The Worst Man on Mars

To his delight, Tarquin Brush found himself alone in the family cabin. His parents, Brian and Delphinia, were out packing their precious laboratory glassware for transfer to the surface, while his siblings, Gavin and Tracey, were probably up to mischief somewhere on board.

“Quality ‘me’ time”, he said to Mr Snuggles who was gently rotating about his centre of gravity in the middle of the room. The robot was holding an empty can of Stallion, picked from many drifting around the spaceship, and mimicking the Commander’s drinking action. Every now and then he would broadcast recordings of the Commander’s deep, croaking belches.

After locking the cabin door Tarquin opened his flaptop, pulled on his headphones and patched himself into the spaceship’s main server. Although only ten years old, he had managed to hack into the server within the first week of the voyage. Since then, he had plundered the ship’s archived CCTV images from all the on-board cameras. Most of it was deadly dull, such as two hours of Miss Leach explaining the merits of the Garter knitting stitch to her SmartFridge. Even the fridge’s rote responses of ‘really’ and ‘you don’t say’ had started to sound jaded before Tarquin fast-forwarded through to the juicier stuff.

And some of the recordings had been juicy indeed. There had been Penny Smith’s murder. He had seen it all. Every gruesome detail, replayed almost nightly in a recurring nightmare. The eyes of the murderer were still etched into his memory. Out of fear, he hadn’t told anyone what he had heard and what he had seen. And then there were the screams of former Mission Commander Chad Lionheart during his fatal ‘accident’. The young boy still heard those screams in his nightmares and saw the shadowy figure that briefly hovered over the body before drifting away.

Now, as he watched the earlier CCTV footage from the cockpit, he shrugged off his fears and listened to Willie Warner talking to himself about his epic discovery. Tarquin became more and more gripped. He turned the sound up so as not to miss a word. When the scene came to an end with Willie’s exit from the cockpit, Tarquin sat back, his mouth in an ‘O’ shape.

“Life on Mars!” he muttered in awe. He turned to his lazily spinning robot. “There are huge aliens down on Mars, Mr Snuggles. What do you say to that?”

Mr Snuggles waited for his rotation to bring himself into the same orientation as his maker before releasing a monster Dugdale-burp and saying, “The chuffin’ dog’s bollocks!”