“Hey. Get up.”

“Grruh… what time izzit?”

“0400. Time to get up.”

“It’s cold.”

“It’ll be plenty warm in the Phoenix. Launch is in two and a half hours. Suit up.”

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t shitting myself. In two hours I’m going to ride a stripped-down, no-backups MAV hurled to unprecedented speeds by a barely-tested magical lifting system. I’ve ridden rockets before, but no human being alive has ever taken a ride like this.

Cherry and I are doing preflight checks now. We have our suits on except for helmets, and we’ll put those on for takeoff, because even though the Phoenix will have the good old pony life support box, it only takes one perfectly timed pea-sized meteor to fuck our shit up big time. Besides, the most efficient way to stow the suits during takeoff is to wear them. The Phoenix was built for short-term occupancy, not extended flight, so there’s no suit rack like in the Hab.

The ponies ate the last of the hay last night. We’re taking along fifty potatoes and about ten kilograms of leftover quartz chips for Fireball, plus seven days of food packs for me and six days for the ponies. (Spitfire ate the other food packs when she was recovering from the storm busting, if you remember.)

Aside from that, we’re hauling up the Sparkle Drive and seven mana batteries, mounted where the removed consoles used to be, so that the batteries can get a slight recharge off of us during flight. There’s an eighth battery for emergencies. We also allowed ourselves fifty kilos of weight for a couple of souvenirs each, which we didn’t come close to using up. Every pony has the little medallion made from pieces of their ship’s hull. Cherry has Groot, her little tree branch in a pot, which somehow she kept alive all the way from Site Epsilon. Starlight has her rainbow crystal samples. Fireball chose to bring the spare computer; his idea is that he’ll copy all the books off of it when he gets home, before our worlds establish any copyright treaties.

Me, I’m carrying the antenna fragment that stranded me here in the first place, plus my smallest ratchet wrench. None of the sockets, just the wrench. It’s a reminder of all the work I’ve done over the last year and a half, with the help of these silly, sweet, strange visitors from another universe, all to stay alive long enough for this moment.

This is it. If the launch fucks up, we probably die. If we get into orbit but fail to make escape velocity, we miss Hermes, which means we have to shoot for our second-best option, a direct Sparkle Drive trip to Earth. That’s the only reason we have seven days of food on board. The Sparkle Drive is our abort mode, and none of us wants to use it if we don’t need to.

There’s one subject we haven’t talked about, not once, not the whole time this plan has been in operation: what if everything fails? We miss Hermes, the Sparkle Drive fizzles; what then? Of course it’s obvious what happens then. We die in space.

As options go, I’m not fond of that one.

If the magic boosting spell crushed the MAV fuel tanks and made the rocket blow up, that might not be so bad. We’d probably never know. But if we’re stranded in space, we’ll starve to death, very slowly, over the course of a month- maybe sooner in Dragonfly’s case. She’s been looking very sick the past couple of weeks.

But I have a solution to that. If starvation is the only option, I’m not sticking around for it. The Hab medical kit had a substantial supply of injectable morphine in case of a serious injury requiring field surgery. It’s enough for six lethal doses. I checked. We’ll fall asleep and never wake up, nice and painless.

That’s a morbid thought to leave this planet on, but it’s only beginning to sink in that I’m actually leaving. This frozen rock has been our home for eighteen months. We figured out how to survive. We built equipment to improve our lives. We’ve seen things no one has ever seen before. And we told stories, learned how to cook using a chemistry set and heating elements from a central air system, and learned to love Dungeons and Dragons all over again.

And then we drove across Mars in a cobbled-together RV, navigating by static-filled messages from Hermes and the tiny moons of Mars. We transformed a launch-to-orbit rocket into, in theory (and pray we don’t have to actually use it) an interplanetary spaceship. And despite being cheek to jowl, hip to flank with each other, we’ve managed not to kill each other in the process.

And now all that is over. There’s only one flight left, either a short or a long one, and then it’s done. We’ve eaten the last Martian crops. We’ve read each other Earth books for the last time. We will leave no more tracks, of boots or hooves or claws, in the red sands. One way or another, we’re leaving Mars.

About fucking time.

“Hello, everyone. This is CNN, and I’m Cathy Warner.”

Cheers rose from the crowd of people gathered behind CNN’s outdoor stage. The late afternoon Houston sun beat down on the observers. No one seemed to mind the heat, except Cathy, who sweltered even in her short-sleeve ensemble.

“In less than an hour Mark Watney and his five alien comrades will launch in their modified Ares MAV, the Phoenix, in their one and only chance to meet the rest of the Ares III crew on Hermes. If that attempt fails, their only backup option will be to attempt to fly directly to Earth using an untested reproduction of the same experimental drive system that stranded the aliens on Mars in the first place.

“Business has ground to a halt around the world as billions of people stand vigil, waiting to see what happens. Here in Houston, the Astros home game has been canceled so that both Minute Maid Park and NRG Stadium can be used to house over a hundred thousand people gathered together to watch the launch on the stadium screens. Tens of thousands more have jammed the area around Johnson Space Center. Even more have gathered at Cape Canaveral, in Times Square, in Trafalgar Square, in Tiananmen Square, in Red Square, and in stadiums, bars, offices, and homes around the world. The world’s stock exchanges have closed, almost all retail has shut its doors, and even many public schools let out early today to allow parents to collect their children before scheduled launch time.”

Cathy gestured over her shoulder to the gates of Johnson Space Center. “And inside NASA, tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, astronauts and administrators stand and wait. They have labored hard to give this launch its best chance of success, just as they worked to help the crew of Phoenix to survive this long. But their work is over now. With radio signals requiring twelve minutes to travel from Earth to Mars, NASA can provide no more help, no more instructions. From now on, they can only watch… and pray.”

In the observation booth, Venkat stared down into Mission Control, where Mitch Henderson stood, apparently calm and in command, at the flight director’s podium. The stations around him were jammed, as every control shift had gathered, on duty or off, to witness the outcome of their efforts.

A few other notables were present in the crowd. Rich Purnell, cleaned up almost to presentability, stood among the trajectory controllers, ready to help with Sparkle Drive contingencies if required. Jennifer Lawrence, the engineer who had taken charge of the Sirius tiger team and designed what became the Whinnybago, stood by EECOM. And Mindy Park, who had described herself at one point as the most overqualified space paparazzi in the universe, had taken up a patch of wall not far from the Tracking station.

To his left, Teddy Sanders sat, briefcase between his feet. To his right sat Annie Montrose, having just completed the final press briefing and the last finessing of the other VIPs present, including the vice-president, the Chinese ambassador, the governors of Florida and Texas, and more than half the House and Senate subcommittees that oversaw NASA.

They had come to wait, and to worry, and to pray, like billions of other people in their homes around the world. Venkat had the entire Hindu pantheon to choose from for his own prayers, but the illogical question in his mind at the moment was: which of them, alone or combined, were strong enough to thwart the ancient Roman god of war and slaughter?

Mars had come close many times to claiming the lives of the six castaways. Would Mars find a way to finish the job, now, at the last moment?

If so, there wasn’t a damn thing Dr. Venkat Kapoor could do now, except pray and hope that all his work, all the work of NASA and of the pony space programs and the six castaways, that all the work had been enough…

Twelve light-minutes away, the crew of Hermes sat at their stations on the bridge. No eyes strayed to the empty seat today. Today that seat would be filled once again- if all went according to plan.

“Fuel pressure green,” Johanssen said from her console. “Engine alignment perfect, gimbals fully operational. Communications five by five. We are ready for preflight checklist, commander.”

“Copy,” said Lewis from the center seat. “CAPCOM.”

“Go,” said Johanssen.

“Guidance.”

“Go,” Johanssen said again.

“Remote backup.”

“Go,” said Martinez.

“Pilot.”

Over the speakers, the voice of a pink pony replied, “Go, Hermes.”

“Systems.”

A slightly raspy-sounding voice called over the radio, “All go, commander.”

“EECOM.”

A male, distinctly human voice said, “Go.”

Lewis permitted herself a pause to smile, but only for a moment. “Star drive,” she said.

A slightly nervous female voice said, “Go, Hermes.”

“Boosters.”

A voice with buzzy harmonics, somewhat weak-sounding. “Go, ma’am.”

Twelve minutes later, as four alien voices and one human voice chimed in, cheers went up from millions of throats around the planet Earth.

Twelve minutes earlier, the checklist continued.

“Telemetry.”

“Go,” said Johanssen.

“Recovery.”

“Go,” said Beck, over the radio from his station in Airlock 1.

“Secondary recovery.”

“Go,” said Vogel from beside Beck.

Lewis took a deep breath. “Mission control,” she said, carefully and clearly, “this is Hermes Actual. We are go for launch and will proceed on schedule. We are T minus eight minutes, ten seconds to launch…” She glanced at the mission clock, watched a couple of seconds tick down, and said, “Mark!”

“MAV to Ground Control,” Mark replied.

“What?” Lewis asked.

“MAV to Ground Control,” Mark repeated. “Everyone is ready and the countdown is on hold.”

“Mark, what are you-“

Then Cherry Berry began to sing, and behind her voice Lewis heard the faint sound of music.

MAV to Ground Control
Phoenix reports all systems go
We’ve come so very far and we’re set to see it through

“Where is that music coming from?” Lewis asked. “We need this channel-“

The ponies, paying no attention, sang together, as the music behind their words grew louder.

Hermes, this is Phoenix, how are you
We’re ready to go home
And the ponies want to kiss this world goodbye
It’s time to take this capsule to the sky-y-y

Then Mark sang:

This is Mark Watney to Ground Control
We’re waiting for the launch
And I guess that we’ve been waiting for so long
That’s why the things we’re feeling are so strong

All six of them, including Dragonfly and Fireball, joined together:

For here we are sitting in our tin can
Here beneath the stars

Then Dragonfly alone:

Don’t ask us why we sing
It’s just a pony thing

And for a minute the sound of guitars, drums, and even violins echoed over the radio.

“Um,” Johanssen said, “that doesn’t sound quite the same as the version of Space Oddity we sent them. And telemetry says the MAV computer isn’t running a music app.”

“It’s not,” Lewis said, knowing that song far better than anyone else on Hermes. “But where could it be coming from?”

“Dragonfly said don’t ask,” Martinez said. “So long as it doesn’t interfere with the launch.”

Now it was Starlight Glimmer singing:

Although it’s still a hundred million miles
We’ve come so very far
And I think our pilot knows which way to go

Fireball:

Tell Mars just what we think of it-

Dragonfly:

--- it knows!

And then all together:

Phoenix calling Ground Control
This life on Mars is getting old
Standing by for launch, Control!
Standing by for launch, Control!

Control, here we are sitting in a tin can
Sitting here on Mars
Hermes, we’re standing by
Waiting on your reply

“T minus three minutes and counting,” Lewis replied, speaking up over the music, which hadn’t abated.

“Phoenix copies three minutes,” Cherry Berry said in a normal voice. “We seem to be experiencing a sudden magic surge. Batteries continue to show full. All systems go.”

And then the others joined in

Here we are singing in our tin can
Ready for our flight
All our work is through
And there’s nothing left to do

“Coming up on two minutes,” Johanssen said. “Sending activation order to Sojourner.”

Outside and well away from the MAV, the ancient little rover received its instructions: drive forward four-fifths of a meter up the metal plate it sat on. Slowly, cautiously, its wheels began to turn.

On the Phoenix, the magical music changed, taking up a faster, more urgent beat, as Cherry began singing again:

Too late to turn back, Sojourner’s rolling
All systems are go-

Spitfire’s voice:
- are you sure?

Cherry replied:
Conditions are not great
But the Hermes cannot stop to wait

And Mark added nervously:
No chance to abort… the countdown starts…

Starlight reported:
Sparkle Drive is set, all batteries full
Everything is ready, now or never

Dragonfly added:
Lie back and relax, look out the window
Soon we’ll ride the fire to the midnight sky
Seconds tick by

And all joined in to sing:

Dust above us
Drifting, falling
Mars beneath us
Soon we’re going home

“T minus one minute,” Lewis called from Hermes. “Sojourner operating as expected.”

Cherry Berry flipped a switch and said:

Capsule is secure, ready for launching
Fuel and oxidizer tanks are full
Pyros are all set, batteries hot
Ready to ignite ascent stage one
The count goes on

Spitfire called out:
Twenty seconds left, begin ignition
Fuel pumps activate, light ‘em up

Cherry Berry replied:
Preparing to release the mooring clamps
Everybody wave this world goodbye
We’re about to fly

For a few moments, over the building rumble of Phoenix’s engines, Lewis’s voice called out, “Four… three… two… one…”

Sojourner’s middle set of wheels passed over the frame member, driving the metal plate down to complete the circuit linking the jumbo batteries and their built-in booster enchantments.

Fifteen beams of magic slammed into the three target crystals mounted to the bottom of the first ascent stage.

Phoenix heaved off the MAV descent stage, rising into the air like a bullet, accelerating faster as the small plumes of flame emerging from the engines opened into a torrent of light.

Inside the capsule, despite the heavy G loads pressing the six crew members into their flight couches, they sang:

Mars below us
Spinning, falling
Hermes, Phoenix
Here we’re coming

Mars below us
Spinning, falling
This is Phoenix
And we’re flying
Ho-o-o-o-ome
Ho-o-o-o-ome

And the music faded as, riding a mighty wave of stored magic energy and an equally mighty controlled explosion, Phoenix raced through and out of the dust storm and up towards space.

The three target crystals mounted around the hole where the central first stage engine had been were carefully carved out of shafts of apparently flawless clear quartz. Each had been carefully sized, using the MAV diagrams included in the Ares computer files, to perfectly fit in the available space while providing the maximum available surface to spread the launch load.

But the fact remained that they were quartz crystals, a material prone to breaking under unpredictable conditions… and they now bore the load of a hundred tons of magical force, pushing up from the repulsor crystals on the surface. Although that force was magical in nature, it still obeyed certain physical laws… and the enchantment that linked the target crystals to their respective repulsor batteries below did nothing to eliminate or redirect the force pressing against them.

To make things worse, this force was not quite steady. No rocket engine runs perfectly smoothly, and the vibrations from the four remaining first stage engines shook the crystals in their mountings. The mountings held firm, having been carefully fitted with changeling-crafted bushings to prevent loosening or shifting of the target crystals. But the vibrations also caused slight variations in the pressure on the crystals, as the rocket engines fired marginally harder or softer microsecond by microsecond.

A flaw appeared in one of the crystals. In a second it spread halfway across the surface. In another second it calved off a third of its mass, directly in the center. The remaining crystal, unable to hold together, shattered completely, and the enchantment within failed.

Five boosters, no longer magically tethered to a target, shut down at seventy-one seconds into flight, no longer providing lift to the rocket.

Phoenix lurched.

“Wha’happn?”

The words were more of a grunt. For all her confidence in sims, Cherry Berry had forgotten what five and a half G’s felt like. She hadn’t tried to pilot a rocket under such acceleration since the first couple of rocket flights ever, when the ships had been tiny capsules stuck on barely stable Mk. 1 “Flea” solid fuel boosters. This flight had already gone well beyond the burn time of those early experiments, and until the lurch the G loads had been steadily increasing as the ship burned fuel. It was taking all her earth pony strength, experience, and what haphazard training she’d picked up to stay alert and keep her hooves on the controls. Speech took lower priority.

The lurch had brought some relief, the darkness at the edges of her vision receding at the drop from five and a half to four and a half G’s. But that relief was temporary, and she knew it. Her forelegs felt heavier every moment. She lay on her back on the flight couch, focusing on keeping her hooves up and her barrel clenched.

“Lost something.” Spitfire, though suffering under the same load, was dealing a little better with it. An advantage of being a pegasus. “Accel drop one point one G. Engines at full gimbal.”

Full gimbal… that meant something… something bad.

There was a new light on on the console. The flight computer had automatically activated the maneuvering thrusters. The light blinked about once every two seconds.

“We lost a target crystal,” Cherry grunted, getting a little air back. “Trajectory drifting. Hermes confirm.”

The cannibalized radio from one of the spare Ares surface suits sat awkwardly on her head inside her helmet, but it worked fine. Johanssen’s voice came through clear. “Confirm probable loss of number two booster target crystal,” she said. “Your computer is automatically compensating for the imbalanced thrust. Recommend manual roll twenty degrees clockwise to put the lost crystal on the west facing side. That will minimize thruster use and keep your trajectory coplanar with Hermes.”

“Done.” Cherry had nudged the controls as soon as she heard “manual roll twenty degrees clockwise.” By the time Johanssen had finished the explanation, the maneuver was complete. It was the first manual maneuver she’d had to execute thus far. The computer was doing its job- better than the ones back home.

“T plus two minutes,” Johanssen called out. “Acceleration 4.7 G and climbing.”

“First stage fuel eleven tons,” Spitfire added.

“It’s all right, Cherry,” Martinez’s voice added. “You lost some delta-V. There’s still plenty in the second stage.”

“Copy,” Cherry grunted, and kept her eyes on the controls and, when she could spare any attention, for the rapidly darkening sky visible through the small windows in front of her.

“Martinez, can you get Vogel’s station running on your console?” Lewis asked. “We need to begin work on the second stage burn.”

“Too soon to tell,” Martinez said. “The MAV computer would have throttled back the last minute and a half of the burn to keep the load on the crew below eight G’s. Otherwise they’d be pulling just over ten G’s at first stage burnout. With a crystal gone, it might not throttle down at all. That’s a bit of extra efficiency regained. We calculated burnout at six minutes and twenty-two seconds, but we can’t count on that now. Too many unknowns until burnout.” Throughout his explanation, his eyes remained locked on his station, his hands resting next to the remote pilot controls.

“Damn,” Lewis muttered. “And how much are we losing to that max gimbal? That’s one hell of a course drift if the engines can’t gimbal enough to compensate. What about reducing thrust on three of the engines?”

“Gain efficiency one place, lose it another,” Martinez said. “Remember, the computer always knows more than you do.”

“Computers don’t know anything their programmers don’t,” Lewis muttered.

“T plus four minutes,” Johanssen said. “Acceleration 5.8 G and climbing.”

“Phoenix, Hermes,” Lewis called. “Cherry, talk to us.”

“Okay!”

She wasn’t, but it was a word she could grunt clearly. The hardest acceleration she’d ever experienced during a launch was 6.1 G, and that had been for only twenty seconds or so of acceleration. There were still over two minutes of launch to go.

Cherry didn’t dare turn her head to look around the capsule, but she could speak. “Spits! Crew check!”

“Okay!” Spitfire replied. “Dragonfly out.”

“Okay!” Fireball’s growl was loud and clear.

“…okay!” Starlight Glimmer’s voice was much softer, but clear.

“…okay?” Mark’s voice wasn’t clear in the least.

“Just relax, Mark,” Lewis’s voice called over the human radio. “It’ll be all right.”

Cherry noticed the maneuvering thruster light flicker again. It had reduced to about once every five seconds. For the moment, the unbalanced thrust was guiding them where they wanted to go, on a slow curve counter to Mars’s rotation, a trajectory which would take Phoenix out and away from the sun before eventually arcing back down towards Earth. But how much maneuvering fuel was it costing them?

“Thruster fuel check.”

“Nine one percent,” Spitfire replied.

Okay. No urgent worry, not yet.

“T plus five minutes,” Johanssen’s voice called out. “6.5 G and climbing.”

“Okay!”

“Coming up on expected booster burnout,” Martinez said. “She’ll fly straight once that’s done.”

“Okay!” The strain in Cherry Berry’s voice spoke volumes.

“Did someone tell her about Alan Shepard’s first flight?” Martinez muttered.

“First stage, one ton fuel!” Spitfire’s voice had less strain, but only by a little.

“Okay!”

“T plus six minutes,” Johanssen said. “Seven point five G. Booster burnout imminent.”

They waited.

“Okay!”

“Eight G,” Johanssen said.

And then, Cherry Berry’s voice again:

“WHOA!”

The first thing she noticed was that she could breathe again- not much, not well, but she could breathe. The dark tunnel in her vision gradually widened again.

The second thing she noticed was the alarm coming from the computer. “Master alarm, off trajectory,” she automatically said.

“First stage burnout,” Spitfire managed to report.

“Burnout? Then what’s this?” Cherry couldn’t understand it. They were still under acceleration- almost four G’s, according to the readouts.

“Boosters!” Spitfire replied. “Has to be!”

It all clicked in Cherry’s head in an instant. The magic boosters hadn’t cut out on schedule. Now, without the first stage engines and their gimbals to counter, the only thing holding them on course were the maneuvering thrusters, which without their secondary and tertiary backups were hopelessly outmatched.

“Going manual,” Cherry reported. “Activating secondary thrusters.” She reached up and hit the switch which activated the six surviving thruster blocks salvaged from Amicitas. Their batteries wouldn’t last long, but the metal walls separating those batteries from the interior of the ship might be thin enough for them to recharge, as had been the case for Amicitas during the crash. The smaller batteries had a faster recharge time in any case.

The guidance readouts shifted. The ship’s attitude returned almost to where it had been… but no farther. Even with the magic thrusters added to the chemical ones, the imbalance from the boosters was too much to compensate for. “Hermes, unable to correct drift,” she reported. “We’re going to be off course by a lot.”

“We confirm,” Lewis’s voice said over the radio. “Can you stage and pull away from the boosters?”

“Negative,” Cherry said. “The first stage would ram into us. And your ships aren’t as unbreakable as ours.”

“T plus seven minutes,” Johanssen called. “Acceleration three point six eight G’s and dropping.”

“Why are those boosters still running?” Cherry demanded.

“My fault.” Dragonfly’s voice was weak, but it carried over the pony suit comms if not the human radio. “All batteries on one circuit. The five failed boosters still work as batteries. They’re powering the other ten. I didn’t think of that.”

“None of us did,” Starlight groaned. “Oh, almighty Faust…”

“Thrust fuel at twenty-five percent,” Spitfire called out. “Secondary thirty percent charge.”

“Hermes, be advised primary thrusters will be exhausted for docking,” Cherry reported. “Secondary thrusters might have some function. We’ll see.”

“Copy,” Lewis replied.

“Request advisability of spin stabilization,” Cherry said.

“Negative,” Martinez said. “Spinning the ship will make it wobble, possibly even turn turtle. And… well, no go.”

“Copy,” Cherry said.

“Thruster fuel fifteen percent,” Spitfire said.

“When are those boosters going to drop?” Cherry asked, unable to keep all the frustration out of her voice.

“When the batteries run out,” Dragonfly said. “Half the unused run time of the failed boosters. Their power’s split over twice as many remaining boosters.”

“So at about the eight minute thirty mark,” Cherry said. “The thrusters won’t last that long.”

“Acceleration three point two five and dropping,” Johanssen reported. “Booster decay with distance. T plus eight minutes… mark!”

Phoenix twitched.

“Secondary thrusters exhausted,” Cherry reported. “Primary thrusters five percent.”

“Phoenix drifting off course,” Johanssen said.

Phoenix twitched harder.

“Primary thrusters exhausted.” Cherry sighed, letting her hooves rest on the flight couch. “What I wouldn’t give for reaction wheels from home right now.”

“Acceleration three G’s and dropping,” Johanssen called out.

And then, at eight minutes and twenty-four seconds after liftoff, the magic boosters finally shut down, and Phoenix entered free fall.

“First stage shutdown. And jettison,” Cherry reported as one final thump signaled the separation of the spent first stage from the rest of the ship. “Crew check. Report!”

Five “okays”, ranging from the weak and groggy to the strong but worried, confirmed the well-being of the Phoenix crew.

“Okay,” Cherry echoed. “Starlight, Dragonfly, Mark, can you use the emergency battery to get some charge back into the secondary thrusters?”

“We’ll have to open up a console panel,” Dragonfly said. “But I think we can feed magic through the control circuits. Not something you’d want to try on a human system.”

“Fuck no,” Mark agreed groggily.

“Do it,” Cherry said. “There’s no point in igniting the second stage if we can’t steer. Hermes, where do we stand on trajectory?”

“Working,” Johanssen said. “Um… you’re actually three hundred forty-one meters per second faster than projected due to the longer burn. Trajectory is eleven degrees off target. No intercept.” The last two words came out almost as a sob, and she repeated them more firmly, “Repeat, no Hermes intercept. Working on burn requirements to put Phoenix back on course.”

“Not just back on course,” Cherry said. “I’ll need fuel in the second stage to slow down to match velocity.” Deep breath. “Mission Control, this is Phoenix. Request calculations for a Sparkle Drive jump to take us inside Hermes’ orbital path to generate an intercept. Assuming we’re still coplanar?”

“That’s affirmative, Phoenix,” Johanssen said.

“Okay. Earth, we need that calculation in half an hour. We’re getting farther away from Hermes every second, so get to work.”

Twelve minutes later, the words echoed in Mission Control: “… we’re getting farther away from Hermes every second, so get to work.”

“Mission Control copies,” Mitch Henderson responded, leaning over the CAPCOM station. “We’re working the problem, stand by.” This was true; at the first sign of serious problems, Rich Purnell had opened up his laptop and set it next on the Trajectory console next to the controller manning the station. By now five other people were gathered around the two, pointing to things on the screens, discussing options.

“Flight, Tracking.”

“Go ahead, Tracking.”

“Satellite observation confirms Phoenix trajectory,” the tracking controller said. “Numbers are solid.”

“Good to know, thanks,” Mitch grumbled. He began to pace, something a flight controller never did.

Up in the observation area, Annie leaned over to Venkat. “Now that it’s quiet for a moment,” she said, “what the fuck happened?”

“The magic boosters put all their input through three crystals mounted on the bottom of the first stage,” Venkat said. “One of those target crystals broke, which took five boosters out of action at once. But the trigger switch for the boosters linked all of their battery components together, so the batteries on the five failed boosters became extra power for the other ten. So those ten kept firing a lot longer than they should have.

“Between that and the normal rockets not throttling back, Phoenix is actually going faster than predicted- a lot faster than Hermes. But since the magic booster acceleration was unbalanced- pushing on one side of the craft more than the other- it pushed Phoenix off course. Cherry used up all her maneuvering thrusters trying to hold it, and she couldn’t. So right now they’re going too fast, in the wrong direction to meet Hermes, and they can’t turn the ship. And the second ascent stage probably isn’t enough to correct all that.”

“Fuck,” Annie whispered.

“Oh, yes,” Venkat agreed. “On a normal launch this would be game over. Cherry would have cut the thrusters to save some for steering. But the magic thrusters can be recharged, so those will probably come back online in a little while. And they have the Sparkle Drive, which can hop them sideways in space so that Phoenix and Hermes’s momentum will bring them together instead of apart.” He frowned more deeply and added, “In theory. They’re going to try it, anyway.”

“And what if that goes wrong? Annie asked.

“To borrow a phrase of yours,” Venkat replied, “fuck if I know.”

“Shit,” Annie said.

"Now would be a good time," Teddy said on the other side of Venkat, “for another cheery musical number.”

Sixteen minutes later, the reply came up from Earth to Hermes and Phoenix. “All right, we have a vector for the Sparkle Drive,” Mitch Henderson’s voice called up. “We’re sending it to both your ships’ nav-comms now. The Sparkle Drive is to fire on two hundred fifty thousand cycles for two hundred seconds. That will provide a total displacement of twenty-five thousand kilometers at a speed of one hundred twenty-five kilometers per second. The trajectory will take Phoenix behind and inside Hermes’s current course and put it on a rough intercept course. We’ll fine-tune the intercept once you’re secure from Sparkle Drive. Over.”

“Hermes copies, Houston,” Lewis said.

“Phoenix copies,” Cherry Berry echoed. “We have secondary thrusters restored to forty percent battery. Preparing to implement Sparkle Drive maneuver.” Cherry Berry brought up the MAV computer’s navigation system, found the program sent up from Earth, and activated it. The computer began firing the magic thrusters, turning Phoenix as it coasted through space, until the nose pointed almost behind them on their path.

“Activating Sparkle Drive,” Starlight reported from her station, bringing up the control program on the repurposed Hab laptop. “Set to timed burn mode. Two hundred seconds.” She keyed in the number and clicked Accept.

“Two hundred fifty thousand cycles.” She keyed in that number, too.

The laptop had been designed to endure high accelerations, vacuum, and various other kinds of abuse. But, above all else, it had been designed to be lightweight. Thus, there were compromises in durability, chiefly in the keyboard- which, after all, was only intended to be used by human fingers for thirty days. This keyboard, however, had suffered from heavy, if unnaturally nimble, pony hooves, for more than a year.

Be it the Galactic Ghoul, the malign spirit of Mars having one final attempt at the lives of the interlopers, bad design, or simply bad luck, the switch under the zero key chose this particular moment to stick. Nothing happened for a second, and then, just before Starlight’s hoof clicked the mouse to accept the setting, more zeroes appeared behind the four already present… and then the software, sensing a number higher than the maximum capacity of the computer to pulse a signal over a wire, reset the entry to its maximum setting.

Starlight clicked Accept for a cycle rate of 1,000,000,000 cycles per second, not noticing the changed number.

“All go for Sparkle Drive,” she reported.

“Engage,” Cherry Berry ordered.

Starlight did.

“What the FUCK?” Martinez shouted. “We just lost tracking on Phoenix!”

“Calm down and work the problem,” Lewis insisted. “Why did we lose tracking? Did it disappear?”

“No, just the opposite,” Martinez said. “Our radio tracking systems claim to be receiving multiple sources for Phoenix’s signal. Thousands of them. And the sources keep disappearing and appearing. The system’s overloaded. We can’t maintain a lock. Same story from the satellites!”

“There must be some kind of glitch,” Lewis said. “There’s no way Phoenix can be in multiple places at once.”

“Unless Phoenix is moving faster than light,” Johanssen muttered. “Um.”

“Put Phoenix’s last known position on screen,” Lewis ordered.

Phoenix should have been too small and too distant to be visible in the viewscreen without significant magnification. But as the image of space and the darker curve of Mars’s night side filled the bridge’s main screen, it included a brilliant thin white streak of light across the screen.

And as they watched, the tail of the streak zipped past them, right to left, and vanished.

Mark didn’t particularly want to move. His chest still ached from the eight G’s peak acceleration of the launch, though the lightheadedness had mostly passed. But his suit’s radio had just gone bonkers, with so much echo it seemed like static.

Over the noise in his ears, he could just about make out the sound of the ponies going nuts about something. He pulled the release latch on his flight couch harness and, not without some pain, sat up. It took an effort of will to focus on the voices and turn sounds into words, but when he did he discovered that the ponies were still speaking- well, almost shouting- in English.

And then the words began to register.

“-they’re dropping like a brick! Down ten percent already! What’s going on?”

“Reduce power to the Drive, then!”

“I’m trying! The slider isn’t working! It- oh buck! It’s set to maximum cycles!”

“How fast is that?”

“Too fast! And the computer won’t take new input!”

Over the sound of the radio going nuts and the ponies following the radio’s lead, Mark heard a loud crunching sound. It repeated, and then a lot of little crunches followed. His eye fell on one of the magic batteries. Cracks were running through it, big ones and little ones, flaw after flaw after flaw appearing in the crystal.

“The batteries are overloading! They’re going to fail!”

“Kill the drive! Now!”

“I’m trying! The computer won’t let me! I keep trying to reset, but-“

Mark had heard enough. The simple solution was the best, even if Starlight was, for whatever reason, overlooking it. Even with the Sparkle Drive on full pelt, they were still in free-fall, so it was a trivial thing for him to grab the back of Cherry Berry’s flight couch, use it to push himself off his own couch and across the opening for the boarding ladder, and over Starlight’s couch. He used a hand to stop himself on the console in front of her, reached down to the laptop, and grabbed the cord leading from the laptop to the Sparkle Drive.

He yanked it out.

The noise in his radio resolved into voices- strangely, Lewis’s voice, saying, “There’s no way Phoenix can be in multiple places at once!” He ignored it for now, focusing on the problems inside the capsule.

The batteries crackled and crunched a few more times, but for the moment they remained intact. Their readouts all showed the same level; eighty-one percent power remaining. The Sparkle Drive crystal itself remained clear, flawless, intact. Cherry and Starlight, with Spitfire sitting between them, appeared to be calming down.

“Thank you, Mark,” Starlight said. “I got too focused on this.” She waved a hoof at the keyboard.

Mark looked at it, then used the three-finger salute to bring up the task manager to manually kill the Sparkle Drive app. That done, a new window became visible with an error message: System has detected a potentially erroneous input (sticky key). Ignore or accept? “Well, there’s your problem,” he said.

“Later,” Cherry said. “How fast were we going?”

“Maximum cycles,” Starlight said quietly. “One billion jumps per second. Half a meter per jump.”

Mark did the math in his head. Five hundred million meters per second. Five hundred thousand kilometers per second.

Slightly more than one point six times the speed of light.

“Well, no wonder the radio went bonkers,” he muttered.

And they had been in Sparkle Drive for roughly a minute, which meant… thirty million kilometers.

Thirty million kilometers away from Hermes. From Mars.

From anything.

As Mark froze, absorbing the impact, Starlight nudged him out of the way. “There’s still fifty percent left in the emergency battery,” she said. “I need that to mend as many of the other batteries as possible, if I can. We need to get the Drive back online ASAP.” She worked out of her own restraints, leaning over her flight couch to look at Fireball. “Fireball, go get that keepsake computer of yours,” she said. “We need it to install a new copy of the Drive software. We can’t trust this computer now.”

“Roger,” Fireball said, getting out of his own seat.

“And nobody bump anything hard,” Starlight added. “Especially not the batteries. They could shatter at any moment with-“

“Phoenix, Hermes,” the voice in Mark’s headset- Commander Lewis’s voice- broke in. “Please report status, over.”

Cherry Berry replied, “Hermes, Phoenix. Secure from Sparkle Drive. We had a computer error that caused some damage. Making repairs now. Sparkle Drive temporarily offline. Please confirm our position, over.”

No immediate response. Well, that wasn’t surprising. They were now a hundred light-seconds away from Hermes, roughly speaking.

One hundred light-seconds. Thirty million kilometers. The numbers finally began to sink in.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, “we’re fucked, aren’t we?”

“Work the problem,” Cherry Berry growled. But she didn’t disagree.

Far out in deep space, Phoenix coasted on, from nowhere to nowhere, alone.

Author's Notes:

Yes, I'm a bastard.

Here's the musical moment I promised. I'm not fond of "Starman" as a song, and I found the scene that used it in the movie to be totally forgettable. But I'm fond of "Space Oddity" and much more fond of "Major Tom," so you get a medley of the two, although an incomplete one. Things eventuated.

And now comes the last thing I want to talk about that the book... well, I don't say for certain the original novel gets this wrong, but it doesn't make much sense to me.

At one point in the book we're told that the full launch cycle for an unmodified MAV requires a total of twelve minutes. We aren't told how much of that is for which of the two stages mentioned. We are told that, at the end of twelve minutes, a normal MAV, weighing 12,600 kilograms plus fuel at launch, will be in Mars orbit moving 4.1 kilometers per second. Let's wave away complexities like air resistance and planetary rotation and just say that requires an average acceleration of only 5.7 meters per second per second above the effects of air resistance, change in trajectory, and Mars gravity. That means, if the launch is twelve minutes, the astronauts on board would experience an average G load of less than two G (one G being 9.8 meters per second per second).

But.

In the book Mark Watney's target velocity is higher than Mars escape velocity- 5.8 kilometers per second. To achieve this the MAV is reduced to less than three-fifths its original unfueled weight, which means its acceleration should be 167% of its normal load, give or take. Now, I can ignore that 5.8 is not 167% of 4.1, because the difference is small enough that atmospheric resistance and differing trajectories can easily account for that. That's not the problem.

The problem is that the book also mentions that Mark Watney experiences higher acceleration than any human before him- a peak load of a rib-cracking twelve G's, or 117.6 meters per second per second, not accounting for Mars gravity or other effects. Now, obviously he experiences this for a very brief period of time, but if the modified MAV hits 117.6 meters per second at max acceleration just before a stage burnout, that means the unmodified MAV should hit 70.4 meters per second, or just over seven G's.

Seven is a lot more than two.

To avoid my having to ask someone to do calculus, let's just assume an average of six G's acceleration, and let's limit it to a six-minute first stage burn. Six G's is 58.8 meters per second per second. Let's ignore air resistance and trajectory changes, but assume that Mars eats a constant 3.9 of that, giving an actual acceleration of 53.9 m/s/s. Three hundred and sixty seconds of that would get us (drum roll)...

... 19.4 kilometers per second.

That's not Mars escape velocity. That's solar system escape velocity. That's next stop Alpha Centauri.

And when I ran the numbers with the magic booster system and the less-modified Phoenix, I came up with numbers saying Alpha Centauri, here we come half again as fast.

So one of two things is correct: Andy Weir knows something I don't, or Andy Weir hand-waved all aspects of the final launch for purposes of drama. Either one could be true.

Unfortunately, I don't really have enough knowledge or skill to correct the whole mess and be confident that I'd actually be doing a better job. So, after about five minutes of looking at the numbers, I decided, "screw it, if I hand-wave hard enough maybe I will learn to fly," and went with what you see here.

Because if a million-selling novelist can do it, so can I.