• 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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Sols 504-505

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.

Author's Note:

I had a lot of writing time at my booth today. NOT a good thing.

One of my preordained points of planning for this story was: the obstacles faced by Mark alone in the original novel will be elided over or negated entirely by the ponies. I didn't hold to that as well as I could have, but today's post was planned from the very beginning to play out more or less this way. (Side note: the Arabia Terra dust storm was originally going to be unchanged and thus easily avoided by maintained communication with Earth, before I decided that the long drive would be too dull otherwise and that the booster test needed long-term negative consequences. Yes, I'm saying right now; the Black Spot was caused not just by the second booster launch but by the first, and by weeks of abnormally high temperatures and thus higher atmospheric pressure.)

It's mostly filler from now until Launch Day. I will now begin pushing hard to work on the final chapters, which will be BIG- as in Changeling Space Program sized in at least one case. Thus, the filler chaps will be short as a consequence, as Mark and crew enjoy a full communications pipe with Earth for the first time, as they strip things out of the MAV, as they say goodbye to the Rover (and a final goodbye to Amicitas), and as they look forward to the single riskiest day of their lives.

It'll be filler, and in short chapters, but I don't intend it to be boring.

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