It was days like today that made Spitfire curse this planet, curse its lack of air or magic, and above all curse a space suit that didn’t come equipped with proper wing sleeves.

Not that she could have flown even with wing sleeves, but Spitfire didn’t want to hear such rational arguments. She was stuck to the ground like a fallen dart, while the others worked on unloading the main engines from Amicitas. Cherry Berry was policing a small area where two of the three engines would come to rest, while Fireball and Mark set up the cradle (which, annoyingly, had taken two days to build) that would hold the third. Starlight Glimmer was the magic crane that would lift each engine out of its mount inside the tail of the ship, while Dragonfly crawled all over and inside that tail assembly, removing the dozens of bolts which held each engine securely in place.

And what was Spitfire? Useless.

Correction: hopefully useless. Spitfire wanted nothing less than a situation where emergency medical aid was required, especially since any conceivable first-aid situation would also include space suit damage, decompression, and all the other ingredients of a Bad Day without even flying.

This bucking planet.

Spitfire wandered over to Starlight, who had her left forehoof resting across the terminals of a magic battery. For whatever reason Starlight had chosen to use the two emergency batteries from the shipwreck rather than any of the new ones. That seemed appropriate to Spitfire. These batteries had been intended to operate the ship, and after a fashion they still were. “How much longer?” she asked.

Starlight gave her a pained look, then waved her head in the direction of Mark.

“Ugh. How long?” Spitfire asked, this time in English.

“It’s a lot of bolts,” Starlight pointed out. “A lot of bolts in deliberately hard-to-reach places. Give it a-“

“Done!” Dragonfly shouted from the tail of the ship. “They’re ready to slide out of their cradles!”

“-never mind,” Starlight said, reaching down to switch on the battery. “Fireball, Mark, get ready to guide down the first engine into the cradle!”

Fireball and Mark both gave thumbs-up signs.

Spitfire gestured to the battery. “Is that going to be enough?” she asked.

“This battery has ninety percent charge,” Starlight replied, smiling smugly. “I picked up the whole ship, before we trimmed anything, on a twenty percent charge. The three engines should be easy.” Saying that, she switched on the battery, put her hoof on a terminal, and lit up her horn.

The uppermost of the three engines, complete with the smaller-than-normal bells scavenged from the MAV landing stage, slid out of its cradle in the tail assembly, surrounded by a blue glow tinged violet against the pink Martian sky. Steadily, effortlessly, it floated in the air well above the dusty Martian ground towards the carefully prepared test cradle, where Mark and Fireball stood ready to guide the motor down into the cradle and clamp it in securely.

And then, at that moment, the battery terminal snapped off under Starlight’s hoof. The indicators on the battery died. Starlight grunted softly, and then her magic winked out and she slumped to the ground.

Roughly one and a half tons of irreplaceable equipment in motion began to fall. Directly below it and in front of it, Mark stared up at it, moving slowly- too slowly- trying to get out of its way.

And then fresh magic surrounded the motor, a green balefire that wrenched the falling engine away from Mark, twisting it on its side, and dropping it, a little roughly, a couple of ponylengths to the side of the cradle.

Spitfire blinked. The whole sequence of events, from the failure of the battery to the hard landing of the rocket motor, might have taken about three seconds- less than that. But it had seemed-

Something else fell. Martian dust billowed up around an orange and white object next to the tail of Amicitas.

“Mare down!”

“Dragonfly!”

Mark ran for the fallen changeling. Fireball shifted back and forth on his feet, looking first at Dragonfly and then at Starlight, who still lay on the dirt next to the failed battery and its unused brother. Spitfire realized she was doing the same, dancing on her hooves trying to decide who to go to first.

“Fireball!” Cherry Berry’s voice cracked over the comms. “Pick up Starlight. Mark, bring Dragonfly. Spitfire, help me with the good battery. Everybody back inside the Hab. This task is scrubbed!”

“Perfect… English.” Starlight Glimmer’s voice came over the comms weakly, but it was there. “A… plus…”

“Don’t talk,” Cherry ordered. “We’ll get you inside and check you out.”

“What the hell?” That was Mark, who had Dragonfly’s suit in his arms. “Since when is Dragonfly this light? It feels like this suit is empty!”

Oh, yeah, Spitfire thought. That was Dragonfly’s magic catching the engine when it fell. And she didn’t have a battery…

… oh buck me.

Spitfire remembered something she’d overheard Dragonfly saying, many, many Martian days ago.

For me magic and love are the same thing.

Spitfire wasn’t used to lifting heavy objects in her forelimbs without the use of her wings (seriously, buck this pressure suit), but she made it work, wrestling the presumably good battery onto Cherry’s back and fastening the harness made for it- that Dragonfly had made for it- onto the earth pony’s backpack.

Then the lot of them, four walking, one semi-conscious, and one… unknown… headed for the nearest Hab airlock, paying no mind to the rules about alternating airlocks. Speed counted for more than caution.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit.

The engine test didn’t come off as planned. In fact, it didn’t happen at all. Everything was going fine until the magic battery Starlight Glimmer was using to lift an engine broke for no apparent reason. (Well, that’s a bit of a stretch; the battery in question was one of the two that survived the crash-landing- specifically the one that was sitting unsecured in the engine compartment and got bounced around like a pinball when the pony ship belly-flopped onto Mars. But as ugly as the battery was, it worked just fine until today, so the question is, why break now?)

Anyway, when the magic quit Starlight was holding not quite a ton and a half of rocket guts about twenty feet in the air and moving at walking pace towards the cradle Fireball and I had built. The thing about heavy objects floating twenty feet in the air over a planetary surface is, they tend not to want to stay there. Starlight’s spell failed, she collapsed, and the engine began falling.

And guess who was right underneath it? That’s right, Mars’s #1 punching bag. This planet has stabbed me, burned me, rattled me around inside a soup can, and tried to suck me out a hull breach, and now it wanted to drop the equivalent of a couple large vending machines on me to see how I’d survive that.

Fortunately, we had two magic-users in our merry crew, and just before I was about to do my best imitation of a used soda can, Dragonfly grabbed the engine in her magic and put it on the ground beside me. She saved my life.

In fact, she might have just given up her life to save mine. Not a good trade. There’s billions of me back on Earth, but she’s the only one of her kind in this universe.

Casting the spell took a lot out of her- by which I mean mass. I was shocked as hell when I picked her limp body off of the ground. She felt like she weighed nothing, and I don’t mean that figuratively.

We got our two wounded back into the Hab and stripped off their suits. Starlight has her usual magic-strain symptoms. She’ll probably be fine. But Dragonfly… well, she’s always been perforated, with cute holes in her limbs and wings and even ears. But now those limbs look like they were made out of lace. There are pits in her torso. Her face is horribly shriveled. She looks like a bug-pony raisin, and that’s no joke.

I suited back up, went back outside to fetch the scale, and put Dragonfly on it. Now, back over a hundred sols ago, I did a set of physical exams on the ponies, with Spitfire’s help. At the time Dragonfly weighed forty-three and a half kilograms- a bit light for, say, a skinny woman of about five foot two, as she might be standing up.

Today? Almost exactly twenty kilograms.

Twenty.

How is she still alive??

And yet she is. She’s breathing, but that’s about all.

Everything else is on hold. At Cherry’s advice all of us, even Starlight, have been sitting around Dragonfly, trying to will love into her.

Spitfire ordered us to rig the good battery for field projection, and that ran for about half an hour. And let me tell you, it was freaky. The rest of the Hab lit up with those vivid pastel colors you usually get when the sparks fly, but Dragonfly turned into a fucking black hole. There wasn’t any gravitational pull, and I was able to put first a screwdriver and then my hand into the field and touch Dragonfly’s body, but all we could see was this blackness that totally concealed the little bug beyond head to tail.

It helped- some. When the battery ran out of juice and we shut it down, Dragonfly didn’t look quite so shriveled or hollowed-out. I put her back on the scales, and she was up to twenty-seven kilograms, which I hope means recovery.

But I can’t help thinking about concentration camp prisoners back at the end of World War II. Thousands of men and women who, through luck or determination, survived Nazi death camps or Japanese POW camps died because they tried to eat too much when rescued. Their bodies couldn’t handle it. I am scared shitless that we’re doing the same thing to Dragonfly. None of us knows what we’re doing, not even Spitfire. Cherry says their bosses back home are trying to get a bug-pony doctor to where they can talk to us as quickly as possible. I hope they hurry, because it’s already been hours.

The ponies actually want to go to the cave and fetch all the batteries, bring them here at once. I said nothing doing. It’s not far from sunset out there right now, and I don’t want anyone to risk being out of sight of the Hab after dark. Also, Starlight isn’t able to make the trip, so they’d be bringing back low-charge batteries anyway. We have a couple of those here, and we can drain those tonight to help Dragonfly further. Tomorrow Starlight might be well enough to transfer charges to fill up a few batteries.

In the meantime, we watch, we wait, and we love.

No TV, no books, no English lessons tonight. Nobody wants to. No potatoes or hay. Nobody’s hungry. We take turns holding Dragonfly’s hoof, watching, and waiting.

Speaking of, it’s my turn again.

Author's Notes:

WHAM.

I wasn't 100% when I wrote this, and I think it shows. The first part in particular is bare-boned and without the usual flavor I try to put into this.

But nonetheless, WHAM.

Buffer's at one, and we'll see if I can maintain that or not. I have a birthday party to attend in Houston, and then a drive to Baton Rouge tomorrow.