AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 201
ARES III SOL 200
Of course there had been more subsidence today. Of course there was, Dragonfly thought. Why wouldn’t there be? More subsidence every single day since the Cave Fart.
It was a good thing they hadn’t turned the water back on after repairing the heating system on Sol 197… or Sol 198, either. The cave would have had been full of water again. As it was, it still stank of black, sticky, gooey mud, which was really weird considering that Mars dirt began either reddish or grayish.
After seeing their work undone again on Sol 199, Dragonfly and Mark had gone into conference. The two of them agreed that re-burying the water heating system wasn’t an option until the soil stabilized, which might not be for months. They also agreed that the cave was losing the war for heat to Mars without the water heating system, even with all the space heaters reinstalled and active. So, the water heating system had to be reinstituted, but it had to be a closed system, or at least mostly a closed system… and, for the time being at least, it couldn’t be reburied.
But the question was, how could they heat the water? Bringing in the Hab’s water reclaimer was out; without that the Hab plumbing didn’t work. (Anyway, it was acting up after three straight days of heavy sludge rinsed down the decon shower drain, and maintenance on it would be top priority after the current project.) Building a fire was out; the only stuff they had that would burn, aside from food, would burn a little too… well… explosively. With toxic gases for by-products. And sticking the heaters into water would just break the heaters.
Then Mark mentioned the one thing he did have that produced heat. It wouldn’t do as good a job as the just-below-boiling water from Equestria had done, but fifteen hundred watts distributed around the area through metal pipes might be enough to, Mark said, “tread water” and stop the cave’s internal temperature from dropping back below freezing.
Which is why, this afternoon, Dragonfly was staring with undisguised fear at the Death Box.
It was in one of the largest clear plastic sample bags, sealed in Mars’s barely-present atmosphere, which made it almost as good as a vacuum seal once brought into the pressurized cave. The bag was submerged in a large plastic tub full of water, one of Mark’s sample containers, with the clear lid modified by Dragonfly to include two pipe attachment points. The evil, therefore, was in a can inside a bag under water inside a box, and this fact didn’t make Dragonfly the least bit happier about being within a mile of the thing.
She’d put it off as long as she could. She and Mark (with Fireball’s help) had turned strips of Amicitas outer hull into combination skids and legs for the pipes to sit on, up in the air about half a meter above the currently uneven surface. This had taken a while, not least because Cherry Berry and Spitfire were dragging dirt from the pit dug at the back of the cave to fill in the new sinkholes, which meant working around the pipes without stepping on the surviving plants. And, when the harvest came in three weeks, the pipes would have to be either reburied or moved to get them out of the way.
(The only one not working in the cave today was Starlight. She, of course, stayed back at the Hab. She was feeling better, but she still had four days of no magic to go before Spitfire would check her over again. And anyway, the less she used her patched suit the better. So she was spending the day reading documents on Mark’s computers while Mark’s people used the idle Pathfinder chat to send more books. Before long Harry Potter would run out, but Dr. Kapoor assured them that he was sending a classic series to follow.)
But the pipes were eventually reassembled (again) and installed on their new feet, and the little pump from Amicitas’s heat control system was installed and wired up to the cave’s solar farm (which now had ten solar panels stolen from the Hab to power everything, plus the Hab battery for nighttime operations).
All that remained was to connect the ingoing and outcoming water feed lines to the box with the RTG in it and turn the whole system on.
Dragonfly felt like there were two spirits by her, the ghost of the cave farm and the ghost of the RTG. The cave farm whispered, I’m sick. I’m cold. Help me.
The RTG rumbled, I don’t care. Do what you like. I’ll kill you eventually.
Dragonfly shook her head. I must be cracking up, she thought. It’s that darn mystery hunger again. It’s making me hear things. And being in the cave isn’t helping much anymore. I wonder if Mark will give up some potatoes to plant the edges of the cave? The plants will be cold, but we don’t need them for food anymore, not really. Anything so long as it’s alive…
“Dragonfly,” Mark said gently, “you’ve been staring at the box for ten minutes. You want me to hook up the system?”
“No, I’m good,” Dragonfly said, adding a moment later, “Thanks, though.” With both hooves she rested each feed line on top of the hookups. She spun each union around in her hooves, down the threads she’d carved herself in the pipe sections salvaged from broken bits. She took a pipe wrench in her fangs and used it to finish tightening the unions until the gasket was fully compressed in each connection. The process took about four minutes total.
Mark, as ever, radiated admiration. He never failed to be impressed at what ponies (or changelings) could do with only hooves and mouth for manipulators. “Okay,” he said. “Cross your fingers.”
Not for the first time, Dragonfly was tempted to perform a partial shapeshift, turning her forelegs into griffon claws, so she could do that exact thing. Instead she stepped over to the life support box and, for the first time since the first sinkholes appeared, she activated the main water flow.
In moments the pipes became hot, too hot to handle comfortably. None of the connections leaked. Good, she thought. Got it right first time.
She’d installed one of the spigots from Amicitas near the life support box, at the highest point in the pipe system, to allow air in the pipes to bleed out. When steaming hot water began coming out, she used her own magic- just a tiny bit, but she felt it drain her- to shut the faucet. The other spigot remained at the lowest end of the pipes, so the system could be drained if and when it got too cold and needed refreshing, or when the crops finally dried out enough to require more water.
Mark reached over and activated the breaker switch in the improvised power cable for the water pump. With a soft little whir the pump came to life, and very softly water began to slosh in a circuit through the pipe system.
“Okay!” Mark said, smiling for the first time in a couple of days. “Looks like we have a winner!”
Dragonfly did not do as she wanted to do and run for the airlock or the rear of the cave. She put her wrench and her other tools back in the Amicitas tool box, ready to take back to the rover and to the Hab. She then joined everyone else in relaying sample boxes of water from the “well” to the airlock, where they would be dumped out down the slope, where the water would freeze and sublimate away. After all, they still had two hours of EVA time before they had to go back to the Hab. Two more hours to do everything they could to salvage their food supply and their magic recharge source.
Two more hours in the close vicinity of a metal can with dozens of fins that kept muttering, in a voice only Dragonfly could hear, Death. Death. Death.
My queen, please come and get me, she thought. I want to come home.
Chrysalis floated in her space suit, about twenty meters away from the actual work being done, and watched as two engineers double-checked the clamps and struts connecting the final piece of CSP Concordia to the rest of the ship.
She regarded the two engineers with… not scorn, exactly, but a particular form of condescension. One was a yeti, wearing the orange of CSP. The other was a hippogriff, wearing the white spacesuit of ESA. Both were rookies; this was their first flight, under Chrysalis’s direct command.
What a strange thing this must be for them, she thought. They weren’t part of the space race. They don’t understand what it was like in the early days. They think this is great adventure. They never experienced the real thing, the true ragged edge of the envelope, when we knew we didn’t know what we were doing.
Today we think we know what we’re doing, and we hope it fools the rest of the universe.
Behind her, and in front of her, and all around her, the spirit Chrysalis usually felt in space- and invariably felt when she went on EVA- giggled indulgently. For a moment Chrysalis thought it would speak- it did that, sometimes- but all she got was the empathic equivalent of a comforting, understanding hoof on her shoulder.
Sighing, Chrysalis turned her attention from the rookies to the new module of the ship- the space station with engines, really. She’d seen it under construction at Cape Friendship. Twilight Sparkle had outdone herself. The one module weighed more than the rest of the ship combined. It had to. It contained the new, adjustable Sparkle Drive and more mana batteries than anyone had ever thought to put together before. Adjusted one way, it could probably do several times the speed of light. Adjusted an entirely different way, it might just go to another universe and get back without stranding its crew… maybe.
And because Chrysalis would never not be Chrysalis, a part of her brain calculated that the magic in those batteries at top draw would let any magic-wielding pony or changeling go hoof to hoof with Celestia herself and likely win, provided that Celestia could be persuaded to remain within a hundred yards of the massive freight train that would be required to haul the things around. But maybe…
No. Schemes another day. My subject and my top pilot need rescuing first, and I suppose so do the others. Now if only they could find them.
There had been a blip, just barely above the level of static, in Twilight’s magic tracking system a few days before. It hadn’t produced meaningful results, so Angel 9 would launch programmed for the same narrow range of possible worlds as Angel 8 had been.
It would help if Angel 8 hadn’t disappeared without a trace on its third hop, checking a universe only an inch and a half away from their own. Chrysalis was beginning to share Twilight’s frustrations with the probe, even if expensive blindfold dart-throwing at universes was better than no clue at all.
I’m ready to save them, Faust take it. Where are they?
Seven figures stood around the scorched metal object that had essentially destroyed Fluttershy’s yard.
Sunset saw the lettering, half-burned, on the side of the probe:
ESA ANGEL EIGHT CSP
Using the flap of her jacket, she grabbed the handle of the least-bent door of what looked like a cabinet and yanked it open. Bits of glittering, razor-sharp precious stones tumbled out. A wire sparked and popped.
“Okay,” she said. “We can’t let the authorities find this. Whose garage can we stuff it inside?”
Twilight Sparkle- still Sci-Twi in Sunset’s mind- bounced up and down on her toes. Even under the streetlights, in the pre-dawn gloom, they could all see the immense grin on her face…
8881746 The principal heat source was the Sun, with the air system and the space heaters contributing. The heat transfer system didn't take the heat away, it just balanced it out, so that 110 C on the sunward side and -100 C on the shadow side average out. It wouldn't work well at all for anything beyond Mars (or, come to that, very far inside Earth/Equus orbit), but it was good enough for its intended use at the time.
And before the water was released at the lowest end of the farm area, where it was allowed to run off towards the entry to the next chamber of the cave and to sink into the non-cultured regolith (which, gradually, has cultured itself a bit through runoff and bacterial propagation). As a result, the system has had a LOT of water added to it over 140 sols... and now, with the failure of the permafrost layer under the farm, it's become a serious problem.
It is at this point that those of us familiar with Twilight Sparkle run away.
I found that ending pretty funny.
And add an EG tag to the story. I see where this is going... ;)
Poor EQG Fluttershy...
And hey, look, it's Sunset! She's probably going to tell Twilight about this mishap (and also ask for an explanation).
Lake Peigneur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddlrGkeOzsI . How to lose barges down a sinkhole...temporarily.
8881787
Just imagine if they end up stuck on Mars too - 7 teenaged girls suddenly arrive at the hab? Mark will think he's lost his last marble, NASA will flip out ("Dammit, we were pushing it to rescue 6, now there's 7 more]?"), and Starlight will be all, "Oh, hey Sunset, long time no see."
8881797 In the first draft, she already had, and Chrysalis was musing on the fact. I dumped that because it was too awkward and not nearly as interesting as showing the discovery of the lost, crashed probe.
For some reason, the fact that they're going to read more fiction from Earth got me thinking about how MLP doesn't exist on this Earth. Does that mean Transformers and G.I. Joe don't either? Or did Has to just not have a show for little girls? Or did they have some other show instead? Did that show get a popular adult male following?
Just something to think about, I guess.
Thing about the RTG, its so inefficint at generating power, that using it as a thermal source is as good as youre going to get even if all its electric output was used only for driving fans to try and keep the warmer air away from the cave walls and roof. Though that is something that might have worked if even thin sheets were available, hang them below the cave roof with any air displacement equipment available. Though given the dampness etc I suspect woven alfalfa mesh with potato leaf inlay still wont be enough or available.
ESA Concordia is going to be to Equestria what the Enterprise is to Earth?
.... the next time Sunset texts Twilight, she going to be asking about the probe.... that amuses me.
Dragonfly was hearing machine spirits.
No hydrazine central heating? Aww
They also have solar crystals. Well, they have them after Starlight recovers, to be precise
It would probably be easier to connect it to RTG (shorter wires )
Dear Princess Twilight,
It looks like some more of your stuff got dumped on our world. Do you want it back?
Sunset Shimmer
P.S. Our Twilight wants to keep it and see what makes it tick. Is there any way we can smuggle it through the portal tonight?
I wonder if this is going to be like a DBZ situation. Starlight spending so much time pushing her magic in these kind of conditions, that when she gets back to a place with normal magic, she gets a huge increase in her power.
Kind of like how Goku and Vegeta were training at hundreds of times Earth's gravity.
Would it be possible to seal a solid layer below the soil in the same way that the roof was sealed?
Congrats on the win; I'm following the link as soon as I get done with this comment. 👏
I hate to sound stupid, but could Sunset reporting the recovery of Angel 8 give them an additional datum point sufficient for calibrating the Sparkle Drive for "astrogation" between the alternate universes? As a benchmark for... well, it wouldn't simply give them the solution, of course... But, perhaps enough of a benchmark to allow them to refine their search parameters, or, at least, not simply launch probes in the blind and hope for the best?
One bit of internal monologue jumped out at me:
Beautiful. Marvelous hint of what it might have been like for the the Mercury and Vostok pilots as they looked at the Apollo and the Soyuz crews. Pure gold. Bravo Zulu for that line alone.
8881852
Aside from the obvious dangers of using the hydrazine, they need it to fuel the MAV descent stage.
Yeah, it's really look like Dragonfly might get a promotion to queen at this rate as it sounds like she's hearing the same sort of thing Chrysalis does.
Also nice to see that Chrysalis has grown to know whats really important at the moment, yet is still the same old bug queen we know and love.
Great. As if we need anymore beings stranded on Mars.
"Okay...Twilight Sparkle...how in the hell did you relocate the entire city to Equestria?"
"Er...lucky guess?"
8881807
i would love to see the look on twilight face still knowing where they could find there world without a mirror now
8881832
as one planning to get into 40k, this amuses me...too bad i favour the Ruinous Powers...
Either Dragonfly is slowly losing it, or she's evolving into a new queen as a result of being cut off from the hive for so long. I forget, has she brought up these non-sapient voices with anyone else yet?
8881882
there already is, thats part of what made the 'cave fart' happen. Starlight was able to completely seal the geode cave to increase structural integrity, but as a result, it trapped more heat and melted the permafrost trapped methane that was lurking under the surface of the cave floor. which was composed of dirt and material that had fallen into the geode. in essence, the geode could be thought of as a very oddly shaped masson jar with dirt in it.
OK, I'm pretty sure that by author fiat, this Sunset Shimmer is the same one that this Starlight Glimmer mentioned meeting. But I can't really say how likely that is in a multiverse with, reportedly, infinitely many universes in a given "direction."
Also, why was Angel Eight at ground level? I can sort of buy that it landed in a humane character's garden, given that. (Also also, are they adults by now?)
8881899
Zulu? What's a BZ?
Now this is an interesting twist, Sunset should recognize the lettering of the probe and hopefully reach out to Twilight. This now begs the question since the Sparkle drive bypasses the mirror to the EG universe does that mean ponys keep their normal form?
8881987
"Bravo Zulu" is Naval parlance for "Well Done" (see Wikipedia's Bravo Zulu article). It's given for the sort of thing that earns commendations, promotions, and the like... Or at least, in the Royal Navies of the UK and Commonwealth, an issue of grog...
Perhaps the ESA has such trouble finding Earth's dimension because it's so close to their own dimension that their 'scanner' can't distinguish it from the origin point? Perhaps the 'inch and a half' need to be trimmed down to a millimeter?
On the topic of scanners, maybe they could park a probe in one of the stable dimensions and use it for tests to calibrate newer and better scanners?
"construction at CapeFriendship"
"construction at Cape Friendship"?
re that last section:
Hah! :D
Ok, I gotta wonder what the hell this is about. I would like to know ahat this "spirit" is fairly soon, if that's alright.
8881987 Angel 8 didn't -start- at ground level. It started in space on what turned out to be a suborbital trajectory, and it ran out of mana before it could make the abort-jump home. It re-entered atmosphere, partially but not completely burning up, and hit Fluttershy's parents' lawn at terminal velocity. It made a pretty good hole, but it didn't hit hard enough to become unrecognizable.
8882019 I like it better than "Good." To explain why, here's a story from the US Navy c. 1920s.
An admiral who was particularly hard to please came to inspect a ship. Everything that could possibly go wrong during the inspection, short of enemy action, did. At the end the admiral departed without a word, and the crew and officers of the ship waited on tenterhooks to learn the verdict.
And then a wireless message came:
FROM ADMIRAL SUCHANDSO TO USS SOMETHING OR OTHER
MESSAGE BEGINS
GOOD
MESSAGE ENDS
For about five minutes the whole ship enjoyed a sigh of relief. Then the second message came:
FROM ADMIRAL SUCHANDSO TO USS SOMETHING OR OTHER
MESSAGE BEGINS
TO PREVIOUS MESSAGE PLEASE APPEND THE WORD "GOD"
MESSAGE ENDS
Oh Celestia its over 100 chapters...
I WILL FINISH IT ALL WITHIN ONE WEEK
IS MY CHALLENGE
But first i need to take a nap
Oh and to read the story that this is a sequel to
8882055 It's been mentioned twice in the currently written part of CSP.
8882085
Well, *that* story is ongoing, And 84.2%, or about 16/19, of this one's length at the moment. Anyway, Kris is doing well enough with addressing events from that story in this one, I haven't needed to read both (though perhaps much of that is I try to read all the comments too).
Ok, this almost REQUIRES a side story in and of itself...
Dragonfly: " Let me get this straight, Mark. Are you telling me your people use DEATH as a power source?"
Mark: "Well, technically..."
Dragonfly: "YOU ARE ALL CRAZY! CRAZY MONKEYS"!
Pity they don't have a hose with a valve and some way to pass it through the airlock. Just drop one end in the area you need to pump out, put the other on the outside, open the valve, and let the differential in pressure do the rest.
Well the machine spirits are strong with this shape-shifter organic. The Mechanicus awaits what the Omnissiah has in store.
Well didn't expect EQG to make appearance but in hindsight, should have known.
8881899
I think, and Kris will need to correct me if I'm wrong, that it might not be CSP's Equestria Girls the probe landed in.
You think with all this world hopping that the Sparkle Census will get involved?
8881881
An amusing idea. Doubt it'll happen, but it could be a hilarious omake.
An almost more amusing idea would be if Sci-Twi manages to send Angel 8 back somehow, giving them at least half a key to using magic spacecraft in low-magic environments.
...Which, on reflection, would probably be a better idea than Blindfolded Dart-Throwing. Doing research across the mirror which is presumably at least a low'er' magic environment, I mean.
Wait a minute
How are Cherry's trees?
Later that day:
"Dear Twilight,
Sorry if I caught you at a bad time, but I need to ask you a question or two... preferably before your counterpart destroys this probe labelled Angel 8 in her study of it. At least I'm assuming the probe is yours... write me.
Love,
Sunset"
8882270
Read "The Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov.
You're going to love it.
All this talk of spigots takes me back to setting up water cooling in my PC a few years ago Dragonfly's perspective was nice to see, and her struggle to tolerate the death box which might stop them from dying.
The last line of her POV then cutting to Chrysalis was moving to see, and this was by far the most wondrous Chrysalis POV of the story so far. Is that more like how she is in CSP, wrapped up in the excitement of the space race and the majesty of the universe? Is a yeti in MLP the thing Pinkie meets in Party Pooped in Yakyakistan?
Nice plan with Angel 8! I rather hope that's the last we see of Sci-Twi, though; personally I can't stand the character.
As for the next book series, I think A Song of Ice and Fire would probably be problematic, but Black Beauty would be worse
8881697
Heat sinks are specially designed object. They have their fins a specific distance apart: To close, and they constrict air flow, rendering them useless without fans. To far apart, and not enough surface area. Taken to the logical extreme would be to use metal wool, or better yet, metal foam. Bad heat conductors those, with massive surface areas.
For it to act as a heatsink, these crack would have to be sufficiently wide. And wide cracks in the ceiling would have caused alarm long before heat conductance is considered.
Porous quartz crystals are new to me. Not a geologist. Still, porous materials are generally considerably better insulators, so i assume that removing these holes will improve conductance.
Here are some ballpark, back of the envelope numbers i calculated a while ago, based on descriptions of the farm.
Incoming heat from hot water: 550 000 W
Heating from condensation on cave ceiling: 15 000W
Most of the heat is going down not up.
Looking at those numbers again makes the rtg feel quite insignificant, but its augmenting sunlight and space heaters. every little bit helps.
8882344
How about some nice equine human friendships, Trapped in an hostile environment, after the destruction of their transportation, awaiting rescue?
The Black Stallion series it is. 20 books of joy.
8882244
I hope!