//------------------------------// // Sols 167-168 // Story: The Maretian // by Kris Overstreet //------------------------------// AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 167 ARES III SOL 167 A year before, if anyone had told Fireball that he’d be digging in the dirt like a common diamond dog, and further that he would be digging not for gems but for pony vegetables, he’d have said they were crazy. Adding the details on a barren planet in another universe under the direction of a mostly hairless monkey would have been superfluous. But here he was, delicately removing tubers from a rather unpleasant plant, then gently placing the plant’s roots back in the upturned earth so it could produce more of the stupid tubers. The strangest thing was, he wasn’t even mad. It was a thing he could do. Not even he fell below whatever doofus event horizon made you incompetent to dig up potatoes. There were certainly a heck of a lot to dig up. It seemed like there were three or four layers of potatoes, their roots tangled together, with barely any dirt separating tuber from tuber. Hundreds, many hundreds, already lay piled up near the cave’s airlock. And, of course, they’d need every single one of them, and a lot more besides. He’d had potatoes before- before Mars, before Amicitas. Pony-made food packs, even with gem garnishes, had all sorts of vegetable matter, and on several occasions he’d had mashed or baked potatoes with little magnetite sprinkles. They kind of tasted like really mushy quartz… which, all things considered, was ironic. But that was his only experience with potatoes before now. He’d never seen where they came from. He’d never cared. Growing plants was a stupid pony thing. And even now, after the last couple months of working with the plants for the sake of his crewmates’ survival, he had zero interest in growing anything once they all got home. But even so, the process of plants growing and eventually becoming food fascinated Fireball, in a way he’d never have believed before. “Hey, boss.” Cherry Berry looked up at Fireball’s inquiry. She dropped the potato she had in her teeth into the plastic bin and said, “What’s up?” “What’s it like, growing things?” Fireball asked. Cherry Berry blinked. “How should I know?” she asked. “I only have the same earth pony magic as any other earth pony. I’m not like Carrot Top or Applejack. They can make seeds sprout the instant they plant them. Even back home I can only give them a little encouragement.” “Yeah, yeah, you’ve told us a million times,” Fireball said, waving the disclaimer away. “But you did farm work all the time before the space race, right?” “Well, yeah,” Cherry shrugged. “I did a lot of things. And when I get back home I’m going to cash my back pay and spend a year doing nothing but balloon flying.” “So, what’s it like?” Fireball asked. Cherry shrugged. “It’s a job,” she said. “You plant seeds. You pull up weeds. You wrangle the local critters to eat the pests, the beetles and weevils and what-not. You make sure the soil’s irrigated. And then you harvest.” “Yeah, but…” Fireball didn’t have the words in Equestrian, never mind English. “But what’s it like growing stuff?” Cherry blinked. “It’s… it’s just a thing you do,” she finally said. “I don’t think I understand what you’re asking. Maybe you could try Mark?” She waved her head over at the alien, who was deftly and delicately parting one tuber after another from its parent plant on the other side of the row. “Isn’t he, like, a doctor of growing things?” “Aw, c’mon, boss,” Fireball moaned, “if I ask him I gotta do it in English.” “We all need the practice,” Cherry said. “Speaking of, how did you do the last time you tried the MAV sim?” Fireball had managed to get himself inverted, plowing the ship into the simulated Martian surface in the last sim. Apparently Dragonfly hadn’t spread the word. “I learned something,” he said, not inviting further investigation. “I’ll go try Mark.” Having successfully separated himself from embarrassment by his commanding officer, he walked over to the strange monkey, concentrated on his words, and said, very slowly, “Mark? What is it like, grow plants?” Mark grinned. “What’s it like?” he repeated. “It’s a power trip, that’s what it’s like.” Fireball blinked. Why did there have to be all sorts of weird phrases in English? “What means, power trip?” he asked. “I mean it’s a big feeling of power,” Mark said. “You take a little seed, or a cutting, or something. You give it fertilizer and water. You keep bugs and other pests out. You find other plants crowding in on its territory, and you weed ‘em out. And then one day you’ve got this beautiful living thing, and you say to yourself, ‘I did that.’ It’s fucking amazing.” “Really?” Fireball asked. “No shit,” Mark said. “It’s a great feeling. Food or flower or whatever, it’s always a trip.” “Okay. Thanks.” Fireball returned to his work, thinking carefully as he used an improvised trowel to turn the soil and unearth more potatoes. He could just about see it, yeah. It was kind of like building a hoard, except instead of digging or stealing it, you took care of it and watched it grow bigger, more valuable, or more delicious. This farm, this farm was… well… kind of like a shared hoard, in that way. The whole crew contributed their time, their effort, their skills. And here there was life, there was beauty, there was the food that would keep them all alive until rescue came. And yeah, they had made it happen. When he got home and back to his own personal cave, Fireball decided, he would get a plant. Something easy to work with, something that liked the desert. He had a little skylight above a ledge that caught the sun every morning. It would be perfect. And no other dragon better give him any crap over it, not unless they spent a year or more stranded on Mars first. MISSION LOG – SOL 168 Ho-lee shit. Almost 5100 potatoes, all about twenty percent larger than the first crop. Fifty-one hundred potatoes. Or, put it another way, roughly one metric ton of potato, combining the cave and the Hab harvests. Airlock 1, aka the Tater Shed, is full to bursting. Fireball had to take scrap metal and wire from the alien ship to slap together a second shed. Considering the extreme conditions, this can’t be called anything other than a bumper crop. If I weren’t already so sick of potatoes I could puke, I’d make like Uncle Scrooge and swim in ‘em. Doing the math, we now have potatoes through Sol 680 (for me only) and hay through Sol 360 (the ponies), with a little fudge factor for cross-munching. I can give the ponies 180 days (for me) of potatoes, which would be 60 days for them, making the balance more like Sol 500 for me, Sol 420 for them. We’re doing this. We’re really doing this. One more harvest might be enough to see us through to the Sol 768 rescue. Two harvests definitely will. Of course that’s not counting for spoilage, but Mars is the ultimate deep freeze. The potatoes will keep perfectly fine in the sheds, and the hay keeps for a very long time if you keep it dry- not exactly difficult here. So naturally I’m worried as fuck, because Mars is going to pull some new shit to try to get us all killed. It’s been too damn long since something blew up on us. We’re overdue. I wonder what it will be? Rover 2 have a wheel lock up? The alien ship breach in one of its two remaining airtight compartments? (A breach in the bridge would be worse, since that’s the only remaining airlock that ship has.) Or maybe a crystal will fall from the ceiling directly onto the cave life support box and smash it flat? Crap, that last one could actually happen, couldn’t it? I need to talk to the ponies about that- building a roll cage or shield or something to protect the magic life support from a cave-in. That box is just too damn useful to risk losing- especially since if we lose that, we lose our best chance at not starving before Hermes returns.