In fact... Dragonfly checked the battery charge indicator and said, "Finish this one and stop, Starlight. The battery's about to run out."
"Okay." Starlight had another magic battery under her hooves, and she channeled both that power and the power she could tap from the weak artificial field into crafting the enchantment as strong and deep as she could. The magic flowed from her horn and into the clear quartz, not flickering even for the brief acknowledgment of Dragonfly's warning. For twenty seconds the spell continued to burn invisible pathways into the stone, and then she cut it off, the enchantment finished. "Okay, shut it down and swap over."
Dragonfly always hated the moment, even if it was brief, when the Jacolt's ladder shut down and the magic field dropped. It no longer threatened her sanity when it happened, but it still felt like something which constantly lifted her up had been yanked away, replaced by a brutal, agonizing vacuum.
But she'd had a lot of practice dealing with it, hiding it, denying it. And anyway, it was the work of less than two minutes to remove the kludged aerials from the spent battery, attach them to the full battery, and switch it from recharge to discharge. "How's it coming?" she asked as she performed this task.
"The three booster targets and ten of the jumbos are finished," she said. "The enchantments all look good. We'll have to add conductors to link the battery terminals to the receptor spots on the crystal. The original battery enchantment wasn't designed to power a second enchantment on the battery itself, not directly."
"Can you show me the places?"
"Sure. I need to drill a small hole into each of them to hard-mount the conductors, to make sure they stay in contact with the receptor spots in case the jumbos get shaken up by liftoff."
"We have some power tools."
"Nothing you or Mark has can cut quartz," Starlight said. "I won't be doing the drilling for another week at least, not until we get the charge back from today's work."
"Okay. If you're sure you're okay to do it."
"Believe me, it's a lot easier to put a two-inch hole in quartz than it is to add these enchantments. Ready with the new battery?"
"Yep."
"Okay. I should be done in another ten minutes."
"What did you think of the last part of the book?"
"Hm? Oh. Didn't I say during Story Time?"
"You didn't say anything. You let us talk."
"Oh. Sorry, my mind was on this task. And besides, since Mark keeps complaining every time I bring up his species' inferior system of government, I didn't think he wanted to hear me talk about how Carrot is clearly meant to be an alicorn prince."
"Oh, really?" Mark asked. "Because, y'know, ponies often have orange buzz-cut hair, stand two meters tall, carry swords using the opposable thumbs they don't have-"
"Switch the battery on, Dragonfly," Starlight sighed.
Dragonfly, having done her little bit to shake up things just enough to keep them interesting, complied.
Author's Notes:
I'd actually intended to have this referred to in passing, but this was the only thing I could think up to write today.
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Sol 363
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 369
ARES III SOL 363
[08:13] WATNEY: Good morning. I have a problem I want to bounce off the back rooms back at JSC.
Two sols ago Starlight Glimmer added the launch boost enchantment to the jumbo batteries. If all goes well, the jumbos will throw three pieces of specially enchanted quartz, and anything attached to them, completely off this planet. This should provide more than enough thrust, when added to the lighter load you'll give the MAV and the existing engines, to reach Hermes with a substantial fuel reserve in the second ascent stage.
There's just one hitch. The geniuses back in Ponyland who thought this system up (after Starlight gave them the idea) want it tested. And NASA being NASA, you want it tested too, because nothing makes a NASA engineer clench his buttocks tighter than the thought of sending a human being, never mind six people, up on a launch system that's absolutely never flown before.
We spent all day yesterday talking about how we could do it. The enchantments are specific and can't be re-tuned to a new target. If we use the enchantments Starlight made sol before yesterday, we lose those targets. Also, we aren't completely sure how quickly the jumbo batteries recharge, but we think it's slower than the regular batteries, so we don't want to use them for anything again until escape day.
So we decided, in a few days, that Starlight would enchant some new crystals and three new targets. We'll hook the new crystals up to the existing batteries and use them to launch something as a test. We considered rigging things to make the targets retrievable for future tests, but there's too much danger of dropping the whole test vehicle on top of our heads. We absolutely want to reach escape velocity. Ideally we want to launch at a time where the expected launch trajectory has the maximum chance of going straight up, leaving Mars's sphere of influence, and then dropping straight into the sun.
We've chosen to launch one of the pony ship's three engines. We won't be using them for anything, and we know the mass to within ten kilograms, so the data we get from the launch should be good. Future archaeologists will have to make do with the other two engines when we return to this site.
Our main problem with all of this is tracking. I'm sure we can pick a launch date and time when several Mars orbiters will be in view to watch the show, but cameras aren't as good as radio tracking. Right now the only thing we have that can broadcast beyond atmosphere is Pathfinder, and we're not launching that. Its ancient systems wouldn't survive launch vibrations anyway.
But we have two good remote weather stations and one half-operational one. They all have short-range radio transmitters. I could fuck up one of them so it sends a constant signal, and I could attach a heavier battery to provide extra current. Could we send extra juice through the transmitter to allow the orbiters to track the test vehicle for, oh, five minutes? If it burns out after that we don't care, but we really want accurate tracking for the first five minutes after launch.
We've still got plenty of time. The rover mods are essentially done, and we have about a month before we'd need to do serious testing and final prep for the drive to Schiaparelli. Get back to me when you've got some solid answers.
[08:39] HERMES: Ooooh, Mark, cosmic litterbug! Between this and how you're completely trashing Mars, Greenpeace is going to picket your apartment when you get home.
[08:46] JPL: Those are some good ideas, Mark. We'll get some systems engineers to work testing how much voltage the weather station transmitters can handle and if there are any other ways you can increase the gain using tools on site. In the meantime, I'll put the problem of tracking your launch in the hands of our very finest SatCom technician.
Mindy Park didn't notice she had a visitor until the mellifluous voice of her five-and-a-half-management-levels-up boss spoke from over her shoulder. "Good morning, Mindy. And how's my favorite satellite herder today?"
Mindy sighed, sitting up from her terminal and swiveling her chair around to face Dr. Kapoor. "About to get a whole lot busier," she said. "Am I right?"
Author's Notes:
The Sparkle Drive can't be tested on the ground. The booster pylon system, on the other hand, can...
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Sol 364
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 370
ARES III SOL 364
Starlight Glimmer poured magical energy in a by now familiar pattern into the fabric of the crystal cube in front of her. Of course, it had been months since she used this particular pattern— not since, come to think of it, shortly before the engine test and its consequences. That had been... five months? Five whole months lost to one emergency after another?
Well, it wasn't five months absolutely wasted. Dragonfly had been revived and put on a gradual road to recovery. The fifteen jumbo batteries had been made, although they'd been repurposed since. And, of course, there had been other issues as well.
But it was still five months with no increase in their magic generation capacity, and only three months remained until they left the cave. And the nineteen (well, eighteen and a half) batteries they had on hoof might not produce or retain enough magic to last the hundred days between departure and Escape Day. She wanted twenty-seven full batteries, fully charged— almost two tons, one whole cubic meter of mana batteries— for the trip. That meant she needed at least nine more, and then she needed spares on top of those so that last-minute magic usage wouldn't leave them short when it came time to go.
So here she was; three batteries powering a field projection, three more batteries for her personal use, and six blank batteries with salvaged casings ready to go. In two weeks she'd make six more. Two weeks after that, the final six. Thirty-six batteries— nine (and a half) above the required minimum. Those nine batteries ought to be sufficient power for their last month in Acidalia.
With one last quick surge of power, she completed the enchantment on the second battery of the day. She switched off the battery under her hooves, conserving the residual power, and shifted over to the next battery.
"Excuse me?" Cherry Berry had been standing behind her; Starlight hadn't noticed. (Well, she had, but she'd assumed it was Dragonfly, who always stayed within a couple of ponylengths of a battery in field-projector mode.) "I didn't want to interrupt you while you were concentrating, but something weird's happening with one of your bins of crystals."
Starlight's ears picked up. "Really?" she asked. "What kind of weird?"
"Water's trickling down the sides of it."
"Yeeeeesss!!" Starlight left the batteries, left the field projector— with three batteries backing it, it could run for over an hour— and galloped over to the trays of cut crystals she'd been using for her rainbow crystal enchantment experiments. Unlike the others, which were trays now filled with the standard randomly-enchanted crystals, the crystals in the bin on the end had a single straight, unchanging blue stripe underlying the rippling colors of the surface. And there, on one facet of the six-sided quartz shafts, the stripe broke through the surface and made a large, deep blue spot.
By design the crystals had been arranged to overlap the edges of the box. And yes, yes, tiny trickles of water were running down those overlapping crystals and down the sides of the tray. "It works! It works!" Starlight cheered, dancing up and down on her hooves with excitement.
"What works?" Cherry Berry asked.
"My enchantment overlay for pumping water back upslope to the top of the farm!" Starlight said. "Look, it's very simple." She scooped up one of the crystals in her hoof and held it under Cherry's nose. "The blue stripe is the enchantment— a conduit that passes water, and only water, and passes it in only one direction. Water comes out the blue dot. If it drips onto a crystal enchanted like this one, it gets sucked up and pushed up the line to the next crystal!"
"Okay," Cherry nodded. "But it'll be a lot of work making all of these and planting them in rows-"
"No, no, that's the genius of it!" Starlight grinned. "This is an overlay on the rainbow crystal enchantment! It self-propagates!" She glanced down at the pile of crystals, with most of the blue dots facing more or less up. "And it self-propagates pointed in the right direction! All I have to do is plant these every so often along each side of the farm area, and the rest of the water lines will build themselves!"
"Okay, that is good," Cherry agreed. "But you don't want every crystal to be one of these, or else you'll end up with constant rain in the cave."
"That's easy," Starlight said. "The rainbow crystals can't pass their enchantment on to a crystal that already has an enchantment. So all I have to do is enchant a continuous row of crystals along the upper and lower bounds of where I want the water lines to go, and the rainbow enchantment can't cross the line!"
"I see," Cherry said. "I guess you had this planned out."
"Well, yes," Starlight agreed. "It's a simpler variation on the enchantment we use for life support. It has to be— overlaying it on top of the rainbow crystal spell weakens it a lot. But with enough crystals, we should be able to recycle water from the cistern up to the airlock— in fact, if the enchantment reaches below the surface, it could tap the subsurface water that drains there from the back of the cave! We establish a magic-powered water cycle that requires no pony intervention!"
"We hope."
Cherry's skepticism took some of the wind out of Starlight's sails. "Well, yes," she said. "But this is what I can do with the time and resources we have remaining. We don't have a pump or water lines to do this mechanically. And if we don't do it, within a month or two of our departure, every plant in the cave will dehydrate and die."
"I know, I know," Cherry said. "But... we're never going to see this in full operation, are we? I mean, long term. We don't know what will change after we leave."
"All we can do is give the farm a fighting chance," Starlight said. "We've got light and water handled. We'll know before long if we've got heat. I just wish I could think of something for pollination." She looked at the crystal a moment longer before setting it back in the tray with its siblings. "Unfortunately, the rainbow enchantment doesn't work at a size small enough for a quartz chip to levitate itself."
"I'm not sure I like the idea of tiny bits of flying glass anyway," Cherry said. "Well, good luck. Let us know how we can help set this up."
"I will," Starlight said. "But I need to finish the batteries now, and then I have to make the boosters for the test launch. And then there's all sorts of other things I need to do."
"Actually, about that," Cherry Berry said. "Could you... um, could you make me a set of crystal dice like yours? I'm tired of the way the computer dice program keeps finding ways to dump me in Harry King's dunny wagon."
"Why exactly did you pick the Assassin character from the pre-gens Mark made, anyway?" Starlight asked.
"He wouldn't let any of us play wizards or witches," Cherry said. "Roof-jumping was as close as I could get to flying. But I don't understand why the computer dice keep failing me on that skill, and ONLY that skill."
"Well, it could be worse," Starlight said. "You could fall into the River Ankh instead."
