AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 426
ARES III SOL 419
“Glass pyramids.”
“Yeah. Bubbles would be better, because they’d be more resistant against breaking after a serious jolt, but that’s pretty much it.”
“Eighty-four glass pyramids.”
“No, just fifty-six. If we put them on the solar panels we carry on the rover, they won’t stack anymore, and we won’t be able to carry them.”
“All right. Fifty-six glass pyramids. On top of the ship. Which no longer has a safe place to stand on top of it, if it ever had one, because it’s covered with solar panels.”
“Starlight, I get the feeling you’re less than enthusiastic about my little brainstorm,” Mark said.
Starlight rolled her eyes. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Look, it’s this or take a lot longer to get to the Mav,” Mark said. “Like nine days longer if absolutely nothing goes wrong. Unless you can think of some other way to juice up the solar panels? Or maybe I could dismantle the wheels on the nose gear, remove their motors, and rig some sort of bicycle so we could take turns manually charging the batteries?”
Starlight shook her head. “Where do you get these ideas?” she asked.
“I dunno,” Mark said. “Where did you get yours? The cave farm is almost entirely your baby, you know.”
Starlight’s head continued shaking. “There’s a little shop in the crater behind the Hab,” she said with mixed sarcasm and disgust. “Can’t miss it. Big sign saying ‘DISCOUNT BAD IDEAS.’ Fireball has a gold card membership, and I put the shop owner’s kid through college.”
Mark chuckled. “I think my jokes may be rubbing off on you a bit.”
“No, seriously, Mark,” Starlight Glimmer said, setting her hooves on the worktable, “I don’t have original ideas. Not good ones. I know a ton of spells because I was an obsessed little filly who wanted to bend the world to her wishes. Every time I think of something myself, it goes wrong.”
“Not true,” Mark said.
“Transmuting rocks to ballistic cherries.”
“You could probably do it now.”
“The perchlorate spell.”
“Which we use for salt mining. God, I don’t know what we’d do without that.”
“The methane spell.”
“That one was my idea, remember?” Mark smiled. “Look, I’m not letting you off the hook. Most of the time if I come up with an idea, I have to come to you for implementation, right? But you came up with the translation spell that got us talking at first. You sealed the cave for the first time without asking for help from home. The lighting crystals were all you. Using the rainbow crystals to circulate water and add heat to the cave- all you. I couldn’t have done any of that by myself. If it was left to me, we’d still be playing Pictionary.”
Starlight looked at the whiteboard currently in the Hab. It had been drawn on and erased until the residue had made it less a white and more a darkish grey. “That’d be a neat trick,” she said.
“Look, I’m sorry I’m always imposing on you,” Mark said. “Believe me, I’d love to learn magic. I’d need a wand or something like in Harry Potter, but even if I could just make colored lights like you do-“
“Mark, we have wands that make light. They’re called flashlights. You have them too.” She sighed. “Look, take it from a recovering magic addict. Magic isn’t everything. It’s a tool just like anything else, and it can be dangerous if used irresponsibly.”
“I’d still love to learn.”
Starlight sighed again. “If you visit Pony-land, we’ll see what can be done, okay?” She lit up her horn- it took a lot from her reserves, with the plants gone from the Hab- and made a line-picture in light above the work table. “Why a pyramid?” she asked.
“Surface area and angles,” Mark said. “Imagine each square meter as four right triangles with the hypotenuse being a side of the square. 45-45-90 isosceles triangles, right? Each of them is a quarter square meter in area. Now imagine four 60-60-60 triangles instead- equilateral triangles, all of the sides being one meter long. Do the math, and each of those is a bit more than two-fifths of a square meter in area. More surface area. And since it stands up above the panel, you end up able to catch even a bit of light from lower angles. Add your light-gathering spell, and you get… well, I don’t know how much you get, but more than we’re getting now.”
“Huh.” Starlight thought about this for a moment, then banished the cantrip. She couldn’t hold it much longer anyway. “You don’t want bubbles,” she said. “They might be more sturdy, but they’d be lenses concentrating all the light on a single point. Bad idea, don’t you think?”
Mark blinked. “Oh. Yeah, you’re right. I’d forgotten about that.”
“I think I can cobble together something from a couple of mirror spells- not like Granny Weatherwax’s sister did, perfectly safe stuff. Instead of being a relay like in the cave, I could have the glass just refract any light that hits it straight down onto the panel. There might still be some hot spots, but nothing that would melt the panel.”
“Okay, I can see it.”
“The problem is, these things will have to be thin to save weight,” Starlight continued. “And they’ll have to rest only on the panel frame, so they don’t damage the cells. These are going to get broken a lot, Mark.”
“Can you fix them?”
“I can’t patch them. If they crack, good-bye enchantment. No, I’d have to replace any broken dome. That means bringing along raw material for repairs. A couple of big blocks of the clearest quartz we can find. I might be able to recycle broken domes into new ones, but I think we’d better add half a ton of quartz to the load.”
Mark groaned. “You know we’re trying to move faster, not slower, right?”
“If you think we’re going to find a second gem cave on the trip-“
“No, no, I get you,” Mark said, waving a hand in defeat. “When can we begin?”
“I need a place where I can stand and look down on the rover from not too far away,” Starlight said. “That means a gully with steep sides somewhere. Site Epsilon’s sides aren’t steep enough.”
“Okay. Get the crystal you need tomorrow, installation the next sol, Sirius 7C after that?”
“Sounds good.”