"Right. No thrusters," Spitfire nodded.
"These," Starlight Glimmer said, tapping the bits of quartz on Spitfire's chest, "are force field projectors. The first one is for launch, during the sub-sonic portion of your flight. It should keep the dust from destroying your suit before you build up a shockwave strong enough to keep it away. The second one is in case your suit breaches. Twilight Sparkle has been told to keep overriding your life support safeties in case of a breach. If your suit breaches, you activate this and come straight down at once if you can.
"The force field will keep out dust and hold in air, but it won't hold up to anything much more energetic. If you see a mountain up there, don't play tag with it."
"Ha ha," Spitfire said sarcastically.
"Once you're supersonic, you must remove the first force field projector by hoof," Starlight said. "One cable will be loose. You'll need to attach that cable to the second projector to activate it. I just hope you don't need it."
You hope? Spitfire thought. Aloud she merely said, "I understand."
"Okay, moving on to the suit proper," Starlight said. "We used the flaps we cut out of your suit to line the leading edges of your wings. They'll take the most punishment and protect the seams of the rest of the sleeves."
"The resin covering the wing-sleeves hasn't cured yet," Dragonfly groaned from a flight couch. Unlike the others, each of whom had their suits on and at least one magic battery to carry out, Dragonfly was staying in the ship. Having spent the entire afternoon and evening horking up goo for the flight harness and the space suit modifications, then actually making the spacesuit mods with Fireball's help, she was literally both sick and tired. "That's the only reason they still flex. The goo is still liquid around the fabric core. A small breach should be self-sealing. But don't tempt it. This isn't your regular flight suit."
"I know," Spitfire said. "My flight suit has naked wings." She'd actually tried to argue for leaving her wings open to the elements. She hadn't been voted down so much as shouted down. Dragonfly had made the one argument against the notion that Spitfire considered valid; the only way to keep an airtight seal on wing slits would be to glue the suit to her skin. No seal meant no air... and no life.
"I really wish we could have used the spare Hab canvas for these," Starlight continued, tapping the spots just above the bulky mana batteries where the wing-sleeves had been added. With Spitfire's wings folded, the new fabric barely showed. "But Hab canvas blocks magic, according to the tests we ran on the rainbow crystals. Changeling goo doesn't, or at least no more than ordinary fabric does."
"I make work," Spitfire snapped.
"Anyway. If you have a suit breach, you abort. When the big batteries run out, you hit the quick-release." Starlight tapped— very carefully— the harness buckle directly under Spitfire's barrel. "I hate to lose these batteries, but better them than you."
"Won't lose `em," Spitfire said.
"When you abort, or when you succeed completely, you activate suit power," Starlight said. "That'll give you a beacon back to the ship. We'll be running the telepresence system for just that reason. But even with the double battery on the backpack, once you're on suit power your flight time will be measured in seconds. Come straight back as fast as you can. Don't waste effort slowing down or braking."
"According to NASA," Mark added, "wings in general become useless on Mars at any speed much below two hundred meters per second. That is, any wings smaller than a football field."
"Right. Just come at us as level as possible. I'll be waiting to grab you telekinetically."
"Got it."
"How are the connections?" Dragonfly asked.
Spitfire gave thought to the two little wires the changeling had added to her suit, ending in biomonitor pads stolen from the undergarment of Mark's spare suit. The adhesive on the pads tugged at the fur between her wings and made her skin itch abominably underneath. But she'd learned many years before to stay perfectly still no matter how she itched, after her first dose of KP duty at the Academy. "Solid," she said.
"Okay," Cherry Berry said. "Booster pad check?"
Mark checked the improvised flight couch— really just the largest flat bit of scrap metal from the small supply they'd brought in Rover 2, with three small repulsor targets bolted to it. "All solid," he said.
"Booster check?"
Starlight squinted at three bits of quartz, about the size of a paperback book each. "Enchantments look good," she said.
"Okay. Suit up," Cherry Berry said, lifting her helmet. "Fireball, Starlight and I go out first. Then Mark and Spitfire. Let's do it."
A pale blue sphere surrounded the rear of the Whinnybago. Flying dust and grit swirled around it. Inside it, a unicorn, an earth pony and a dragon waited as a human helped a badly overburdened pegasus navigate the boarding ladder that extended from the airlock almost to the ground.
The five went about their tasks in almost total silence, speaking only to confirm tasks completed. Fireball held a mana battery in one claw and Starlight Glimmer in the other, allowing the unicorn to keep her hooves on the battery terminals and focus on maintaining the force field. Mark and Cherry put Spitfire on the improvised launch platform and carried it, slowly and carefully, to the same cairns that had been used to launch Operation Cloudbuster the sol before. Once the launch platform was in place, they wired up the three boosters to the single battery dedicated to the launch. Two more batteries stood ready if and when the battery Starlight was using ran out of power.
Spitfire, in all of this, had nothing to do but lie back, wait, and think about exactly what a horrible idea this had been. She had, on a couple of rare occasions, barely managed an ordinary sonic boom. The only genuine rainbooms she'd ever witnessed had been performed by Rainbow Dash and Princess Twilight Sparkle; she herself had never, never gone that fast in her life. Not even close.
I'm about to fly what would be Mock 2 back home, she thought. Three times the local speed of sound. In a dust storm. And if anything breaks on my suit...
Oh, Faust, oh Faust, I am about to die.
No. Calm. We've taken every possible precaution. Multiple backup systems.
I am wearing a space suit that we took a pair of shears to. We patched it with changeling puke and scrap clothing. Then we strapped over two hundred and fifty pounds of rocks to it, so that I will not only have the aerodynamic properties of a brick, I'll be a bucking FAT brick.
I am SOOOOO gonna die.
Okay. Fine. You're gonna die, Spitfire. But your crew isn't. Keep your mind on the task. Beyond that? What happens, happens.
"How are you doing, Spitfire?" Mark asked over the suit comms.
"All go," she replied, her voice calm and steady as she'd trained to be.
"Okay," Mark said. "We're pulling back for launch. You're about to lose the force field. Are you ready?"
"Yes, Mark."
"Clear skies and fair winds, Spitfire." Where the buck had Cherry Berry picked up that old pegasus farewell? Probably an adventure book somewhere; nopony talked like that anymore.
Unless they thought somepony was about to die.
Oh, yeah.
"Yes, commander, clear skies, that's the plan," she said out loud.
"Counting down," Starlight said. "Thirty. Twenty-nine."
The wall of the force field flowed past and around Spitfire, and she suddenly felt the soft brush of talcum-light Martian dust running across her spacesuit. Right now, she thought, all it would take would be one well-placed bit of gravel, right in my faceplate, and it would all be over.
"Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen."
"Suit comms off at t minus six. Force field at t minus three, Spitfire," Cherry Berry called.
"Copy t minus three," Spitfire replied.
"Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven."
"Back in a few minutes, guys." She'd spent half the previous night thinking of what her last words would be pre-launch. Part of that had been because the phrase had to be in English, but only a small part. Most of it had been because she hadn't been able to think of anything except mush or empty bluster. This was— what was Starlight's word?— banal, but it had a certain class, a clean simplicity.
As a dying mare's last words, she could do worse. She switched off suit power.
"Six. Five. Four."
On three Spitfire's hoof hit the toggle switch, and the two big batteries came to life. A smaller version of the same force field Starlight Glimmer had used popped up around her. At the same time magic poured through her, in a strength she couldn't remember ever having before. She felt like all of Equestria was pouring into her wings.
She'd never touched a magic battery's terminals during operation before. She could see, now, how Starlight might find it addictive, here and now.
And then zero came, and the mighty hoof of Faust slid under her back and shoved her towards the skies.
Centrifuge training, back at Cape Friendship, came back to her instantly, as did the Dizzitron at the Academy. She clenched her abdomen, breathed shallowly, forced the darkness at the edges of her vision to stay there. Somewhere off unimportant, a voice counted upwards, sounding urgent, as if shouting a number made it more real somehow.
Ignore it. Focus on the mission.
The forcefield deformed around her, pushing closer to her as the forces pushing against it intensified. Just beyond it she could see dust being pushed aside, not by the force field, but by the inability of the air immediately in front of her and the launch platform to get out of the way.
Almost time. Be ready.
And then, just as suddenly as Faust's hoof had lifted her up, it was gone. Free-fall.
Instantly Spitfire's newly sleeved wings opened— just a little, for opening them completely at this speed would have been suicidal. She raised a hoof into the sky, slapped away the force field crystal with her other hoof, felt the magic in her wings...
... and pushed.
The forcefield died, and several kilometers above the surface of Mars, nothing remained but a storm and a single pegasus carrying two massive batteries and over seven hundred meters per second of momentum.
Spitfire's first task was to level off while maintaining speed. That took almost half a minute. Even at the absurd speed, with magic flooding her wings, there wasn't that much air for them to get purchase on. Besides, this was a completely unknown environment. No pegasus had ever flown under conditions like this before, anywhere, ever.
But though the sky was alien, it wasn't totally unfamiliar. Spitfire had flown high altitude and high speed enough that these conditions, potentially lethal as they were, had some familiar qualities.
She could work with it.
But the clock was ticking. She had to get to work.
Without realizing it, she'd turned automatically into the wind. Good. Counter-flying the rotation of a storm was the way you broke it... you and a couple dozen other Wonderbolts, or a couple hundred ordinary weatherponies. But since there was only her, she'd have to make up the difference with sheer speed.
Even with the batteries pouring magic through her, she couldn't maintain seven hundred meters per second for long in level flight. She'd have to angle down, let Mars's weak gravity help her.
She found herself panting. Had the suit lost integrity? No— no alarms yet. This was just exhaustion, being out of shape, and that lost lung capacity from the last medical exams.
No time for weakness. Either this works, or the crew dies. Pony up and do the job.
Spitfire's eyes caught a glimmer of light. There, above her, was a blazing streak of orange flame, floating in the sky like...
... like a contrail. Like her contrail, except that instead of smoke, she was trailing fire behind her. A ring of fire. A spiral of fire.
No. A corkscrew of fire. Because Mars, you bucking rock with delusions of grandeur, you just got screwed.
Spitfire grit her teeth, angled a little downward, and flapped her wingtips, pushing for the heart of the storm.
"Oh my God."
Starlight had just switched to the second magic battery, the force field flickering for only a moment, when Mark pointed skywards and said the words. There, miles and miles overhead, a flickering thread of light shone through the dark haze of the dust storm.
"She's doing it!" Cherry Berry cheered. "Go for it, Spitfire! You can do it!"
Unnoticed by the observers on the ground, the launch platform crashed to the ground behind them, sending up a thin spattering of chipped rocks from the impact.
The air grew thicker, and so did the dust. Despite that, Spitfire knew she was slowing down, losing momentum, losing power.
She couldn't help it. For all the power in her wings, she couldn't really feel the air around her through the sticky, horrid wing sleeves. She wondered how well an earth pony farmer would do with all four hooves in galoshes, trying to work the fields.
But she could feel a little, secondhand. Her instincts told her where the currents of the weather were going, how they could be distrupted, how she could bust them. She plowed through them, always turning her leading hoof into the greatest point of resistance, each descending loop growing tighter around the center of the storm's circulation.
And above, unseen by her, gaps in the storm appeared, spreading out from her contrail, which persisted in its glow as if the Martian air itself was burning.
And then she felt a tug on her wingtip, an imbalance in the huge, bulky batteries, each bigger than her head, strapped to her sides.
There. That's the core of the storm.
Her suit alarms went off— suit breach. The life support cut out, then cut back in. In, out, in, out, in... and stopped. Breach self-sealed, for the moment. Good.
She felt another eddy, a downdraft in her wake. Yes. It's weakened. It's breaking.
Time to finish it.
She rolled to the right, nosed down, and dove down through the heart of the storm.
The trail of fire followed her down.
The castaways stared up as the corkscrew of light grew tighter, and tighter, and then...
... stabbed.
The light plunged down through the storm, descending faster and faster. As it plunged, it expanded, sending rings of condensed dust pluming outwards from the center of rotation to descend in a slow shower on the ground below.
Patches of ordinary Mars-red sky began to appear through the breaks in the storm overhead. Even as they watched, the red patches became red-ringed patches of pink, and then pink-ringed patches of the same amazing blue they'd experienced for weeks after the first booster test.
