AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 514
ARES III SOL 504
In the early days of the solar system, a large meteor struck Mars, gouging out a tremendous crater hundreds of kilometers across. The ejecta from this impact caused innumerable secondary impacts, creating rough and rippling terrain in the region immediately surrounding the giant crater.
But at the time Mars was still a young world, with active geology and hydrology. The smaller craters weathered down into mere hills and ridges. The giant crater became an immense lake, silting up as the millennia passed. Then, as Mars froze and dried, brief wet periods would flood the lake again, giving its soil the layers and ripples which, billions of years later, would inspire the civilization of Earth to send first probes and then a manned expedition to the crater.
Long after the great crater formed, but long before humans began to send machines into it, a smaller space object struck the northwest rim. The impact triggered an avalanche which left a large gap between the new crater and the remaining towering rim of the old. Air rushed through the gap, as the thin atmosphere of the planet sought a new and easier path to fill the void created by the warmer air rising from the crater floor.
The wind brought dust, weathered from the cliffs, swept from the once-flooded lowlands, expelled by the occasional volcanic eruptions from the other side of the planet. The dust settled, layer by layer, onto the broken remains of the landslide, creating a ramp extending from the gap down into the depths of the ancient crater.
Time, gravity, and the ever less frequent warm wet periods Mars occasionally experienced compressed the ramp… but not evenly. In some places the dust became rock, or rested upon the shock-hardened fragments of the original crater rim. In other places the dust remained loose, prone to shifting, a trap for the unwary traveler.
The travelers, when they came, were very wary indeed. The great slope, though fairly shallow on average, contained many uneven slopes, dips, and rises. A maze of sand dunes covered the surface, some small enough to detour around, others that the travelers crossed with discussion, planning, and the utmost caution. Even the areas without dunes lay covered by a thick, grasping layer of sand and dust, erasing the few visual cues the travelers could rely on in the alien environment.
A lone traveler would have come to grief in this hazardous terrain. Fortunately there were six, not one, entering the crater on this particular day.
Two spacesuited figures, one bipedal, one quadrupedal, walked down one of the steeper bits of the slope, making zig-zag sweeps left and right to cover the terrain as completely as possible. Their vehicle followed a safe distance behind them, the immense and ungainly collection of parts creeping along on its massive wheels.
On one leftward sweep, the bipedal scout stepped off an unseen subterranean ridge. On the right, the sands lay atop an ancient, well-compacted sandstone. On the left, they covered a subsidence filled with uncompacted, unstable powder- exactly the hazard remembered from the biped’s childhood on an unimaginably alien world. His left boot found it, and immediately he went tumbling down the slope. Indeed, the slope beneath him went tumbling as well, subsiding a good forty meters before finding a new equilibrium.
The scout righted himself, buried past his low-slung hips by the slide. The tough exterior layer of his well-worn spacesuit easily held up against the light, soft grains of collected dust and sand. A few barked orders were sufficient to keep the quadrupedal scout from attempting to rush down to his aid. More discussion with the occupants of the vehicle turned it away from the landslide area.
And as the quadruped carefully stamped the edge of the revealed crest, tracing it further down the slope and guiding the rover onto a safer path, the biped pulled himself out of his hole and, with the same caution used to guide the vehicle before the slide, he crawled across the soft sand until his hands and feet found the solid surface once more.
In fifteen minutes it was over, and both scouts led their vehicle onwards down the sandy, rock-studded slope.
TRANSCRIPT – AUDIO EXCHANGE BETWEEN ESA AMICITAS AND NASA EXPLORATION VESSEL HERMES
(note: one-way lightspeed lag of over four minutes)
AMICITAS (Dragonfly): Hermes, Friendship. Sirius is secure from driving. We’re done for the day. We had one little bit of excitement, but otherwise it’s been a dull trip. Mark’s putting out the solar panels for what’s left of the day- I mean sol- but he says our batteries are over 60% charged because we moved so slowly. Good thing, because the shadow from the crater rim is about to hit us. Over.
HERMES (Johanssen): Roger, Friendship. We show you as having made about nineteen kilometers today in eight hours. You’re about halfway down the ramp. We’d like you to stay as close to true south as possible. The center of the slope makes a sudden thirty-meter descent about ten kilometers south-southeast of your current position. Staying true south should keep you on the most shallow grade. Over.
AMICITAS (Fireball): Roger, Hermes. I tell Mark. Over.
HERMES (Johanssen): Um, hello Fireball. I wasn’t expecting your voice today. How was your day out? Over.
AMICITAS (Fireball): Lousy. Mars only tried to kill me once today. I only fell thirty meter maybe. What’s a dragon gotta do to nearly die around here? Over.
HERMES (Johanssen): Ummm…
HERMES (Martinez): Hey, I knew I liked this guy! He’s funny! Hey, Fireball, ever consider joining the military?
HERMES (Beck): Fireball, I could give you a list of possible options, but the broadcast window isn’t long enough.
HERMES (Vogel): We heard about your fall. It is good to hear that you are all right. It is also good to hear your English improving. Please be careful tomorrow. It is still possible for things to go wrong close to your goal.
HERMES (Johanssen): Um… everybody done? Okay. Over.
AMICITAS (Fireball): (in Equestrian) You better believe I’m gonna be careful. (in English) Yeah, we be careful. Right now I’m hungry. Missed lunch. Friendship out.
MISSION LOG – SOL 505
Have you ever wanted to be the driver of a parade float? Of course you haven’t. Nobody wants to spend hours at a time driving a large, unwieldy platform at less than walking speed. It’s a mind-numbing task made all the worse by the knowledge that you actually need to pay attention all the time to keep from running down the clowns walking on all sides around you or bumping into curbs or fire hydrants. It’s a shit job.
Now pretend the Whinnybago is a parade float. Only instead of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade or the Rose Bowl parade, I’m driving in the Schiaparelli Basin Homegoing Parade. For two days. And instead of a nice, flat, wide city street, I’m guiding the tandem rover down a slope of varying levels of steepness, covered with every obstacle short of a canyon or glacier that this planet has in its toolbox. And the whole way I’m trying to maintain a heel-toe pace of two kilometers per hour, exceeding that only when the loose dust on the surface threatens to mire the Whinnybago if I don’t power through.
But it’s over now, thank God. The ground is level, the sand dunes are all smaller than the rover wheels, and the dust between them has thinned out. In two days we had only one minor incident. Granted, it would have been a major incident without Fireball and Cherry scouting ahead, but with them it was just one scary moment followed by a little bit of extra caution.
Have I mentioned lately that I’m grateful as hell for my alien buddies? Because I really am, you know. In addition to helping keep me sane (because seriously, this planet is enough to leave anybody cracked), they have helped me survive so many things that ought to have killed me. (Yeah, they’ve caused a few of those themselves, but I came up with a few stupid ideas too. Fair’s fair.)
We’ve driven over 3,400 kilometers across this planet so far. Only a bit over two hundred to go. If all goes well, we’ll arrive at the MAV on Sol 508. That leaves forty-three sols to make the MAV ready for our escape from this place.
Interesting bit of trivia; the Vikings believed that demons lived in Muspelheim, a realm of fire and brimstone. But the souls of the wicked didn’t go there. No, if you were a bad Viking, you went to Niflheim, a place of eternal cold and dampness and misery. The Vikings believed that freezing cold was more hellish than fire.
Having spent a year and a half on Mars, I’m coming around to the Viking way of thinking. But I’ll pass on Valhalla. I don’t want to die in battle. I’m like the Dean of Unseen University; my preferred way to die is late.
Three more sols of driving. Forty-six until launch day.
We are all counting the sols.
200 kilometers to go. What has Mars got left to try to kill them with in that teeny little last bit of the trip? I can't wait to find out.
If the Black Spot was caused by the first booster... what's the second booster going to cause? Or has Spitfire nipped that in the bud?
And as harrowing as their stay on Mars has been, what I'm really looking towards is everything that happens after they get off of Mars and eventually back to Earth.
9171435 In all honesty, not a lot. The floor of Schiaparelli is flat, covered with small sand dunes and little ridges of exposed layering, and relatively rock-free. It's almost as good as Meridiani Planum for easy rover driving.
Murder Planet is running out of opportunities.
If it helps the workflow and pacing, you can cut Sol 551 into multiple parts. (After all, the show does two-part major events all the time.)
Edit: And then you can end one part on a nice little cliffhanger, and put “Cue happy theme music...” in the author’s notes.
I know you said we're not seeing Equus anymore, but I'm hoping that it doesn't end with just the Equestrians on Earth.
Oh, it's going to be one of those chapters...
...Or not? Not much in the way of disaster, everything's pretty ok, and a nice demonstration of what Fireball contributes that no one else can
Will Sojourner hitchhike back to Earth or is Dragonfly and the probe going to have an extremely gutrenching and heartfelt goodbye?
And on that final sol, everyone has a huge last meal, preferably at mid-day.
Broadcast to Earth: Sorry, we're all out to launch....
9170496
Similar premise: First Contact is Magic
9171477
Hey, remember, if they can get the Sparkle drive working reliably, there won't be any of this two-years-or-more crap to travel to Mars. It'll be "*blink*" and "Wow, that was fast. Let's land, pick up all the probes we left behind and give them an honorable retirement in a museum as a thank you. We should be back to Kennedy by this time next week at the latest.."
9171498
That depends on how fast they can regenerate magic with just the onboard crew, and either a futur greenhouse “Magic Fuel Tank” and/or working out the practical applications of the Purnell Therom to convert electrical power to magic.
In the Equestrian universe magic is so prevalent they can recharge their batteries while under drive power. Here? They slowly discharge unless enough living things are around them.
9171444
So that means something is going to (almost?) go horribly wrong either in modifying or launching the MAV.
You know what you should do to help pad out the filler? Go back to the news outlets reacting to everything that's happening. Video proof of magic aliens is going to be in their hands soon and I can't imagine that will be anything but newsworthy.
Fun fact: The Tibetans also belive hell is a cold place. I guess living in the Hymalayas and cold as heck central asia makes the idea of eternal heat way too appealing.
9171542
Just means two things.
1) Can the Sparkle drive be powered by mundane sources?
2) Is it possible to feed pure hydrogen or helium-3 through one of the water/air mini-portals the Equestrians use?
If both are possible, hey presto, we gots a fusion reactor that gets its fuel from the ground. Problems solved.
If 2 is true but not 1, then we go with a pure fusion drive.
Simple compounds are possible (water is hydrogen and oxygen), therefore the Equestrians should be researching the hell out of the possibility of passing salt water through the connection. If THAT works, we go with Zubrin's nuclear salts water rocket, just fueled from someplace safe. Like, say, the lunar surface in Earth's reality. If Zubrin's toy can be made to work, then hell, anything inside of Jupiter orbit becomes a quick jaunt of a few weeks.
Lots of fun toys are possible now, with Equestrian help. In say, twenty years, humans and ponies are gonna be all over the bloody systems...
At one full gee of acceleration, no less.
Mars tried to get one more subtle drop on them, and instead ended up facing off against the one race that Eats Planets. Personally.
Wonder if whatevers left of the impactor and the layers above are going to have any sort of side effects from the MAV launch. Is it going to start off like the magical equivalent of the Columbiad, explosive launch, but end up transitioning into more like a Clarke Cannon? Reaching down into the mantle and possibly into the core, retriggering the Fires Of Olympus?
Pheonix might be pushing it, but as long as they dont call the MAV Prometheus, they should be ok?
A great chapter, as always. However, I think you may have confused a few things with your Norse Mythology. Niflheim was indeed a land of ice and snow and mists, but it was Helheim that was the home of the dishonored dead. True, Helheim is often synonymous with or said to be located within Niflheim and is its self a land of great cold, but there is a difference between them.
H Beam Piper's works stuck in my head as a kid, to the point where I'll usually go "Niflheim!" instead of "Hell!"
Given the cold icy place of malice that is Mars, or space in general...cold does seem a mite worse than hot.
9171542
For some reason, this reminds me of the first story in the Venus Equilateral series, where a newbie know-nothing manager throws out the active ingredient in the station's atmospheric maintenance system and they have to scramble to find a replacement source before they suffocate.
Great series by the way. You can get the whole thing in a single novel-sized omnibus and, since George O. Smith worked as a radio engineer, we actually get to see the details of how they invent teleportation as the series goes on, with a realistic test procedure and stumbling blocks. (And, at the end, cultural implications of ST:TNG-esque replication technology that I haven't seen anyone else come up with.)
Man... I get this horrible feeling that the launch is gonna be all like "That's a very nice Hermes you got there... be such a shame if you completely missed intercept and your magical McGuffin couldn't do anything about it"
When they leave the Rover they will be leaving a good faithful friend behind. Like they left a good shelter behind that did it's best as well.
Well played, sir.
#DragonflyForHomegoingQueen
9171738
Nah, my guess is that Mars is going to pull some last minute bullshit move, like placing Phobos or Deimos directly in the MAV's flight path (assuming their orbits go anywhere near Schiaparelli, which I wouldn't bet on)
9171444
Well, it can find a kind of solace in at least still having one Opportunity
Fact: Geeks who attend conventions are getting poorer because in general they tend not to work much.
Take me for instance, I have more money than at any time of my life... but I don't have the time to go to conventions.
There was a time when I would go to a convention, see a picture in the art show I wanted, and obliterate the lowest bid with one so high, I might as well have written, "THIS IS MINE!! Bid at your own peril, mortal!"
All is work now... endless work.
final Stretch! Much excitement!
Was Fireball being sarcastic, or is some fatalism seeming in?
I immediately started sweating bullets when you opened this chapter with preamble of Martian history. And that's when I realized that re-reading The Martian and your story had instilled in me a Pavlovian response for ominous infodumps.
But hey, good to see nothing too serious happened.
And now they've entered Schiaparelli proper now, we're onto the final stretch!
Are we going to see them on earth?
9171895
He's grumpy because literally everyone else has very nearly killed themselves to be a hero.
He voiced his complaints last chapter, and is likely annoyed that nothing more exciting happened.
The lack of exciting things for the dragon to do has been one of the main points of Fireball's character arc.
Can't magic, can't science. Only lift heavy things. It's been frustrating. Especially since all the others have had a chance in the spotlight of near suicidal heroism.
Looking forward to some fluff and somehow whenever that last song makes an appearance!
I recorded yesterday's chapter: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/450571904462618624/490394586242351104/Sol_503_Powder_Pit_talk.mp3
9171759
The orbits of the moons are stable and predictable, and thus mathematically avoidable.
Is Fireball anyone else's favorite character now?
9172021
Except magic has been flying around and Mars wants them dead. It's already pulled a big ass impossible f you at the crew. What is one more for the road?
Fill us with words!
9171980
That means Fireball's probably going to have to perform 'heroic action by heavy lifting'. Realize how much it sucks to be a hero, and complain he shouldn't have complained about being left out of the 'almost died club'.
9172110
It requires an exponentially much huger leap in the level of suspension of disbelief I'm willing to go to. I'm fine with extra-celestial magic causing Mars to send a storm after them and keep it on them, but I will not and can not accept it altering the orbits of Phobos or Deimos enough to specifically get in the way of the characters.
A couple of facts: Phobos orbits at 5,827 miles above the surface of Mars, and Deimos orbits at 14,580 miles above its surface. I don't know how high the Hermes will be orbiting at, that they'll need to dock with (perhaps Kris knows), but I'm pretty confident that Deimos is nowhere near that; where the Hermes was in the movie.
Phobos takes 7.66 hours to orbit, and Deimos takes 30.35 hours to orbit. It's not going to take that long to launch from the surface to the Hermes.
Finally, here's a picture showing how far away the moons are from Mars:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Mars_Moons_Orbit_distance.jpeg/700px-Mars_Moons_Orbit_distance.jpeg
So I think that shoots enough holes in your theory that, like one of those star cards at the carnival you have to shoot BBs into and completely take out the star, they no longer stand up to the fire (of facts). Sorry!
9172066
He has been since I started doing his voice! But I like Dragonfly and Cherry, too.
Mars is like “ ah magic get it off me “ and merephoeically thrashing around to get it off. Much like an itchy you can’t reach.
9172160
Even before you crunched the numbers, I was going to agree with this statement.
Mars isn't capable of directly throwing death at the group. It's attempts have all been oblique. Very precise and controlled, but oblique none the less.
A smarter wager would be things like 'sand pits where there shouldn't be', sudden rock slides, or even another brew up dust storm just before they depart. None of them involve literally pulling the heavens from the sky, as it were. Just some freakish levels of coincidence. And Mars can pull that, no problem.
It's the difference between politely requesting someone to show your 'friend' the door and personally getting up and slugging them in the face. Both get the same result, but they won't know about the first until the bouncer throws them onto the street.
9171980
Fireball may not have contributed much compared to the others, but he is low upkeep. Just a few rocks. The others need actual food.
So on a cost-benefit scale he is probably on top.
9172021
Normally, yes, but this is a fly-by. Hermes isn't going to be entering Mars' orbit, and the MAV has to launch before they get there as a result
9172160 Hermes would normally orbit well below Phobos. However, this is a fly-by. No orbits.
Going from the book, after a twelve minute launch cycle, the MAV managed to achieve 5.3 kilometers per second, matching Hermes's velocity but not its vector. (I'm still wondering how it did this despite increased atmospheric drag caused by the failure of the tarp-cover, but let's say there was a fuel margin not mentioned in the book.) After SECO the MAV coasted for thirty-nine minutes before Hermes intercept, at (again) 5.3 kilometers per second. Even leaving aside the entire distance traveled in the twelve-minute launch, that puts the MAV at not closer to Mars than 12,402 kilometers. That's way above Phobos and way below Deimos.
And all of this leaves aside the fact that space is big, and Phobos isn't that much bigger than Manhattan Island. Deimos is a lot smaller. Absent a fully horned and operational battle alicorn to raise and lower moons, avoiding them is child's play. So no, neither moon is going to play any role in the launch, fair or foul.
9172289 Fireball is being a bit sarcastic, but he would rather like a Crowning Moment of Awesome. Everyone else has got at least one.
Cherry Berry had hers in the very first chapter- turning certain death into a survivable crash landing on Mars.
Mark has two that I can think of- saving Fireball from the perchlorate explosion and reviving Pathfinder.
Starlight Glimmer has done a lot of work, but her greatest moment has to be saving the cave farm from the methane blowout.
Spitfire gave the advanced warning which saved the lives of everyone in the Hab when Airlock 1 blew out, and of course she killed the Great Black Spot.
And Dragonfly saved Mark's life twice- once by disguising herself as Johanssen and coaching him to keep driving while suffering from burns and the effects of sudden decompression, and again when keeping a falling engine from flattening him.
Fireball doesn't think picking up a bunch of heavy things really counts.
Completely off topic, but what's with the huge views spike these last three days? Not that it's undeserved or anything but it is peculiar.
How many sols will this wind up going.
9172289
True. But how would you feel about being told 'in terms of cost/benefit, you're on top?'
9172799 Launch Day is Sol 551.
9172626
Awesome. Thanks for the insight and clarification.
9172649
Love the Star Wars reference. Death Luna, anyone?
I started to read this about two months back... now I'm up to date..... I'm very sad.
It's just a short little thing, but I performed the call from Sol 504 here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/450571904462618624/490661463925588008/Sol_504_call.mp3
9171576
Absolutely! It won't be filler anymore but premium-grade content.
I have to be honest, the things I liked best about the story is not the sciency-parts but the clash of worlds/cultures. So more of that is always welcome!