When Spitfire and Dragonfly walked up, Cherry motioned them to shut the airlock door behind them. "What's up, boss mare?" Dragonfly asked. "I hope this isn't an order to walk the plank or something."
"Dragonfly," Cherry began, "I don't think you've ever asked me to get Spitfire to stop hitting you on the head."
The changeling froze, which Cherry had half-expected. So did Spitfire, and Cherry hadn't expected that. "Er... I figured you'd stop it yourself," she said, almost convincingly.
Cherry looked at Spitfire. "And I'm pretty sure I've told you to cut it out once or twice."
Spitfire lapsed into Equestrian. "Just look at her! Isn't that just the most hittable face?"
Dragonfly grinned. "It's true. Five hundred royal guards can't be wrong!"
Cherry cleared her throat. "I'm not laughing, you two," she said in English. She looked at Spitfire. "This is an order: no more hitting Dragonfly." She looked at Dragonfly even harder. "This is an order: quit goading Spitfire into hitting you."
Dragonfly cocked her head, doing a very good job of pretending to be confused. "You think I want to be hit in the head?" she asked.
"I think you're deliberately being annoying," Cherry said. Looking Spitfire right in the eyes, she continued, "And I think you're playing along."
Spitfire shrugged. "Makes me feel better."
Dragonfly nodded. "It makes everybody feel better, too."
"Not me," Cherry said. "I mean it: cut it out. If you two want a running joke, come up with something else."
Dragonfly slumped. "The queen would let me get hit over the head."
"Only if she held the stick," Cherry said. "Anyway, she's not here, thank Faust. Now let's go make the plants happy..." She couldn't suppress a sad sigh at the thought. "... for a little longer."
Author's Notes:
I ran out of writing time, or else this would be longer.
Tomorrow I go to Houston (just down the road) and set up for Delta H Con.
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Sol 342
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MISSION LOG — SOL 342
Today NASA decided the new communications link via Hermes was stable enough to resume our email accounts. Our bandwidth is only about six hundred bits per second— Hermes is closer to us than Earth, but not that much closer, and it's going to be pretty close to the sun for at least another month. So NASA is limiting us to thirty emails total— the most urgent in-house messages plus whatever they think is most interesting from the weeks we spent without email.
Four of us, of course, are glued to computers, reading and replying to messages from the outside world. But not Starlight, and not me. We both have homework, which means our emails have to sit on the computer a while longer.
Today Starlight actually rigged up four magic field projectors to run at once so she could make a new core crystal for the Sparkle Drive. She wasn't taking any chances on it being underpowered. In order to make it, she covered both the whiteboards with notes, used up all the remaining sample labels, and even transmuted some of the really old hay into a sort of unbleached paper that smells a lot like hay, just so she had something to write on.
Then, once the enchanting was done and she'd shut everything off, she examined the crystal until she keeled over from exhaustion. (She hasn't done that in a while, so I know she was really working hard on it. Starlight got good at making a little magic go a long way since she arrived here on Mars.) She says the enchantment matches the final designs she and Twilight Sparkle came up with. Unfortunately, that's not the same thing as saying "we did it, it works." We won't know that until we test it.
And by test it, I mean "switch it on while in deep space on a trajectory to nowhere, assuming we live even that long." We can't do a ground test, because when you switch on the Drive, it and anything physically attached to it moves. We'd either have to go along for the ride or else wave goodbye as it achieves Warp One and departs for the Klingon Neutral Zone without us. And, as Starlight has repeatedly warned me, the spell is a little vague about the difference between "attached to," "sitting inside," and "standing on top of." The odds are pretty good the Drive would take a large chunk of Mars along with it if we used it for a ground launch.
So follow along with me: our escape plan, if absolutely anything goes even marginally wrong with our launch, requires that we use a totally untested magical rock to correct the problem and get us either rendezvous with Hermes or a rapid Earth intercept. As you might expect, NASA is less than thrilled by this, which is why they're working overtime to give us the best odds of getting a rendezvous without using the Drive.
Which brings us to Starlight's homework. With the Sparkle Drive replaced, Twilight Sparkle is now pouring out a river over their magical water telegraph giving her details about the extra enchantment she has to make. This one is much simpler, though: adding a spell that, when triggered, tells the enchanted rock to push hard against a particular other enchanted rock. In theory, nothing much to it.
There's a funny story about this. The spell is older than dirt, so to speak. It was invented before the pony tribes united into the modern pony nation. Seems the unicorns wanted a city in the sky to match ancient (according to the spell this is actually a name) Pegasopolis. So they made a small crystal forest, enchanted it, and used its power to lift a large chunk of continent into the air about five thousand feet. Voila, flying city... until some earth ponies came along, saw some pretty crystals, and mined the enchanted boosters away. The unicorns couldn't get the earth ponies to leave their enchanted rocks alone, so they had to land their flying city in a hurry before it landed on its own, and that more or less ended that. There's a lot more to the story, mostly about unicorns trying to get the earth ponies and pegasi back for their humiliation and how this helped bring on the Go Windys, but that's where Starlight left off..
Anyway, there's one problem with the current design for the magic punkin' chunker, as I like to call it. There's currently no way to turn it on remotely. We don't have any radio-controlled switches we can use. We'll have to figure out a way around that before Launch Day, or else someone's staying behind.
For the record, not it.
Did I say one problem? I meant one major problem. There are also a ton of minor problems, such as getting magic power from the super-sized batteries to the chunker enchantment, regulating the power output so it doesn't unload all its push at one shot and turn us into chunky salsa, things of that nature. And that's kept Starlight glued to the water telegraph again, all afternoon and evening, hashing it all out with Twilight. I'm about to pull the plug for the evening; the auxiliary tank on the water reclaimer is almost full, again, which means we'll have to start dumping excess water out the airlocks, again.
Speaking of airlocks, it's now about three times as long since Airlock 1 blew out as between the assembly of the Hab and the blowout. Tomorrow I'm going to ask Starlight, Spitfire and Dragonfly to help with a thorough check for incipient flaws in the Hab canvas. It's been over a month since we last did one. I don't expect to find anything, but that's exactly why we do the check. It's the shit we don't expect that kills, and we're getting too close to getting off this rock for me to literally blow it now.
Why not tonight? Well, that's because of my homework. Cherry Berry asked Starlight for ideas on how to keep the cave going after we leave. Starlight says she has some ideas, but she needs to know exactly what's required to keep the farm healthy and growing once we're gone. So she handed that off to me.
Which is why I'm spending this evening calculating oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles between aerobic bacteria and plants. I'm calculating water consumption and respiration. I'm making an educated guesstimate at heat losses for the cave based on past data (from the Cave Fart and its aftermath). I'm seeing a need to measure current insolation through the solar relay crystals so I can make an educated guess on what the rate will be during the Martian winter roughly three hundred sols from now.
But there's one problem that no amount of magic or tinkering will solve: bees. We don't have any.
Here's the thing. If we can somehow create a self-maintaining environment suitable for plant life, the cherry trees will live a very long time— possibly fifty Martian years or until they outgrow the cave, whichever comes first. And the potato plants can theoretically keep sprouting new plants from buried tubers, so there will be potatoes in the cave for years, possibly decades.
The limiting factor is the alfalfa. Alfalfa plants live for about five to seven years if left to grow continually, but eventually they get old and die. Alfalfa doesn't bud like potatoes, and cuttings require human care and tending to get started. And without animal life with animal digestive systems to fix nitrogen and provide certain amino acids, the alfalfa is the only thing that will keep the soil from playing out within a couple of years.
We're out of seeds after the replanting we did after the Cave Fart and the sinkholes and the anaerobic bacteria plague. And in three hundred plus sols of growing hay on Mars, we've yet to see a single bud, let alone an actual flower, on any of the alfalfa plants. And if we did see a bud, we'd have to fertilize it by hand, if that's even possible, because there are no bees on Mars.
Without bees, alfalfa doesn't produce seeds. Neither do potato flowers (of which we have seen a few) or cherry blossoms (the trees are way too young). No seeds means no new alfalfa.
If NASA proceeds with Ares IV landing at Schiaparelli on schedule— which will require a really fast refit after Hermes makes it home— and if Ares V is redirected to this site for a follow-up picking through our garbage, they'll get here about eight Earth years from now. By that time the cave farm will be plenty sick if not totally dead, for lack of soil nutrients. And I just don't see any way around that.
Eh, maybe I'm overthinking this. Maybe Starlight can make little crystal bees out of magic. Maybe the alfalfa will spontaneously mutate to reproduce by parthenogenesis, like in Jurassic Park, only without the bloody murderous pack predators.
(Come to think of it, what would alfalfa hunt? How much tactical knowledge do you need to sneak up on loam?)
I'm getting punchy. Time to put this aside and pull out my other homework: campaign building. Starlight's too busy to try making a new campaign for D&D, and we've played all the pre-gen adventure modules twice, so she asked me to work on a Discworld campaign setting.
If I do this right, they'll never get out of Ankh-Morpork...
Author's Notes:
Offhand, can't think of anything that needs explaining here.
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Sol 346
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 351
ARES III SOL 346
"A-HA!"
Spitfire jabbed her hoof at the computer screen. "Starlight always talk `need to know how to talk write proper.' So humans understand. But here a human writer, writes bad. On purpose!"
They were midway through Guards! Guards! On the screen, Watch Captain Samuel Vimes had engaged in the traditional police procedural device of writing down facts in the hopes of making a connection. But since the book was a fantasy book and involved a dragon that appeared and disappeared by magic, the policeman's notes were written in a bad Ye Olde Langueuage. (Though, admittedly, not using any actual bad language.)
"Look! Look at this! He even can't find word! `I-Time: The drag-gone was not a Mechanical devize, yettie surely no wiz-zard has the power to create a beas-tee of that mag— mag — magnight— size.' What he trying say anyway?"
"Magnitude," Starlight Glimmer muttered. When that got a blank look, she said in Equestrian, "Magnitude."
"Oh. I don't use that word even in Equestrian, let alone English." Spitfire shrugged and shifted back to English and back to her point. "This proves you don't need perfect English! Not when humans get it wrong!"
"Spitfire," Cherry Berry said quietly, "do you ever read the Wonderbolt-" she used the Equestrian name— "-records from about, oh, four hundred years ago?"
"Yes! When I must!" Spitfire replied. "Annoying! Ponies not know spelling then! Words all... weird! Make me nuts reading..." The light dawned, and Spitfire looked down to the computer screen, then back at Cherry Berry. Borrowing a phrase she'd heard Mark use several times, she said, "I see what you did there."
"Oh, it's better than that," Starlight Glimmer said. "The character writing those notes grew up poor and on the streets in a place with no public education, not even a one-room school like Ponyville's."
"A one room schoolhouse?" Mark asked. "You still have that kind of thing? How big is Ponyville anyway?"
"Not important just now," Starlight said. "My point is, Captain Vimes has every excuse to have bad grammar, but he's trying. He uses archaic— that's very old— words and spelling, even though he doesn't talk like that, because he thinks that's how educated people write. And the author, Mr. Pratchett, knows exactly when and how to break the rules of grammar and spelling to make this effect work. That's what knowing a language can do for you!"
"Right," Spitfire scoffed. "Didn't mean to write book on Mars."
"Can we get back to reading the book now?" Cherry Berry asked.
"Just a minute," Mark said. "I want to go back to public education not being important."
Spitfire pulled the computer back to herself and began reading aloud— and very loud— until Mark gave up on any attempt to investigate the educational system of the ponies.
Author's Notes:
This seemed like a much more promising line of exploration when I decided on it for today's writing. But between distractions and work at Delta H Con, this is all that resulted.
Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive.
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Sol 347
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 352
ARES III SOL 347
"I've been thinking— and don't make any stupid jokes about it, okay?"
Dragonfly and Mark had cleared a worktable and sketched designs for Rover Saddlebags Version 2.0 on the surface, having discovered that the dry-erase markers could also be wiped (mostly) clean from the tabletops. (Starlight Glimmer had made it clear that, for the duration, anyone who laid a hoof on either of the actual whiteboards would lose that hoof.) The new saddlebags required careful planning; they would be expected to hold as much as ten times the weight of the saddlebags Mark had used for the drive to Pathfinder, and they would have to do that job without crushing the lightweight rover pressure vessel.
