The essential function of a switch is to touch two wires together to complete a circuit- but only when you want them to touch.

By that definition, what Mark had rigged using a small rock, two cables salvaged from Amicitas’s discarded engine room, and a long piece of parachute rope too weather-decayed to be put to any more demanding use was a switch… of sorts.

Dragonfly thought it more resembled those box traps that idiot ponies built to capture rabbits (and other things, including changelings). Those things always annoyed her, because (a) they were so blatantly obvious any animal dumb enough to go for the bait deserved to be trapped, and (b) despite being blatantly obvious, they occasionally caught rabbits (and other things, including changelings).

But she had to admit, as dumb as it looked, it worked on paper. One cable, its terminus wire shaped into a hook, had been raised above the other (its wire shaped into a loop) and balanced there on a carefully chosen rock. Any little tug on the rock with the rope would cause the hook cable to slip off and land, hook down, on the loop cable. It didn’t have to be a perfect ringer, though that would be ideal; any wire-to-wire contact would do. The system allowed the two of them, Dragonfly and Mark, to be about fifty meters away from the loop, or seventy meters away from the rock cairn built to hold the test vehicle above the enchanted repulsor crystals.

Seventy meters, or as Mark called it, “ten seconds head start.”

So long as that hook remained above that loop, the nine batteries powering the launch could be safely switched on with no effect, and this Dragonfly had just finished. “Pad power hot,” she reported over the comms. “Repeat, pad is hot. All batteries show full charge. Go for launch.”

Mark, for his part, had removed the nosecone and was connecting one vital wire in the small transmitter cannibalized from the north weather station. “Ow!” he grumbled. “That’s a strong signal, all right! Transmitter is live. Reattaching nosecone now.”

Dragonfly trotted over and burned a little magic to start four of the bolts that kept the nosecone clamped around the reversed neck of the engine bell while Mark started and tightened the fifth. Once that transmitter went live, the clock had started. Pushing enough current through the transmitter to allow it to be tracked by the satellites circling Mars, most of which hadn’t been built to track things other than Earth, would overheat the circuits. The Martian cold would only slow that process down slightly. They needed to get done and get out.

“Message sent to Pony Space Agency,” Starlight said over the comms. She and Fireball were at the cave, she inside and Fireball just outside. Fireball would film the launch with Mark’s hand-held video camera while Starlight, in the cave, would communicate with Equestria.

“Message sent to NASA; about to launch, stand by for data.” Cherry Berry and Spitfire were back at the Hab. Cherry Berry stayed in the Hab to communicate with Mark’s people (even though, by the time they got the stand-by warning, the launch would be complete). Spitfire sat in the old bridge of Amicitas, running the telepresence spell so that the magic-powered suit comms would reach across the eleven kilometers between the Hab and the flat ground well east of Site Epsilon.

Normally using tools in a spacesuit required care, planning, and patience. A year of being stranded on Mars had made both Mark and Dragonfly a bit blasé about such risks; Dragonfly could patch her suit, and Mark’s suit had been built to withstand being used by troll babies with teething problems. The nosecone bolts were snug to a turn in under a minute. “Nosecone secure,” Mark reported. “All go for launch. Pad crew now clearing launch area.” Slipping the ratchet wrench into the small tool pouch on his suit, he turned to Dragonfly and said, “Engage de-assifying procedure.”

Dragonfly liked Mark quite a lot- and not just because he was delicious and generous with his affection to a fault- but he wasn’t as funny as he thought he was. “Excuse me?” she asked.

“I said run!” Mars’s low gravity couldn’t help but cause some muscle atrophy, but enough tone remained in Mark’s legs to send him bounding over two meters in a stride at full gallop. Dragonfly, on the other hand, had learned like the ponies to gallop with minimum vertical motion and maximum horizontal motion, so she arrived at the end of the trigger rope in four seconds, leaving Mark to arrive three seconds later.

“Launch crew at trigger station,” Dragonfly reported as Mark, having lost his balance in the effort to brake his momentum, picked himself off the regolith and grabbed the loose end of the rope. “Standing by for final go no/go for launch.”

“Earth comms are go,” Cherry said. “Suit comms?”

“Suit comms go,” Spitfire reported.

“Water telegraph?”

“Water telegraph is go, Flight,” Starlight reported.

“Ground tracking?”

“Go, Flight,” Fireball reported.

“Roger. Satellite tracking is go. Launch systems?”

“Launch system is go, Flight,” Dragonfly said.

“Ship systems?”

“We’re Go, commander,” Mark said.

There was a brief pause.

“Oh. Right. Yes.” Cherry Berry continued on, “Command confirms all go for flight. Pad crew may initiate launch at their discretion.”

Dragonfly looked at Mark. “How you wanna do this?” she asked.

Mark cleared his throat. “Counting down from ten,” he said, squeezing the cracking, somewhat brittle changeling rope in his suit glove. “Nine. Eight. Seven.” He carefully got to his feet, leaving enough slack in the rope to avoid a premature launch. “Six. Five. Four.” He turned his back to the launch pad, facing the afternoon Martian sun and the flattened lump that was Site Epsilon half an imperial mile away. “Three. Two. One!”

He yanked the rope hard, pulling it taut, and ran with it for several paces. When he heard a rumble of thunder through Mars’s tenous atmosphere, he dropped the rope and ran faster, trying to adjust his bipedal gait to better imitate the ponies. A second shadow flickered in front of him, despite the sun shining down.

Dragonfly, meanwhile, passed him like he was standing still, making a beeline for the cave farm’s airlock.

Neither one looked back. Safety lay under meters of solid rock, and neither of them was confident enough in what the six of them had built to risk being outside if it came down.

Later on, they watched the video Fireball got, so that they could edit down the first couple of seconds of launch to send to Earth for a precise measurement of how fast the test vehicle left the cairn.

In the end they didn’t send the video, because one frame the test vehicle was on the cairn, the next frame the cairn was hidden behind nine beams of brilliant magical light that triggered the automatic safety systems in the camera, and in the third frame the test vehicle and the top layer of rocks on the cairn were gone. The rocks would be found later, having fallen just a bit short of the repulsor spell projectors, caught up in some sort of wake.

Then Fireball had reflexively tracked up, finding the top of the pillar of light and, presumably, the small former rocket engine on top of it. He never actually caught sight of the test vehicle. He did, however, get a perfect shot of the ring of clear air that opened up around the repulsor spell in the wake of the vehicle, the shockwave driving away the fine dust that turned the Martian air pink and leaving a rapidly growing hole in the sky colored a perfect robin’s egg blue.

The crew looked at that beautiful image, frozen in pause on the computer screen, for several seconds before Mark said, “I think we should make plans to be ready for another storm in about, oh, ten days.”

The ponies, changeling and dragon all nodded silent agreement.

“Tracking lost eight minutes after launch,” Mitch Henderson reported. “Acceleration cut-off came at seventy-three seconds. The last twelve seconds or so showed a slight decay in acceleration- about ninety-six percent of peak performance when it cut off. Course is slightly down-range and velocity slightly slower than projected; those stabilizing fins they cut must have been slightly out of true.”

“It worked perfectly,” Venkat said. “It worked absolutely perfectly.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Mitch muttered.

“Why’s that?”

“Usually the first time you try to launch anything, it blows up on the pad,” Mitch said. “Or there’s some other in-flight glitch. But everything went right in the test. So what’s going to happen next time, when they do it for real?”

Venkat sighed. “Thanks a lot, Mitch,” he said. “I was just running short of nightmare fuel. Thanks very much for topping me off.” He shook his head. “Where’s it going?”

“Slightly better than we anticipated,” Mitch said. “The test vehicle will pass within about three million miles of the Sun’s surface on a tight parabolic loop. Materials says that at that distance pretty much everything, even quartz, will vaporize before it gets anywhere near anything else. And since the launch inclination was about nineteen degrees, it’s not coming anywhere near anything we care about anyway.”

“Well, that’s good,” Venkat said. “So, how are you spending Thanksgiving? Going to see the family?”

“What family?” Mitch asked. “NASA is my life, you know that. I have a brother in Cleveland and a sister in Gainesville, and they’d be happy if they didn’t see me again until my funeral.” He adjusted his tie slightly. “No, I’ll be on my shift in Mission Control as usual. Just another work day for me.”

“Well, I’m going to take the afternoon off,” Venkat said. “I doubt I can leave for a full day. But I have a wife and family, and they’re forgetting what I look like.”

“Just tell them Daddy’s getting the nice cute ponies down off of Mars so they can come and visit,” Mitch said.

“My daughter told me I’m gone so much she thinks Daddy’s on Mars with the rest of them,” Venkat said. “She wants to know if I’m bringing one back with me next time I go.”

“Huh.” Mitch thought about this, then said, “Which one’s her favorite?”

“Starlight Glimmer,” Venkat said. “Because unicorns are the bestest, she says.”

“Well,” Mitch said, a little cautiously, “I know we’re not supposed to be promoting non-licensed manufacture, since Hasbro won the bid to make the NASA-approved toys, but I know someone in Friendswood who makes better alien plushies than what’s on sale in the visitor center gift shop.”

Venkat couldn’t help goggling at Mitch. “You know someone outside of JSC?” he asked.

“Hey!” Mitch’s tone went fully defensive. “I have friends, you know.”

“I never doubted you had a friend, Mitch. I’m just shocked at the existence of the plural.”

Author's Notes:

This actually felt like a Changeling Space Program snippet. You can spot the footnotes, if I were doing footnotes in this story.

I get my van back tomorrow, just in time so I don't have to borrow someone else's van for Mechacon in New Orleans. See you there (assuming there are NOLA area readers not doing Bronycon).