• Published 2nd Jan 2018
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The Maretian - Kris Overstreet



Mark Watney is stranded- the only human on Mars. But he's not alone- five astronauts from a magical kingdom are shipwrecked with him.

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Sol 489

AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 498
ARES III SOL 489

Dragonfly watched as Sojourner navigated the walkways between Amicitas’s flight couches. The little rover crept along at a snail-like pace, navigating based on orders given by her laptop and relayed via wireless network to Rover 2’s computer and out through its radio to Sojourner’s receiver. Every two minutes it paused, slowly rose up to take stereograms with its forward cameras, then rocked forward to do the same with the aft-mounted color camera.

“C’mon, bug, put Robo-Bug away.” Spitfire, still wearing Starlight Glimmer’s space suit, walked out of the habitat deck. The helmet made her voice sound very muffled to Dragonfly without the suit comms to transmit it. “And help me off with this thing. I gotta hit the head.”

“Good morning, Spitfire,” Dragonfly said. “How are you feeling today?”

“I’m going stir crazy,” the pegasus said. “I want out of this suit full time. I want to stretch and start doing exercises again. I’ve got a lot of work to get back in flying trim.”

“Uh huh. Now try that with symptoms added.”

“Ugh.” Spitfire turned her head away, as much as the suit helmet would let her. “All right. I still have a headache, there’s still pins stuck in my fetlocks, my new feathers itch horribly, and I can’t put three words of English together. But it’s all better than yesterday.”

“It must be,” Dragonfly agreed. “After all, you couldn’t put three words of English together before.”

“Fuck you.”

“Two, however, you manage just fine.”

“Look, if this was your suit I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t want to fill Starlight’s suit full of roadapples when I don’t have an undergarment anymore. Y’wanna help me out of this?”

“Sure, Spitfire,” Dragonfly said, rearing up to grip the helmet between her forehooves. “But once you’re done in the head, you go back in the suit and lie right back down. You’ve got two days of treatment to go, and treatment is high pressure, oxygen, and lying down. No exercise.”

“But I’m feeling better-“

“How does it feel to swap places with Starlight Glimmer, by the way?” Dragonfly asked pointedly.

When the helmet came off, Spitfire’s ears slumped in shame. “Yeah, all right,” she said. “You made your point. I’ll be good.”

“That’s our hero.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Spitfire muttered, wiggling out as Dragonfly helped unseal the rest of the suit. “I may be flying a desk after this, but at least I have one record Rainbow Dash is never going to beat.”

Dragonfly looked at Spitfire’s wings. They were in tatters. Another couple of primaries had come out overnight. The Feather-Fix potion had begun growing replacements for all the feathers they’d had to chop up to get the gunk-lined suit wings off her, but it came a lot more slowly than it would have done at home. The new feathers were barely barbs. A lot hadn’t even broken the skin yet.

Spitfire noticed Dragonfly examining her wings. She looked the changeling straight in the eyes and said, “Worth it.” Stepping free from her suit, she walked to the head, wobbling only a little as the deck underneath them rocked gently. The morning was young, and the Whinnybago was rolling along at top speed through an uncommonly smooth stretch of Martian terrain.

Dragonfly returned her attention to Sojourner. The little probe would have to scoot back to its corner in a while; it didn’t get a lot of sunlight through the cockpit windows to recharge its batteries. But learning the commands to make the little rover go gave her something to take her mind off of other things, like the hunger she imagined she could feel building up after days of almost no magic.

It had to be imaginary. A daily two minutes had to beat out twenty minutes every seventeen days. But… well, she felt weaker, she felt hungrier, and she couldn’t stop feeling that way.

She hadn’t mentioned it to the others, though she knew they would want her to. It just didn’t seem to be helpful. There were very good reasons why magic time had been cut back so drastically.

The batteries recharged at 1.4 percent each per sol- they’d triple-checked the rate- for a total mana recharge of 29.4% of a single battery’s capacity. 7.5% of that went to top off the jumbo batteries to compensate for their slow bleed. Two minutes of magic field, the new daily ration, ate up another 5.6%. That left just over 16% per day to recharge the eleven batteries they’d used defeating the Great Black Spot, as NASA was calling it.

At noon of Sol 483, they’d had ten full batteries and eleven empty ones. By tonight, assuming no emergencies, they’d have eleven full batteries and ten empty ones, or the equivalent. According to Mark’s travel estimate, they might be able to recharge four more batteries before they reached Schiaparelli. After that work on modifying the MAV would eat more power- who knew how much. And at the end of the process- with recharging the jumbos, with MAV mods, with daily magic doses, with emergencies if more cropped up- they had to have at least seven full batteries, minimum, for installation with the Sparkle Drive.

Bottom line: recharging the batteries against future emergencies took absolute top priority- even if it meant pushing the edge of magic starvation again.

The Great Black Spot had totally bucked Spitfire- but to be fair, she’d got the last kick in. But it was still bucking Dragonfly over, too, and it wasn’t around for the changeling to get her own kicks in. And it didn’t help that she had entirely too much time to work all of that out, especially with Starlight borrowing her suit and taking her place scouting alongside Cherry Berry.

Spitfire eventually came out of the head. “Okay,” she said. “Help me back into the flour sack.”

“Rarity would have a fit if she heard you call it that,” Dragonfly chided.

“Would she?” Spitfire asked. “Oh dear. Did this suddenly become Ponyville instead of Mars while I was on the can? Sure fooled me!”

“You’re getting better,” Dragonfly muttered as she helped Spitfire shrug the borrowed suit back on. “It takes energy to be sarcastic. What do you want for breakfast?” Mark had dug out a few of the precious non-meat food packs, formerly reserved for use if they had to take the MAV straight to Earth, to give Spitfire more incentive to eat full meals.

It hadn’t worked as well as Mark might have liked. “What’s the entrée?” Spitfire asked, not bothering to fake optimism.

“Cowboy beans and rice,” Dragonfly said.

“Bring on the hay,” Spitfire said, allowing Dragonfly to walk her back to the mattress-covered floor of the habitat deck.

Watching Spitfire eat breakfast (and getting a snuggle-snack for her trouble) occupied twenty minutes of her attention, but that was over once the helmet was back on the suit, the life support turned back on, and a computer left beside her so the pegasus could read one of the mystery novels Fireball had recommended from the NASA stash. To make things worse, Sojourner had completed its pre-programmed little dance, so Dragonfly didn’t even have watching that to occupy her mind.

Well, the Whinnybago was still rolling, so there was at least the entertainment of watching the gently rolling terrain of Meridiani Planitia slowly passing by and behind the rear-facing cockpit windows. She dragged Sojourner back to its usual resting place, then trotted forward to the co-pilot seat.

The flight couch was occupied, however, by a potted plant.

“Hey, Fireball?” Dragonfly asked.

Fireball reached over to switch off his outgoing suit mike, then said, “Done playing with the mini-rover?”

“Why do you have Cherry’s shrub in a flight couch?” Dragonfly asked.

“I’ve been helping take care of Groot,” Fireball said. “I think he likes looking out the windows. Of course, we’re at the wrong angle here for him to get much sun, but I think he likes the view.”

Dragonfly had her mouth open to say something like It has no eyes, it can’t see the view, or How do you know what a plant does or doesn’t like, or, most probably, It’s a bucking TREE, before her brain caught up and turned all of it to a meaningless, “Errr…” After all, how many times had she talked about her delusions of sensing what this or that thing felt about anything? Where did she have room to scoff at what saner people thought an inanimate object felt or thought?

Come to think of it…

She could feel Sojourner’s smug feeling from its corner, as if it were saying, I did work today! She could sense the Whinnybago’s confidence: I am rolling, and I will continue to roll, because I was reborn to roll. But she’d never bothered to try tuning her insanity to Radio Free Twig before. Why not?

She turned all her attention to the leaf-covered branch stuck in mildly damp soil.

Must get bigger. Must get stronger. Must get big and strong real soon.

“I don’t think it notices the terrain,” Dragonfly said carefully. “It’s really focused on growing as fast as it can.”

“Really?” The dragon actually smiled at that. “That’s good. Good Groot.”

Dragonfly sensed a sudden spike of… delight? “It knows we’re paying attention to it,” she added. “It likes attention a lot.”

“Who doesn’t?” Fireball asked.

“You mean, besides dragons?”

“Dragons love attention,” Fireball said. “We just don’t like visitors.”

“Pardon me for asking,” Dragonfly said, “but why are you fooling with Cherry’s plant anyway? If she finds out she’s going to have your hide.”

“I asked first,” Fireball said, a little primly. “Ever since the cave farm, I’ve been wondering how it feels to take care of something of my own.” He reached over to the copilot seat and turned the sample-box planter a quarter turn. “Feels kinda nice so far.”

Dragonfly could just barely hear Cherry Berry’s voice through Fireball’s headset as she broke in, speaking in English. “Small crater ahead. About a kilometer wide. Rubble field for two hundred meters around the rim. Scattered rocks a lot wider.”

“Roger. Any problem with taking it on the south side?” Mark asked from the rover’s driver cabin.

“Negative. No sign of any serious obstacle on either side,” Cherry said.

“Okay. Fireball, prepare for plus ten.”

Fireball switched his mike back on. “Copy plus ten,” he replied, also in English.

“On my count… five, four, three, two, one, turn!”

Fireball turned the flight yoke on the word turn.

“Hold… hold… and zero!”

Fireball re-centered the flight yoke, and with barely a wobble the Whinnybago rolled on.

“Battery check?” Cherry called.

“Twenty-one percent,” Mark answered. “About half an hour to go.”

“Roger. Looking forward to lunch. And some hot cherry tea.”

“Me too. Fireball, get Dragonfly on the headset, will ya?”

“Roger.” Fireball took his claws off the flight yoke long enough to remove his headset. “It’s for you,” he said, handing it down to Dragonfly.

Dragonfly squeezed between the pilot and copilot seats, carefully placing her forehooves away from any important active controls. “Dragonfly here, Mark. What’s up?”

“How did the Sojourner test go?”

“By the numbers,” Dragonfly said. “Should be a lot of new pictures in the rover’s data storage.”

“You might want to have it wave out the port side windows,” Mark said. “We’re passing by Opportunity right now.”

“Opportunity? What’s that? Where is it?”

“We can’t see it. It’s over three hundred kilometers south-southwest of us. This is as close as we get. But Opportunity was one of the two rovers that came immediately after Sojourner. A bigger younger sister, if you like. It was expected to last one hundred sols. It survived for years and years.”

“I don’t suppose we could stop by and visit?” Dragonfly asked.

“Over three hundred kilometers south? Nope, sorry. We need to keep moving. Besides, Opportunity is a lot bigger than Sojourner. It wouldn’t fit in the airlock.”

“I wasn’t thinking of taking it with us,” Dragonfly protested.

“I know. But the Opportunity mission is detailed in the Project Ares database. Go read about it if you’re bored. It was one of the most successful space probes of all time. I think only the Voyagers beat it out.”

“Oh? Where are they?”

“They left the solar system decades ago. They were deep space probes, sent to fly by our outer planets. Have you tried anything like that yet where you come from?”

“No. We were going to just use the Sparkle Drive to go there direct.”

“Well, you’ve got some wonderful things to look forward to, then,” Mark said. “Anyway, put Fireball back on. I think I see that crater Cherry found, and we may need to make some turns in a minute.”

“Okay.” Dragonfly hoofed the headset back up to Fireball, then left the dragon and the plant to their driving.

Reading about Opportunity and its sister Spirit consumed the remaining driving time for the day. Thirty minutes of distraction.

Only about twelve more waking hours to go…

Author's Note:

With the immediate danger past and nothing but open road (or lack thereof) ahead, here's a chapter more or less about nothing.

Writing this on the laptop. My desktop HD is all but dead- hesitating and locking up a LOT. I managed to back everything on it up overnight- at least I think I did- but Monday I have to hand the compy over to a tech to clone the drive and check the computer's drive controller to make sure it isn't an issue.

Fun times...

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