MISSION LOG – SOL 207
Today is a day of rest, and both physically and mentally, we all needed it. We spent ten days doing all we could to salvage the cave farm after the minor case of compartment overpressure on Sol 196, and then I spent yesterday doing a lot of badly overdue maintenance work on the Hab. Today I’m resting my sore back, and the aliens are lounging about except for Dragonfly, who went by herself to the cave to do the daily maintenance check.
So: sitrep time.
THE HAB – No signs of weak spots anywhere in the canvas or around Airlocks 2 and 3. The atmospheric regulator and oxygenator are working at 97% of rated efficiency, which is pretty good considering they’re dealing with, among other things, fur. Cleaning out the filtration system was NOT fun. We’re truly lucky the filter system uses non-disposable, cleanable filters. As it is, I could start a fire with the lint and crap I cleaned out. And I might need to, so I’m storing it in a small sample bin against the day we need it.
Side note: I made the comment about becoming a hoarder, and Fireball asked what was wrong with that. I said nothing if you’re a dragon, but humans generally don’t hoard gold and gems and like that. We tend to hoard old newspapers, used wrapping paper, dirty dishes, old prescription medicine, and cats. Cherry began wishing we had some newspapers, and Starlight wanted wrapping paper, and Spitfire wanted more medicine, old or not, so I don’t think I made my point very well.
Anyway, there is one big problem: the water reclaimer. With all the toxins present or potentially present in Mars soil, a decon shower was an absolute necessity. Ares I proved that. But the decon shower was meant to deal with light to moderate amounts of regolith clinging to spacesuits, clothes or skin. It wasn’t meant to deal with viscous stinking black mud full of bacteria of all kinds. It shut down twice in the past week due to clogs, which I had to locate and clean out before we could wash.
And yesterday it shut down again for an entirely different reason. The wastewater holding tank had silted up.
By wastewater I don’t mean the toilet. The toilet has its own system for extracting the water from urine and feces before vacuum-sealing them and dumping them in little baggies behind the Hab. (Which it doesn’t do anymore, because despite months of crapping and pissing into a bucket, we ran out of the baggies for the toilet ages ago.) No, the wastewater tank is where the drains go from the lab/kitchen sink and the decon shower. And that was mostly full of sand and mud- to the point that it couldn’t hold any more. When the holding tank is full, the reclaimer treats it as a malfunction and shuts down until the engineer (me) addresses the situation.
Getting the muck-filled tank out was a minor adventure. The valve was almost locked up from silt, so it took half an hour to close it so I could disconnect it without dumping water everywhere. I couldn’t lift the thing, and I think I may have hurt my back trying. Eventually I got Fireball to do it. I’ve since replaced it with the only substitute I could find- one of the empty CO2 tanks from the MAV fuel plant. It’s a lot smaller than the water tank, but the valves and couplings are standardized sizes. It works well enough in the short term to get the reclaimer running again.
Once I had the old tank out, there were two ways to address the problem: magic the gunk out with my handy-dandy unicorn (she slices, she dices, she makes julienne fries!), or flush the thing out until the muck is rinsed away. Unfortunately my unicorn is on strike because of the magic battery thing, and she refuses to recognize hygiene as an emergency. (Which, considering how badly we have to stink before we rinse off, isn’t that big a change…)
So, rinse out the tank it was. And rinse. And rinse. And rinse and rinse and rinse.
The problem is that a lot of Martian soil consists of basaltic dust. When you get basaltic dust wet, it clings together, and sometimes it goes so far as to form chemical bonds. The ancient Romans added it to quicklime to make the world’s first underwater concrete. Add to that the discharge from soil bacteria of both the oxygen-breathing and sulfide-breathing kinds, and you get the kind of clogs Drano just won’t touch.
So I ended up contaminating about eighty percent of the Hab’s store of fresh water trying, and mostly failing, to convince the crud in the tank to leave. What came out was invariably black as sin and stank really badly. We took it to the airlocks and dumped it.
We’ll gradually get the water back, of course. The ponies water the Hab farm every day using the nearly infinite supply from their space suits. What the plants don’t turn into more plant material they aspirate through the stomata in their leaves. That puts humidity into the air, which gets absorbed by the atmospheric regulator and shunted over to the water reclaimer, which cleans it and stores it. And if we really need it, we can ask the pony bosses to override the suit shutdown failsafes and- very slowly- refill the Hab’s storage tanks from them. But for right now, no showers for anybody.
I refuse to recognize this as an insoluble (pardon me) problem. I’m looking through the limited inventory of chemical agents in the soil analysis lab, trying to find something that’ll loosen up the crap in the tank without attacking the tank or plumbing. And if worst comes to worst I can just wait until Starlight builds more batteries and decides there’s enough magic sparkles in the bank to empty hardened Mars muck out of a bottle.
But the big problem is, what this stuff did to the holding tank it might also be doing to the innards of the water reclaimer. This is an issue. A short-term reduction in the use of indoor plumbing is inconvenient. A permanent loss of the plumbing approaches mission-critical.
So I reported all of this to NASA, and my dear friend Dr. Venkat Kapoor reacted in the quiet, professional, understanding way we’ve all come to expect.
[16:42] JPL: Mother, look! Our dear sweet Mark has called us for the first time in days! And Mr. Self-Reliant needs some help. Possibly even, just perhaps, a procedure? Why, certainly, son. Did you bring your laundry with you too?
Yeah. Prick. Sarcasm is my job, not his.
Moving on: one other Hab issue. With one-sixth of our electrical production capacity at Site Epsilon warming the cave back up, we’re beginning to get undercharge on the Hab systems. Too much demand (especially by the half-choked water reclaimer) is my guess. I’ve disconnected the MAV fuel plant and, with great reluctance, the MDV turned flight sim. That appears to have righted the balance for now. it's only about a hundred sols to the summer solstice, and after that the days will get shorter again, so it’s something we’re going to have to watch.
ALIEN SHIP: Chilly as fuck, but it refrigerates rather than freeze-drying the hay stored inside. It holds air fine, and the electronic-only systems are holding up like a champ. The only problem is that the ship has no electrical generation of any kind, so it’s another load on the Hab- and its internal batteries are pretty wimpy. Again, something we’re going to have to watch.
ALIEN SPACESUITS: Dragonfly declared another make-and-mend day for the suits yesterday, and tomorrow I’m supposed to trim hooves again. She ate most of the old freeze-dried alfalfa to get raw material for today’s work, re-soling the suit feet inside and out and then putting patches on the inside of Fireball’s back (wing chafing) and her own legs (hole chafing).
Peculiar thing: yesterday Fireball was complaining that his suit had started feeling tight. That’s a potential game-ender for him. Apparently dragons grow slowly throughout their very long lives, but they never stop growing. And furthermore, dragons sometimes experience growth spurts caused by emotional imbalance or the size of their hoards. It’s an inconsistent and non-scientific phenomenon- and it’s a dragon telling me this, so even they admit it’s nuts. But long story short, if Fireball can’t fit into his spacesuit, he’s trapped on Mars- period.
Except… this morning he was roaring about how someone had stolen one of his five remaining sapphires from his homeworld, plus both his remaining food packs. And then, when Dragonfly asked him to shut up and put on his space suit for further adjustments and patches, it was loose on him. I don’t think you need Inspector Poirot, or even Jim Rockford, to figure out whodunit.
CAVE FARM: I admit, I’ve saved the worst for last.
The Hab farm, bear in mind, is doing just fine- let’s get that out of the way. Today I used my free time to take cuttings of the small stands of alfalfa in between the potato plants and prepared the soil planting tub with fresh cultivated soil for rooting them in. We’ll give it a week to see if they root, and then we’ll stuff the survivors in a space suit and take them to the cave for transplant.
And the fact is, we’re going to need to do this.
Between the methane, the black bacteria, the cave blowout, and the sinkholes and flooding, about sixty percent of the alfalfa crop is dead. Of the remainder, about one-third is plants salvaged from the sinkholes that survived the water and transplanting, and none of them are what you’d call healthy. Another third avoided getting flooded but is still fighting off root rot, so they’ve barely grown at all over the past two weeks. So only about twenty percent of the pre-methane alfalfa plants are healthy and on course for a harvest ten sols from now.
I tried making cuttings from plants which were obviously too far gone to root rot for them to survive, but in most cases I was too late. Only about a quarter of my cuttings have rooted, and it’ll take at least sixty days before we can get any good harvest out of them.
The potato plants are in much better shape. We lost only fifteen percent of those to sinkholes and drowning. Their root systems were too shallow for the anaerobic bacteria to bother them much, so the only plants we lost from non-sinkhole issues were the ones that had all their leaves stripped off during the brief blowout. And anyway we already have a massive potato surplus here in the Hab. so we can afford to lose potatoes in the cave.
The cherry trees all survived, although six of them needed minor tending to the roots. They were planted near the walls of the cave, so they were less susceptible to sinkholes. The one tree that was on a sinkhole edge held enough soil in its remaining root system to avoid toppling.
So, on the one hand, about sixty percent of the plant life in the cave survived and will probably recover. That puts a hit in magic battery recharge, to the point that it’s now barely better leaving them in the cave than having them here in the Hab. But we could replant more potatoes, or even more cherry pits, and get that back in about a month.
But on the other hand, more than two-thirds of the main protein and minerals source for the ponies just bit the dust. We absolutely need to get that back if at all possible.
Luckily, we’re moving towards Martian summer here. Heat and light will be less of an issue. Hell, some days we’ll even have surface temperatures that break the freezing mark briefly. But that’s the only thing going for us.
We have enough alfalfa seed left to replant most, but not quite all, of the sinkhole zones. We’re probably going to use all but a tiny emergency reserve of that. The seedlings I’m trying to start from cuttings will have to make up the difference.
The good news, of course, is that once we get that last good harvest it’ll be okay. I’d like two good harvests, so we can give the ponies more calories from protein than from potato starch. And after that we can just let the farm grow until it’s time to leave.
A lot of work behind us, and a lot of work ahead.
Here’s hoping it pays off.
Oh dear, the trouble that dating system has caused you
8889850
Man, Just the changes between their situation in the last two chapters, I can only imagine what a headache that must be to go back and fix. Plus, I imagine it kind of ruins some of the plans that were in place for Martian winter to mess with the crops...
Mark probably smiled all the same... While uttering words Spitfire would love to learn.
Do me a favour, let us know when you have all the chapters updated. I'll have to change settings on calibre to redownload the entire fic and I'm going to just wait until you're done updating it all before I transfer the next batch.
I keep thinking once the story gets to the point where they have their ship RV ready and are heading to the Ares 4 site that Cherry is going to insist on bringing one of the cherry trees with them. Given how she reacted in the last chapter to the concept that even growing them was a waste of time I think they'll have to make the allowance on the basis of her mental health.
Of course with the reduction in their rations I can't help but think that the strain of building the RV is going to leave the ponies in very poor physical condition. Which at least thankfully they should have a chance to rest up from on the trip to the other site as I imagine there will be little for them to do. I keep wondering if Fireball will be taught to drive the rover so that Mark can rotate out of that job.
One also has to consider the ponies will potentially either lose their water telegraph home or have to reduce their messages to short ones once they leave the Hab as there will no longer be a convenient farm for them to dump the water into.
Wait, but why should Weir have cared about the Martian season for his? His crops were all grown in the Hab, or directly connected to it, with artificial lighting and heating. He didn't have to worry about the temperature or lighting conditions, he had complete control over them. It might affect the Solar farm, but it was made clear he had an excess of solar panels.
By the way, folks, anyone pointing me to "surface temps here" or "it talks about balmy summer here" would be greatly appreciated, to speed up this correction process.
8889888 No, the mistake is the chapter header. 207 is the "day off."
8889890 Insolation for the solar panels. (On the other hand, a certain event during the book's trip to Schiaparelli now makes much more climactic sense.
Today I’m resting my sore back, and the aliens are lounging about except for Dragonfly, who went by herself to the cave to do the daily maintenance check.
I feel like sending Dragonfly on her own is a bit irresponsible, unless it's required for narrative purposes.
Here's hoping some quiet time in the cave gives Dragonfly the answers or resolution she's looking for.
[Insert obligatory "Game of Thrones" joke/reference here.]
8889933 The others didn't send Dragonfly. She just went.
8889936
I'll clarify -
Allowing Dragonfly (or anybody) to go on their own anywhere on Mars seems like an invitation for trouble.
Out of curiosity, what is the sunlight comparison between Mars' longest day (summer solstice) and it's shortest day (winter solstice)?
I know the Hab isn't anywhere near the poles to result in that "30 days of day/night" that occur yearly near the poles on Earth (if such a thing is even possible on Mars), but I'm still curious as to the min/max of available sunlight hours in a Martian year.
Also, that Fireball prank was hilarious, since I suggested a similar thing weeks ago (the growth and its repercussions on EVAs, not the prank)
8889943
Well, in the Book, Mark did everything by his lonesome, and nothing bad ever hap-
*remembers all the shit that nearly killed him*
....on second thought, there's something to be said for the Buddy System...
8889956
Ahha that was quite the unintentional irony. Looks like I haven't quite grasped the situation properly yet :D
8889905
If it's gonna be Martian Summer soon, why are the days getting shorter?
someone made a cover for ya
https://texasuberalles.deviantart.com/art/The-Maretian-742144602
8889950 Such things depend on where you are on Mars. Mars's axial tilt is almost the same as Earth's (at the moment- there are theories that state that, without a very large moon to stabilize it, Mars's axis wobbles and flips slowly over time). The Hab is at 30 degrees N latitude. So the daylight hours would be comparable with, in American terms, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, and Los Angeles/San Diego.
Fireball just has to mutate into a Space Dragon.
Everyone knows those can breathe in space and can flap their wings for lift and motion in a vacuum. He can then just fly them all back to Earth in 10 seconds flat.
It is also a well-known fact that Space Dragons hatch from eggs the size of the moon, are guarded by giant bacterial that resemble spiders for some reason, and once born lay another egg immediately... which is as large as, and has EXACTLY the same crater configuration as, the moon-egg it just hatched from. Oh, and also as it's close to hatching it somehow gains an enormous amount of mass and increases its gravity 6-fold... I guess from absorbing the vacuum of space or whatever...
(You know which Doctor Who episode Alondro is sarcastically referencing here, don't you?)
8889981 Keep spotting things like that. I'm working backwards through the story to fix all of those.
8889982 Yep, I know. He was waiting on me to post it here before posting it himself. https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/807718/the-promised-art-at-last
8890005 The episode you mention is like unto Stargate: SG-1 Seasons 9 and 10, in that it does not exist in my personal universe. What it does in your personal universe is your problem.
Suit
8890021
hope to see the look on there face when they see on that USB drive about a show of hoarders
So what was Venkat's/JPL's proposed solution?
Also, you misspelled "Inpsector Poirot".
8890031 Stargate seasons what and what?
Ugh. I thought oh how I'd feel if I discovered something like that in one of my own stories...
"Well, I guess I'll play god a bit and change the seasons."
I am a man of shortcuts.
8889943 8889936 True. She could break Mars.
I really respect this attention to detail.
8890086 It was "We'll get back to you on that."
Wait, I just realized, how do the plants accurately identify the seasons when the temperatures they're being planted in are nowhere near normal seasonal temperatures on their native planet?
8890160
Loved Stargate, but replacing O'Neil just felt wrong,
8890186 As I recall most perennials that do the winter-hibernation thing (trees, for example; also alfalfa) have two ways of sensing when winter is coming; shorter days and colder temperatures over a significant period of time. In the first draft of today's chapter, before I found out that Mars wasn't going to be where I thought it should be, the shorter days was going to be a thing Mark was worried about even if they got the temperature back up to more than two degrees above freezing.
8890160 Who? Never heard of them. And by that I mean I have retconned my memory.
8890186
Plants are sensitive to the length of the day. When the amount of daylight starts decreasing (after the summer solstice) plants switch over from "grow-grow-grow" mode to a "start-seeding" mode and preparing for winter by storing nutrients in their roots.
8890209
The Cave farm is sealed, with an airlock. The light sources are artificial - sunlight just doesn't get in. What difference does it make, what season Mars is in? Mark can just keep the lights on long enough, and the heaters running, and he'll fool the plants into thinking that it's summer, regardless of the season outside the Cave.
Talking about Roman underwater concrete caused a totally unrelated trivia fart in my brain. Apparently there was Roman influence in the Ethiopian highlands at one time and the basalt concrete wasn't deemed good enough to hold rocks together for their bridges. They came up with a method of strengthening the cement by working whole ostrich eggs into the mix. Some bridge abutments still stand near 2000 years later, which can't be said for the ostrich population of Ethiopia.
Sorry, just had to air out this brain fart.
8890213
Damn spellcheck.
8889943
I told y'all, don't let the killer-rape-bug out of your sight!
*running around with a sign "The times they are changeling pun"*
Shiny's still healing from trypophobia.
8890264
Don’t they have sunlight coming in through magic?
And on the Seventh day of 200, Fireball rested. and dieted.
If it takes N days to recharge the batteries, wouldnt the best aim to be first get N batteries, then once thats achieved, if possible for unicorn stress etc each day there after, those battery prodution units are left in the cave and used to produce One new battery, meaning each day they have One full battery, and N batteries each with (N-1)/N, or slightly less than full charge for emergancies, and after a further N days, Two N batteries all of which are full or near full charge? Then take the first bank out for use, backup, or make Two batteries per day next, take One out leave One behind. After 2N days you now have production of one battery a day and multiplicative in the cave, or only take half the new batteries out each day still giving a half exponential climb. If nothing totally catastrophic occurs yet again?
Cherries Earth Magic would go into increasing rate of growth of teh Farm to her Equestrian normal level, which would feed back into battery recharge speed and also Farm resiliance and survivability.
Do they even have enough time left to get anywhere near that production rate, and what if Glimmer as a last run, Battery converts the Stump, it turns into the local tress of Harmony, and The Farm becomes the Mars equivalent of The Everfree?
Oh, and it seems tehre was a chance that the reason they added the totally science fiction sounding Transparent Aluminum to Star Trek4 Whales, was because someone had read about it being made. Five years before the movie aired. There be Whales here captain.
8890372
Huh. So they do.
I'd forgotten that was how they did things.
8889936
Have to agree with that other comment on Dragonfly's solo adventure to the cave, what the heck is she thinking? I suppose it can be chalked up to becoming complacent despite the lethal environment combined with her increasing emotional issues. Although if the next time the crew visits the cave they find half of it looking more like a hive, we'll have figured out what our little cuddlebug's been up to. It's still disconcerning that she went off by herself however. Was there a pressing need for privacy? Maybe some self-experimentation that would be biased/invalidated with emotional beings nearby thus necessitating such isolation? I really hope she's not going to try and eat-convert the rotten plants into goo for building, hoping that her changeling biology protects her from getting food poisoning. That's risky as hell and she is not expendable despite the hive mentality.
8890160 More hallowed are the Orida Tater Tots.
(Alondro's spud powers lay waste to the false gods, with the blessings of Weird Al!)
If it's not too much trouble, please let me know when you're finished so I can put it on my TODO list to write a simple script to go through re-downloading every per-chapter HTML file. (Normally, I archive each chapter I read as I read it.)
If anyone asks, the Angel program is causing eddies in the space-time continuum.
Time travel is not a viable method of locomotion.
Does this invalidate that moment between Cherry and Mark where the trees ate getting sleepy?
8889981
8890021
I was going to point out that the summer solstice is the longest day, and therefore days immediately after that get shorter. And that while days are longer around the summer solstice and shorter around the winter solstice, our defining those as the first days of their respective seasons means days get shorter in the summer and longer in the winter.
Then I reread Mystic Thunder's comment. So I'm still saying it, just not as a correction.
8890569
That's Ore-Ida, Mr. Troll. It's named after Oregon and Idaho and uses three letters of each.
Great work so far. I’m loving the series
This message is just for people caught up on the story. I went back to Sol 114/116 and recorded Mark's radio interview. https://soundcloud.com/dogman15/fimfiction-story-396744-sol-114-mark-watney-interview
If anyone wants to make edits to it like Filthy Fred did, be my guest. I licensed it under Creative Commons, just attribute me the same way.
Why do I get the feeling those cherry trees are going to end up being the saving grace for mana power?
8890288
Specifically, the live version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida which has a 10-minute drum solo in the middle of it... because reasons