Well offshore, on a small barge that rocked gently in the slow swells of the Celestial Sea, one unicorn after another popped into existence with a flash of light (and, in one instance, with a splash of water, having unexpectedly been bumped aside by the spell's failsafe when another unicorn arrived at the chosen destination a split second earlier). Some pegasi and most of the changelings followed at a more normal flying speed, while the four fastest pegasi and the two fastest changelings, plus one alicorn princess, hovered and watched for whatever was about to happen.
The princess in question, Twilight Sparkle, wore one of the new wireless headsets, and as she counted down every word echoed over the little island launch pad. "... seven... six... five... four... three... two... one!"
What happened next, in tests one through eight, had been the sudden appearance of a magical blast wave, a force dome that rapidly expanded and left trees standing while carrying the test vehicle— and usually a lot of things that hadn't been intended to become test vehicles— up into the air along with it.
Test Nine had been the first test to see if less of the dome could be generated. Subsequent tests had reduced the dome into a more or less round magical plate— or, rather, a trampoline, since what it did was essentially bounce whatever was above it into the air at tremendous speeds.
But, as with the prior tests, Test Fourteen proved that the spell had extreme difficulty discerning which things it should toss into the air, and which it shouldn't. The mock-up spacecraft caught only the edge of the field, which was still enough to lift it in the air a bit before it slipped out of the forcefield's effect and almost immediately plunged back to the ground.
The launch tower, on the other hoof, went almost straight up and kept accelerating, driven swiftly through the sound barrier by the fifteen pylons that generated the spell.
"Forget the capsule! Track the tower!" Twilight called out over her headset. "It's still valid data!"
Inside the earphones of her headset, an imperious and grating voice snapped, "I don't care if it's data or not, it's heading directly for my space center!!"
"Pssh," Twilight scoffed. "It's still accelerating upwards. I can follow it and prevent it from-"
Far, far up in the sky, the launch tower, already not at all well from having been ripped up off its foundation by the spell and then accelerated to over three times the speed of sound, gave up what structural integrity it had remaining, turning from one slightly mangled object into over a hundred smaller, but still very destructive, ballistic projectiles of tremendous weight. The spell lost its focus, and without its target it shut down.
"My space center, princess!" Chrysalis demanded over the radio.
"Shoot. Hold on one moment."
Twilight Sparkle had heard the occasional joke about her being the Alicorn Princess of OCD, but even her detractors would have to admit that a miles-distant telekinetic grab of almost a gross of different objects, collectively massing about seven tons, followed by a mass teleport that left the metal neatly stacked in careful rows next to the launch pad for reassembly, was a feat not even Celestia would have been able to perform.
"There. All sorted out. What did we get?"
"Tracking reports maximum speed at breakup of twelve hundred sixty-two meters per second," came the response from the minotaur chief scientist of the Changeling Space Program, Warner von Brawn. "Altitude approximately fourteen thousand, five hundred meters. Rate of acceleration had dropped by fourteen percent below launch estimate, with numbers inexact due to not tracking the tower for the first six seconds of flight."
"Perfect!" Twilight Sparkle cheered. "Mares and gentlecolts, we have proof of concept!"
"What?" Chrysalis wasn't having it. "Did it escape your attention that the actual capsule flew about two hundred meters, came down, and exploded on the pad? Or that we still have no way of actually steering the thing without a unicorn controlling the spell in person?"
"Oh, those? I solved those problems a week ago," Twilight said, her voice too chipper to be smug. "The only question was whether or not the same kind of projectors that Starlight Glimmer will have available, at her much reduced power levels, would be able to produce sufficient force to be worth bothering with! Today's experiment shows that, if anything, the spell might be slightly overpowered!"
"There is some truth to that," the minotaur rumbled over the radio. "The estimated G forces for the tower's launch would severely inconvenience a changeling and would pose lethal danger for practically anyone else."
"Why didn't you tell me you solved the other problems?" Chrysalis asked.
"Aren't you going to ask how I solved them?" Twilight asked, pouting a little.
"Would I understand it? No. And I have no need to understand— not the theory, anyway. All I need to know is how to make it go in the right direction."
"I'll show you when I get back to your space center," Twilight said. "I need to call Rainbow Dash, anyway. Test Fifteen will require a live pilot."
"Tell her to stay home," Chrysalis replied. "I'll fly Fifteen."
"Aren't you two weeks overdue to relieve Concordia?" Twilight asked.
"Concordia is in good hooves," Chrysalis said.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles overhead, the current officer in command of CSP Concordia looked sternly at her subordinate and said, "I don't care if you can teleport here in one go, I've told you, you're not allowed to visit Mama when she's at work."
"But Mama!" Flurry Heart whined.
"No buts," Cadance replied. "Now go sit in the corner and think about what a dangerous thing you've just done."
"Isn't a corner, Mama."
"Fine. Over by the ladder, then."
"An' can't sit in zero-G."
"Improvise."
As the overpowered alicorn child floated past one of the changelings on duty on the half-ship, half-space station's bridge, she asked, "Can Mr. Changeling play with me?"
"No," Cadance said, but her glare was reserved for the drone whose crimes were (a) Being a Changeling Who is Not Thorax, and (b) Being Here.
The changeling, remembering that his current commanding officer had once launched himself, his queen, and tens of thousands of his friends hundreds of miles at ballistic speed, bent back to his console and thought small thoughts.
Author's Notes:
Cadence is really regretting "keeping an eye on things for a day or two." And she holds one particular grudge a very long time, especially when her daughter is in close proximity. But the two changelings currently on crew regret it even more. She gets tetchy when you say "Princess of Food" in her hearing...
KWLP tonight is the July 4th show. First thing tomorrow I hit the road for Sausomecon, up by Kansas City airport. Vacation is over; time to get back on the road. I'll have tomorrow's chapter finished before I sack out tonight.
Oh— and by the way, here's my favorite Martian post-Mars fanfic. It's a shame the ponies act as kind of a curb on Mark's more manic side, because this writer really gets Mark: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8879638
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Sol 332
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 337
ARES III SOL 332
TRANSCRIPT — WATER TELEGRAPH EXCHANGE, ESA BALTIMARE and ESA SHIP AMICITAS
ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, over.
AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, this must be urgent, what's up, over?
ESA: We are testing a solution for your ascent vehicle boosters. If successful we will send performance data and design guidelines. This will require very long messages in next couple of weeks, over.
AMICITAS: Good to hear. We'll be ready, over.
ESA: Basic plan: enchant three durable crystals, current estimate 100 kg each, and mount them on underside of first ascent stage above engine bells of ascent vehicle. The enchantment will link all three crystals to each of fifteen repulsion field projectors which will draw power from the oversized batteries you have made. The link will ensure that the ship, and only the ship, is lifted by the full, focused power of the enchantments. The enchantment will be set to "away" without directional input, so steering of the craft must be done using chemical rockets on board. Over.
AMICITAS: Good idea. Any preliminary numbers?
ESA: System not yet tested with target blocks. Prior tests without blocks show lack of control but minimum potential acceleration of over 1200 m/s of a seven ton object in under one minute, over. We expect final system to be much more efficient.
AMICITAS: That's groundbreaking! Development of this system would vastly reduce weight and cost of launch vehicles! Excellent! Over.
ESA: We still need to do more tests. We don't want to send you up on a single test. But we can give you a head start based on what we learn from the first test, over.
AMICITAS: Very happy to hear! We'll be waiting! Amicitas out.
HERMES — ARES III MISSION DAY 466
The shutters remained down on all the portholes around Hermes, as if the largest spaceship ever built by mankind was about to undertake an aerobraking maneuver. No such maneuver was on the schedule for another year or more, of course. Today, and for many weeks prior and many weeks to come, the shutters held out a force more potentially deadly than air at hypersonic velocities, a force more unavoidable than micrometeorites, space junk, or any other merely physical obstacle.
The shutters held out the sunlight.
At a mere ninety-five million kilometers away from the Sun, Hermes currently absorbed two and a half times the solar radiation— light, heat, and even nastier stuff— that it would ever encounter in Earth orbit. Most of the photons in the visible and infrared range reflected off the reflective white paint and the silvery cooling fins of the ship, but enough remained behind to strain the cooling systems on board to their absolute limits. The cooling pumps remained at their top speed almost constantly, despite the ship rotation that both provided Mars gravity in the habitat ring modules and, as a bonus, provided a passive thermal control, or PTC as it was called in the Apollo days— or, more popularly, the "barbecue roll."
For harder radiation, Hermes had the lining of its hull plus an experimental electromagnetic field generator which, in deep space, generated a bubble much like that of the Earth in miniature. Twin slightly offset poles, one just below the vehicle airlock at the nose of the ship, the other just above the exhaust ports of the VASIMR engines. Here, in theory, charged solar wind alpha and beta particles would be grounded, relatively far away from the astronauts. If Hermes had had an atmosphere the auroras would have been fantastic— and frightening— but in the near-vacuum of space, nothing showed from outside of this extra (theoretical) layer of protection.
And, of course, there was the final defense: in case of a solar storm powerful enough to endanger astronaut health beyond the safety margins set by NASA, the crew would evacuate the rest of the ship and retreat to the chamber most securely sealed from radiation and best provided with redundant cooling systems... the reactor room.
Watney and Martinez had both laughed and joked about the irony of getting as close to the little reactor as possible to get away from the products of the really big reactor outside, when they were first briefed on the procedure. That had been over three years before. Now Watney was on Mars, and Martinez no longer felt like laughing— not merely because the danger-room scenario was a serious possibility, but because getting fried by one of the Sun's little temper tantrums ranked maybe fifth on his list of things to worry about today.
Number four was his bunk. He'd noticed two weeks before that he was sweating at night. When he was awake he didn't feel particularly warm— hey, not compared to his time at Edwards AFB— but sweat glands didn't lie. There was something wrong with the cooling system near his cabin. He'd have to talk with Johanssen, maybe Beck too, about it.
Number three was training for the MAV launch. All MAVs could be remotely piloted; after all, that's how every MAV had been put on the ground except for the very first. But NASA hadn't decided yet whether Martinez would fly the ship remotely or if the pony commander, Cherry Berry, would fly it manually. And more to the point, NASA hadn't nailed down the final parameters for the modified ship, which made it impossible for either pilot to fly simulations. Martinez wanted to get started training, and the sooner the better.
Number two was Mark Watney in general, with his friends somewhere far back down the list. Oh, the aliens were cool, but Mark was his crewmate and friend. They'd spent years training together, only to be split apart by a chain of freak accidents. Now they were on their way to get him back, and not a day went by that Martinez didn't pull out the rosary he'd made to replace his lost crucifix and say a silent prayer for the continued well-being of his buddy.
Normally Mark would be on top of the list, but yesterday something new had bumped it out of the way. Now Martinez sat in the pilot's seat on the bridge, trying not to jump up every thirty seconds and look over Johanssen's shoulder at the controls for Hermes's radio systems. Since yesterday the Hermes computers had tried to establish contact with Pathfinder. Not only was Hermes well ahead of Earth in orbit around the sun, it was three light-minutes closer to Mars. Thus it only made sense to resume the communications relay through the ship... if, that is, Pathfinder still functioned at all.
Johanssen wasn't even on the bridge at the moment. He was alone. Johanssen was doing diagnostics on the reactor. Lewis and Vogel were in the lab performing their scheduled experiments— NASA wasn't going to waste extra time in deep space— while Beck was in his bunk-slash-sickbay checking samples taken from the crew for signs of radiation exposure.
So, when Johanssen's console beeped, it took a moment for Martinez to realize that he needed to attend to it... and another moment to realize that it was the thing he'd wanted to attend to for a day and a half. The data link to Pathfinder was re-established. Pathfinder was still up and running... and, if the sun would settle down, they could talk to it.
Martinez opened the ship comms. "Status update," he said. "We have signal acquisition of Pathfinder. Repeat, we have signal acquisition of Pathfinder."
"On my way." Lewis's reply came immediately— no hesitation, not even a gap between Martinez's last syllable and her first.
