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The Maretian

by Kris Overstreet

Chapter 150: Sol 251

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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 254

ARES III SOL 251

TRANSCRIPT – WATER TELEGRAPH EXCHANGE, ESA BALTIMARE and ESA SHIP AMICITAS

AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, use suit DF for response, over.

ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, over.

AMICITAS: SG – I don’t recall any atmospheric test of magic thrusters producing weather. Did I miss anything, over?

ESA: Confirmed no unusual weather effects from magic thruster tests. Why do you ask? Over.

AMICITAS: Mark’s bosses report the abnormal storm we just survived might have come from engine tests using main thrusters. Circumstantial evidence also raises possibility that Amicitas atmospheric entry amplified storm that resulted in Mark being marooned, over.

ESA: Repeat no unusual weather effects from tests on Equestria. Effects where you are totally unpredictable owing to inability to accurately measure and determine laws of magic (if any) in your current universe, over.

AMICITAS: Please double-check. In the meantime will not use engines until/unless necessary for Mars escape, over.

ESA: Good plan. We’ll go over the equations here. Baltimare out.

MISSION LOG – SOL 251

What I Did on my Summer Vacation, by Mark Watney, age 8.

Wait, sorry, wrong beginning.

What I Did Right After Surviving a Freaky Martian Storm, by Mark Watney, age 41.

Seriously, the last few days have been spent (while waiting for Pathfinder to revive, or not) either undoing what the storm did, or undoing what we did preparing for the storm. There were two big headaches: getting all the scrap and other junk we crammed into Friendship’s engineering compartment back out of it so we can proceed with cutting it off, and getting as much sand and dust as possible out of Potato Shed #2.

But, even with taking four hours out of every sol for a visit back to the cave, we got it done, those things and all the other stuff too. We are ready to truncate (isn’t truncate a fun word? Starlight found it in the thesaurus. I’d forgotten it existed) the pony ship, and we’ll probably do that tomorrow.

Anyway, on today’s trip to the cave, Starlight Glimmer and Fireball went prospecting. According to Starlight, they found the materials in the Hallway for the fifteen extra-large batteries Bruce Ng asked for. That is, big quartz crystals that can be sliced up into shafts thirty centimeters wide and a meter and a half long. Unfortunately there were too many flaws in the shafts that tangle up the cave in that section to get fifteen three-meter lengths. Which is probably for the best, since I don’t think a three meter quartz crystal is going to be all that happy under the vibration of a rocket launch.

“They say that breaking up is hard to do, now I know they’ve never pulled three G’s in a rocket…” Yeah, so I’m not Weird Al. Who is? Besides about a thousand people on the Internet with three fans each, that is.

Anywho, Starlight also says she found a perfect amethyst crystal, twenty centimeters in diameter and almost a meter tall, to make a new Sparkle Drive core.

She takes it for granted, but the biggest amethyst crystals I’ve ever seen were in a geode twelve feet tall and just barely big enough for a person to stand inside, and those weren’t even quite as big as baseballs. I’ve never really been able to make the ponies understand just how unusual this cave is by Earth standards, with its giant quartz crystals and shafts and all. It makes me wonder just how big crystals get in their world.

Memo: if I ever get there, I must ask to see one of these “rock farms” they keep talking about. I bet they grow some smashing pumpkins along their black-eyed peas and red hot chili peppers. (And I know, somewhere, a music historian is groaning that this entry is a bunch of korn.)

Anyway, once we got back Fireball and I worked on trimming hooves and claws. It’s been well over forty sols since Dragonfly’s last round of suit maintenance. We don’t know how much longer she’s going to spend in her cocoon, so we need to be pro-active as possible about preventing excess wear and tear on the irreplaceable suits.

Amazingly, my current suit is holding up very well. It’s my original surface suit (my patched flight suit getting burned up in the perchlorate blowout on Sol 40) with Martinez’s helmet (my surface helmet shattering when the Hab sent Airlock 1 flying on Sol 88). I have put double-digit kilometers, maybe triple-digit, of travel on this suit, especially the boot soles, but they show very few signs of wear despite the environment. For all their bungles with the CO2 filters and the safety-glass visors, I have to admit the contractors built the rest of this suit to take an unholy beating. Unfortunately the pony suits, being more of an Apollo-level construction, aren’t as durable, which is why Dragonfly was patching and re-soleing things not long before her audition for a John Carpenter film.

Speaking of Dragonfly, as I said, she’s still in that cocoon. It doesn’t make a black hole anymore when we turn on the magic field, but it still glows black, kind of. It’s sort of like shining anti-light. It’s the same temperature as everything else in the cave. I tried holding a stethoscope up to it, but I didn’t hear any heartbeat, any breathing, or any voices whispering hastur hastur hastur or anything like that. But the outside is tough, if a bit pliable, and it doesn’t feel like we’re doing any harm when we hug it going and coming.

In one last bit of news, Bilbo and the dwarves have just entered Mirkwood. Gandalf’s stock has gone down considerably with the ponies, who think any responsible wizard would see things through to the end, and if he had business elsewhere he shouldn’t have been meddling with innocent people’s lives in the first place. The temptation to spoil things is great, but I can resist.

Resisting is made easier by Starlight and Cherry reading this over my shoulder and glaring daggers at me. So I think I’ll go to bed before things escalate to homicide, or worse, wedgies.

Author's Notes:

Got home at 7 PM local time. The above is an hour and a half's work.

BTW, for a bunch of people who might or might not think they're Weird Al, but who produce a lot of material I enjoy, I recommend http://www.thefump.com .

Next Chapter: Sol 252 Estimated time remaining: 14 Hours, 17 Minutes
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