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The Maretian

by Kris Overstreet

Chapter 156: Sol 259

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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 262
ARES III SOL 259

Standing outdoors on Mars without a spacesuit helmet on is almost instant suicide, if you don’t have a magical unicorn with you.

The five of them stood together, more tightly together than they’d stood outside the rover for many days now, just outside the cave farm’s airlock. A small tank of compressed oxygen plus a battery-powered force field prevented them all from dying a short but excruciatingly painful death as they removed their helmets.

“I still think this is stupid,” Fireball said.

Spitfire ignored him, taking off her own helmet. Stupid it might be, but it was close enough to a tried and true tool of teambuilding that she was more than willing to try it. And they’d spent an hour discussing the best way to do it, before committing to this particular method.

The email from Dr. Shields- the last message before Dr. Kapoor ordered email and chat shut down for several days for a long data transmission- had referred to it as a generally discredited therapy from over forty years before, which had attained fad status and then just as quickly died out in favor of more effective means. Their case, Shields had said, was one of the rare cases in which it might actually be effective.

Primitive scream therapy, is how Starlight Glimmer had translated the name.

“I can keep this up for about ten minutes,” Starlight said. “Cherry, that means one language only, okay?”

Cherry snorted, then stepped forward to the edge of the force field. She took a deep breath.

Spitfire, flinching ahead of time, put her forehooves over her ears.

“BUCK YOU, YOU MOTHERBUCKING ROADAPPLE SOUFFLE!”

Primitive Scream Therapy was supposed to be wordless shouting and roaring, but most of the castaways had words for Mars. Cherry had chosen to speak them in her native tongue, which made up for its relative lack of truly obscene words with a host of rhyming slang and euphemisms.

“WE’RE FIT TO HURL WITH YOUR COWCHIPS, YOU MOTHERLESS FOAL OF A DIAMOND-DOG! I CAN’T WAIT TO SCRAPE YOUR TARTARUS-BEDAMNED MEADOW-MUFFINS OFF MY SHOES! AND I’D DARN WELL CUT OFF MY LEFT TEAT FOR A CHANCE, JUST ONE BUCKING CHANCE, TO KICK YOU IN THE PONY-FRUIT! IF YOU HAD ANY, YOU HEAD-BUCKED FLANK-KISSING CARROT-SUCKING SON OF A SNAKE!”

The echoes faded almost instantly. Outside the force field, Mars’s thin air sucked up sound and killed it.

“Not bad,” Fireball said in English. “But now I show you.”

Fully grown dragons are as large as mid-size passenger planes. When they roar, birds fall from the sky mid-flight, stunned by the sheer impact of sound.

Fireball had a century or more before he could expect to reach that stature, but his single, wordless roar, accompanied by the largest burst of flame he’d had in months, would have been quite respectable even in the company of his elders…

… had it not ended in a choking fit as the flame ran out mid-roar, leaving black choking smoke instead.

While the others were coughing and waiting for the pony EVA life support to clear the smoke from the air bubble, Spitfire decided to take her turn. She couldn’t compete with a dragon roar- no pony could, not even Bulk Biceps, who had taken vocal lessons from a couple of dragons.

But that wasn’t what the exercise was about, was it? It was about taking all your frustration, all your anger and grief and fear, and throwing it at the disembodied world, rather than at your friends. Spitfire’s wordless shout, half-growl, half-bellow, did that just fine.

Then it was Mark’s turn. He accomplished as much as Cherry’s rant with a single cry of, “FUCK!!!” Remarkably, the echo of that one word lingered a little longer than Fireball’s roar.

And, finally, came Starlight, who had been waiting, listening, and concentrating, standing behind the others the whole while. Now they looked at her, at the dark green glow around her eyes, at the heat-haze rising from her body.

There was a sudden grab for helmets and a scramble for the outer edges of the air bubble.

The shout came out slowly, building from a soft beginning to a literally earth-shaking roar amplified by the canned magic flowing through Starlight Glimmer’s body. Clusters of dark purple and black crystals erupted from the hillside in a rough cone extending forward from Starlight’s body, ripping downslope for over a hundred meters.

And then the glow faded, and Starlight’s normal voice said, “I feel better now. Help me on with my helmet, please?” After a moment, when Mark reached for one of the little crystals called forth from the Martian soil, she warned, “Oh, and don’t touch those. It could be really bad.”

And the echoes lingered.

Some say, long after the fact, they linger yet.


Back inside the cave, the crew gathered around Dragonfly’s cocoon and listened to Mark read from The Hobbit of Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug.

“I know some dragons like this,” Fireball muttered. “Old fatheads. Love sound of voice. When I was your age blah blah blah.”

Mark, setting the computer down for a moment, asked, “You think Smaug’s an old fogey? ‘Get off my lawn you damn kids’ and like that?”

“Kinda,” Fireball said. “Must be old and sick if his scales fall out. No dragon have bare skin ever.”

“Yeah,” Spitfire agreed. “Take it from a pony who knows. Dragons don’t have soft spots.”

“Dern right,” Fireball nodded, his English taking on a Southern- or more accurately a Hazzard County- accent.

“What do you think of Bilbo?” Mark asked.

“I think Bilbo is toast without ring,” Fireball rumbled. “Angry dragons don’t do chit-chat. Should have run.”

“But if Bilbo ran, he wouldn’t get the information the dwarves needed to kill Smaug,” Starlight Glimmer said. “That’s the whole point of this trip, isn’t it?”

“Am I the only one,” Cherry Berry asked, “who thinks the dwarves have been pretty useless all this time? If Gandalf isn’t saving them, Bilbo is. Is Bilbo going to be the one who saves them?”

Mark grinned. “There have been a couple different movies made of this book. The first one had a line at the end of this bit, not in the book. The dwarves congratulate Bilbo on living, and he says, ‘Thank you, but I would greatly prefer a more practical response- in other words, EXTINGUISH ME!!’”

Everyone laughed, even Spitfire, who’d had squadron mates shout the exact same thing in distinctly non-funny circumstances.

It felt good, very good, to be a team again.

Author's Notes:

This, more or less, was what I planned to write yesterday.

Next Chapter: Sol 261 Estimated time remaining: 13 Hours, 46 Minutes
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