But that was over— or almost so. "I see the tight spot you warned me about, Cherry," Mark said. "Fireball, prepare for plus thirty on my mark... now!"
"Plus thirty," Fireball rumbled, turning Amicitas's flight yoke to the point marked on the steering guide Mark had installed.
"And zero!"
"Zero," Fireball said as the rover crept cautiously past a boulder so large the top of it rose almost level with the former spaceship's cockpit windows. "Boss, how big rocks did you move?"
"Don't ask," the earth pony turned forward scout replied.
"Minus ninety in three, two, one, now!" Mark ordered.
Fireball yanked the flight yoke all the way to the right. "Minus ninety," he said.
"Hold it... hold it... zero!"
Fireball straightened. "Zero," he said.
"Yeah, that looks beautiful," Mark said. "Wide open now. Let's get a little more distance from the pass, and then I'll turn us due east and open up the throttle."
"Which way is east?" Fireball asked. "Can't see sun from back here."
"Um, yeah, it's pretty high up by now, isn't it?" Mark said. "But I can see Spitfire's spacesuit. It's the only white thing anywhere in sight. Cherry, I'm following Spitfire. That good with you?"
"No problem, Mark. We'll stick together for a while. What are we looking for?"
"An upslope. A shallow, level upslope. Starlight, ask Hermes for details, okay? By the time you get a reply, we should be eight or nine kilometers along."
Starlight nodded to herself, then remembered Mark couldn't see her head from the rover cabin. "Will do," she said.
"Lot of trouble to drive up a river," Fireball muttered from beside her.
"Less trouble than having to work it out for ourselves," Starlight replied. She switched back over to the radio. "Hermes, Friendship," she called. "We're out of the pass now and making full speed due east. We expect to be about nine kilometers east from our current position by the time we get your response. Please give guidance to the best path up the valley from that position. Over."
As Starlight switched her headset back to suit comms, she heard Mark say, "So, after all of that, are you talking to me again?"
"That depends, Mark," Starlight growled. "Are you going to let me have my apprentice witch character?"
"Oh, not this again," Mark moaned in her headset. "I banned all witches from the campaign because I didn't think you'd have fun being constantly stepped on by Granny Weatherwax. If there's a serious magic problem in Lancre and any witch is involved in any way, she's going to take over the whole thing. She just is. That's how the books worked."
"They don't work like that for Tiffany Aching."
"I am not giving you Tiffany Aching for a starting-level character, Starlight," Mark groaned. "Look, if you want to be a magic user, be a hedge-wizard."
"I'm holding out for witch, Mark," Starlight insisted.
"Dragonfly here. Just wanted to mention the total and absolute lack of rocks in the path ahead. Definite absence of obstacles of any kind for klicks and klicks. Nary a rock. Boulders are conspicuously inconspicuous."
"Message acknowledged, Thesaurus Jones," Mark replied.
"How much longer are we going to drive today, Mark?" Cherry asked. "We're already an hour past the point where we'd normally stop."
"I'm going for the full seventy kilometers," Mark said. "We won't start tomorrow on full batteries, but we can drive in shifts. Assuming no more major obstacles— or at least advance warning without geological detours— we should be back on normal driving schedule by the time we get out of Mawrth."
"Pretty big assumptions, Mark," said Starlight.
"I'm thinking big," Mark replied. "Mars is a pretty big planet, after all."
"If you're thinking big, how about you think a little bigger about witches in the campaign!"
"Starlight, drop it. We're tired of it." Spitfire's first words in the radio conversation were the last...
... almost.
"So, talking to me?" Mark asked.
Starlight stared silently out the cockpit windows at the gradually receding mountainside.
"That'd be a no," Mark answered himself, and then the conversation really did die.
Author's Notes:
So, yeah. In the original book Mark talks about how Mawrth Vallis is wide open at the mouth and nice, smooth and near-level all the way up.
Take a look at actual orbiter maps, and you'll find none of that is true. The mouth of Mawrth Vallis, along the line of what obviously was the original edge of Arabia Terra, is almost completely closed off by a big-ass mountain. The interior of the valley has splits in the middle, rivulets, and one hell of a lot of boulders, as you would expect if you were looking at a river valley in mountainous terrain on Earth that one day spontaneously went dry.
That said, it's still Mark's best available option. But it's not going to be as easy as all that.
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Sol 464
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 473
ARES III SOL 464
Two ponies and a changeling galloped through the valley of Mawrth Vallis, hearts sinking as they drew close to the next obstacle.
"Please, please don't be what you look like," Cherry Berry moaned as she approached a sudden rise in the valley floor. The meter-high scarp was bad, but not insurmountable by itself, had it been even and level across the valley. It wasn't. The water of ancient floods had scoured a trench through the center of the rock layer that made up the scarp, leaving a trench that grew deeper as it rose up the valley. Although it technically grew narrower the farther back it went, the sides also grew higher and steeper. The total effect was a wheel-breaking, rover-dumping obstacle that had to be bypassed.
The previous two days had been full of this sort of thing, which is why the ponies had gone a full two kilometers ahead of the Whinnybago. Large boulders had to be moved or shattered to make room for the rover. The most level, most gradual slope had to be picked out. Three times so far the rover had actually had to backtrack, reversing Fireball's and Mark's roles in steering the contraption out of a cul-de-sac. They'd maintained their seventy kilometers per day, but at the cost of falling farther behind in battery recharge.
But this was the worst obstacle yet. A large plateau, twenty-five kilometers long according to reports from Hermes, split the valley in two. They'd been about to take the eastern channel (the valley running almost due north-south at this point) because Hermes reported the western one as narrower, unlevel, and clogged with boulders, some as big as the Whinnybago itself.
And now, well after noon, blocked by impassable terrain, Cherry had had enough. "Buck!" she shouted, and then added in English, "Friendship Actual to rover. All stop, all stop, all stop. And set out the solar panels. We've hit a really tough obstacle. We're not going any farther today."
"Cherry, we've only made forty-two kilometers-"
"And we're not going to make any more without careful planning, Mark!" Cherry snapped. "It's after noon already, and we're on our fifth hour of EVA." She held her tongue as she looked at Dragonfly, who drooped in her orange space suit. Changelings didn't have the endurance of ponies even without developing life-threatening levels of magic withdrawal. "We're going to use the rest of our EVA time to look over our options. In the meantime, stop before you get under the shadow of that mountain." She took a deep breath and added, "Starlight, report our situation to Hermes."
"Details, Cherry," Starlight called back from the old Amicitas bridge.
"Meter-tall rock shelf, almost sheer. The rock shelf is split down the middle by an eroded trench of some kind. The trench walls build up high and steep really quick as you go up the valley, leaving not a lot of safe room to either side without risking a fatal slide into the trench. We're scouting around to examine our options."
"Got it. I'll pass it along."
"I stopped the rover as soon as you gave the first order," Mark said. "We're parked. The plateau is square in the right window. Suiting up now."
"Good." Cherry looked over at Spitfire, her white suit badly soiled by several days of long-distance galloping. "Spitfire, go around the north end of the mountain. I want to know more about those boulders. Come back to the rover at 1330 hours."
"On it, commander," Spitfire said, saluting and then galloping back down the valley.
Cherry Berry looked at Dragonfly, who had stopped hiding her exhaustion at rest stops the day before. She motioned at Dragonfly's comms controls before switching her own to the private channel. Once Dragonfly had followed suit, she asked, "Are you up for a bit more scouting, or do you need to go back to the rover?"
"I can go on, so long as I don't need to gallop," Dragonfly said quietly.
"Okay. We could probably get the rover up over this shelf, but there's no point if there's not a safe path up. I'll take the eastern side of the branch, towards the valley walls. You take the side next to the mountain. We need a clear, mostly level path at least three times the width of the rover. Anything that puts wheels on the downslope leading into the valley is probably game over. Right?"
"Yeah," Dragonfly said, saving her breath.
"How's your suit battery?"
"Nineteen percent."
"At nine percent you go back to the rover, no matter what," Cherry said. "I don't want to risk you getting lost."
"Getting lost?" Dragonfly waved a hoof at the big flood-scarred wall of rock practically next to them. "Boss, we're in a valley. A darn big valley, yeah, but still a valley."
This was true. Mawrth Vallis was bigger than Ghastly Gorge, than practically any canyon or valley outside the Badlands that Cherry Berry could think of. It lay almost fifteen kilometers wide in places, so wide that the actual canyon walls, despite being as much as a kilometer high, just barely peeked over the horizon. Mark had told her there were a couple of canyons on Earth larger— the Grand Canyon was twice as deep and wide, if only about half as long— but that Mars had canyons much bigger than Mawrth— "Valles Marineris is so big that, if Mawrth flowed into it, it wouldn't even have its own name."
But it was still a valley. And the mountain next to them, according to Mark, would lead anyone near it back to the Whinnybago.
"Okay. Just be careful. Back to public channel, and get moving."
Dragonfly didn't gallop, but she made a decent walking speed up the slope to the right of the wash. Cherry jumped up the shelf— almost as tall as she was— and took off up the left side, gauging the slope, the maneuvering room, everything. Oddly enough, there weren't a lot of rocks here; the floods which carved out the canyon, and the rock scour they were trying to avoid in particular, must have flushed them farther down the valley to bedevil poor innocent shipwreck victims.
After half an hour Dragonfly said, "Returning to ship as per orders. There's a path on this side, but it's pretty narrow. And getting the rover up that first step will be a pain."
"Roger," Cherry said. "The way is a lot more open and clear on this side, and the channel slopes merge smoothly with the upper levels of the valley. I'm going to backtrack and see if there's a path up the sides of the main channel that the rover can climb."
"Spitfire here. The west channel is no go. Tight, deep channel crammed with rocks. We might make a kilometer per day trying to get through on this side. I'm coming back."
"Roger," Cherry repeated. "See you in about an hour."
She stopped, looking around the slopes near her. The ground here looked different than most of the rest of Mars she'd seen so far. The colors were different— for example, there was the orange not of Martian dust, but good old common clay like she might see on some of the farm roads around Ponyville. That particular shade hadn't been in the planet's color palette anywhere near the Hab.
For a moment she felt like she could follow the streak of orange and, in a few moments, be walking past Golden Harvest's farm, next to Sweet Apple Acres...
... and that moment of thinking of home, instead of a task at hand, opened a crack in her mind.
A wave of panic slammed through her as, for the first time in months, the full weight of responsibility and danger struck her. She'd been fine as long as there was a task, but now that she'd paused, that she'd thought of being in Ponyville again, now that she was off alone by herself, she reverted to a typical Ponyville pony, right down to the hair-trigger panic button. Every fiber of her being shouted at once, I'm not supposed to be doing this! I don't know what I'm doing! Princess, save us!! I don't care which princess! I'll even take Flurry Heart! Just don't leave this up to me!!
She flopped onto her side, the fabric of her spacesuit scraping the loose dust of the valley floor as she curled into a ball and let the panic attack wash over her. It had been a while, but she knew the symptoms by now— the racing heart, the uncontrollable tears, the waves of fear and shame. Give it a few minutes, a part of her separate from the storm thought. Let it run its course, and she'd be able to control herself again. Trying to push through immediately, without something to focus on, would just make it last longer.
The suit comms didn't give her that time. "Cherry, this is Starlight. Johanssen apologizes for the bad info. The colors of the valley here make telling surface features difficult, and a meter escarpment is pushing the limits of what they can make out from orbit. They figured you'd just go around the wash on the left side."
With her insides still storming with fear and anxiety, Cherry found room for surprise at just how calm her own voice could sound. "Looks like that's what we're doing, all right," she said. "If we can get up above the wash, there's a broad level area that goes for kilometers with almost no rocks. But getting up is going to be the problem."
"No hurry," Starlight said. "NASA sent Mark on an extended EVA. They want all the pictures he can get of the rock layers of the plateau. Something about clays and... phyllosilicates, I think Johanssen said."
"Silicates?" Cherry asked, focusing on the conversation as her lifeline back to sanity. "Like the cave? Didn't Mark say something about the cave being made over millions of years from dissolved mineral deposits? Maybe this is where the minerals came from."
"It's not impossible," Mark said, cutting into the conversation. "I don't see any level routes up and out of the main channel on the left side that I'd like to try driving the Whinnybago up. How crumbly is that rock ledge?"
