thsaaa sat there on its own and watched. Once Noel asked curiously, ‘Can Morrors drown?’

‘Yes!’ it replied crossly, and that was about the extent of conversation.

At last the torrent gushing round our outcrop dwindled to something that Monica could possibly wade through, and the Goldfish led us slowly down the slope of Tharsis and into a hole between two columns of rock. We had to climb off Monica’s back and let her scuttle in separately, which meant we had to wade through the small cascade splashing into the cave.

The cavern didn’t look, at first, like a good place to get dry, seeing as how water was streaming down the walls from unseen channels and dripping from the ceiling, and the bottom was practically a river. But there was a rocky shelf towards the back under a dry overhang, and with Monica crouching beside that we had a reasonable amount of space to recuperate in.

Our new floor space wasn’t the only thing illuminated by the combined light of the Goldfish and the Paralashath; stalactites hung from the ceiling, some long and pointed like icicles, some heavy and swagged like velvet theatre-curtains. Stalagmites rose from the floor all crinkly and twisted like melting candles. As the Goldfish moved between the pillars, the rock glowed rosy-amber and translucent in places, and strange lacy shadows played across everything.

‘Guess we’ll be here for a while,’ said the Goldfish, deceptively casually. ‘You’ll need something to do… How about a math lesson?!’

‘Let us eat something first, for God’s sake,’ said Carl.

We started sorting through our remaining supplies to see what was still usable. We’d lost both the Morror blades when Carl nearly got swept away. We still had the shockray staff, but right now we weren’t as interested in mysterious alien weapons as we were in things we could eat. Some of our food had been washed away too, of course, and almost everything that wasn’t in sealed packs or tubs was ruined. Still, the damage could’ve been worse, though of course we were that much closer to running out and if we didn’t get to Zond soon… or if we didn’t find help when we got there…

‘Give the alien some lunch,’ said Carl.

‘I cannot eat your… Smeat,’ Thsaaa said haughtily.

‘We don’t only eat Smeat,’ I said. ‘OK, this isn’t exactly dinner at the Ivy, but it’s not that bad, in the circumstances. We’ve still got cheese.’

‘Let it have its blue meat-stuff,’ said Carl. ‘It’s defrosted, anyway.’

‘We can’t keep calling it “It”,’ said Noel, who I thought was coming on a bit strong with this Rights of the Morror business, even though I guess I started it. ‘It’s a person.’

‘We call the Goldfish “It”,’ Carl pointed out. ‘It IS an it.’

The Goldfish surely was a person, I thought; it was programmed to want to do certain things and behave in a certain way, but it still had feelings and it could come up with its own ways of doing things. It had proven that when it zapped us into doing schoolwork. I felt guilty this wasn’t something I’d thought about before.

‘Do you mind us calling you “It”, Goldfish?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m definitely an “It”, kids!’ said the Goldfish sunnily.

‘Er… and you, Thsaaa?’

‘I am not in the same category as a robot,’ replied the alien.

‘OK, fine. Are you a boy or a girl?’ Carl asked.

‘No,’ said Thsaaa.

‘Oh.’ There was a small silence. Carl considered. ‘Are you more… both, or more neither?’

‘No,’ said Thsaaa.

‘Would you care to elaborate, would you like Carl to keep guessing indefinitely or do you want us to understand you’re not going to tell us?’ Josephine asked frostily.

‘I’m Quth-laaa,’ said Thsaaa wearily. ‘There is Suth-laaa, Quth-laaa, Ruul, Thuul and Ma-lashnath.’

We all thought this through.

‘Five sexes? How can you have five sexes?’ I asked. ‘I mean, what would they all do?’

There was a slight pause as we all realised what I had asked, and my face got hot and later Carl called me a pervert. But at the time, no one said anything because everyone totally wanted to know.

Thsaaa didn’t seem to have an emotional reaction that I could make out, except possibly mild boredom: ‘As you like…’ it began.

So that’s how we ended up being the first humans ever to hear about Morror sex, and at first we were pretty interested. It turned out that though there were five sexes, it was actually really rare to have five parents – it was good if you did because you’d probably be extra healthy and live a long time, but it was only really possible when there was peace and plenty for all Morrorkind, which hadn’t happened in a while. But no one had fewer than three, and though Thsaaa didn’t actually say, ‘And that’s another reason why we think you humans are so primitive,’ it was pretty clear.

So, yes, that was interesting. But then it just went on and on and on, and Thsaaa kept stopping and explaining that though usually, most Morrors did it this way, there were like twenty per cent or something of them who did it that way. And after a while, without meaning to, I sort of stopped listening for a few seconds, and when I started again I’d completely lost track of who was supposed to Harvest the Genetic Material from whom, and who else would then Absorb it Through their Sensory Tendrils and what climatic conditions were required for a Thuul to give birth alone, and when they wouldn’t be able to without a Ma-lashnath. And we started nodding and saying Oh yes I see in a polite sort of way, and hoping it would stop talking soon. And at the end we still didn’t know what pronouns to use because Morrors don’t have pronouns. Well, no, they do in some Morror languages, but not in the one Thsaaa spoke.

So I’m going to say ‘they’ when I’m talking about Thsaaa, even if it gets a bit confusing. I can’t guarantee I mightn’t slip up and say ‘it’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’, but that’s the plan. Thsaaa was as happy with this as they seemed to get about anything.

So anyway, eventually Carl created a distraction by eating some of the Morror food; I guess it was inevitable we couldn’t keep him from trying it indefinitely.

‘It’s actually OK,’ he said, chewing thoughtfully. ‘Kind of like crab… but more meaty… and sort of raspberry.’

‘Crab and raspberry?’

‘Yeah, but it works. Come on, Thsaaa. Have an apricot.’

Thsaaa rippled green and black. ‘I will soon have no choice. Your army will not have Morror food for me,’ they said. They warily extended a tentacle to accept a dried apricot, put it in their mouth, and instantly shuddered. ‘The texture…’

‘Never mind, try something else. Jo! Have you got any of those ginger biscuits left?’

Carl and Noel were now equally enthused about interspecies food-sharing and were busily sorting through our scant resources in hope of finding something the Morror liked. Thsaaa listlessly accepted energy bar after cold noodle and though I suppose you couldn’t expect actual enthusiasm, I found its limp disgust a bit irritating. Carl and Noel, however, only seemed to see it as a challenge.

Thsaaa cautiously tried a lump of cheese and twitched and shuddered, but I thought maybe they weren’t totally unpleasant twitches and shudders. Thsaaa ate a little more and said, ‘That’s so strong.’

‘That’s made of milk,’ explained Noel.

‘Which is a fluid cows secrete to feed their young,’ muttered Josephine darkly. ‘Laced with bacteria and then fermented.’

That put Thsaaa off the cheese for the time being. But then they picked up something that quite randomly had survived everything, a bottle of tomato ketchup. They cautiously squirted a dab on to another tentacle, and touched it to their mouth.

Thsaaa went blue, orange and fuchsia, made a high-pitched ‘Eeeeeeee!’ noise and reached for more.

‘You like it!’ cried Noel, delighted.

‘This would go very well with baked fal-thra,’ said Thsaaa, busily sucking ketchup off their tentacles. ‘I wish my Ruul-ama could have tried this.’

‘What’s a Ruul-ama?’ I asked, but Thsaaa was either too engrossed with the ketchup to answer, or pretended to be because it was a convenient way of not answering questions.

‘Are you going to feed it all our food?’ asked Josephine sharply.

‘We don’t really need the ketchup,’ argued Noel, who was just delighted to see the Morror more or less happy.

‘Try and keep in mind why we’re on this messed-up planet instead of at home living our lives,’ said Josephine. ‘Also the small matter of the hundreds of thousands of people who aren’t living their lives at all.’ She drew up her knees and glowered into the black depths of the cave.

After eating, we focused on properly warming up and drying things over the Paralashath. You’ve got to remember that we weren’t quite as badly off as we could have been in this situation, because our uniforms were made of up-to-date, temperature-controlled, highly waterproof nano-weave. On the other hand, what with all the crashing into things and being attacked by Space Locusts, our uniforms also had holes in them and the flash flood hadn’t been particularly kind to the duct-tape patches.

So in the end we mostly stripped down to our underwear and set up a sort of clothes line between stalactites, and then just crouched as close to the Paralashath as we could and breathed some more oxygen. I was way past the point of worrying about the other kids seeing me in my pants and crop top, and frankly didn’t care if our friendly neighbourhood alien saw me either, but Josephine evidently felt rather differently, as she didn’t take anything off but ordered Thsaaa: ‘Stop looking at us.’

Thsaaa obeyed at once. ‘I apologise. I only… I never thought to see humans so close.’

‘That’s the first thing you think to apologise for?’ said Josephine.

‘We’ve all been looking at it… them… Thsaaa,’ Noel countered.

‘Of course we have! But they know what we look like. They’ve been watching us for years; they’ve had time to learn our languages, they know a lot about how to kill us. We know what? That they like tomato ketchup!’

‘You know well enough how to kiiill uuus,’ murmured Thsaaa, their speech again getting soft and long and slow.

‘But you were the ones with the head start,’ said Josephine.

‘You could not understand.’

‘You keep saying so. I keep suggesting you explain. Why did you come to Earth? Why are you on Mars? What’s the plan?’

Thsaaa sighed again. ‘We are forbidden to speak to humans.’

‘Well, then you’ve already broken the rules. Are you worrying about being in trouble with your people? Shouldn’t you be worrying about the trouble you’re in with us?’

‘We neeeeeeed the Earth,’ whispered the Morror, breathing faster and sucking in oxygen from the mask I’d given them.

‘And we don’t?’

‘No, you do not feel it as we do, you are so blaaaaank,’ said the Morror, flashing all kinds of colours.

‘Blank,’ repeated Josephine. And for a moment she was blank; expression just dropped off her face.

Then she leaped at Thsaaa, and grabbed the oxygen mask away. ‘Is this blank?’ she shouted, pushing them against the rock wall. And then she was struggling with them while they gasped and she yelled: ‘Why, just explain all of it, tell me why any of this had to happen.’

‘Go Josephine!’ cheered the Goldfish.

‘No! Don’t go Josephine!’ protested Noel in distress.

Thsaaa might have been too surprised to fight back at first, but they weren’t tied up any more, so they wriggled and lashed out with their tentacles. Carl and Noel and me were trying to separate the two of them anyway, so Thsaaa shortly got free and then they hopped off the rocky shelf into the shallow river coursing through the cave and splashed away into the dark making a wailing noise.

‘Oh, well now we’ve lost it,’ said Carl in disgust.

Josephine just stood there gasping and staring, and then she took off as well. I thought for a moment she was going after Thsaaa, possibly in order to drown them, but then she splashed off in the opposite direction.

‘Stay here,’ I cried at Carl, dragging my boots back on.

‘Oh, this one’s all yours,’ he said, sitting down and putting his head in his hands in sheer exasperation.

I put on my uniform jacket and climbed gingerly down from the ledge. ‘Come on, Goldfish. I need a light,’ I said. ‘But when we find her, don’t talk, OK?’

I waded into the dark, feeling very cold and damp as soon as I was away from the Paralashath.

‘Josephine?’

The dark water glittered, reflecting the Goldfish’s glow. Josephine’s silhouette separated from a twisted column of rock. ‘What do you want?’

‘Well, I don’t know, I usually just do come after you when you charge off somewhere. And it generally works out OK.’

‘That’s why you’ve ended up out here,’ growled Josephine. ‘And nothing about this has worked out OK.’

‘Well, we’re alive. You found us Monica. We’re semi-close to Zond. We’ve got a Morror, even if they are really annoying and rude. Look, I would say I’ll leave you alone if you want me to, but what with this whole situation…’

Josephine made a sad, impatient little noise. I decided to try a different tack: ‘What’s going on with you? You’re the one who never even wanted to fight them.’

Josephine kicked up a spray of water. ‘I don’t want to be a soldier. I’m a useless pilot and I hate being told what to do. If I don’t get blown up on my first day, I’ll end up going crazy and shooting myself.’

‘Don’t say that,’ I said, but Josephine ignored me.

‘But that doesn’t mean I’m not angry. I want to be an archaeologist and a composer and I should be allowed to be, and if it wasn’t for them – and they were shockraying London on the day I left, remember? And that thing – all I want from it is an answer. I’m not punishing it, I haven’t said, “Let’s kill it with rocks.” And after everything they’ve taken away, a lot of people, grown-up people, would think I was more than justified.’

‘Who did they take away?’ I said, very quietly, because I was sure we were talking about a person.

‘Guess,’ said Josephine bitterly.

I had, already, I was almost certain who it was, given the people she’d mentioned from home and the person she rather significantly hadn’t.

(I hate thinking about dead mums.)

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

Josephine swerved round. ‘Oh, don’t be,’ she snarled in a weird, strangled, horrible voice. ‘She was a musician on the Queen Guinevere when they sank it. I was one year old. I don’t remember her. So it doesn’t matter.’

After quite a long time of standing there, praying I wasn’t going to say the wrong thing, I said, ‘Of course it does.’

Josephine made a noise that was a bit like a laugh, although not very much, and did actually look at me. ‘Yes, it really does,’ she agreed. ‘Of course, Lena and Dad do remember her. I know it must be worse for them in lots of ways. But I hate that I can’t. I can tell when they’re thinking about her and sometimes they don’t talk about her because I’m there and I –’ She smacked her hand hard against the stalactite pillar. ‘I want to know why she’s dead. Is that so unreasonable?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course it isn’t. But not like this, OK? This isn’t like you.’

There was a soft splashing nearby and a murmur of long, mournful Morror syllables. The Goldfish spun round, but Thsaaa was still hidden in the shadows and might as well have been invisible again.

‘You are speaking of your… mother?’ Thsaaa said quietly from the darkness to Josephine. ‘I wish she could return to you. I wish my people had not harmed you. I… do not believe it should be forbidden to say that.’

Josephine didn’t answer straight away. ‘Why do you think we’re blank?’ she asked, at last, pacing towards the voice and the splashing until the Goldfish revealed Thsaaa, flickering orange and green, and somehow I got an impression of confusion. Josephine tilted her head. ‘It’s because we don’t change colour, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ said the Morror, and went yellow.

‘Yellow!’ I said, suddenly getting it. ‘Yellow is embarrassment.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ insisted Thsaaa, but not at all persuasively and more yellowly than ever.

Josephine’s lips parted with fascination and she breathed, ‘Oh, Dr Muldoon would love this.’

‘Noel would, too,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back and show him. Come on, it’s not as if anyone has got anywhere better to go, and I’m freezing.’

So we splashed back to the ledge where Carl and Noel were, and everyone had some more oxygen, and Noel was duly thrilled by Thsaaa the Alien Mood Ring. Thsaaa might not have particularly enjoyed the attention, but Noel tried to give them a quick rundown on what all the various human expressions meant so at least it was reciprocal.

‘Look, THIS – GRRR! – is ANGRY! Like when you go…?’

‘…black, purple,’ supplied Thsaaa.

‘Oh, are you angry now?’ asked Noel in concern, because Thsaaa was mostly lilac and grey now. ‘I didn’t mean to annoy you.’

‘No. Not angry. Not this purple. This is… this is something else. I cannot… I do not know all the words,’ and whatever those exact colours meant, Thsaaa sounded so weary that we left them alone for a bit.

‘Can you lie?’ asked Josephine guardedly, from across the Paralashath.

You’d think it might have been in Thsaaa’s interests to say that they couldn’t, but they said, ‘Yes. One may force colours to some extent. It is not easy to maintain, unless you are very skilled or very talented. An actor, for instance.’

‘Is that why you wear invisible suits? So you can lie if you want to?’

‘No,’ said Thsaaa, and clammed up again.

Josephine looked at the Paralashath. It wasn’t producing any colours at the moment, just heat, but Thsaaa had said that wasn’t what it was for and we’d seen the patterns it could make.

‘Is this… art?’ she asked.

Thsaaa went soft rose and amber and blue, reached out and swirled the tips of their tentacles across the Paralashath’s surface again, and it changed, whorls of turquoise and peach quivering over it. ‘Yes,’ Thsaaa said. ‘My Ruul-ama composed it. They were a musician too.’

Josephine frowned, and either Noel’s Human Expressions lesson had done Thsaaa some good, or the Morror had realised on their own that this didn’t quite make sense. ‘Ah. I suppose… this is silent, so not music? But art, yes.’

The Paralashath gave off little ripples of heat and cold in time with the rhythm of its colours, so you could feel the patterns of temperature play across your skin like feathers. Thsaaa’s colours gradually flowed into sync with it.

Thsaaa said into the depths of the Paralashath: ‘My Ruul-ama died over Karaaaa, and my Suth-laaa-hum, working on the Northern light-shield.’ There was a pause, and then it explained: ‘My parents.’

Kara, I thought. The battle that made my mum famous. Maybe she’d even been the one who killed them.

‘Yeah, but how old are you?’ asked Carl, briskly.

‘Thirteen,’ said Thsaaa.

‘…Thirteen of our Earth years?’ asked Carl, after a grinding silence.

‘Of course thirteen of your Earth years,’ said Thsaaa witheringly. ‘Why would I give you an answer you couldn’t understand?’

We all wondered if maybe Morrors were like dogs and cats who didn’t live that long but were middle-aged at five or whatever.

‘And… er…’ said Carl. ‘Does that roughly correspond to… I mean, as a proportion of… I mean, are Morrors grown up when they’re thirteen?’

‘No,’ said Thsaaa.

‘Oh.’

‘I’m eight,’ volunteered Noel, but no one else felt like saying anything much for a while.

‘We didn’t know you were a kid,’ Josephine said softly.

And us stranded war-kids sat there quietly in the Martian cavern, waiting for the rain to stop.

‘…Math, anybody?’ suggested the Goldfish.

Oh Christ, that maths lesson, you don’t even want to know. To cut a long story short, it became obvious that Thsaaa’s new position was that while humans might have a bit of emotional depth after all, we were still probably drooling idiots compared to the lofty grandeur of a Morror brain. That got Josephine’s back up – well, everyone’s, but Josephine was the one who challenged the alien to a Maths Duel for the honour of our respective species.

‘Is this really necessary?’ I groaned.

‘Yes!’ cried Thsaaa and Josephine as one.

Noel lent Thsaaa his tablet to work on, which Thsaaa got the hang of pretty fast – we’d already seen that their tentacle-tips were at least as dexterous as human fingers. So the Goldfish sent a maths quiz over to both of them and Thsaaa and Josephine were soon furiously hacking away at the questions.

‘Look on the bright side – as long as they’re doing that, we get out of algebra,’ Carl whispered to me as we settled down to watch.

Now, you do assume that invisible aliens who’ve besieged your planet your entire life can’t be completely thick. So, much as I respected Josephine’s brain, I was pretty surprised when she proceeded to wipe the floor with the Morror, who just got yellower and yellower as Josephine finished her quiz in about a third of the time they needed and, according to the Goldfish, got ninety-six per cent right while Thsaaa got nothing.

‘That is a lie!’ Thsaaa exploded. ‘You are cheating! You have no thol-vashla-sleeth!’

‘Aww, no one likes a sore loser, Thsaaa,’ chirped the Goldfish with undisguised satisfaction.

But the triumph had gone out of Josephine’s face. ‘It’s because it’s in base ten,’ she mumbled, almost inaudibly.

‘What?’

‘Base ten!’ Josephine yelled. ‘Ordinary maths! Human maths! We work everything by tens because people started off counting on their fingers! But look at it… them!’

‘Yes!’ Thsaaa proudly waved the three tentacles that grew at each shoulder. ‘I knew there must be an explanation! You are using the wrong kind of mathematics!’

‘There is nothing wrong with our mathematics,’ snarled Josephine.

So Thsaaa wanted to do the whole quiz again in base six. And Josephine might have been an intellectual prodigy, but this wasn’t something she’d had a lot of practice with.

‘Have you got any logic tests, Goldfish?’ she asked.

‘You are trying to avoid a fair challenge!’

‘I am trying to find something with a universal frame of reference!’ Josephine retorted.

‘Maybe there isn’t one,’ said Carl.

‘All right, so we’re not going to find out who’s cleverest today, and everyone’ll just have to learn to live with that,’ I said in exasperation, while the contestants glared at each other and then at me.

‘You souuuuuuund like my Suth-laaa-hun-Ruul,’ grumbled Thsaaa.

‘Your what?’

‘I’m pretty sure you just got called an alien granny, Alice,’ said Carl.

‘If you were that intelligent, you’d have realised the problem straight away,’ muttered Josephine to the Morror. ‘I was the one who did that.’

Noel decided to smooth things over at this point by shuffling over to Thsaaa to show them the various things his tablet could do that were more fun than maths tests. ‘See, it’s a bit like a Paralashath,’ he said.

‘No, this is a much simpler construction than a Paralashath,’ said Thsaaa immediately.

Noel shrugged and just played some songs and videos, and then various funny things he’d got off the internet at home.

Thsaaa tolerated this loftily for some time. Then Noel hit play on a particular video and there was a much more noticeable effect: tendrils swayed and flashed red and pink and Thsaaa wheezed, ‘The… creature… pushed the human… into the pond.’

‘Are you… laughing?’ I asked uneasily. ‘Or are you ill?’

‘Please, show it agaaaaaain,’ begged our Morror.

I suppose some things are universal after all. It was a particularly funny video of a goat butting a man into a pond.

Noel leaned over to show something else on the tablet and, as he did so, brushed Thsaaa’s tentacle with his hand.

‘You’re a lot warmer than I’d have expected,’ he said thoughtfully. Tentatively he held his hand out so Thsaaa could touch it or not as they wanted to. ‘I thought Morrors liked everything really cold.’

Hesitantly, Thsaaa coiled a tentacle-tip around Noel’s finger. ‘And I knew you would be cold. And yet… I thought it would be like touching something dead…’

‘Oh.’ Noel frowned, and then decided to shrug it off. ‘No, I expect it’s a bit like what touching a reptile feels like, to a human.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Thsaaa. ‘You generate less heat, and lose it more quickly. We would overheat in warmer climates. Our world was cooler – we were made to keep warm easily.’ Thsaaa sighed and flickered sage-green and grey. ‘Humans… humans do not need such particular conditions.’

After that, the Goldfish said the storm outside had stopped, and we figured we were as dry and ready for travel as we were going to get.

Which frankly wasn’t that ready, after everything. A big part of me really didn’t want to move. It was difficult to do it without starting to promise myself things like baths and warm beds and hot pasta and Mum and Dad, and I’d been pretty good at not focusing too much on that sort of thing up until now and I was scared of getting let down and not being able to take it.

We waded out of the cave and piled onto Monica.

Everything outside was still extremely wet, to the point of there being exciting new torrents of floodwater thundering across the landscape, but it was now more possible to skirt around them, and Monica was sure-footed enough not to slip in the mud.

The umber clouds parted and the little sun came out as we skittered round the flank of Mount Peacock. A misty rainbow hovered over the peach-coloured ridges of the land beyond.

Thsaaa was entranced. Their tentacles spread wistfully towards it and their colours flickered into sympathetic bands of red, orange, yellow, green. ‘A vamala-raaa! It has been so looooooong,’ they said.

‘Yeah, it has been,’ I agreed. I hadn’t seen one in years, even on Earth, and it made me feel a little better.

‘There are so few colours on this planet,’ sighed Thsaaa.

‘That’s not really true,’ Josephine said. ‘Have you seen the little flowers that are growing now? The purple sea and the grasslands? And even without the terraforming, the sky at night…’

Thsaaa considered. ‘Yes,’ they conceded. ‘Yes. But you cannot imagine what it is like, without Ruhaa-thal. It is so strange, that you come from a planet that has mag… mag…’

‘A magnetic field, Thsaaa,’ supplied the Goldfish, and I thought, Wow, Thsaaa is now in the category of Kids the Goldfish needs to Teach Stuff. That really is progress.

‘A magnetic field,’ Thsaaa repeated. ‘It is so strange that you have it and you did not evolve to use it. This place, it… it hurts. But yes, I can see it must be beautiful for humans.’

‘So, tell us about your planet, Thsaaa,’ said Noel.

Thsaaa went quiet.

‘Or planets, plural?’ suggested Josephine.

‘I am not allowed. You already know, I am not allowed.’

‘Yeah, but c’mon, that horse bolted hours ago,’ Carl said.

‘That… horse?’ echoed Thsaaa, confused.

‘There must be something you know is OK,’ said Carl. ‘Something that’s just about the stuff you do at home. Like, here’s an example. We come from a city called Sydney, our parents run a cinema, and I’ve seen Hawkflight so many times I can recite the entire screenplay. It’s about a Flarehawk pilot who chases a Morror ship through a wormhole to the Morror home world and he defeats all the… uh, never mind. I mean, in Sydney, there are many beaches, people like swimming.’

There was a slight pause. ‘We are aware of Hawkflight,’ said Thsaaa. ‘It is inaccurate on almost every possible level.’

‘There’s a fountain in Darling Harbour where the water goes in a spiral and you can play in it,’ offered Noel encouragingly, before Carl could say anything else tactless.

‘Darling Harbour stinks of fish,’ said Carl.

‘It does not. And there’s an aquarium. There’s a pool where you’re allowed to feed the rays. And sometimes we used to walk back from the aquarium through Chinatown and eat Emperor’s Puffs… they’re little batter cakes with custard inside…’ Noel began to look slightly mournful.

‘I have spent most of my life on ships and civilian stations,’ said Thsaaa.

‘Yeah, but still,’ Carl said.

Thsaaa considered. ‘I have always wished to see the city of Swaleeshashalafay Athmaral-haaa-Thay…’ (I’ve given up here but the name actually went on for much longer than that.) ‘I have only ever seen pictures, and there are many Paralashath by Morrors who lived there. The glowing towers and galleries and stairs, built of ice-blocks of every colour – and on the horizon always the steam rising from the sea, from the – the – hot, burning things under the water—’

‘Underwater volcanoes?’ guessed Josephine.

‘Yes! Volcanoes. The steam was like – like pillars holding up the sky. And red spirals of fraaraval hanging between the buildings, and amber gardens of lathmalee…’

‘Is Swarlyshash… thing – is that, like, the capital city?’ Carl asked.

‘The capital city of what?’ asked Thsaaa witheringly. ‘The planet? How could a whole planet have a capital city?’

‘Can you tell us a Morror story, Thsaaa?’ asked Noel. ‘It doesn’t have to be a modern one.’

Irritable bands of orange were winking across Thsaaa and I was sure they were going to refuse, but then, unexpectedly, the orange gave way to soft greens, and they actually patted Noel gently on the head with a tentacle.

‘I will tell you the story of the Bridge of Tham-thol-Tharaa. In the land of Ee-ee-Lathwama, there was a beautiful Suth-laaa who loved a beautiful Ruul. The Suth-laaa had a mane of tendrils as delicate as patterns of frost on a window and their arms flowed as elegantly in the air as weed in the water, and the Ruul’s colours changed as gracefully as theela-va in the sky. But they were alone; for the thirty turns before there had been many warm winters, and so very few Ma-lashnath had been born. The Ruul and the Suth-laaa met Quth-laaa and Thuul sometimes, but without a Ma-lashnath, the Ruul and Suth-laaa could not have children. So they set out for the land of Safwalaa-aa…’

The storytelling didn’t go totally smoothly; Thsaaa soon got annoyed with us because we didn’t always know which bits were Morror society working as normal and which were magic (apparently Sufwalaa-aa was not a real place, even baby Morrors know that, but the thing about warm winters was totally true). But basically the beautiful Suth-laaa and the beautiful Ruul didn’t find any beautiful Ma-lashnath in Safwalaa-aa, but they didn’t realise it was because all the Ma-lashnath had headed for Ee-ee-Lathwama, looking for Ruul and Suth-laaa, and then there was a series of misunderstandings that were probably more hilarious if you were a Morror, but before we could get to the happy ending, or even the Bridge of Tham-thol-Tharaa, Noel interrupted: ‘What’s that?’ And we all tensed up because in our recent experience that question had not been a sign that nice relaxing things were about to happen.

We were picking our way through the Sulci Pavonis – sharp ridges and flat, narrow-bottomed valleys that streaked the land at the base of Mount Peacock – and Noel was pointing at five specks in the sky. Space Locusts! I thought at once – but before I could even say it, I realised they couldn’t be. The specks were holding a rotating circular formation even as they hurtled through the air towards us, and the light glittered silvery off their sides.

‘Those are human work,’ said Thsaaa.

‘Drones – or could they be…?’ began Carl, squinting. ‘We’re nearly at Zond, aren’t we – they could be Goads, right? It could be Colonel Cleaver?’ He stood up on Monica’s back and started waving his arms. ‘HEY! HEY, COLONEL CLEAVER!’

The little robots dived down towards us from on high.

And, of course, they started shooting at us.

We bounded off Monica in all directions. I crammed myself under an overhanging rock; Josephine was crouching between two boulders on the other side of the little canyon. Carl and Noel had headed up rather than down, and were both on a ledge a few feet above Josephine’s head, flattened against the rock wall. That left Thsaaa, trying to hide under Monica, but Monica was still obliviously scuttling forwards and her body was too high off the ground anyway. The drones swept up above us and then swooped back to the attack, surrounding us completely. The air blazed with energy bolts.

‘GOLDFISH!’ Noel howled, from the ledge. Carl had shoved in front of him but they looked horribly exposed up there.

The Goldfish was already doing its best, dancing in the air, shooting and darting, but it was one fish-shaped classroom robot against five military killing machines, and it was really only because the drones seemed so intent on scouring the canyon floor that the Goldfish managed not to be blown to bits itself.

‘What are they doing?’ I yelled. ‘Why are they shooting at us? They’re supposed to be on our side!’

To my horror, Josephine half rose from her crouch, making herself an even easier target. ‘They’re not shooting at us! They couldn’t have missed us all – they’re avoiding us!’

An energy bolt scorched the rock beside my head. ‘They’re not avoiding us very well,’ I complained, shrinking back against the rock and relieved to see Josephine doing the same.

‘Sorry, Alice!’ called the Goldfish from above, who presumably had been the intended target.

‘They’re firing at me,’ shouted Thsaaa, seizing one of Monica’s legs with their tentacles and catapulting away from a volley of blasts. They landed close to the valley wall and dived under an overhang like mine, picked up six stones at once and hurled them with rather impressive precision. They knocked two of the flying drones off course – but only by a foot or two, and they soon recovered and swept back into formation.

‘Your temperature signature,’ Josephine called, as Thsaaa dived out of the line of fire again. ‘It has to be. They can see we’re human and you’re not!’

But there wasn’t much Thsaaa could do about that.

‘Goldfish!’ wailed Noel again. ‘They’re going to kill Thsaaa!’

The Goldfish had actually managed to zap one of the drones so repeatedly it fell to the canyon floor with a thud. But the four remaining drones looked more than equal to one teenage alien with nothing but stones to throw.

‘My amlaa-vel-esh! My invisibility gown!’ Thsaaa wailed. ‘I need it!’

‘It won’t help!’ shouted Josephine. ‘You’ll show up even colder – it’ll just make it more obvious!’

‘The shockray staff !’ I yelled, suddenly remembering it. ‘Grab it!’

But the staff was still strapped to Monica, and Thsaaa wasn’t anywhere near grabbing distance of her now. They were pinned against the rock wall with nothing left to hide behind.

Carl burst into motion; he took a huge leap down from the ledge, lurched for a moment atop Monica’s back, snatched up the staff, and then hurled himself up forwards again. He threw himself on top of Thsaaa, knocking the alien flat, and the four drones stopped in mid-air and hovered there, confused. Carl brandished the shockray staff – which did precisely nothing, until Thsaaa reached from underneath Carl and looped a tentacle around it…

There was a flash of nasty violet light and the drones all dropped with a clatter on to the rocks. The valley was suddenly silent, and there was a faint burnt, metallic taste in the thin air.

Thsaaa scrambled out free of Carl, their tendrils quivering in all directions and their colours flashing so fast and messily they were difficult to look at.

‘What if they had not stopped?!’ they cried in an unusually high-pitched voice, as the rest of us ran over. ‘What if they hadn’t seen you in time? What if your temperature had not masked mine?!’

Carl blinked. ‘Well, that would have been bad,’ he agreed.

‘You could have died, Kuya!’ cried Noel, torn between admiration and horror.

‘You have my ushaal-thol-faa,’ said Thsaaa formally, making an obvious effort to get their colours under control. They extended three tentacles and Carl, who hadn’t hesitated before diving between Thsaaa in front of four killer robots, did hesitate now. But then he took hold of Thsaaa’s arms and let Thsaaa hoist him to his feet.

‘No big,’ he said. But, though I really don’t think he’d thought about what he was doing while he was doing it, he couldn’t help thinking about it now. ‘That really was pretty cool of me, actually,’ he confessed, reaching for his oxygen cylinder and taking a deep breath. ‘Take that, Captain Mendez, I am not just about doing things for the spotlight.’

‘That point would be a lot stronger if you hadn’t actually said it out loud,’ said Josephine, in exasperation, though she was smiling.

But it was hard to stay cheerful. Mars seemed so cold and unwelcoming and full of things that wanted to hurt us just then. We climbed back on to Monica and scuttled onwards as fast as we could.

Carl cleared his throat. ‘I thought –’ he began, and broke off. ‘I really did think it might be Colonel Cleaver. But we’ll find him soon, I guess.’

‘Where did those things come from?’ wondered Noel.

‘Some of the Auroras have them,’ said Carl, his expression tight.

‘So there has to be a ship, somewhere…?’

I could see what was upsetting Carl. ‘Yes. But it has to be… crashed, or malfunctioning,’ I said. ‘Or they’d be here. Those things would have transmitted back that they were dealing with something.’

‘Yeah. I just… I really hope the pilot of the Aurora was all right,’ Carl said.

I thought about Thsaaa’s wrecked ship, and the bodies Thsaaa had had to drag away. The Aurora could have shot down the Morror ship, perhaps; and the Morrors could have shockrayed the Aurora as it fell. The Aurora might have limped as far towards Zond as it could before dropping on to the rocks. Or, on the other hand, it could have been Space Locusts. But I didn’t feel like saying any of it aloud, or asking Thsaaa about it. I was so tired, and none of it would make any difference to the fact we had to keep going.

‘And so those drones were left roaming the sky, hunting for Morrors,’ said Thsaaa softly.

‘Yeah, but look,’ said Carl. ‘Don’t worry. They were just robots. People won’t do that to you. We’ll make sure they know you’re a kid. They won’t hurt you. They’ll work something out with your guys and you’ll be back home in no time.’

Thsaaa rippled black and indigo. ‘They have never had a Morror prisoner before. They cannot waste the chance. They will want to find out… everything they can.’

No one had a very good answer to that.

I hadn’t really been thinking of Thsaaa as our prisoner any more, because we weren’t getting on so badly now and because they could technically have run off whenever they liked. Except that would have almost certainly meant they suffocated or starved, so as choices go that one didn’t really count.

Our last afternoon of travel was as uneventful as an afternoon can be when you are riding a robot spider along with your Alien of Uncertain Status towards a questionable destination with the oxygen running out and, by the end, no more food. We were crossing another great bare plain as a blazing blue sunset spilled into the pink sky. Fine, fine dust rose under Monica’s feet in little spiralling puffs like flares of gas (it also got you very dirty). And there ahead at last was Mount Olympus, the biggest mountain in the solar system, rising above the atmosphere, so huge it was as if part of the sky had been walled off. We rode through the first hours of the night, the two knobbly little moons, and endless snowdrifts of stars. Then we draped the remains of the tent under Monica’s legs and Thsaaa lent us the Paralashath to keep us warm.

‘Can you play something, Josephine?’ I asked, because the silence was getting to me again.

Josephine nodded and played something I’d never heard before, more bluesy than those heartbroken songs she’d played in the Labyrinth of Night, but more delicate and glittery than the actual jazz she’d played back at Beagle, and it kept floating up high and sounded a bit like what being in a tiny, isolated group of people sitting under all those incredible stars is like.

‘What was that?’ I asked when she was finished.

‘I’m going to call it “Martian Sunset”,’ said Josephine.

‘Oh, you made it up? It was lovely.’

‘Yoooooou made it up?!’ Thsaaa flickered turquoise and orange, and seemed astonished.

Josephine raised an eyebrow at them, though I’m sure they wouldn’t have got what that meant. ‘What? You know we have music, right? Did you think we just dug it out of the ground like potatoes?’ She hesitated. ‘What does it sound like to you?’

‘To me it sounds… very… bare. With no colour or movement or shalvulu – temperature changes,’ Thsaaa said.

‘We’ll introduce you to musical theatre when we get home,’ said Josephine, a little crossly.

‘…But I think I understand, I was going to say. You are too quick with everything,’ said Thsaaa, and reached for the Paralashath. ‘Come here,’ they added, and curled a tentacle around Josephine’s wrist and guided her hand to the glowing surface, steering her fingertip in a pattern that might have been like the sigils we’d seen in the Morror ship.

‘Now, play again.’

Josephine’s dislike of doing what she was told briefly warred with her desire to see what would happen. Curiosity won and she put the harmonica back to her lips and started playing ‘Martian Sunset’ again.

The Paralashath answered the music. Colours and patterns streamed out of it, rippling over the sand and faint drifts of shalvulu quivering on our skin. Josephine’s playing hitched and her eyes went wide with amazement, and the colours faltered for a second, turned white and grey. She got back in control again and they steadied and strengthened with arcs of deep blue rising with the high notes and quivers of crimson pulsing with the rhythm over the ground.

Thsaaa said, ‘Ah, yes… I do see,’ and their colours started to sync up with the Paralashath’s colours, as they always did, but this time the hues were from the music.

Josephine actually looked a little teary-eyed by the time she finished playing again. ‘That was…’ she said rather hoarsely. ‘…Thank you.’

‘I wasn’t sure it would work,’ Thsaaa said modestly.

OK, technically that’s not true. There was plenty left in the way of rubble and ash and mangled Flarehawks, and there were even some buildings that were more or less in one piece. But that there’d been a battle at Zond pretty recently, and that it hadn’t gone very well for the home team, was not something you could miss.

It was also pretty noticeable that there didn’t seem to be anyone around, either to pick up the pieces or to welcome in battered and bedraggled fugitive children.

‘Oh God,’ whispered Josephine, looking at it through a pair of binoculars from the Flying Fox. Then, through gritted teeth: ‘Faster. Make her go faster, Goldfish.’

The Goldfish’s eyes flashed and Monica lumbered on quickly enough that the wind ripped at our hair or tendrils and we were too busy clinging on to really talk to each other. Which was perhaps for the best.

Zond Station sat on a plateau amid the foothills of Olympus. The empty plains of Mars stretched away below, and above it the gentle, bare slope of the mountain went on and on until its peak disappeared above the atmosphere.

We climbed off Monica. ‘Oh, kids…’ said the Goldfish helplessly, sagging in the air.

I found that even though I had this heavy, empty feeling, like Earth-gravity had suddenly slammed back on inside me, I wasn’t actually surprised. Of course I’d hoped there’d be people at Zond to help us, and I hadn’t wanted to think about the possibility there might not be. But it’d been there with us all along, the chance that maybe we weren’t running to anything so much as running away from something that was always bound to catch up. It had nearly caught us once in the Labyrinth of Night, and now it was really here.

Josephine was beginning to shake beside me. ‘We’re not finished yet,’ I said to her. Somehow it came out sounding quite calm and sincere, which was odd as it didn’t seem to have a lot to do with what I’d been thinking and I hadn’t known I was going to say it.

‘HALLO!’ Carl boomed, in that enormous voice of his. ‘There must be somebody here… HALLO!’

But no one answered.

Zond Station was much smaller than Beagle Base, and clearly a lot less science had been going on here, though there were a few algae pools and things doing their bit for the terraforming effort. Otherwise, there were a couple of barracks buildings with roofs on and the blackened remains of a couple more. There was a single farm dome with a wheat field, but it was broken open and nearly everything inside was black and dead.

‘The comms tower,’ breathed Josephine, pointing. It was snapped in two like a breadstick. No wonder the Goldfish hadn’t been able to contact Zond at all.

Thsaaa was changing colour rapidly, grey-black-blue-purple, tendrils rippling and swaying.

‘Did you know it was going to be like this?’ I blurted out.

‘You know I did not,’ Thsaaa hissed. ‘I am no better off than you.’

‘But Morrors did this. You know what’s happening. You know why they came here, don’t you? You’d never tell us.’

‘Do you think they tell me everything? I am only thirteen. What do your adults tell you?’ cried Thsaaa. ‘My parents had been reassigned, I was being transported to a training centre nearer the Earth. But something happened and we were called to this awful place.’

‘That’s really it? That’s all you know.’

Thsaaa said nothing.

‘We need to know when this happened,’ said Josephine in a thin, breathy voice.

‘What difference does it make when?’ asked Carl.

Josephine ignored him. ‘Everything’s dry. But nothing’s smoking any more. It was recent, but not that recent… Some of the lights are still on… Goldfish – can you get any information off the life-support system? When did the main doors last open?’

The Goldfish obediently darted off into the command centre. It came back, and told us the date.

‘A week ago. When the grown-ups vanished,’ whispered Josephine. ‘So that’s it. Something started here, and everyone at Beagle went to help.’

‘But they couldn’t,’ I said, and it felt like the silent thing that had chased us here from Beagle was roaring so loud I could hardly hear myself.

‘Guys,’ said Carl urgently, grabbing Noel and turning him against his chest. ‘Don’t look.’

There was the wreck of an Aurora lying in the ruins of the comms tower. Maybe a shockray had sent it smashing into the tower, I’m not sure. The cockpit was ripped open and you could see there were people still in there.

There was a moment where we all stood there frozen in a huddle. Then Josephine set her jaw, and started walking towards them.

‘Don’t,’ I said.

‘I have to see who they are,’ she said, in a voice like stone. ‘Dr Muldoon came here.’ And I went stumbling along too, though I wasn’t sure I could make it all the way.

We didn’t go that close in the end. Just close enough to see that neither was Dr Muldoon or the Colonel.

But they were still somebody. And I thought, Oh God, are we going to have to look at every body to see if it’s someone we know? Because I assumed there would be lots.

But there weren’t, as it turned out. We picked our way through the ruins, into the farm dome, across the spacepad, past the ranks of unmanned guns. There were places where it was hard to be sure; some of the buildings were so badly collapsed or burned that we couldn’t really tell if there were people under the rubble. But we didn’t see anyone else dead. Josephine was moving like a sleepwalker, stumbling and staring. I only noticed that in a dazed, distant kind of way, so maybe that was how I was moving too.

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, Thsaaa? 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 Thsaaa.

‘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 Thsaaa.

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 Thsaaa 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 Thsaaa 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 Thsaaa. ‘What else could we do?’

‘What else? Oh, rack off,’ said Carl.

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

Thsaaa’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 Thsaaa 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. Thsaaa dragged out the invisible suit from inside it and ran for the Flying Fox, throwing on the suit as they did so.

‘Thsaaa!’ 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 Thsaaa. 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.

Thsaaa 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 Thsaaa 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 Thsaaa. 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 Thsaaa 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.

‘How long do you think before they get here?’ I asked.

‘The horizon’s only a mile and a half away,’ Josephine whispered. ‘All that’s slowing them is what they’re eating… Maybe ten minutes, if we’re lucky.’

‘Right,’ I said. And for what seemed like far too long in the circumstances, we all stayed put in a heap on the ground.

‘We need weapons,’ said Carl. ‘At least this is a good place to look for them.’

‘OK,’ I said, getting up. ‘Three minutes. We’ll look for anything that might hurt them or anywhere we can hide. Meet back at the dome.’ And we ran.

There had to be an armoury around somewhere, but after the first panicky minute I didn’t think I was going to find it. I decided I’d focus on looking for shelter, so I ran from the barracks towards the back of the base because maybe there’d be fortifications built into the mountainside itself. Sure enough, I found a trench leading to a heavy door set into a huge slab of grey concrete amid the red Martian stone. On the other side of the door, there was a tunnel and stairs leading up into the mountain, and for a wild moment I thought maybe I’d find a whole underground base, with all the soldiers missing from the surface who would know exactly what to do about the Space Locusts. But I only found a little control room looking out over Tharsis, and empty rooms behind with a poured-concrete floor extending into natural caves.

I glanced at the bank of controls beneath a band of windows of thick glass. It did not strike me as a moment for being sensible about not pressing strange buttons, so I did some brief experiments and found I’d fired some sort of energy cannon. The blast went off westwards in the general direction of the Space Locust swarm, though I’d be surprised if I’d hit any part of it. Still, it was a satisfying thing to have found.

I must be already out of time. I ran back down to the heart of the base, yelling, ‘I’ve found somewhere to hide!’

‘I assume you were responsible for the fireworks,’ Josephine’s voice rang back to me.

‘Yes, but I hope someone’s got something more portable.’

Carl, thankfully, had come back with armfuls of energy guns. Noel, on the other hand, was just pitifully dragging the Goldfish along the ground by its tail, and Josephine didn’t seem to have found anything except a couple of canisters of some kind of liquid. She was crouched over her oxygen tank, doing something to it.

‘What are you up to?’ I asked.

Josephine looked up. ‘Making some adjustments,’ she said. She’d taken the mask off the oxygen hose, which she now pointed into the air. She released a glorious spray of red fire, arching a good twenty feet, and laughed. And as laughs go it sounded pretty crazy, but it was so good to hear.

‘Nice,’ I said.

‘Maybe it’ll keep them off.’ She shouldered the improvised flame-thrower.

Around us, the first few Space Locusts smashed into Zond Station ahead of the swarm: ploughing through the soil; into the farm dome; churning up the algae pools.

‘RUN,’ shouted Carl, tossing me an energy gun.

‘We can’t just leave the Goldfish,’ whimpered Noel.

I looked down at it. Maybe it wasn’t exactly rational; taking it with us would have to slow us down a little, but I thought it deserved better than being left to be eaten by Space Locusts too. ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘We can’t.’

We could hardly hear each other by now; the sky was growing darker and darker, and the buzzing was a booming roar that seemed to come from everywhere. Streams of dust coursed across Zond and we could feel a strange wind on our skin.

Carl and I carried the Goldfish – it wasn’t heavy, just bulky and awkward with no good handholds. Behind us Josephine ignited pretty much everything even vaguely flammable, leaving walls of fire between us and the oncoming Space Locusts. It did make me feel a little less defenceless, but it also made me think: Even if they don’t get us, even if they pass on and we’re not eaten – what’s going to be left of Zond Station? Where will we look for food and oxygen and shelter next?

There really isn’t any more hope. Even though everyone’s being so brave and brilliant, there just isn’t.

But I couldn’t stop what I was doing now, for everyone else’s sakes, and they couldn’t stop, for each others’ and mine. We just couldn’t. And I thought stupidly, Well, you never know, maybe something good will still happen.

So we kept on trying to do the impossible.

We slammed the door to the tunnels behind us and ran gasping up the steps. We weren’t doing that brilliantly for oxygen now – we shared a few puffs from Carl’s tank and left Noel and the Goldfish towards the back of the cave. You could barely see out for the clouds of dust and the boiling mass of the swarm itself. Carl bagsied the big gun and fired off an energy blast into that oncoming wall of darkness and made a sizeable hole in it.

We cheered. But the gap closed up again at once, and then the Space Locusts truly fell upon Zond Station, and were devouring it within seconds.

Had they seen us? Could they smell us? Had those first few at the Jeromiana Waterlands somehow passed on a curiosity for the taste of humans? I don’t know. But it felt as if the Space Locusts were as desperate to get to us as we were to get away from them. Even with all that Carl could throw at them, there were just so many coming in from everywhere and there wasn’t any barrier thick enough to keep them out.

A little hole opened at the edge of the window, glass dust spilling down the bank of controls. A single Space Locust’s head squeezed through, then more, gnawing and worrying at the gap so that it spread and spread. ‘Get away from there, Carl,’ Josephine screamed. He scrambled back and Josephine jumped forwards, and swept flame across the opening. The effect wasn’t instantaneous; a few of the Space Locusts simply swooped through the fire into the chamber, but some of the ones behind weren’t so fast or lucky and they blackened and dropped to the ground like lumps of coal.

But there was a handful of the creatures inside with us now. I had a vague memory of promising Miss Clatworthy, I’ll try to kill lots of aliens, and aimed and fired and aimed and fired again, while Josephine kept hosing fire on to the widening hole in the wall like a firefighter in reverse. But step by step, the Space Locusts forced her back as more of them wormed through. One of them took a slice out of my scalp before Carl shot it, and I met Josephine’s eyes for a fraction of a second and felt sure we were thinking the same thing: We’re not going to last much longer.

Then there was the sound of an explosion. Possibly more than one – with all the noise and fire, I think I might actually have missed the first one.

‘What is that?’ I said, to no one in particular.

A torpedo burst against the control centre. Dead Space Locusts and debris showered inwards. We were all knocked off our feet. If the Space Locusts hadn’t already forced us so far back from the window, we’d have been killed.

‘Huuuuumans!’ wailed an unearthly voice.

‘It’s Thsaaa!’ screamed Noel, jumping to his feet.

The windows had been blasted in completely, leaving a ragged hole behind. Outside, a shape bobbed against the daylight in a cloud of dust.

‘Are you all aliiiiive?’ keened Thsaaa into the ruins.

We rushed for the gap in the wall. The Flying Fox was hovering outside, the hatch open, Thsaaa’s tentacles waving from within and changing colour madly.

The silhouette of the Flying Fox abruptly lurched away. ‘I cannot fly this ship very well!’ Thsaaa’s voice called, from somewhere below.

Indeed, the Flying Fox was wobbling about so badly Colonel Cleaver would have given Thsaaa a detention on the spot.

‘Thsaaa, you bastard!’ Carl bawled. He scrambled over the rubble up to the hole and, without ceremony, jumped out. It would have been terrifying if I hadn’t already burned through my entire capacity for feeling normally scared and was now getting by on some wild fiery feeling instead. But Carl landed with a clunk on the Flying Fox’s roof and the Flying Fox wobbled even more worryingly as he climbed around the hatch to slide inside.

Almost at once the ship steadied as Carl took over the controls. Then it was hovering beside the gap with Thsaaa standing in the doorway, tentacles reaching for us.

‘I am sorry,’ they said immediately.

We didn’t have time to accept apologies. ‘Alice! Down!’ Josephine yelled, and loosed a burst of fire over my head as I ducked. A cooked Space Locust dropped to the ground beside me.

‘Get in the ship!’ cried Thsaaa, though it was easier said than done. Space Locusts that must have been stunned by the explosion were waking up and wriggling into the air.

‘The Goldfish…!’ Noel insisted.

‘Grab it! Throw it to Thsaaa!’ I ordered. Noel dragged the Goldfish up to the hole and more dropped than threw it, but Thsaaa’s tentacles were deft and strong and the Goldfish was flipped inside. ‘Now you,’ I panted to Noel, and he jumped while Josephine and I stood back-to-back, me trying to zap any new Space Locusts that came in from outside and Josephine toasting anything that moved in the shadows.

‘Go on. Get out!’ Josephine screamed, painting fire around the room. I hesitated. ‘Go on, I’ve got to be last, I can’t jump carrying this and we need the cover.’

I gritted my teeth and jumped for the ship. I felt Thsaaa’s tentacles lock around my arm and waist in mid-air. Then I was inside the Flying Fox yelling for Josephine, who stood right on the edge and set off one last massive torrent of fire. Then she let the flamethrower fall from her shoulder and leaped.

Thsaaa caught her, flung her back into the ship beside me and slammed the door shut.

‘Kuya, go!’ Noel cried, and Carl yanked viciously on the controls, climbing so steeply that the g-force put paid to my efforts to sit up. We hurtled north around the curve of Olympus, out of the grip of the swarm. I thought about trying to get up on to one of the seats, but on the whole I decided it was too much of a bother when I could curl up on the nice comfortable floor and have a cry. Josephine, sprawled beside me, had chosen the blank staring approach for the time being.

Thsaaa was standing over us in various sombre shades of navy and teal.

‘I am sorry,’ they said again, softly and formally. They patted us awkwardly with their tentacles. ‘Are you badly hurt?’

‘Still conscious,’ croaked Josephine beside me. ‘That’s a good sign.’

I couldn’t even answer at first, as I needed to think about it. I hadn’t noticed it in all the excitement, but now my left arm wanted me to know that it hurt, not horribly but in a way that felt significant. I thought I might have broken it when the explosion knocked me over. Still, I did have a left arm, and a right arm come to that, so I knew I should count myself lucky. Staggeringly lucky, in fact.

‘Thsaaa! You killed our Goldfish!’ Noel howled, before I could offer a summary of any of this.

‘I deactivated your Goldfish. Surely it can be mended,’ said Thsaaa.

‘But you just ran off,’ said Noel, who had taken it all very hard.

‘I wanted to get back to my people!’ cried Thsaaa. ‘I did not want to be a prisoner or an experiment!’

‘Fair go, Noel, they came back,’ said Carl shakily from the helm.

‘And I would have sent my people to find you – I did not mean to leave you there forever. I would never, never have left you to them. When I saw their swarm in the sky… and I knew you would feel just as I would… I had to return for you.’ Thsaaa’s tentacles waved fretfully in the air and then covered their face. ‘Ohhhhhhh, if you had not fired that cannon I might never have found you.’

I managed to get up and into a seat, hugging my arm against my chest. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Thsaaa,’ said Josephine, lifting her head from the floor. ‘You recognised the Space Locusts.’

‘“Space Locusts”?’ echoed Thsaaa curiously, like they didn’t understand the word ‘locust’. But it didn’t matter. ‘I have never seen them, only heard the stories. But yes, I know them. No Morror could make a mistake.

‘They are the Vshomu.’

‘The Vshomu drift through space,’ said Thsaaa. ‘They feed on whatever they find, the organic compounds in the rocks and dust, the ice of comets. But when they come to a world full of life, they feast, and their numbers…’ They made an expressive movement with their tentacles.

‘…explode,’ supplied Josephine.

‘Yes. Explode. They never stop feeding until there is nothing left. Then many of them starve, their numbers decline again, very fast, and the survivors drift on. Their sight is very keen. They are the reason we learned to make ourselves invisible. But all we learned of them – all we know, came too late to save our world. They stripped it to the core, which cooled and died and fell away from our sun. For so many years all we could do was run from them.’

‘Yeah, and you led them to us!’ said Carl.

‘It’s not their fault,’ said Noel, who was mollified by now.

‘I don’t know. The Vshomu have devoured so many worlds across the galaxies,’ said Thsaaa.

‘They’ll eat Mars,’ I said.

‘At that rate, they’ll eat the solar system,’ said Josephine.

‘We must tell my people,’ said Thsaaa.

‘We have to tell everyone,’ I said.

‘OK,’ said Carl. ‘So everyone’s had a chance to freak out back there except me. Does anyone know where the hell we’re even going?’

‘The Morror base,’ said Josephine. ‘They must have one on this planet. Don’t they, Thsaaa?’

There was a pause while we all tried to get used to the idea of running into a horde of hostile Morrors on purpose.

‘Is there a map on this ship?’ asked Thsaaa.

‘Sure,’ said Carl, calling one up in the corner of the viewport. Thsaaa gazed at it thoughtfully, then reached out with one tentacle and pointed to a place on the screen.

‘I think,’ they whispered, ‘we should be searching there.’

I’d stopped crying by now, so I lurched over to the helm and said, ‘I’ll fly if you want,’ so that Carl could have a fair turn at freaking out.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Josephine, scrambling off the floor. ‘You can’t pilot with one hand. I’ll do it.’

‘…Er,’ Carl and I said simultaneously, remembering the wreckage of the obstacle course back at Beagle and all that exploding.

Josephine seemed unworried, though. ‘I’ve at least had more relevant training than Thsaaa has. It’s not really that hard.’

It was true, actually; seeing as we weren’t currently taking off or landing or shooting invading ships or dodging Vshomu, piloting wouldn’t be much more complicated than just telling the computer where to take us. She nudged me out of the way and took over at the controls and we carried on flying and did not blow up. Josephine gave a very small smile.

Carl flopped into one of the seats at the back of the ship and Noel gave him a hug, and I flopped alongside them. I couldn’t help but wish the Goldfish was keeping an eye on the piloting just in case.

But the Goldfish was still just a broken piece of luggage in the back of the ship.

‘Do you think they’re alive?’ asked Josephine, as we sped through a sky stained orange with Martian dust. ‘The people from Zond and Beagle… Dr Muldoon?’

Dr Muldoon’s name couldn’t have meant anything to Thsaaa, but they rippled pink and orange at her in what might have been encouragement. ‘I hope we will find everyone.’

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 Thsaaa 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.’

A tall Quth-laaa Morror – at least, that’s what I assumed they must be because they had the same kind of tendrils as Thsaaa – came along and sighed, ‘I am Warth-raaa. Come thiiiiiiis waaaaaaaay,’ at us, being not as good at English as either Thsaaa or Swarasee-ee.

‘Do you have to – to run off anywhere else, Dr Muldoon?’ Josephine asked, trying to sound casual about it.

Dr Muldoon smiled. ‘No. Swarasee-ee and I need to be on the first ship to reach Earth; someone has to be the one to brief the EEC. And I need you to make sure I have all the facts.’

‘Hey, kids!’ called an unmistakeably perky voice.

‘Goldfish!’ Noel cried in delight before we could even see it.

The Goldfish came swimming over the heads of the remaining Morrors, with Thsaaa hurrying along behind it.

‘You’re OK!’ it said. It showered us with sparkles. ‘I’m so proud of you guys! Doesn’t that just show you what teamwork can do?’

‘…Well, teamwork, flamethrowers and energy torpedoes, yes,’ Josephine said.

‘They fixed you!’ Noel said, reaching up to hug it.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Noel!’ said the Goldfish, with that faint edge to its perkiness that meant it was in fact profoundly cross. ‘These pesky Morrors! You can’t expect them to fix anything. Not properly, anyway!’

‘Why? What’s wrong with you?’

It still looked rather a mess, of course. There was no light behind its right eye, which had been stuck clumsily back into place with glue, and it still had all its scrapes and dents. But it was flying and talking.

‘They took out your zapper, didn’t they,’ said Josephine.

Carl burst into tactless laughter. The Goldfish’s eyes flashed red, but indeed, nothing happened.

‘We could not let it fly around armed,’ said Thsaaa. ‘It tried to attack us the moment it was reactivated.’

‘Look, I know it must be very confusing for you, Goldfish, but a lot of things happened while you were… deactivated, and now us and the Morrors are kind of on the same side,’ I said.

‘It’s more of an informal truce,’ said Josephine.

‘And now you can’t make us do history,’ said Carl, who hadn’t stopped laughing.

The Goldfish went into a massive sulk and stopped talking to everybody.

‘I’m sorry it’s being so rude,’ said Noel to Thsaaa. ‘Thanks so much for fixing it.’

Thsaaa flared their tentacles dismissively. ‘It is really a quite primitive device,’ they said. ‘It was simple to repair.’

Josephine cocked her head sceptically. ‘Did you actually do it yourself ?’

Thsaaa shuffled and went slightly yellow. ‘Well… no. I got a grown-up to do it.’

‘Thsaaa!’ called Flath, rippling green and peach and gesturing. ‘Athwara sel lamarath-te!’ And Warth-raaa beckoned to us again, with the same colours.

‘Just a minute,’ I called.

‘I have to go,’ said Thsaaa hurriedly. ‘But first, I want to… Josephine. Please take this.’

Thsaaa was holding out the Paralashath.

Josephine went very still and wide-eyed. In fact, we all did.

‘Because it may be a while before we see each other again, but when we do, I hope neither of us will be prisoners of war,’ said Thsaaa. ‘And because of the music.’

Josephine stared at the Paralashath, which was pulsing softly with the same colours streaming across Thsaaa’s skin. Then she reached into her bag and fished out her harmonica. ‘Then you take this,’ she said. ‘For the same reasons.’

Thsaaa took the harmonica and Josephine hugged the Paralashath to her chest.

‘Thank you,’ said Thsaaa, turning solemnest blue as Flath led them away.

‘You gave them your harmonica?’ I hissed at Josephine incredulously, as Warth-raaa herded us off towards an invisible ship.

Josephine threw me one of her withering looks. ‘Yes. I gave them my harmonica. I didn’t give away my ability to buy a new one.’

‘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—’

I was, I suddenly realised, getting slightly hysterical.

‘Alice,’ said Mum, sounding completely in control again. ‘Slow down. Now, these Vshomu. Would they be anything to do with the swarm of small flying objects coming up behind you?’

‘What? YES!’ I screamed, absurdly looking over my shoulder as if I’d be able to see them.

Mum’s ship pounced straight over ours like a cat and I saw the flash of her torpedoes light up the windows. ‘Squadron!’ I heard her saying over the channel. ‘Concentrate all firepower on the small incoming creatures! Do not attack the Morror vessels. Repeat, do not attack the Morror vessels.’

She always did understand things quickly. It had been so long; I’d forgotten that about her.

‘Mum, don’t let them touch you! They’ll eat right through your ship!’

I turned anxiously. Dr Muldoon was propping herself up on her elbows and groaning and Josephine was dabbing at a cut on her head with a Morror skirt. Carl and Noel were already pressed to the windows. I ran and joined them.

I could only see bits and pieces of the battle, but there was one ship that moved just beautifully – that was the only word for it – like a bird of prey sweeping through a flock of sparrows, and I was sure that was Mum’s.

I suddenly really wished I had a Flarehawk of my own. I felt sure I could have picked off a reasonable number of Vshomu given the chance; I was trained for this and it would have felt better than just sitting there waiting to see if Mum won or not. But I couldn’t have done a thing with the Morror ship, which seemed to be fairly broken anyway. And so was my arm, come to that.

Her ship was out of sight now. Some debris that might have been fragments of exploded Space Locust floated past the window. I ran back to the communicator. ‘Mum, Mum – are you all right?’

‘Well,’ said Mum’s voice, sounding slightly out of breath. ‘That was exciting.’

Swarasee-ee plucked the communicator from my head. ‘Good afternoon,’ they said, sounding for all the world like the kind of automated helpline my parents used to complain about back on Earth. ‘Am I right in thinking this is Captain Stephanie Dare?’

‘Who is this?’ asked my mum.

‘My name is Swarasee-ee.’

‘What…? A Morror. You don’t… sound like a Morror.’

‘I have a special knack for languages.’

‘You know who I am.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Swarasee-ee, rather grimly. ‘We know who you are.’ And there was a pause in which the atmosphere of the ship seemed even more icy than it had done before, with both of them just listening to each other’s silence and to the memory of fifteen years of war. ‘Our ship is damaged,’ said Swarasee-ee finally. ‘I doubt we can reach Earth without help.’

‘We can tow you in,’ said Mum. ‘But I can see there’s a whole fleet behind you; I can’t be responsible for escorting that many down to Earth.’

‘What do you mean you can see them… ?’ began Swarasee-ee, sounding faintly scandalised, but then shook it off. ‘It is of no importance. I agree the other ships can wait in orbit until terms are agreed.’

‘Off we go, then,’ said Mum briskly. And there was an odd feeling as if something was squeezing the ship, and then we were moving again, faster and faster.

Earth came rushing to meet us.

I was warm. I’d more or less forgotten what that was like.

I also felt as if someone had placed a large piece of furniture, possibly a chest of drawers or a big desk, on top of my chest. I groaned.

‘Alice. How do you feel?’

‘Urgh.’ I lifted one arm and watched it drop back on to the blankets in disgust. ‘…Heavy.’

Mum laughed. ‘Yes, shifting gravity that suddenly is a pain, isn’t it?’

‘Where are we?’

‘Earth.’

‘I know that, I mean which country?’

‘Oh. America. New York.’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I said. ‘Can we see the Statue of Liberty? It is still there, isn’t it?’

The main thing I remembered from landing was being knocked flat by the gravity, and a lot of people gasping at their first sight of visible Morrors. Then we’d been scooped into ambulances and whizzed off to hospital. Someone had put a cast on my arm, although by that time I’d had trouble keeping my eyes open, and after that I couldn’t remember a thing, except it had clearly involved going to bed.

‘It’s still there.’

I looked at Mum properly. She looked smaller and more ordinary than I remembered. I’d been finding it harder and harder to picture anything when I thought of her except that bloody poster.

‘Alice, you’ve had such a terrible time, and I nearly killed you.’

‘I’ve been being nearly killed all week,’ I said grandly. ‘Doesn’t bother me that much now.’

‘That is not a reassuring thing to say to your mother,’ Mum said, and crawled half on to the bed so as to hug me.

A very tiny, spiteful part of me thought it was only fair if she had to do some worrying now; I’d been doing it long enough. But mainly it was just wonderful to curl up against her and not have to pretend I wasn’t bothered about where she was or what she might be doing, because she was there and alive and not going anywhere for a bit, hopefully. And her arms were warm and her hair smelled of the coconut shampoo she always used, which I’d completely forgotten about but now I remembered.

‘It wasn’t all terrible,’ I said. ‘And I’m not dead. And I’m glad I got the chance to watch you fight. I mean, I can’t say I enjoyed it at the time, but still, you really are amazing at it.’

Mum sniffed a little. ‘You’ve done these incredible things.’

‘Oh, those,’ I said, trying to sit up. ‘What’s going on? Is the war over?’

‘Not quite, but—’

‘Why not?!’ I burst out, indignant.

‘It takes a long time to finish a war.’

‘I don’t see why. Everyone just has to stop fighting each other and start fighting the Vshomu. It’s not complicated.’

‘It is complicated,’ said Mum. ‘There’s the status of the territory the Morrors have occupied, the climate, the invisibility shield… a lot of loose ends. But there’s a ceasefire. The EEC president’s flown in; and there’s a Morror delegation in the UN now.’

‘So…’ I felt better for hearing the word ‘ceasefire’. ‘Do you think it will be OK?’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Mum. ‘At least, as OK as it can be when the solar system’s infested with planet-eating bugs. It’ll have to be OK. There’s no real choice, for humans or Morrors.’

‘No, that’s exactly it,’ I said. And I flopped back on to the pillows, but the wave of tiredness eased off sooner than I expected.

‘I don’t need to be in hospital,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing particularly wrong with me.’

‘You’ve got burns, cuts, a broken arm, hypothermia, gravitational readjustment syndrome and dehydration.’

‘Like I say,’ I said, waving a hand and feeling I could milk this grizzled old veteran act for a while yet: ‘Nothing.’ And this time I did succeed in making Mum laugh. ‘So, what about everyone else? The kids from Beagle…’

‘They’ve only just landed. Some of them will probably be turning up here later. Things got pretty bad out there, from what I hear…’

‘But…?’

‘But no fatalities, no.’

‘Oh.’ I’d known the news wouldn’t be any better than that, really, but it still wasn’t good. I thought about Kayleigh and Chinenye and everyone else, and how I had no real idea what they’d been through. And even though I knew I couldn’t have done anything useful, I started to feel bad about leaving them. I never even said goodbye.

‘They’re alive. And you saved their lives.’

‘I didn’t really. That was all Josephine; I’d never even have thought to go off on my own and… Mum, my friends, are they here? I want to go and see them.’

Mum didn’t try to stop me climbing out of the bed, and propped me up when I put my feet on the ground and got wobbly.

‘Why do we need so much gravity?’ I complained. ‘Completely over the top.’

We shuffled out of the room and into a corridor. I thought of something. ‘Can I,’ I said, ‘have tea and beans on toast?’

Mum laughed. ‘Well – in principle, of course you can. But finding the right kind of baked beans and tea in America…’

‘…has got to be easier than on Mars,’ I said.

‘True. Yes, then.’

‘Spaghetti carbonara would do in the meantime.’

A hovering hospital robot came round the turn of the corridor. Someone was hanging on to it with both hands, letting themselves be pulled along, bare feet skidding on the ground. The robot did not seem happy about having a passenger; it twitched as we saw it, and the person fell off. But they jumped up for another go, letting out a cry of, ‘WOOHOO…!’

It was Carl, obviously.

‘Leave the robot alone,’ said Mum. ‘You’ll break it.’

Carl saluted my mum, which was a weird thing to witness, but Carl seemed to get a strange kick out of saluting people. ‘A man from the EDF came into my room and told me I was a hero,’ he said. ‘In which case, a ride on a hospital robot is not that much to ask, is it?’

I couldn’t help but think that whoever had said that to Carl had been very, very unwise, but my mother only said, ‘You’ve got a point,’ and let him latch on to the robot for one more swoop along the corridor.

‘So hey,’ he said to me breathlessly, coming back. ‘You took forever to wake up.’

I suppose, compared to the kid I’d seen jumping into the ocean months ago, he looked terrible; too thin and too pale and covered in bruises where he wasn’t covered in bandages. Compared to me, though, he looked in unreasonably good shape. ‘How come you’re so lively?’ I said.

‘Because I am a hero,’ said Carl, grinning. ‘Eh, I was as limp as a rag a few hours ago, but you get over it. I’ve just been really bored. And my parents aren’t here yet. And the Goldfish’s been nosing about, and I don’t trust it not to give me a physics quiz. No respect for heroes, that fish.’

‘Where’s Noel?’

‘I’ll show you. He was knackered, though.’ Carl led us through a set of double doors to a room halfway down another stretch of corridor. ‘Oh, no, the Goldfish’s got him.’

I peered round the door. Noel was still curled up in bed. The Goldfish was hovering over him, but it wasn’t teaching him anything. It was singing gently, the Chinese song it had sung to me back on Beagle Base.

We tiptoed past so that we wouldn’t disturb Noel and the Goldfish wouldn’t notice we were there.

A soft play of coloured lights was marbling the white paint of a wall outside another room.

A crisp voice from inside said, ‘Interesting. But what is it for?’

‘It’s art, Lena, I already told you. Ow.’

‘It would be worth examining the internal workings.’

‘You will not take it to bits, it’s mine. Ow.’

Josephine’s fingers were clasped protectively over the Paralashath lying on her chest. She looked smaller in the bed, and even more battered and fragile than I’d remembered. It might have been partly that her hair was combed and styled and so took up less space. A sombre young woman was just finishing the last plait, Josephine wincing all the time.

‘This is Lena,’ she greeted us. ‘She has no soul and she tortures young girls.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ said Lena gravely, rising from her chair. She seemed to keep on rising for some time; she must have been six foot two at least. She wore little glasses and a dark suit, and her hair in a chignon, even though I knew she was only eighteen. She did look a bit like Josephine around the eyes and forehead, but I couldn’t imagine Josephine ever growing up to be that big, or that tidy, or so composed and still and unfidgety. Lena shook everyone’s hands.

‘Lena, this is Carl,’ said Josephine. ‘He can fly a spaceship through a cloud of Vshomu and come out the other side.’

‘And I am the first person to do a wee on the Acidalia Planitia,’ said Carl happily.

‘Oh, for God’s sake. He is also disgusting, but we have to put up with that. Noel is a lot less gross, but sadly he isn’t here right now to balance Carl out; he was the first one to spot a Vshomu.’

‘And he stopped the Goldfish hurting Thsaaa,’ I said.

Josephine smiled up at me. ‘This is Alice,’ she said more quietly. ‘She’s handy with duct tape when you’ve been partially eaten or exploded. But mainly she stops people going crazy or giving up.’

For a moment I had the weirdest feeling I was going to cry, and I didn’t know why.

‘Duct tape is always good,’ said Lena.

‘This is Josephine, Mum,’ I said. ‘She worked out why the Morrors were on Mars and she finds giant robot spiders and builds flamethrowers, and she’s my best friend.’

Lena frowned. ‘Josephine, you didn’t mention anything about a flamethrower.’

‘If you didn’t want me to build flamethrowers, you shouldn’t have taught me the basic principles when I was six,’ said Josephine. ‘It worked well.’

‘Everything seems to have worked out well,’ I said.

‘Of course it did,’ said Josephine serenely. ‘I was never in any doubt it would.’

And we laughed, because that was hysterically funny, and Josephine added, ‘Alice. Let’s go outside.’

So we did that. There was some talk of wheelchairs for both Josephine and me, which neither of us wanted. But I managed to shuffle along on my own feet leaning on Mum, and Lena simply hoisted Josephine over one shoulder and walked off with her. Josephine protested heartily. Lena ignored her until she gave up.

The hospital grounds weren’t particularly beautiful. There were a lot of military vehicles and tarmac. But there were some flower beds and roses growing in them. And the sky was bright blue.

‘Isn’t it sunnier than it used to be?’ I said as Lena plonked Josephine down on a low wall.

‘The Morrors,’ said Mum, tilting her face up to the sunlight. ‘They said they’d let more light through. They’re doing it. And it’s summer.’

Later there was this whole business where we got medals for Conspicuous Gallantry, and of course that was nice but it’s not really the point of the story so I’m going to skip it. It only happened because this one newspaper ran a campaign of headlines saying things like ‘Reward the Plucky Kids of Mars!’ and people got a bit hysterical. And Dad always particularly hated that newspaper, and since then some human and a Suth-laaa Morror fell in love and now it’s doing a campaign about OUTLAW MORROR–HUMAN MARRIAGE SHAM.

So the medal thing was nice, and Gallantry is a really enjoyable word to say, but it’s all also slightly embarrassing.

They’ve just finished building the Vuhalimath-laa. They can adjust it to let sunlight through, somehow, even though from the outside Earth is invisible now. If you’re flying in from Mars or Saturn, you just see the moon orbiting an empty space. So Earth is colder than it was before the Morrors came, but not as cold as it was when we left for Mars.

Of course, that doesn’t mean everything’s sorted out and everyone’s happy. Mum wasn’t kidding about it being complicated. A lot of countries left the Emergency Earth Coalition because they wouldn’t accept Morrors living on Earth permanently, even though the Morrors are plainly staying here whether anyone likes it or not. A lot of them live in Antarctica, which they’re calling Uhalarath-Moraa, and it hasn’t officially been recognised as a state yet, but Dad says it probably will be soon. And not all the Morrors are happy either – some of them don’t think there’s enough room on Earth, and still want a planet to themselves, and recently they did find a chilly little uninhabited moon out there that might be OK for them with a bit of terraforming. Dr Muldoon, who recovered fine from her injuries, is helping with that when she isn’t doing ungodly experiments on people, or flying out to Mars, or mentoring Josephine.

She had a lot of work to do to get the EEC to put much effort into defending Mars as well as Earth from the Vshomu, but at last they understood that leaving Mars as a place for Vshomu to feed on and breed is a really terrible idea. It’s not going to get its own Vuhalimath-laa any time soon, but the EDF do go out there regularly and clean up any Vshomu infestations that they find.

It got scary about six months ago when a big cloud of them turned up and started chewing on the Moon. But at least we’ve got a lot of warning about them, whereas the Morrors hadn’t had a clue until their actual planet started being eaten, and by the time they began to get organised it was too late.

Mum still spends a lot of her time out there, doing what she’s best at: defending Earth in her spaceship. Now she protects the light-shield instead of trying to destroy it. She doesn’t come home every night, but she does come home. And we live together with Dad and Gran in Warwickshire and that’s all I wanted.

Not all Earth’s Morrors live in Uhalarath-Moraa. Some of them live anywhere on Earth that’s cold and will have them.

Thsaaa’s two surviving parents run a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. A year after we returned to Earth, we all got together to go and see them.

Josephine and I rode up on the ski lift with our families. Carl and Noel had got there already. It was summer again, but the mountains were still gleaming with snow. On a crag above the ordinary chalets, between banks of fir trees, there was a large domed building painted in whorls of colour, and outside it Thsaaa stood with their parents, waving their tentacles.

‘Hi, Thsaaa,’ I said. ‘Erm, Vel-haraa, Thsaaa, alvaray sath lon te faaa? How was that? I’ve been practising.’

Thsaaa went pitying colours. ‘It’s nice that you tried,’ they said. ‘I think we should stick to English.’

‘Thsaaa!’ Thsaaa’s Thuul-lan gave them a light cuff with a tentacle.

‘Don’t mind them,’ said Thsaaa’s Quth-laaa-mi said to us placidly. ‘They’re aaaaaaaalways like that.’

‘Hi, team!’ crowed the Goldfish, bustling up to us over Noel and Carl’s heads. Someone had fixed its eye and given it a new coat of paint, but it was never going to look quite as good as new again. Not that it seemed to care. ‘Hi Alice, hi Josephine! Long time no see! Have you learned anything exciting about the history of Switzerland today?’

‘Can you believe Noel and me got stuck with this as a reward,’ Carl groaned.

‘I asked,’ protested Noel. ‘It’s my friend.’

‘That fish is a good fish,’ said Carl’s dad. ‘It’s got your grades up across the board. I won’t hear a word against it.’

Thsaaa’s parents showed us their house, though it was too cold to stay in there for long. But we saw that there were Paralashaths of different sizes and shapes on pedestals. And there were two empty sleeping niches, lined with multi-coloured pebbles, for the two parents that wouldn’t come back.

Thsaaa’s Thuul-lan and Quth-laaa-mi had put a big table outside in the snow. It was warm enough if you kept your coat on. We ate baked fal-thra and tomato ketchup, and Thsaaa was right, they do go really well together. And we watched the last few skiers shooting down the slopes as the sun went down.

‘Do Morrors ski?’ asked Carl, dubiously.

‘No,’ said Thsaaa. ‘We toboggan.’

‘Are you going to help your parents run the ski resort when you grow up, Thsaaa?’ asked Noel.

Thsaaa turned soft, thoughtful shades of blue and aquamarine. ‘I want to study the history of our people,’ they said. ‘Our art. The Paralashath. So much has been lost.’

We were all quiet for a bit after that.

‘I asked what you were going to do when you grew up the first time I met you,’ said Josephine to me. ‘And you wouldn’t even think about being anything except a soldier.’

‘There was no point, then,’ I said.

‘What about now?’

I hesitated. I had been thinking about it, of course, but I hadn’t talked about it yet. ‘I think I want to be a doctor,’ I said.

I was a little worried Mum might be sad I didn’t want to be a fighter-pilot like her, but she said, ‘You’d be a wonderful doctor.’

‘And are you still going to be an archaeologist and a composer and… all the other things?’ I asked Josephine.

‘Oh yes,’ she said confidently. ‘And I’m doing a lot of biochemistry with Dr Muldoon. But I’ve been thinking lately…’ Josephine looked up at the sky. The stars were beginning to come out. ‘Do they have space archaeologists? Because I think they should.’

I laughed. ‘So: a multi-disciplinary scholar, artist, and explorer, in space.’

‘Yes. Shut up.’

‘What about you, Carl?’ asked Mum.

‘Fly spaceships,’ he said, shrugging.

‘I have this awful, haunting fear you will end up a politician,’ said Josephine.

‘Nah. Just spaceships. Maybe I can be your pilot, Jo; you’ll need someone to get you there.’

‘And we might need a doctor,’ said Josephine.

‘And Noel can be a space zoologist and categorise any animals we find,’ I said.

‘Are there other people like us out there, Thsaaa?’ Josephine asked. ‘I know Morrors searched a long time before they found a place you could live, but did you find anyone else along the way? Places where there are people?’

The stars above the Alps were huge and wild and clear. Thsaaa’s long tentacles rested loosely around our shoulders.

‘There are millions of worlds,’ Thsaaa said.

Thank you so much to my wonderful editors at Egmont and Harper Collins, Sarah Hughes and Alyson Day and Toni Markiet, and to Lynne Missen at Penguin Canada for the warm welcome (and all the books!). Thank you to Jo Hardacre too for bringing such imagination and energy to Mars Evacuees. Thank you Andrea Kearney and Andy Potts for the beautiful cover – seriously, have you seen it? So orange. So shiny. It fills me with joy.

Thank you Marisa Pintado for your lucid copyediting and for actually being moved to go to see the Visions of the Universe exhibit at the National Maritime Museum!

Thank you, Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan, for your laser-guided agenting, for a life-saving suggestion about the sequel, and for exploding ‘They just don’t get it!’ in the back of a taxi when a different publisher rejected Mars Evacuees on the grounds of featuring too many girls in space.

Thank you Zoe Pagnamenta for flying the Martian flag high on distant shores.

Thank you, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Ivy Alvarez, both of whom generously talked to me about Filipino and Filipino-Australian childhoods. I hope I didn’t mess up too badly. And Rochita, additional thanks for being so enthusiastic about the idea and such a warm reader of my work. Readers, you should check out both these writers: rcloenenruiz.com and ivyalvarez.com

Thank you, John Rickards and others for calculating how far a twelve-year-old could jump on Mars.

Thank you, Samira Ahmed, for letting me chat about Mars on your radio programme, for pushing me towards public stages and people towards the things I write.

Thanks to my family for their unwavering support.

Thank you Mrs Cooke, for reading us Goodnight Mr Tom and for believing I could be a writer in a school where encouragement was in short supply.

And thanks again, Freya, for telling me – at a crucial moment – that you wanted to read this book. Even though you thought Alice was an old-fashioned name and that I’d started too many sentences with ‘And’. I needed to hear it. All of it.

First published in Great Britain 2014

by Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2014 Sophia McDougall

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978 1 4052 6867 7

eISBN 978 1 7803 1413 6

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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