"How bad is what?" Dragonfly asked innocently.
Cherry Berry took a deep breath. "Dragonfly, I'm not in the mood for `am I pretending to pretend to not be sick' games. So don't give me those roadapples, all right? How bad is it?"
Dragonfly shrugged. "I'm not particularly hungry— no more than normal, I guess," she said. "But I still get tired so easily. I thought I'd recover more strength with our daily magic sessions, but..."
Cherry Berry's lips tightened on her muzzle. It had been four days since the last magic session. She wanted to get back to the cave to see how the improvised life support was working, but Dragonfly needed to get back. But that didn't seem to be the problem at the moment. "You were really sick for a really long time," she said. "Ponies don't get over things so bad so fast."
"Changelings do," Dragonfly insisted. "We're tough like that."
"Maybe back home," Cherry Berry said. She waved a hoof at their surroundings, the almost white sky above, the red and gray surface of Mars around them. "What about this looks like home to you? We can only give you a couple minutes of magic energy a day. That's not the same as spending all day, every day, in a proper magic field."
"You think this place cares?" Dragonfly asked. "Look, I'll be all right. All right for long enough, anyway. And we need everyone to pull their weight."
Cherry Berry sighed. Commanders weren't allowed to whine and say It's Not Fair, not even when alone. Of course it wasn't fair. Nothing about this horrible planet was fair. Fair, if it existed at all, had stayed in bed back in Horseton or Cape Friendship or Canterlot or Ponyville or somewhere in Equestria while the rest of them rode Amicitas off the pad to its date with catastrophe.
But she still wanted to scream It's Not Fair until they heard it on Mark's home planet without the use of radio.
It wasn't fair that she'd been without fresh cherries for over a year and without even highly preserved cherry-based desserts for months. It wasn't fair that Starlight had spent a year risking permanent crippling injury on the simplest of spells. It wasn't fair that Spitfire couldn't do the one thing she was born to do— fly fast, far and free in these hostile, barely-present skies. It wasn't fair that Fireball was here, full stop. And it wasn't fair that Mark had been stuck here by chance, accident, or possibly the hoof of Faust herself as if he existed solely to keep five Equestrians from dying horrible deaths on a horrible, horrible planet.
And it wasn't fair that Dragonfly, well, fill in the blank with anything. Whatever crimes and casual bits of unthinking evil she'd committed in the pre-space era when changelings were still hostile invading monsters, they didn't merit being turned into a shadow of her former strong, confident self by magical starvation.
But shouting Not Fair didn't make things any more fair, no matter how good it might feel to say it. If you wanted to make it fair, you had to do it yourself.
No, that's wrong; you had to do it together.
Cherry tapped the control box on the front of her suit, then made a show of switching her comms back to the all-call channel. Once the changeling followed suit, she said in English, "Dragonfly, stay here and coordinate. I'll take the other direction."
She hadn't gone far when Spitfire called out that she'd found a crossing spot. But that wasn't the point.
She couldn't make Mars fair. But she could help make it a little less unfair.
MISSION LOG — SOL 398
Sirius 5B ended up being more travel practice. I pulled the plug at twenty percent battery power, at which point we'd gone fifty-two kilometers. That's encouraging news by itself; fifty kilometers per sol would get us to the Ares IV MAV in about seventy sols, well within the deadline for launch on Sol 551. We could live with that, if nothing else went wrong, but we really want seventy kilometers per sol. The next time we take the rover out, it'll be for the performance run.
Fireball and I are still working out communications glitches. The turn indicators help a lot. Now the main problem is me, because I keep forgetting to warn Fireball what I'm about to do. It's hard work, because I have to be thinking about teamwork all the time while driving. It's like the old gag of two little kids driving a car by one steering and the other crouching under the dashboard and working the pedals.
(Come to think of it, doesn't that gag always end in disaster? Scratch that, it's a stupid simile and I should never have mentioned it.)
Anyway, we're taking a couple days off from testing after this. We need to get back to the cave and check on things. That means disconnecting the trailer, because there's zero reason to risk an accident with it if we're not testing its capabilities. We absolutely need the trailer intact for the Schiaparelli run. If we fuck it up, then Hermes goes back to Earth without us, and we think of something else.
Part of me still wants to push forward on the rover tests. Hell, part of me wants to just go to Schiaparelli right now. But we're not ready. We need a plan for getting there. We need to be sure we can make the trip. And, as Sirius 5 and 5B demonstrated, we need training to get there.
So it's better to be patient, and cautious. After all, it's not like the Soviets are going to beat us to the MAV because we waited to see if a chimp could drive before we tried it ourselves.
I hope.
Author's Notes:
Feeling Dragonfly here recently, though I haven't got the excuse of being on Mars or originating in a different universe.
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Sol 399
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"So, what have you got for me, Mindy?" Venkat asked.
Mindy brought up the online Mars map and focused on the location of the Hab. "Acidalia Planitia is fairly smooth, especially once Mark gets out of the fractured region around the Hab. He'll leave the last of the gullies behind by the third day of travel, assuming a seventy kilometer average daily transit. And once he gets onto Arabia Terra the continental crust is fairly smooth except for craters and ejecta. If he stays clear of craters, he should make good time. And Schiaparelli Crater has a mostly smooth floor of compacted dust. So the two major problems are getting up onto Arabia Terra and getting down into Schiaparelli."
"Got it. What's the solution?"
"There are only two feasible ways for the tandem rover to get up Arabia Terra," Mindy said. "Arabia is divided from the surrounding Martian terrain by a large escarpment. I think it's too steep for the weight the rovers will be carrying. It's broken in only two places." She pointed to a dry river network almost directly southeast from the Hab. "Mawrth Vallis is my choice. The river bed is uneven, broken in a couple of places, and almost certain to be full of rocks carried down its path by ancient water flows. But the overall grade is one the rover can probably manage, and it meets the level of Arabia Terra here, near Trouvelot Crater. From Trouvelot there are large gaps between major craters to allow easy driving.
"The other way isn't as good. Mark would have to drive due south from the Hab for about fifteen sols. The escarpment is shallowest in that direction, allowing for a gradual rise in elevation. From there Mark would have to turn east-southeast, and a lot of overlapping craters will be directly in his path. Getting him through that route will be difficult. The only advantage to that route is that it's a slightly easier ascent to altitude than Mawrth Vallis. But it's the more difficult route, and it's several sols longer."
"Got it," Venkat said. "I'll tell Mark to pack all his cameras. We've wanted data from Mawrth Vallis for decades. We just kept finding even more interesting places to go instead." He reached down to Mindy's keyboard and switched the focus of the digital map to Schaparelli. "What about getting him down off the plateau again?"
"That's not so easy," Mindy said. "Most of Schiaparelli's crater walls are sheer drops. And the ground surrounding Schiaparelli to the south and east is rugged and broken— almost impossible for the tandem rover to navigate. There's only two possibilities."
She pointed to two spots on the map. "There's a point just west of Edom Crater where what looks like a smaller crater broke the rim and helped form a sort of ramp down from the highlands into the crater, here on the northwest side. That's the point closest to Mark's line of travel, but the ramp down is really rough and questionable. In the southwest corner, not far from the Ares IV MAV, there's a point where Meridiani Planum is almost the same altitude as the basin inside Schiaparelli's rim, and there are passes between the rim mountains. A rover might be able to get through them, but the passes aren't large. It's out of his direct path, and he might end up losing days to an obstacle we haven't spotted that he can't get around."
"Can we get better photographs of these sites?"
"Not much. I can try."
"Okay, do that. But in the meantime, let's assume this northwestern entrance is the way to go. Work up a detailed travel plan for Mark and write it up for transmission through Pathfinder. And look at some alternative routes if we run into a problem."
"Will do," Mindy said.
"I suspect Mark's been too busy to think about his route himself," Venkat continued, almost to himself. "We didn't include any detailed maps of Arabia Terra in the Ares III data files. He'll only have an old planetary map and a detailed map of Acidalia and Chryse Planitias. Getting this will let him focus on more urgent things."
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 406
ARES III SOL 399
"Look, all I'm saying," Dragonfly said, waving her forehooves in the multiversal calm-down motion, "is that Granny Weatherwax is the perfect Slytherin. I never said she was evil."
"Granny is Griffindor!" Spitfire insisted, slamming the worktable as she said it.
"I thought Granny was Hufflepuff," Cherry Berry said.
Heads turned. "Hufflepuff?" Mark asked.
"Yeah. Think tough love."
"But wouldn't Nanny Ogg be a better Hufflepuff?"
"Think about it," Cherry urged. "Granny and Nanny are close friends, right? Wouldn't they be housemates?"
"Or maybe Granny developed Nanny as a friend because she wanted the support and power," Dragonfly pressed. "Because she's Slytherin."
"Look, can we at least agree that Magrat Garlick is a Ravenclaw?" Starlight Glimmer asked.
Fireball snorted. "Well, duh," he said.
"Too obvious," Spitfire said.
"Come to think of it," Cherry Berry added, "what house would Ridcully be? He doesn't seem to be afraid of anything, so I guess Griffindor."
"He seems too stupid to be afraid," Dragonfly said. "Which means definitely Griffindor."
"Griffindor is not lawful stupid house!" Spitfire shouted. "Ridcully smart in his own way."
"You know, all of this is nice," Mark said to the world at large, "but at some point we're going to have to do something about the three trolls guarding the back door to the opera house."
None of the other players, nor Starlight the GM, paid the least bit of attention. "I think Hogwarts would need a fifth house for Rincewind," the unicorn said. "With a cheetah mascot. Or something else that runs really, really fast."
"Rincewind probably went to Durmstrang," Fireball theorized. "A perfect place for a wizard to learn about surviving really bad things."
The debate continued. The game session, not so much.
Author's Notes:
One of the critiques of the original book is that Acidalia/Chryse turns out to have a lot more obstacles than Andy Weir made out, that Arabia Terra is a lot smoother, and that Mawrth Vallis is a nasty obstacle course full of rocks and uneven terrain wide enough at points that the canyon walls are over the horizon, etc. etc. etc.
All set up at Ama-Con (Amarillo Civic Center); we open to the public tomorrow. Had plenty of time today, but not the energy to write more than this.
By the way, I'm no longer going to be building buffers. When I can write ahead, I'm going to be writing the Sol 551 launch. That will be an ENORMOUS chapter, as you might expect, compared to most of the others.
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Sol 400
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 407
ARES III SOL 400
[09:03] WATNEY: Hello, this is Starlight Glimmer. Mark is busy today— he's moving the south weather station to the cave farm so we can figure out exactly how much heat the cave is losing without the life support system. I have a solution in mind, but I need to be careful how I implement it so I don't accidentally cook the plants we're trying to preserve.
But I can't work on that without the data from Mark and a few other things, so I'm working on the Sparkle Drive for the MAV today. The new crystal has been installed in the old control system for some time. But since we won't have the old ship computer in the MAV with us, I need help connecting the Drive to the MAV computer, or failing that one of Mark's portable computers.
The Sparkle Drive works by signal from a computer. The version of the Drive that got us here jumped two meters at a time. We programmed our computer to trigger a jump every four computer cycles, or about 250,000 times per second. In our home universe that worked fine, but when we made the cross-universe jump our batteries were instantly drained to nothing. The Drive tried to draw more power, and the batteries crumbled to dust under the strain.
To prevent that, the new Sparkle Drive makes a much smaller jump, one which (we think) will only draw the power that seven batteries can regenerate with the six of us right next to them producing a tiny trickle of magic from our life force. We think a half-meter jump per cycle for capsule plus second stage (6 tons) will be small enough to allow the batteries to regenerate. The new Drive cannot make an inter-universal jump, so the danger of the power system failing in the same way as before is almost zero.
We also have two other settings, 0.65 meters per jump for capsule only and 0.2 meters per jump for the capsule docked with Hermes, based on the masses in your records. Those settings are adjusted by placing electrodes in different spots on the core crystal and can't be changed by the computer.
So what we need is an electrical connection that can pulse hundreds of thousands of times per second (it only takes a tiny charge) that the computer can operate. We need a program the computer can run to do this. And, finally, we need navigation software updates to take this system into account for trajectory calculations.
