Sol 398
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 405
ARES III SOL 398
Cherry Berry bucked hard with a hind leg, sending a rock that probably weighed over a hundred pounds soaring in a low arc above the Martian surface. The reinforcements Dragonfly had made to the rear boots of her spacesuit appeared to be working just fine, the heavily insulated metal plates allowing her to apply full earth pony strength without worrying about bursting the soles.
A short distance away, Spitfire and Dragonfly rolled other rocks out of the path of the rover, still half a kilometer away. Mars was covered with rocks of various sizes, but the smaller rocks could be ignored. The ponies were only interested in rocks large enough to cause problems for the huge rover wheels, and those were few and far between. The three of them appeared more than capable of clearing those rocks out of the way or, if they were too large to budge, finding a detour and then galloping well ahead of the rover again.
Sirius 5B was going well- much better than the previous attempt. The communication issues hadn’t been entirely fixed by Mark’s heading indicators, but at least the rover wasn’t coming to a complete stop every time he and Fireball tried to turn. As Mark had explained, maintaining a steady top speed as long and often as possible was the key to stretching travel distance and battery life. Acceleration burned a lot more energy than cruising, and even though the rover wheels regained some power from braking, it wasn’t remotely close to what was lost speeding back up again. Anything that prevented the rover from stopping was, by definition, a good thing.
Which led to the other half of the pony scouting mission. The area around the Hab looked smooth in the photos taken from high orbit, but the shallow crevasses that ran across Acidalia only became visible in high-magnification or super-low-altitude shots. The gullies were a pain and had been since the ponies had first left their wrecked ship to investigate the beacon on their suit navigation systems. The gullies were just deep enough, with steep enough banks, to be annoying.
And the one the ponies had just come up to, at this spot, had banks not so much steep as vertical. “Mark, Cherry,” she called over the suit comms. “Stop the rover. We found a gully with no safe way down. I’d like to practice scouting for a detour.”
“Okay,” Mark said. “Fireball, braking.”
“Roger.”
Cherry looked at the other two. “Okay, Spitfire, you go left, and…” She took a second look. For a moment Dragonfly had been slumping in a position of apparent exhaustion, but she sat to attention the moment she realized attention was on her. “Dragonfly, switch to private channel. Spitfire, go.”
The pegasus gave the two of them a glance, but she galloped off to the left of their position, looking for a shallower crossing of the gully. With her gone, Cherry switched her own comms to private and said in Equestrian, “Okay, Dragonfly, how bad is it?”
“How bad is what?” Dragonfly asked innocently.
Cherry Berry took a deep breath. “Dragonfly, I’m not in the mood for ‘am I pretending to pretend to not be sick’ games. So don’t give me those roadapples, all right? How bad is it?”
Dragonfly shrugged. “I’m not particularly hungry- no more than normal, I guess,” she said. “But I still get tired so easily. I thought I’d recover more strength with our daily magic sessions, but…”
Cherry Berry’s lips tightened on her muzzle. It had been four days since the last magic session. She wanted to get back to the cave to see how the improvised life support was working, but Dragonfly needed to get back. But that didn’t seem to be the problem at the moment. “You were really sick for a really long time,” she said. “Ponies don’t get over things so bad so fast.”
“Changelings do,” Dragonfly insisted. “We’re tough like that.”
“Maybe back home,” Cherry Berry said. She waved a hoof at their surroundings, the almost white sky above, the red and gray surface of Mars around them. “What about this looks like home to you? We can only give you a couple minutes of magic energy a day. That’s not the same as spending all day, every day, in a proper magic field.”
“You think this place cares?” Dragonfly asked. “Look, I’ll be all right. All right for long enough, anyway. And we need everyone to pull their weight.”
Cherry Berry sighed. Commanders weren’t allowed to whine and say It’s Not Fair, not even when alone. Of course it wasn’t fair. Nothing about this horrible planet was fair. Fair, if it existed at all, had stayed in bed back in Horseton or Cape Friendship or Canterlot or Ponyville or somewhere in Equestria while the rest of them rode Amicitas off the pad to its date with catastrophe.
But she still wanted to scream It’s Not Fair until they heard it on Mark’s home planet without the use of radio.
It wasn’t fair that she’d been without fresh cherries for over a year and without even highly preserved cherry-based desserts for months. It wasn’t fair that Starlight had spent a year risking permanent crippling injury on the simplest of spells. It wasn’t fair that Spitfire couldn’t do the one thing she was born to do- fly fast, far and free in these hostile, barely-present skies. It wasn’t fair that Fireball was here, full stop. And it wasn’t fair that Mark had been stuck here by chance, accident, or possibly the hoof of Faust herself as if he existed solely to keep five Equestrians from dying horrible deaths on a horrible, horrible planet.
And it wasn’t fair that Dragonfly, well, fill in the blank with anything. Whatever crimes and casual bits of unthinking evil she’d committed in the pre-space era when changelings were still hostile invading monsters, they didn’t merit being turned into a shadow of her former strong, confident self by magical starvation.
But shouting Not Fair didn’t make things any more fair, no matter how good it might feel to say it. If you wanted to make it fair, you had to do it yourself.
No, that’s wrong; you had to do it together.
Cherry tapped the control box on the front of her suit, then made a show of switching her comms back to the all-call channel. Once the changeling followed suit, she said in English, “Dragonfly, stay here and coordinate. I’ll take the other direction.”
She hadn’t gone far when Spitfire called out that she’d found a crossing spot. But that wasn’t the point.
She couldn’t make Mars fair. But she could help make it a little less unfair.
MISSION LOG – SOL 398
Sirius 5B ended up being more travel practice. I pulled the plug at twenty percent battery power, at which point we’d gone fifty-two kilometers. That’s encouraging news by itself; fifty kilometers per sol would get us to the Ares IV MAV in about seventy sols, well within the deadline for launch on Sol 551. We could live with that, if nothing else went wrong, but we really want seventy kilometers per sol. The next time we take the rover out, it’ll be for the performance run.
Fireball and I are still working out communications glitches. The turn indicators help a lot. Now the main problem is me, because I keep forgetting to warn Fireball what I’m about to do. It’s hard work, because I have to be thinking about teamwork all the time while driving. It’s like the old gag of two little kids driving a car by one steering and the other crouching under the dashboard and working the pedals.
(Come to think of it, doesn’t that gag always end in disaster? Scratch that, it’s a stupid simile and I should never have mentioned it.)
Anyway, we’re taking a couple days off from testing after this. We need to get back to the cave and check on things. That means disconnecting the trailer, because there’s zero reason to risk an accident with it if we’re not testing its capabilities. We absolutely need the trailer intact for the Schiaparelli run. If we fuck it up, then Hermes goes back to Earth without us, and we think of something else.
Part of me still wants to push forward on the rover tests. Hell, part of me wants to just go to Schiaparelli right now. But we’re not ready. We need a plan for getting there. We need to be sure we can make the trip. And, as Sirius 5 and 5B demonstrated, we need training to get there.
So it’s better to be patient, and cautious. After all, it’s not like the Soviets are going to beat us to the MAV because we waited to see if a chimp could drive before we tried it ourselves.
I hope.
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Sending hugs to Dragonfly now. Wonder what Cherry has in mind?
9086385 Not much; just adjusting things so that Dragonfly doesn't have to overexert herself. In this case, she's letting the bug rest instead of sending her running off maybe a kilometer or two looking for a detour. Now that she knows there's a problem, she can do something about it.
What's the buffer currently at? Is it still just to the current chapter or did you actually manage to pick up an extra chapter along the way?
Thanks for the update!
9086407
As many cons as he has been doing? I'm surprised we still get a daily update (no offense to you Kris, you deserve a break)
This is reminding me of a film I saw once (Wages of Fear or something like that) about a group of men who had to drive trucks filled with nitroglycerin through mountainous and jungle terrain. Also as quickly as possible. And the trucks had no shock absorbers. And there was no way for the drivers to communicate about who was going to slow down, or speed up, or switch drivers.
I am definitely not looking forward to the 2+ months without a magic field for the poor love bug. After they leave they won't be able to spare the magic juice.
9086190
Ehhhh, you still don't dismiss someone's stress, and follow that dismissal with outright mockery. That's a bad thing, especially following the Dragonfly situation. I get that this is a one-off gag and it'll be fine but if it wasn't, I'd be worried that their relationship was going to get really bad.
All characters seem to be choking a bit on their vulnerabilities, but you've shown Dragonfly to be the worst off with Fireball near the edge too. Hell, I'm feeling pain for all of them. Which I guess is your aim.
...I want some smart-ass in Russia to see this report and e-mail them that they will too beat them to the MAV, and if they beg, they'll even take them back to Earth on the way home.
that last part with mark saying of kids driving like that....
Welp I’m placing my bet now. I don’t think dragonfly is gonna make it the whole way through. Call it a gut hunch.
Yeah, if only they could have found a way to pipe magic through the environment systems... Scarcity is scary...
I think it wise to have a cocoon contingency for dragonfly on the trip.
Might be anting to get so much distance out of the Rover each day, but those scouting are running maybe double that, and working as well in rock duty. With limited rations and no access to magic recharge, by te time effects really kick in they might not even be halfway to their expected destination, with a cleared known route behind them than in front. As in, because of clearing rocks and ground tracks, the travel halfway point will be far closer to the MAV than the HAB?
Of course, if they were even a bit luckier, the scouting and driving would be along the line of the approximate route so they can get an idea of return speed and at least the first day or even two days run out along better known tracks?
9086533
An inflatable peg leg? Sounds like something they would do.
9086618
Well, they might be capable of electrical transport by means of specialised solar collection crystals. Not quite the same, but an improvement.
Pre-positioning some supplies along the route while testing could help a very little bit.
Even if it's only 5% of total, it's still 5%.
9086572
Personally i am betting on Fireball. He hasn't been eating any gold as far as i am aware, and its been over a year now. He might not show it, but he must be getting close to the edge.
9086618
The magic field is probably completely disconnected from the atmosphere in the same way a magnetic field would be. At least, that's how I imagine a universal magic field would behave.
Combine that with the fact that the life support systems are really just molecular teleporters rather than a wormhole or something, and it becomes challenging to pipe magic over through the air.
Still, I have to wonder if there's a reason that Horseton couldn't, say, saturate a bunch of water with a ton of magical energy, and then pipe that over.
Cherry may not believe it, but she's still a darn good commander.
Meanwhile, Mark may want to think of this as a livestream of Horribly Overloaded Mars Rover Simulator, though going too for in the other direction may lead to Fireball tuning out vital steering instructions.
9086750
Gold has never been shown to be a nutritional requirement for Equestrian dragons, and he's been getting plenty of crystals.
9086884
It so far has not affected him in moving heavy stuff, but that is a completely different thing then being able to control a rover for hours and sols.
9086894
I'd forgotten about that. Good catch.
I would not rule out wormholes that quickly.
reminds me of a scene in the online comic Sluggy Freelance, where a rabbit and a ferret tried to steal a car...they did crash, partly because the car was a stick-shift, which confused and distracted the rabbit.
9086741
We meant piping Magic itself from Equestria through to Mars. They're delivering air and water using magic, it should be similar to transfer over magic too.
That would actually be incredibly useful, actually....
9087137
Well, the system is obviously capable of leaking some Mana, that is how Sparkle is trying to find them.
Just not enough to be usefull.
9087165
Alondro is into something. What if they build a highway out of ice?
9086980 Quantum entanglement may actually depend on wormholes or a very similar phenomenon.
9087165
Might actually work. Lift some dirt across gully's an turn it to concrete. Steep slope? Concrete.
9087180
No binding agent.
9087330
Binding agent is Clover's Instant Foundation.
9087370
Dispense with the clever naming and just call it cheating/transmutation.
9087401
It is not transmutation, you just remove the holes...
And I did not name it that. But if you can build a castle on it you can drive a Rover across it.
9087418
Ponies are so hax.
I wish I rely could e-mail them. I have an idea how they could pollinate the cave farm even after they leave. I know some pollination is done by birds. So my idea is if the could build 3 or 4 Drones and equip them with feathers (from Spitfire) on wires that they can drag over the flowers moving pollen from one to another . A program could run them and when they need to recharge they could dock to a station like a Romba. Break the farm up into sections and have each one work its own that way they don't collide or maybe they could give them a simple object avoidance ability. Its not a perfect system but it might work. Just an idea.
9088121
The cherry trees aren't going to grow flowers in the exact right positions, and object recognition by camera at that level is a Really Hard Problem (which means it won't be solved in time). Also, if they had the hardware to create drones, I think they would have by now.
Cuddles for the Cuddlebug!
9090434
LOVE FOR THE LOVE THRONE!
I thought sad thoughts. In my thoughts, Spitfire dies on Mars. Earth can’t get her body home for a while. They let her fly one last time and give her a funeral pyre worthy of a god, they fly her right into the sun.
9087736
it made me think of a scene in the online comic sluggy freelance:
http://archives.sluggy.com/book.php?chapter=15#1999-09-13
And that, Cherry, is why you are the commander of this group.
10169765
Mmm. She's got the leadership, support, and team thinking aspects down, but she's still missing the spine at times. The right answer here would have been:
"Yes, we do need all hands on deck. Which means I, as your commander, need to have an accurate idea of your condition, because if I make plans based on the assumption that you really are doing as well as you make it look like you are doing when you're actually at the end of your rope, it could get us all killed."
Ones more broken format for autoread function.
Even without Mars playing mule this will be one hell of a ride..
If this was the game 'Spore' than i would Terraform the Shit out of Mars...
How would the mission look like if Russian or Japanese would lead it?
Bears in sturdy rockets with beards?
Japanese anime waifus coming to save the day in bipedal walking mechs?
Could be fun to read