Now the voice lost its senile tones and gained a hard edge through the wheezy, whispering sound. "You have to succeed every single time," it said. "I need only succeed once. I have forever and you do not. You will die."
"Not today, buckhead," Dragonfly snapped. "Not tomorrow either."
"You will die," the voice repeated, much fainter, as if the effort had weakened it too much to continue.
"We will live," Dragonfly hissed. "We will ALL live, do you hear me? Do you? DO YOU, you stupid planet?"
"ANSWER ME!"
The shout awakened the entire pile of sleepers. "What th— get off me!" Fireball snapped, thrashing to dislodge the ponies on top of him.
"Heeeeey!" Cherry half-whinnied. "I was having a flying-and-cherries dream! Do you know how long it's been since I've had a flying-and-cherries dream?"
"What's all the noise?" Starlight asked, blinking away the sleep. "And what am I standing on?"
"That would be me," Mark grunted. "Can't breathe. Off, please."
"Oops! Sorry."
"Ow! Watch the wing!"
"Sorry, Dragonfly."
As the pile unraveled, Mark reached over to the mat where he'd been asleep, found the arm controls of his space suit, and checked the timer. "It's only forty minutes until we have to be up," he said. "Might as well make an early-"
"Mark." The voice was Spitfire's: low, cold, and sleepy.
"Yes?"
"All of you. Lie down. Shut up. Or I will make you."
"But-"
"Do it." That was Cherry Berry, equally cold.
"But-"
"Flying and cherries dream!"
"Yes, ma'am."
Mark and Fireball lay back down. Dragonfly crawled between them. The three ponies flopped on top of them and, in a few seconds, two of the three of them were asleep.
The third whispered, "Mark?"
"Yeah, Starlight?"
"Remember when I said that Cookie Clicker thing was the dumbest game ever invented?"
"Mm."
"It's dumber even than that."
The rest of the crew's final night in the crystal cave, what was left of it, passed in silence.
Author's Notes:
See idea.
See clever idea.
See clever idea not work out in the least the way you wanted it to.
See the clock tick down on the day, leaving no time or energy to redo the idea.
See the publish button.
Click the publish button.
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Sols 451-455
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MISSION LOG — SOL 451
Well, the cave farm is now seventy-one kilometers northwest of us. We're hanging out in the trailer now, with nothing much to do but spend the day waiting for all the batteries to recharge. And I do mean all. Starlight Glimmer ran one of the small magic batteries for ten minutes on field-projection. Then she linked them all so that they'd all recharge the partially spent one. If they recharge completely, it means they can afford ten minutes of magic time a day, which should be enough to keep Dragonfly at her current level of health. If not... well, we'll see.
Oddly enough, although I feel excited about taking the first step towards finally getting off this bastard planet and back home, I'm also feeling a bit anxious. The only time I've been this far from the Hab was during the Pathfinder retrieval trip. Even then I had the feeling that, if I got into trouble, I could get back to the Hab somehow. But this time we're not going back to the Hab, or the cave. We're driving over twice as far as I did for the round trip to Ares Vallis and back, and this time it's all one way.
Of course, in theory we could still backtrack. We could even get all the way to the MAV, turn around, and come back with the food we have on hand. And there would likely be a fresh, edible crop of hay and potatoes waiting for us when we got back. But that's if nothing goes wrong. This time there's nobody left behind looking after things. There's no telling what we'll run into on this trip. There's so much that could go wrong.
For the first time I'm really thinking about just how risky this whole enterprise is. And I'm wondering what NASA was worried about, when they green-lit this plan as being the least risky option. Is an asteroid going to hit the Hab on Sol 552 or something and they decided not to tell me? Is the warranty going to expire on Hermes and the next day the interplanetary tow truck has to haul it to the local AAA-certified spaceship repair facility? Is there some secret clause to the treaty that prohibits national territorial claims in outer space that says, "If aliens are on a planet for six hundred days, it belongs to them"?
OK, I admit, I'm being silly. But the thing is, I don't know. And Venkat, I love you like a brother if my brother were my boss, but I can't expect you to answer that honestly. You'd tell me what you thought I needed to hear to complete the mission, which is not the same thing as the unvarnished truth. And you wouldn't be totally wrong to do that, no matter how much it sucks for me on this end.
Eh, I'm going to stop worrying about it. I'm going to see if I can get together four people for a game of computer hearts. Starlight says she hasn't quite finished her new campaign setting of Middle-Ponyworld. She's working out exactly how a Ring of Power would function under her world's magical laws.
Come to think of it, that just makes me worry harder.
MISSION LOG — SOL 452
The sleeping arrangements are... well... communal. And uncomfortable.
A quick explanation: the rear part of the habitat compartment of what was the pony ship is taken up with the life support equipment looted from Rover 1, plus the RTG. The cabinets are stuffed full of hay, with what little space not taken up by that devoted to medicine and other supplies that might hurt from direct exposure to Mars's so-called atmosphere. The floor space is ringed around with twenty-one foot-wide crystal and metal bricks— the magic batteries. What's left of a horizontal surface for sleeping on isn't all that much larger than a king-sized bed.
You may ask, "But where did the ponies sleep when this trailer was a spaceship?" Answer: on the cabinets. Unlike Hermes, which rotates to maintain a 0.4 G gravity in its habitat modules, Friendship had no artificial gravity of any kind. The ponies slept in sleeping bags tethered to the cabinet fronts, much like they still do on our space station and have done since the days of Skylab.
The problem is that this sleeping space was vertical, not horizontal. Even in Mars's weak gravity, only Dragonfly can still sleep in a bag hung from the wall with anything remotely close to comfort. And it can't be that comfortable, because when we woke up this morning she was down in the pillow-pile with the rest of us, cuddling up for warmth.
And yeah, even with the RTG only a few feet away, even with the windows blocked up, even with the pressure door to the bridge sealed, and even with the improvised insulation we threw in here, the room still gets chilly before dawn. It's a fight between the RTG and the air from the pony life support and the metal hull conducting the heat out into Mars's lethally cold night. So we start out in our own little private spots on the pile of Hab bunk mattresses, and we end up in a tangle of bodies when the alarm goes off.
But on the bright side, nobody's kicked me in the belly yet.
In other news, the recharge system is working perfectly. The combination of permanently mounted, crystal-enhanced solar cells and the fourteen unmodified panels that ride in a stack on Rover 2 bring the batteries up to full charge well before sunset. And since we start driving at very first light, pre-dawn, we don't stay up all that late to burn charge at night.
So I drove another three hours, another seventy-one kilometers, and set out the extra solar panels again.
One minor bit of trouble: the magic batteries aren't recharging as well as the original two did when the ponies first came to the lab. Starlight estimates a recharge rate of 1.4% per day per battery. She puts it down to Dragonfly's weakened system sucking up more magic than before. Also, in the early days she deliberately strained herself to dump her inner magic reserves into the batteries to build up charge faster. Both Cherry and Spitfire are determined to stop her if she tries doing that again. Fainting Unicorn Syndrome ceased to be funny ages ago.
The good news is, that's enough to replace the juice used to create ten minutes of magic time— but only barely, and only because we have these twenty-one heavy pointy uncomfortable toe-stub hazards where we sleep. Daily magic production is just enough for that one ten minute window of magic plus topping off the jumbo batteries each sol.
We'll refine things as we go. For now, it's more or less smooth sailing.
MISSION LOG — SOL 453
Excellent news— today we left the part of Acidalia with all the shallow gorges. Technically that means we're in Chryse Planitia now, but the border between the two is really uncertain. They're both part of the great Boreal Planum, with Chryse being the southernmost extension of the Martian lowlands and Acidalia being the northeastern region tucked between Chryse, Arabia Terra, and the polar regions.
None of which makes a fuck, except that with the gorges gone we don't have to slow down and accelerate anymore. We squeezed out four extra kilometers today from improved efficiency.
Looking forward to tonight. Starlight says her campaign is ready, and she's given us templates to use to build our characters. I've decided to play the wizard. If Starlight will let me, I'll have him wear rainbow-striped plate armor, even though technically metal is supposed to interfere with magic according to D&D rules.
But it's essential, if I'm going to name him Canned Ralph the Gay.
(I'm kidding. He's not gay. He's asexual.)
MISSION LOG — SOL 454
We all woke up grouchy this morning, partly because some of us were lying on limbs so hard they lost circulation, partly because the first, and likely last, session of Middle-Ponyworld ended with a TPK. Alas, Canned Ralph, we hardly knew ye. But apparently goblins in Middle-Ponyworld have invented the can opener.
Yeah. Apparently we started out with the Pony-Shire getting invaded by an army of orcs and goblins and wolf-riders and like that. No warm-up. No Nine Riders, no Old Man Willow, no trio of easily fooled trolls, nope. Straight into the rampaging hordes. Starlight still needs to learn a bit more about pacing.
Anyway, things were pretty frosty in the Whinnybago today, even after the sun warmed things up some. For once Lewis's disco music is a better companion than the ponies. Cherry in particular is relaying orders through Spitfire because she isn't talking to Starlight, not after a great goblin took her druid, tossed it, and told a worg to fetch.
And from the way Starlight looks at the rest of us, the grudge is mutual.
I suspect that, before today is out, I'll be asked to take back the DM screen again. Which means more Discworld games. I'm thinking this time I'll focus on Lancre. Anyway, writing up a campaign will give me something to do. Once I've set out the solar panels for recharging, my work day is over.
In the meantime, I think I might take a nap. I didn't get much rest last night, because see above.
MISSION LOG — SOL 455
Fireball can snore and continue living.
Fireball can smoke and continue living.
But if he does both at the same time another goddamn night, I am going to build a plank and walk him the fuck off it.
By the way, seventy-two kilometers, if you give a shit.
Author's Notes:
Not feeling well today— sinus infection. This is all I could do.
In the original book Mark's log skips ten sols here.
If he hadn't, it would have been about on this level.
BTW, my sympathies lie entirely with Starlight. Level 1 characters, when confronted with thousands of goblins and orcs, are supposed to run, not attempt to defend their village in a futile last stand. But then, GMs who expect their players to be mind-readers can look forward to nothing but disappointment...
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Sol 461
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 469
ARES III SOL 461
"Friendship, Hermes. You're almost through the southern gap. Now turn directly east if possible. That'll aim you towards the center of the main channel of Mawrth Vallis. Please acknowledge, over."
Starlight Glimmer, seated next to Fireball in what had been Amicitas's co-pilot seat, keyed on her microphone. "Friendship acknowledges, roger wilco, over." Switching her headset from the ship radio to her suit's magic-powered comms, she said, "Confirmation from Hermes, Mark. We're in the valley. The main channel mouth is due east of us."
"That's what I figured," Mark said from Rover 2's cabin. "Cherry, did you get that?"
"We copy, Mark," Cherry Berry's voice added. "We're clearing a couple of large rocks out of the way now, but the ground is wide open once you get past that last narrow part of the pass."
Ten days of very easy driving across the northern lowlands of Mars had come to an abrupt end towards the end of driving the previous Sol. This hadn't been totally without warning— NASA, via Johanssen on Hermes, had warned them— but it had still been a bit of a shock to see the big-ass mountain of flood debris dead ahead, where the low-resolution map in the rover computer showed a wide open valley entrance.
They'd parked close to the mountain and taken some pictures. NASA couldn't decide if the great mountain that spanned almost the entire mouth of Mawrth Vallis was debris left behind by subsiding flood waters or the moraine of some long-gone glacier. They'd have to wait at least another forty sols to find out, but they'd sent Mark and Fireball out to get enough photos and video to keep the astrogeologists arguing for years.
As a consequence, the Whinnybago had made a late start of it the next day. Partly this was due to the shadow of the mountain blocking much of the early morning light, but mostly it was due to waiting for the broadcast window to Hermes to open so the crew could get guidance, even at eighteen minutes' round-trip lightspeed delay, from Hermes, its superior Mars maps, and its direct connection to the Martian orbiter network.
Their eyes in the sky had revealed the southern pass between the mountain and the outer edge of the ancient valley mouth, though tight and half-filled with loose debris, was the more direct route around the obstacle. The northern route was twice as far and not that much more open, according to Johanssen. Unfortunately the difference might still have been moot, since a ten kilometer drive had taken an hour and a half, counting the time lost waiting for updates from Hermes.
