And then the plume of fire pulled out of its dive with a terrifying slowness, swinging away from the perpendicular, approaching the ground closer and closer...
... but not quite touching it. Less than a hundred meters overhead, it soared over their position and began to climb again, rising over the now clearly visible rim of Crommelin to the south.
And behind it, mixed with the dust rapidly settling out of the rare Martian atmosphere, fell snowflakes.
The alarms didn't stop now. Fortunately, the life support wasn't cutting in and out anymore, either. The tiny part of her mind Spitfire could spare for irrelevancies decided that Twilight Sparkle must be leaning on the override switch constantly. Good for her.
In a way, the suit breach felt like it helped. Spitfire thought she felt a slight improvement in the lift and thrust from her wings. Without that, she didn't think she could have pulled out of the dive, not with the stupid batteries harnessed to her. The fact that she was gasping for air, her mouth wide open, her lungs laboring, all that was a minor issue.
Whatever. Finish the job. Hold on to all the momentum you can. Keep pushing. Bank around and come in for another strike-
The overwhelming power that had flowed through her wings CEASED.
The laws of physics, which had railed against the flagrant violations the spacesuited pegasus had committed, pounced. Air resistance grabbed at the empty ship batteries, slowing Spitfire below the local speed of sound almost instantly.
She reached for the release buckle... and yanked her hoof away, instead hitting the switch for suit power. She didn't know where she was in relation to the ship, and she was not going to risk dropping two heavy rocks from the sky onto her friends' heads.
The suit power came up, providing a water fountain where the big batteries had been a firehose. But it was enough, for the moment, to regain control.
With the suit power came the comms and the nav-ball. She didn't have the breath to spare for talking, but she could see the nav-ball and the beacon for the ship.
The same part of her mind that had imagined an alicorn princess propping up a wall with one hoof to keep a certain switch closed now noted, with an almost insane clinical detachment, that she'd just missed a perfect bombing shot if she'd wanted to utterly destroy the rover with a hundred kilos of crystal and metal. Even as she thought it, she passed over the rover at a kilometer high and dropping faster and faster.
Two other things ran through Spitfire's head: Wings become useless when you drop much below two hundred meters per second on Mars, and Once you activate suit power, your flight time can be measured in seconds.
Without really thinking about it, Spitfire spread her wings as wide as they could go, pounding them frantically, in the process pumping air through the breach in her left wing sleeve. Snow condensed out of the leak as soon as it left the hole, trailing a cloud of white behind her where there had been a streak of fire. She banked left and down, using the little power remaining to regain enough speed for her wings to catch enough of the thinning air to make the turn back to the ship.
The red world beneath her turned... turned... so slowly...
It grew closer... fast... faster... faster...
She saw the rover again. More to the point, she saw the cairns where her friends were waiting.
More alarms were going off. The suit breach had gone beyond the life support system's ability to compensate. Gasping for air wasn't helping anymore. Panic began rising in her chest, for lack of anything else there to rise.
And then she remembered the second force field.
Flight time measured in seconds. No power to spare.
Buck that!
Spitfire fumbled frantically at her chest with her forehooves, found the loose cable, and jammed it into the plug carved into the little crystal slice.
A pointy bubble appeared around her, streamlined back by the rush of air, thin as it was, around her. She could see herself slowing down in relation to the surface, dragged back by the field's resistance.
And she could feel air, precious, life-giving air, returning to her lungs as the life support filled up the bubble with air. It felt...
... really, really painful. The inside of her chest felt like she'd inhaled sandpaper.
She felt her wings lose way in the air; she'd slowed down below the speed required to gain lift. All she had left was momentum, and that was a rapidly diminishing resource.
Oh, look. There's the ground. Hello, ground. Be kind to me when I'm buried in-
She felt something grab her, and in a yank she hadn't felt since the crash landing all those sols before, she came to a rapid stop some thirty meters above the surface. Then, slowly, she was lowered to the ground, while a large blue bubble of light charged towards her position.
Spitfire let herself flop forward onto her barrel when she touched down. She didn't have the strength to stand. She couldn't get the air to stand. She felt herself begin to shake. Everything was cold, horribly cold, despite the warm air blowing from the vents in her suit.
The force field flickered and burst as it merged with the larger one. Figures stood over her. They had voices— the voices had been in her ears for some time now, but they hadn't seemed really important, no matter how urgent they sounded.
"The left wing is ripped wide open!"
"There's a pinhole leak in the right wing, too!"
"Spitfire, you idiot! Why the buck do you still have those batteries strapped on!"
"Don't just stand there, get them off her!"
"Hey." Was that her voice? She'd always had a rasp to it, but wow. "Told you I'd bring the batteries back."
"I can't hold this field much longer! Get the crap off her and get her to the airlock, now!!"
Airlock. Ship. What a good idea.
Spitfire wanted to help, but she hurt, and she was so very...
... very, very...
... tired.
Moving as fast as they could without jarring their burden, the crew carried the unconscious pegasus back to the Whinnybago.
Around them, the shattered, dusty fragments of sky fell.
Author's Notes:
Well, this turned out to be longer than I expected.
But now you see why I didn't want to try to write this during a convention.
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Sol 484
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MISSION LOG — SOL 484
The skies are clear and dark blue, and the north rim of Crommelin is so clear on the horizon it almost looks like we could walk to it in half an hour. We're no longer trapped under a thick curtain of airborne dirt.
So why, you might ask, are we still sitting here like a bump on a log? Well, I'll tell you.
First and foremost, after yesterday's miracle (there's no other word for it), Spitfire is still in a bad way. We had to cut those wing sleeves off of her, because the uncured changeling gunk had pretty much sealed to her wings. When the sleeves finally came off, they took a lot of pony feathers with them. She woke up during the process, and we had to give her a triple dose of the pony painkillers to get her back to sleep.
Fortunately, the pony medical kit actually has medicine— I suppose "potion" is a better word— to accelerate regrowth of pegasus feathers. It's just like the medicine Spitfire kept jamming down Starlight's throat when her right foreleg was broken. It doesn't work as well as it does back on their homeworld, though, which is why they administer it only when they're running the magic field... which has been cut down to three minutes a day. More about that in a bit.
But the bigger worry is decompression sickness. When Spitfire wakes up, she complains that her lungs feel like raw meat. Been there, done that. But lung tissue is incredibly resilient. Also, there's another medicine bottle specifically to treat smoke inhalation, and the ponies on the other end of their water telegraph gave the go-ahead to use that on Spitfire, too. It'll be a long healing process, but we like her odds there... or would, if it wasn't for the headaches.
Whenever Spitfire wakes up, she complains of terrible headaches and joint pain. She also sees stars, the way you might if you get hit in the head really hard. I suspect our little hero had a very close brush with the bends. I didn't get that, because my exposures to low air pressure were brief— first when the antenna impaled me on Sol 6, second when my suit caught fire in the perchlorate bomb on Sol 40.
(God, that was over a year ago. So hard to believe... seems like only yesterday I was driving across Mars in a pain-filled stupor, egged on by a hallucination that turned out not to be a hallucination at all... fuck, I better stop this. I'm getting nostalgic for the times I was almost killed by Mars, and I'm not off this motherfucking planet yet!)
Anyway, the proper treatment for the bends is a hyperbaric chamber with an almost pure oxygen atmosphere. The bends are caused by gaseous nitrogen in the bloodstream. Normally nitrogen, like oxygen, remains dissolved in the blood. But when you undergo a sudden drop in pressure, it can come out of solution, becoming bubbles that operate just as efficiently as blood clots for cutting off circulation. Left untreated, the bends can kill just like a stroke— exactly like a stroke, in fact— or cause permanent injury.
Unfortunately we don't have a hyperbaric chamber. Once Spitfire told us the symptoms, we stuffed her into Starlight Glimmer's suit and asked the pony homeworld to overpressurize the suit with as high a concentration of oxygen, and zero nitrogen, as they could manage. We take off her helmet for meals, then stuff a rolled-up shirt into it for a pillow, put it back on, and let her drift off.
Fortunately, Spitfire seems to be escaping the paralysis and nausea that my training taught me come with the bends. (Ares astronauts get training on this because we have to be prepared for triage and recovery in case of a Hab breach.) We'll have to watch her, but the worst should be over in a week. After that, Spits gets to begin recovery, and we find out what, if anything, she's lost permanently.
That's the main reason we haven't moved an inch— taking care of Spitfire. But there are other reasons.
We didn't know what damage the storm did to the exterior of the Whinnybago. We did know, however, that when Spitfire killed the storm, all the dust it was carrying fell almost straight down. So this morning Fireball, Starlight Glimmer (borrowing Dragonfly's spacesuit) and I spent the entire morning cleaning off the rover, dusting off the solar panels, and inspecting everything for signs of damage. We took special care with a bottle of compressed air to clean out all ten rover wheels. The last thing we want is for accumulated grit to lock up a wheel and make us drag it across the Martian plains.
In the process, we found four of the solar panel amplifier sheets had been broken in the storm. That required Starlight to levitate Fireball and myself up to remove the bad sheets, bring down the most intact parts of what was left, and then reverse the process once she'd used more of the spare quartz to fix them. Between that and the boosters and things, we've used up over half of that half-ton chunk of crystal we brought from the cave farm.
Meanwhile, Dragonfly spent today undoing the modifications on Spitfire's suit. That required cutting out the wing sleeves, stitching the flaps back in place, stealing about two square feet of the spare Hab canvas, and a lot more puking up black sticky stuff. She's lying down next to Spitfire now. When I asked if she was all right, she flipped me the "high hoof" and rolled over. Not a happy camper, is our little love bug.
And finally, reports. Oh, GOD, the reports. The ponies took turns flooding the toilet with water describing the last couple of days. They had it easy. I had to make my report by vox, and NASA kept relaying more questions to Hermes for me to answer. By the time today's broadcast window finally closed, I was feeling a little... like I'd swallowed broken glass. (See, I can too resist the urge for a cheap joke!)
But one day is all we can spare. Hermes is getting closer. The lightspeed lag is only five minutes now. In sixty-two sols, ready or not, it's going to fly by. And we're still over sixteen hundred kilometers from the MAV. We've got to get moving.
(Besides, NASA is still shouting at me to send them the video Fireball captured of Spitfire's flight, and we need the MAV's radios to do it. So we better do that before the last scientist at JSC has a brain aneurysm and dies.)
The electric batteries are full again. Eleven of our magic batteries are empty, and most of that is power we're not getting back, but they'll regenerate a little each day. We're as ready to roll as we're going to get.
Tomorrow we turn east... and, in the words of BJ McKay, lay the hammer down.
Author's Notes:
Not a lot of energy today, so this is all I had. Staying up late last night to finish the chapter had its drawbacks.
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Sol 485
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"Well, Bruce," Venkat said, looking across the desk at the chief of JPL, "what have you brought to show me? The final MAV modification procedures, I hope?"
"I figured now was a good time," Bruce said. "We finalized them six days ago, but the storm thing came up. By the way," he added, "I was somewhere over New Mexico during the comms window with Hermes. What's the report?"
"Seventy-five kilometers today," Venkat said, smiling. "Spitfire is resting, eating well, and recovering, though she reports still having headaches. Even better, they're entering Meridiani Planitia; mostly flat, level, empty land. Between the clear skies and smooth terrain, they should make excellent progress over the next ten sols or so."
"That's good to hear," Bruce said. "I've been looking at the satellite photos taken near the time of the event. It's a shame that Hermes was at the wrong angle to see the flight. I doubt its video cameras could have picked up any details, but it would have been nice to try."
"Believe me, the photos we have are still plenty," Venkat said. "Not that the people demanding more would agree. We're lucky we had satellites in place to monitor the Whinnybago's usual drive time, and that they launched Spitfire during that window. But some of the people asking for more pictures act like NASA has a secret time machine that would let us go back and take more photos." He shook his head. "The ones with doctorates, at least, ought to know better."
