She could feel Sojourner's smug feeling from its corner, as if it were saying, I did work today! She could sense the Whinnybago's confidence: I am rolling, and I will continue to roll, because I was reborn to roll. But she'd never bothered to try tuning her insanity to Radio Free Twig before. Why not?
She turned all her attention to the leaf-covered branch stuck in mildly damp soil.
Must get bigger. Must get stronger. Must get big and strong real soon.
"I don't think it notices the terrain," Dragonfly said carefully. "It's really focused on growing as fast as it can."
"Really?" The dragon actually smiled at that. "That's good. Good Groot."
Dragonfly sensed a sudden spike of... delight? "It knows we're paying attention to it," she added. "It likes attention a lot."
"Who doesn't?" Fireball asked.
"You mean, besides dragons?"
"Dragons love attention," Fireball said. "We just don't like visitors."
"Pardon me for asking," Dragonfly said, "but why are you fooling with Cherry's plant anyway? If she finds out she's going to have your hide."
"I asked first," Fireball said, a little primly. "Ever since the cave farm, I've been wondering how it feels to take care of something of my own." He reached over to the copilot seat and turned the sample-box planter a quarter turn. "Feels kinda nice so far."
Dragonfly could just barely hear Cherry Berry's voice through Fireball's headset as she broke in, speaking in English. "Small crater ahead. About a kilometer wide. Rubble field for two hundred meters around the rim. Scattered rocks a lot wider."
"Roger. Any problem with taking it on the south side?" Mark asked from the rover's driver cabin.
"Negative. No sign of any serious obstacle on either side," Cherry said.
"Okay. Fireball, prepare for plus ten."
Fireball switched his mike back on. "Copy plus ten," he replied, also in English.
"On my count... five, four, three, two, one, turn!"
Fireball turned the flight yoke on the word turn.
"Hold... hold... and zero!"
Fireball re-centered the flight yoke, and with barely a wobble the Whinnybago rolled on.
"Battery check?" Cherry called.
"Twenty-one percent," Mark answered. "About half an hour to go."
"Roger. Looking forward to lunch. And some hot cherry tea."
"Me too. Fireball, get Dragonfly on the headset, will ya?"
"Roger." Fireball took his claws off the flight yoke long enough to remove his headset. "It's for you," he said, handing it down to Dragonfly.
Dragonfly squeezed between the pilot and copilot seats, carefully placing her forehooves away from any important active controls. "Dragonfly here, Mark. What's up?"
"How did the Sojourner test go?"
"By the numbers," Dragonfly said. "Should be a lot of new pictures in the rover's data storage."
"You might want to have it wave out the port side windows," Mark said. "We're passing by Opportunity right now."
"Opportunity? What's that? Where is it?"
"We can't see it. It's over three hundred kilometers south-southwest of us. This is as close as we get. But Opportunity was one of the two rovers that came immediately after Sojourner. A bigger younger sister, if you like. It was expected to last one hundred sols. It survived for years and years."
"I don't suppose we could stop by and visit?" Dragonfly asked.
"Over three hundred kilometers south? Nope, sorry. We need to keep moving. Besides, Opportunity is a lot bigger than Sojourner. It wouldn't fit in the airlock."
"I wasn't thinking of taking it with us," Dragonfly protested.
"I know. But the Opportunity mission is detailed in the Project Ares database. Go read about it if you're bored. It was one of the most successful space probes of all time. I think only the Voyagers beat it out."
"Oh? Where are they?"
"They left the solar system decades ago. They were deep space probes, sent to fly by our outer planets. Have you tried anything like that yet where you come from?"
"No. We were going to just use the Sparkle Drive to go there direct."
"Well, you've got some wonderful things to look forward to, then," Mark said. "Anyway, put Fireball back on. I think I see that crater Cherry found, and we may need to make some turns in a minute."
"Okay." Dragonfly hoofed the headset back up to Fireball, then left the dragon and the plant to their driving.
Reading about Opportunity and its sister Spirit consumed the remaining driving time for the day. Thirty minutes of distraction.
Only about twelve more waking hours to go...
Author's Notes:
With the immediate danger past and nothing but open road (or lack thereof) ahead, here's a chapter more or less about nothing.
Writing this on the laptop. My desktop HD is all but dead— hesitating and locking up a LOT. I managed to back everything on it up overnight— at least I think I did— but Monday I have to hand the compy over to a tech to clone the drive and check the computer's drive controller to make sure it isn't an issue.
Fun times...
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Sol 492
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 501
ARES III SOL 492
Cherry Berry took the sample box full of water and began washing off her space suit, beginning by splashing her forehooves in the plastic bin.
The Hab had had an advanced air filtration system that scrubbed dust particles out of the air and a full decontamination shower. Amicitas had had neither, and there wasn't space or weight allowance for them in the Whinnybago. After a couple sols of driving, Mark had noticed the buildup of dust in the trailer and had insisted, using graphic and detailed accounts of the potential inhalation hazards of perchlorates and regolith, on efforts to get the dust out of the trailer again.
The solution relied heavily on one of the few resources the ship had an endless supply of: cold water. Suits would get as much of their surface as possible washed off, leaving aside only those spots which might be hurt by getting wet. This would be done in the airlock, so that when the last suit was cleaned, someone with a dry suit could suit up, open the outer airlock doors, and quickly sluice out the airlock floor before the water froze or evaporated.
It was Cherry's turn to do it this sol, and she was already worn out. The Martian sky had already returned to its normal pink tones, and there had been a large, rocky ridge to overcome. (Mark said it was an ancient riverbed, which seemed crazy to Cherry; since when did riverbeds bulge up from the surface? Mark had said something about concretion, but Cherry wasn't interested unless the concrete was a royal highway leading straight to the MAV.) Cherry wanted lunch, followed by several hours of immobility.
So when she saw, through the open inner airlock doors, Spitfire suited up in her own spacesuit and doing stretching exercises, Cherry Berry's nerves grew just a little bit more frayed. "Spitfire," she said quietly, "what are you doing?"
"I'm going out for a trot as soon as you're done," Spitfire said. "Don't worry, I'll wash out the airlock when I get back."
"The heck you are," Cherry Berry said.
"Cherry? Spitfire?" Mark, his freshly heated food pack in his hands, leaned over the second row of flight couches. "Something wrong?"
"We're fine, Mark," Cherry said in English, forcing a smile.
"Yes. Fine. All good," Spitfire added.
Mark didn't look like he believed it, but he shrugged and sat down in one of the seats to eat his meal.
Cherry ground her teeth. She'd have to keep her voice soft and sweet, considering how much Equestrian Mark understood. "Spitfire, go put that suit away and eat your lunch," she murmured.
"What's the problem?" Spitfire asked. "I completed the week of rest. My head only hurts a little, and my joints don't hurt at all anymore. I'm better. And I need to get some exercise so I can build my strength back up." She tossed her head, adding, "And don't talk to me about relapses. I'm the mission medic. And so long as I don't go flying or rip my suit, I'm safe to begin moderate exercise."
Cherry's teeth grit a little harder. "I'm not worried about you having a relapse," she lied. "But your suit is compromised all to Tartarus. Dragonfly fixed it up so you'll have it for brief EVAs, but the more you take it outside, the weaker the patches will get."
"It'll hold up for half an hour of trotting!" Spitfire insisted, not bothering to keep her voice low. "If it won't, then Dragonfly needs to do the job over!"
"Is somebody calling my name?" The changeling herself strolled out of the habitat deck, trotting up to where Mark sat eating his lunch. "What's all the noise?" she asked him in English.
"Well," Mark said, "Spitfire wants to go outside for a run. Cherry Berry doesn't want her to because she's afraid Spitfire's suit might blow out at the patches. And neither of them wants to make a scene about it in front of me. At least not Cherry."
Cherry Berry blushed. So much for keeping voices low. And apparently Mark understood even more Equestrian than she'd thought.
"Come on, commander," Spitfire moaned. "I've been stuck in here for over a week. I need to get out of here for a little while or else I'm gonna buck some heads."
"You can put up with it a while longer," Cherry said. "Look at Dragonfly. She's been in here just as long as you have. And she's holding up just fine."
"Are you kidding?" Spitfire asked. "Dragonfly spent two months in a cocoon. I'm pretty sure she doesn't get claustrophobia."
"Excuse me," Dragonfly said, a little miffed. "I was asleep for those two months, thank you. I get cabin fever about as much as the next bug."
"Anyway, it's just half an hour."
"Sure it is," Cherry said. "And what happens if the patches fail when you're out there? You could asphyxiate in seconds if it's a bad leak."
"So don't let her go out alone," Dragonfly suggested. "Send someone with her carrying one of Mark's emergency patch kits. They'll work just as well on our suits as on his."
"See?" Spitfire said, grinning. "No excuse left! C'mon, bug, let's go for a run!"
"Yeah, no," Dragonfly said. "You've heard of the law of conservation of energy? Well, I'm conserving mine, and that's the law."
Cherry Berry cleared her throat. "Fireball?" She called out. "Could you come here a moment?"
"Huh?" Spitfire's face scrunched up inside her helmet. "What do you want Fireball for?"
Fireball walked onto the bridge still crunching on a sliver of quartz. "Yeah?" he asked.
"Please suit up," Cherry said. "Spitfire needs a backup for her EVA. She wants to get out of the ship for a while."
"Don't we all," Fireball muttered.
"No, not really," Dragonfly corrected, radiating innocence.
Spitfire looked at Fireball, then at Cherry, pleading in her eyes. "Commander, please, not Fireball," she begged. "He's even slower than Mark is. If I have to stay close to him, I won't even get beyond a walk! Can't you send somepony else?"
"His suit is intact— well, more than anyone else's— and more to the point, it's dry," Cherry pointed out. "The only other dry suit right now is Starlight Glimmer's, because she's been using Dragonfly's for scouting duty."
"But Cherry..." The former Wonderbolts commander, for all her experience and maturity, had trouble keeping the whine out of her voice.
"Have a nice bit of exercise," Cherry said, using a bit of Ares III discarded clothing to wipe down her hooves. "And don't forget to wash out the airlock once you're done."
Author's Notes:
I have a headache, and my right arm (which has had rotator cuff and tendonitis issues since February) is more sore than usual today. So this is all I could come up with.
Incidentally, ridges made of ancient dried river beds are very much a real thing on Mars. Arabia Terra is full of them. They're formed because sediment from the ancient river beds, being mostly grains of basaltic material, made an excellent cement to hold together larger bits of other rocks, forming a kind of concrete. Over billions of years, this natural concrete eroded more slowly than the surrounding material, so what had once been the lowest point in the local terrain eventually became the highest point.
And incidentally, they've had to shut down the life support multiple times to stick a tool down the air lines and wipe dust and other crud off the crystal that didn't get transported along with the air.
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Sol 494
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MISSION LOG — SOL 494
Three years ago, if you'd told me that one day I would find Mars boring, I'd have said you were crazy. Wait a minute, that's not exactly true. I'd have told you to go fuck yourself, because I'd just been selected as prime crew for Ares III and was totally into every aspect of the hardcore training we had to do before we shipped out. But you get the idea.
Anyway, whaddaya know? I'm on Mars, and I'm bored.
Aside from the little bit of mildly life-threatening weather we had, we've been in a rut, so to speak. Every sol we drive seventy-odd kilometers across terrain that, truth be told, tends to look a lot alike. (Seventy-four km each of the last three days; we've used over 200 kg of food and over 200 kg of our emergency quartz supply, and the lighter load is showing in our power efficiency.)
After every sol of driving, I set out the rover solar panels so the batteries can recharge, then go in to exchange a quick message with Hermes— we're only about four light-minutes apart now, and the signal is getting pretty clear. After that lunch, reading time (everyone has their own book they're reading silently, but for some reason we still like reading aloud from one book together, even if it is Agatha Christie). Every three afternoons we have a D&D session; Starlight comes up with basic scenarios, and I fill in the actual challenges and run the game. It's more fun for everyone that way, since Starlight tends to get a little TPK when players piss her off.
On sols that we don't do D&D, we watch television, or we work on the various reports we owe NASA and the pony space programs once we get to the MAV. We don't stay up too long after dark, because we have to wake up well before dawn to have breakfast, suit up, pick up the solar panels, and then start driving again just as the pre-dawn light begins filling the sky. Besides, when the sun sets it gets damn cold in the bridge.
