AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 82
ARES III SOL 84
“There it is.”
Fireball looked up from the section of landing strut he’d brought in the previous day. The storm they’d crash-landed into had ripped it off of Mark’s lander and carried it to the foot of the crater rim northwest of the Hab. It, along with a dozen antenna fragments and other odds and ends, had been the product of a coordinated salvage sweep led by Cherry Berry the day before. Dragonfly had pronounced it non-repairable, and so Fireball was left to carefully disassemble it into its hardware and scrap metal. “There what is?” he asked.
“Didn’t you notice just now?” Spitfire asked. “When the airlock was being pumped out?”
“What, do Cherry Berry and Dragonfly want back in?” Fireball asked.
“No!” Spitfire said. “The air current changed in the hab just now! And when the airlock was empty, it changed back!”
Fireball shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t feel a thing.”
“Ugh!” Spitfire waved a hoof at Airlock 1. “I’ve been wondering for days what kept bothering me, but now I know! There’s been something wrong in here, and it’s the air currents!”
Fireball spread his tiny wings and flapped them rapidly. His skinny torso stretched slightly, but his feet didn’t leave the ground. He stopped flapping and said, “I don’t feel much difference. Are you sure about this?”
Spitfire nodded. “Now I am,” she said. “I wasn’t before, but now I am. Now we just have to track down what’s changing the air currents in here.”
Fireball sighed and pushed his stool away from the worktable, leaving new furrows in the all-pervasive soil floor. “Okay,” he said. “How strong a change are we talking about? From what direction?”
“It’s just barely there,” Spitfire said. “Not enough to move a dropped feather. But I could feel it.”
“Blockage in the air ducts?” Fireball suggested. “Maybe there’s dust or something in the atmospheric regulator?”
“Hmmmm,” Spitfire thought. “I don’t think so. It feels like it’s coming… coming from…” The pegasus spread her own wings and took flight. She still had to flap her wings hard constantly to stay aloft, but she had a bit more control now, looking less like a frightened chicken than she had on their first day here. After two struggling loops of the Hab interior she landed where she’d been. “Shoot! I can’t tell where it’s coming from!” she said. “My flapping swamps it out!”
Fireball walked carefully over the dirt, through the rows of starter plants and over the ridges of not-yet-sprouted potatoes, to where Spitfire stood. “Hold your breath,” he said, and then he concentrated on his sinuses, forcing his dragonflame through them just so…
A thin gray stream of smoke wafted from his nostrils. It drifted slowly in the air, spreading thinly, until it got sucked up by one of the atmospheric regulator’s nine intakes. Spitfire studied the smoke, moving carefully around the edges of the slow plume, before shaking her head. “It’s no good,” she said. “I can’t see it. But I can still feel it.”
Fireball shrugged and let his flame lapse. The smoke stopped, and in a few moments the atmospheric regulator filters sucked it away.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Spitfire asked sullenly.
“It’s not a matter of believing you,” Fireball said. “I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“But… but… nngh!” Spitfire stamped the dirt with one hoof. “Every instinct I have is telling me that something’s wrong!”
“Good,” Fireball said quietly.
“What?!” Spitfire was in the dragon’s face in a heartbeat, wings flapping like mad to maintain an unsteady hover. “What *gasp* d’ya mean *wheeze* by that?” she panted.
Fireball carefully put a clawed hand on her head and pushed her back to the ground. “My instincts always tell me everything is fine,” he said. “I try to ignore ‘em. But if your instincts are telling you something is wrong, listen.” He smiled a little and added, “I trust your instincts a lot more than I trust mine.”
Spitfire, wings folded again, gave this a little thought. Then she trotted to the suit storage area, plopped her helmet onto her head, and said, “Cherry Berry, this is Spitfire.”
“Go ahead, Spitfire,” Cherry’s voice replied over the suit comms.
“When you and Dragonfly come back from the cave,” she said, “could you use Airlock 3 to re-enter? The one by the ship, I mean?”
“Um… sure, Spitfire,” Cherry answered, her voice full of confusion. “Do you want us back now? We’ve barely left the base.”
“Negative,” Spitfire said. “I’ll explain when you get back. But for now just humor me, all right?”
“I keep trying,” Dragonfly cut in, “but you never laugh.”
“Not funny, Dragonfly.” Cherry Berry cleared her throat and said more loudly into the comms, “Understood, Spitfire. We’ll use the back door coming home. See you at lunchtime.”
“Roger that,” Spitfire replied. “Spitfire out.” She replaced her helmet on her suit. “That should do it for-“
A brief hissing sound came from the direction of Airlock 1. In a couple of seconds it was over, and the sounds of Mark’s base machinery echoed unimpeded inside the Hab.
“… now…” she finished.
“Great,” Fireball muttered. “I guess we have a haunted airlock now.” Shaking his head, he walked back to the landing strut. Undoing nuts and bolts, at least, he understood.
“What do you suppose that was about?” Dragonfly asked.
“No clue,” Cherry said. “But she sure- hey, look at that.”
Dragonfly turned on her hooves to watch. “Aw, it’s just a dust-devil,” she said. “We have those all the time back at the hive.”
The two astromares from Changeling Space Program watched anyway as the small, slender whirlwind, visible only from its cargo of light fine dust and its effects on the dusty soil underneath, shimmied and twisted its way towards the Hab, sucked into the microclimate generated by the inflatable base’s waste heat. The closer it got to the Hab, the faster it moved towards it, until it practically collapsed, dropping its load of silt almost directly on top of Airlock 1.
For the briefest moment, the canvas rippled, and then everything was still once more.
With the show over, earth pony and changeling turned again and resumed their hike to the cave farm.