AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 434
ARES III SOL 426
The speakers hissed and popped with noise, but the voice that came with the noise came out clear and distinct. “Friendship, this is Hermes, voice comms check. Friendship, Hermes on voice comms check, over.”
Mark nodded to Fireball, who switched Amicitas’s transmitter on and said, “Hermes, Friendship. Lotta noise, but we hear you. Stand by for Mark.”
The human grinned, adjusted his borrowed pony headset and said, “Good to hear your voice, Martinez! I’ve been practicing my Morse code, but I guess it won’t be needed. Over.”
Fireball switched his own headset over to the magic comms. “Friendship confirms voice contact,” he said. “Report reply sent at 11:14 hours.”
Cherry Berry’s voice replied, “Copy that, Fireball. Report sent over Pathfinder chat. Let us know when you and Mark are done.”
“Will do.” Fireball switched back to the ship radio, then leaned back against his flight couch. “Well,” he said, “got nine minutes wait for reply. What ya gonna say?”
“What would you say, in the same place?” Mark said. “If you could actually hear the voices of your people back home?”
“Easy. ‘I quit.’” Fireball growled softly, continuing, “I had enough space for lifetime. I crashed on launch and lived. Been stuck in orbit and lived. Looks like I’m gonna live after crash and been stuck in whole other universe. Think someone giving me a hint.” He smirked a reptilian smirk and added, “Gonna go out on top of the game.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Mark said. “Once I get back to Earth, I’m never going up again. Not that it’s likely NASA would ever give me another flight, but if they did, I’d turn them down.”
“Why?” Fireball asked. “My lord, she say, you astronaut now, do what I say. But you… word… you asked for this.”
“Yeah, I volunteered,” Mark said. “And don’t get me wrong. I loved every minute of being an astronaut, up to the moment I got stranded here. After that, not so much.”
“What’s to like about astronaut?” Fireball asked. “It’s mostly boring, except for total scary parts.”
“Are you kidding?” Mark asked. “It’s, like, the greatest adventure ever. You get to experience zero-G. You get to see things almost nobody ever gets to see, first-hand. Whatever science you’re interested in, you’re instantly on the cutting edge of it. And you get the knowledge that everything you do is this incredible privilege, something that only a tiny lucky few people will ever get to experience.” He shrugged and added, “The pay’s pretty shitty, though.”
Fireball snorted. “Dragons don’t do adventure,” he said. “Dragons are adventure for other people.” He couldn’t suppress a chortle as he remembered a line from what was still his favorite of all the Earth books NASA had sent up. “Dragons make you late for dinner.”
“I thought dragons made you dinner, period.”
“Never!” Calculated pause. “Well, hardly ever.”
Mark laughed. Score one for Fireball.
“Seriously,” Fireball continued, “we not monsters like hydra or chimera or manticore. People leave our hoard alone, we leave them alone. We like nice, quiet life. No trouble. And flying rocket is nothing but noise and trouble.”
“Are you kidding?” Mark said. “Yeah, it’s scary, but it’s also the most exhilarating experience of my life! Riding into space on top of the biggest controlled explosion ever devised by the mind of man!”
“But you never do it again?”
“Nope. Not once I’m home.” Mark sighed. “I’m glad I visited Mars, but being stranded here taught me how much I took little things like breathable air, not dying if I step outside, and food that isn’t a goddamn potato for granted. Let new Ares missions come back here. I’ll cheer them on from my comfy chair, in a house with open windows, eating nachos and drinking coffee.” The human shook his head and muttered, “Fuck, but I miss coffee.”
“Just thought,” Fireball said. “Coffee. Dragons don’t get coffee. Never drank it until dragon program folded into changeling program.”
“So, what?” Mark asked. “Are you saying you can’t get coffee without being an astronaut?”
“I don’t know how make coffee. Not without wall-plug coffee pot.”
The admission embarrassed Fireball enough that he was grateful that the voice on the radio prevented Mark from delivering whatever rejoinder he’d been about to make. But once the words sank in, he was less grateful: “Friendship, Hermes, we read you clear, but your mikes are set to vox. Repeat, your mikes are set to vox and we’re hearing everything you say. And recording it for posterity. Over.”
Mark gave the dragon a Look.
“Oops,” Fireball said, and switched the transmitter off. Then he remembered that Hermes had signed over to them, reactivated the transmitter, and said, “Friendship copies vox.”
“And for the record,” Mark said hurriedly, “although I firmly believe other people should have the chance that was cut short for me on Sol 6, I will happily work with NASA in whatever capacity they believe I can best advance the cause of the human exploration and colonization of space. Talk to you later, Friendship out.”
Fireball didn’t need the neck-chopping movement Mark made with a hand to switch the transmitter off properly this time. “Walk back much?” he asked with a grin.
“Hey, those people are holding my back pay for the last year and a half,” Mark said. “Granted I probably owe them every penny for what they’re spending to rescue me, but I have to live on something when I get home!”
Fireball’s eyes widened. “And Dragonlord has my hoard!” he gasped. “All my stuff!”
“Yeah. So maybe we should wait to quit until we actually get home?”
“Oooooooh, yeah,” Fireball agreed.
“And after someone teaches you how to make coffee.”
“Yeah.”
Ah, the old "astronauts on vox" incident. Never gets old. Also reminds me of Apollo 13, so cheers for that.
9113242
I think Mark should tell his guests that even for humanity it hasn’t been all peaches and cream. They’ve had bumps in the road during the quest to learn more beyond Mother Earth. From Apollo One, Challenger, Columbia. But they’ve also had some tremendous triumphs: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 13 (in a way far different from the other Apollo missions), the Lunkhod Rovers, the first Shuttle Mission, Skylab, Mir, the ISS, Hubble, the reusable booster of the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Red Falcon, the orbiter that the Hermes program uses.
9113242
"ARE WE ON VOX?!!"
"No."
"No."
"Copy Houston, this is Aquarius."
Fireball don't worry once you make it to earth you get all the free coffee you every wanted you ever needed for free
These little personal one on one moments with Mark and the pony crew are deliciously sweet.
9113276
Yeah, but if we told them all those mistakes, then they might not think we are competent. Or sane.
9113284
Still one of the best space movies I've ever seen.
9113284
9113242
Considering what immediately followed that incident was the square peg/round hole situation, I don't think that it's a good idea to be laughing about that connection...
Awesome, a whole bunch of Fireball lines to record tomorrow!
9113276
Two that you forgot: The loss of the Soyuz 11 crew during reentry (They were the first humans to live in a space station, but overshadowed by being the first humans to die in space), and the repair and recover of the Salyut 7 space station, which is an awesome story all around, that sadly most people don't know about.
9113306
Implications aside, the square peg/round hole sequence was easily one of the best parts of the movie.
so about last month I heard this was near its end..... yet its not?
9113350 Well, Launch Day is Sol 551. It's closer to the end than the beginning, and I suspect it'll wrap long before Christmas. It's a lot closer to the end than the beginning, but there's still some adventure yet to go.
9113346
Can't possibly disagree on that front...
Two words, Mark: speaking fees. Ask any former U.S. president.
Good advice: Never burn your bridges until after you've gotten everything you want on the right side.
Ahhhhhhh! I'm caught up!
...Now what do I do with my life?
9113486
You wallow in sadness, Kiwi brother.
Also can't Mark now start eating the food packs instead of Haytatoes?
Hehe, the things said trying closed
doorscom lines.I knew something diden't quite add up with that convo... I knew it!
9113362
You started on January 1.st, (well, 2nd, according to the website here, but don't know if it accounts for timezones)
And you are saying you will stop long before Christmas? Come on.. you have done over half a year of one-chapter-a-day, you can do a full year, can't you? can't you? :D
Vox? Pops.
Ohhhh, what does This button do, Dexter?
This, peoples, is the new and improved Flight Manual. Inside you will find most of the pages are a treated resiliant material marked up with the cut and fold lines to make up most parts of this spacecraft. The rest o the pages are for anything else. What about this bunch of soft fluffy pages in the back? Those, are Cohens Diary. Or the ACME Catalog, depending on your preferences.
I think the biggest problem Fireball might have when he gets back to his horde, is breeding priviledges.
Except that's not at all how things are going to play out. The most probable outcome for this scenario is that they all make it back to Earth, and as soon as they're on a planet with abundant life...Starlight will be able to send out a beacon powerful enough for Equestria to locate them. From that point...they're probably only days away from an inter-dimensional portal that will allow anyone to simply walk through, just like the Equestria Girls mirror.
Out of all humans on the entire planet, Mark will be the one with the most direct and personal experience with this new alien species that mankind is now in contact with.
He'll be made an ambassador. And if he turns that down, every government and research organization on the entire planet will be throwing money at him to gain whatever scrap of knowledge or access they can get to magic.
9113362
Just please remember we want to know what happens after too
9113301
You mean we are?
Fireball: the Derpy Hooves of space.
I am the dragon of the Pinafore (and a right good dragon too!)
In any case, now I kind of want to see Mark and Fireball host a radio show together. Martians in the Morning?
9113301
ESA’s flight five had a disaster that by all accounts should’ve killed Rainbow Dash. Fireball as survived a crash, but I can imagine that they’ve had a number of accidents that they have prevented thanks to simulating it. We can’t do that yet, not to mention our rockets are more fragile than their’s are. Plus most of the time something goes terribly wrong with a rocket launch was because of something completely unexpected or administration being idiots.
Holy fucking shit, this story has 350'000 words. That's about 3 times longer than the original book. Is this ever going to stop?
9114010 (1) They have only minimal fuel on hand for a chemical thruster- not enough to run a thruster even on low throttle for fifty sols.
(2) The magical thrusters burn a LOT of almost irreplaceable mana in a short period of time.
(3) Remember what happens whenever magic thrusters get used?
(4) Ground clearance. The rovers have to be able to drive over rocks below a certain size, because there are parts of Mars (like where Pathfinder originally landed, for instance) absolutely littered with the things. A thruster large enough to take significant load off the chassis would also pretty much negate ground clearance.
9114075
125 sols left, plus maybe an epilogue. Might be one more book to go.
9113291
When they get home I'm gonna miss them.
One thing for certain, they will always be family. A wonderfully dysfunctional family.
You can't live that long, that close, together without familial bonds to form. Seeing each at their worst, their lowest, their smelliest... and their best.
9113867
“GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD-BYYYYYYYYYYE, ACIDALIA PLANITIA! That’s right, we’re history… We’re outta here. We got the lucky ticket home, baby. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’… keep them rovers rollin’, rawhide! Yeah, that’s right… the final Martians in the Morning! broadcast… and this one is brought to you by our friends at NASA. Remember the people who brought you Apollo XIII? That’s right, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. If it’s being done correctly, here or on Earth, it’s probably not being done by NASA.”
9113384
Too bad it was Artistic License. The truth was one of the engineers remembered the procedure while he was driving to work.
This chapter was fantastic. Loved seeing more from Fireball, especially showing that he can, in fact, be clever.
9114404
When they get home...
Behold! Your three new princesses.
Princess Starlight Glimmer
pre00.deviantart.net/941e/th/pre/f/2017/287/5/f/_shadowbolts_au__starlight_glimmer_by_dashievectors9000-dbqldfc.png
, Princess Cherry Berry ,
orig00.deviantart.net/97d7/f/2015/171/3/e/princess_cherry_berry_by_abealy2-d8y4f3b.png
and Princess Spitfire
orig00.deviantart.net/38f2/f/2014/074/b/f/spitfire_alicorn_by_featherstar47-d7aaokp.png
Smooth, guys, smooth.
9114626
Let's be honest, here... a lot of things in that movie were artistic license. If the movie were 100% faithful to actuality, it wouldn't have been nearly as entertaining to watch for a fairly large number of people
9113859
... Well, we like to pretend at least. Those that don't end up in the big, bright buildings with the nice men in white coats, and the tight but nice white jackets.
9113982
Yeah, but they have the eternal crutch of magic to act as a 'get out of grave free' card. We just have math, metal, and the ability to keep bashing our heads against walls until the wall gives up.
Even if they don't want to go back to space as astronauts, they might go back up there with space tourism, colonies, and the like. At the very least they should visit each other's homeworlds.
Mark, don't visit Chicago right now.
Good to see the boys of the mission bonding. And over simple things too, like job choice, coffee, and backpay.
9113719
This is the fascinating stuff future chapters or sequels or spinoff stories are made of.
Mark Twain wrote about how he once got lost while hunting, spent several days in an abandoned cabin, and only had tomatoes to eat. "Since then, I've always been able to get along without tomatoes " Mark probably feels the same about potatoes. King John died of eating a surfeit of peaches. Mark knows just how he felt.
You know what, that's fair.
The Dragon is one of the most human characters. That why i like ponys and especially Changeling more
Coffee, some love or hate it. But they all know it
11294888
Ehhhhh... Coffee in Equestria with Heartsongs might not be such a good idea...
I mean... it would be funny... but if The Pink One ever learned of the Tactical Espresso...
God save Eqqus... *shudders*
Great chapter, maybe a coffee plant for the Dragon?