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The Maretian

by Kris Overstreet

Chapter 282: May 22, 2037, 12:07 AM CDT

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It was just after midnight. Some of the multitudes gathered around JSC had gone home, but most had stayed.

There had been a press conference, explaining the basic facts of the situation. The launch had had several problems, but none fatal to the mission. Phoenix was now an immense distance from Hermes, but that might still be corrected. The Sparkle Drive was being repaired, partly by mending the overstrained batteries, partly by switching the Drive over to a backup computer. Once the Drive was fully operational, the crews and NASA would re-evaluate the situation and decide between another attempt at a Hermes rendezvous or using the Sparkle Drive for a straight shot to Earth.

That had been hours before. Most of the intervening time had been taken up waiting on the Sparkle Drive interface app to be uploaded fresh to Phoenix for a new installation. The original install file had been on Starlight’s laptop, which still refused to work properly due to the keyboard error.

The Phoenix crew had put that time to good use, repairing the damaged batteries, topping off the smaller batteries on the salvaged magic thrusters, and eating a meal. They had also exchanged messages with Hermes, celebrating the fact that, without intending to, the Phoenix crew had become the first known beings from either universe to travel through space faster than light.

In the meantime, Mission Control remained full- mostly. The prime controller team had gone off-shift, replaced at the consoles by the night watch. The morning team, for the most part, had gone to the cots in the meeting rooms below the observation area to get some nap time, but few of them stayed out of the room for more than two hours at a time. This included none of the Trajectory team, who had been engaged in one argument after another over the benefits and drawbacks of another Hermes rendezvous attempt versus the Direct Earth Abort option… all directly over Rich Purnell’s head, as he kept working non-stop on trajectories and flight programs for both options, saying not a word unless directly asked.

And in the observation room, no one had left. The trash cans now overflowed with empty takeout boxes and bags. The vice president was still there, as was the Chinese ambassador, as was the entire Congressional delegation, and all the rest, including Teddy Sanders, Venkat Kapoor, and Annie Montrose.

“When the fuck are they going to make a decision?” Annie asked. “For that matter, why aren’t you two down there making the decision for them?”

“This isn’t a question of planning or policy anymore,” Teddy said. “This is crisis management. Operations. Go or no go. That makes it the flight director’s decision. Ever since Chris Kraft, the rule has been, on all operational decisions the flight director is God.”

“Right,” Venkat said. “It’s out of our hands now.”

Below, Mitch Henderson stood at his position, having retained command after his team had gone off-shift. Brendan Hutch, whose team was officially on duty, had joined the discussions at the Trajectory consoles. Both appeared in full control of the situation, barely showing the hours of waiting and alertness. The only indication of how much time had passed came from the row of paper coffee cups that now lined two-thirds of the cupola surrounding the flight director’s station.

“Flight, Tracking.”

Although there had been a lot of discussion on the floor, the headset circuit had been silent for almost a full hour, except for a press officer summarizing the situation every ten minutes for the benefit of press and VIPs. This call-out caught the attention of everyone in the room, silencing the argument at Trajectory and causing the VIPs to sit up and come alert.

“Go, Tracking,” Mitch said.

“We’re receiving a signal on 110.1 megahertz,” the Tracking officer said. “It’s coming from an object in very low Earth orbit, closer than the SpaceX station. We’re trying to get a visual on it now.”

“What’s the signal?” Mitch said.

“110.1?” Venkat gasped from the observation area. “It's them! That's the prearranged arrival signal!”

“Morse code,” the Tracking officer said. “It’s repeating. The back room is decoding it…” The tracking officer held his headset tighter to his ear, listening to the message from his subordinates elsewhere in the building. “Message is: C-S-P H-R-M-Y, R-S-Q, and the code for ‘stand by.’”

“Roger, Tracking. Get someone to acknowledge the message on the same frequency.”

“I’ll try, but it keeps- wait a minute. We’ve got a satellite with a camera pointed at the object. Put feed 31 on screen.”

“Do it,” Mitch said.

A moment later the main screen in the control room showed an image of the other side of the Earth, with a large object vaguely like three enormous cylinders linked side by side, flanked by enormous solar arrays, flying over some ocean or other below.

“That’s not one of ours,” Teddy said. “It looks bigger than the SpaceX station. Almost as big as ours.”

“Of course,” Venkat said, almost giggling, bouncing in his seat.

“We’re getting a voice message now over the same frequency,” Tracking said. “Patching it in.”

The room was treated to garbled sounds which, if you were of a certain frame of mind, sounded like a half-Welsh, half-Dutch woman clearing her sinuses.

Then another voice made the same sounds- a voice the room recognized. That voice then said, in English, “Mission Control…” There was a brief burst of the other language, which sounded like some variant of ‘oh my god’. “Mission Control, this is Phoenix, relayed through Changeling Space Program spaceship Harmony. Their message reads: ‘Stand by- we are coming.’ Message ends.”

An instant later, the mysterious spaceship on the Mission Control screen vanished, leaving nothing but the unobstructed view of the eastern Pacific Ocean.


TRANSCRIPT – AUDIO FROM MAV PHOENIX, MAY 22, 2037 07:32 CDT

CHERRY BERRY: NASA, this is Phoenix. Harmony has arrived at our position and is proceeding with recovery efforts.

MARK WATNEY: Je-zus Christ! Look at the size of that thing! It’s as big as Hermes! Bigger! Let me get a video link on it… there! I hope you're getting this! Look at it! It looks like someone lifted two Saturn V rockets to orbit and tied them to a space station! I think that’s exactly what they’ve done! Look at the engine bells there! And what’s that sticking out of the middle section?

CHERRY: (unintelligible pony sounds) Message from Harmony. “To Phoenix crew: brace and prepare for grappling.” Grappling? Since when could we do that? (unintelligible pony sounds)

WATNEY: That’s what that thing is! It’s a claw! Like the arcade game! They’re going to take us in tow!

CHERRY: (unintelligible pony sounds) New message, um… “Harmony to NASA. We cannot stay long. Power drains quickly. We will return your ship and your astronaut as soon as we can. We will be back. Phoenix, stand by for grapple.”

WATNEY: Huh! Well. I guess we’re not going to Earth after all. Sorry, everyone on Hermes, but we’ll have to wait a bit longer for that reunion.

(sound of thumps, slight creaking)

CHERRY: (long string of unintelligible pony sounds) Grapple confirmed. Phoenix to Hermes and Earth, thanks for all your help, Mark will be-

END OF TRANSMISSION


“… thanks for all your help, Mark will be back as soon as we can manage it. Phoenix out.”

“They can’t hear you,” Dragonfly said. “We’re not there anymore.”

Cherry blinked. “What?”

“We’re already home.” The changeling grinned, already looking more like herself than she had in months. “We’re home!” In a flash of green flame, she took on the appearance of Beth Johanssen. “Can’t you feel it?” Another flash of flame, and there were two Mark Watneys in the capsule. “We’re HOME!”

“Look at the batteries!” Starlight said, pointing to the readouts. Before, four had been completely drained during the repair process, and the others had been around eighty percent full. Now all eight showed 100%, with the needles vibrating slightly at the top of the range.

And in Cherry’s headset, the voice of Twilight Sparkle said, in her native tongue, “Phoenix, this is Concordia. Prepare for EVA transfer to this ship. We’re sending out three spacewalkers to assist with the crew transfer. What is your condition?

“We’re home,” Cherry whispered in English. Tears began running down her face. “We’re finally home.” She leaned over and hugged Spitfire, who hugged her right back, tears also running down the pegasus’s face. Fireball was next, hugging the two ponies tightly, with Starlight joining a moment later and Dragonfly, shifted back to her natural form, joining last. Finally, the hand of Mark Watney snaked through the mass hug to rest on Cherry’s shoulder, squeezing tightly.

“We’re home,” she repeated, and then in Equestrian, “Thank you, Celestia, we’re home.”

Author's Notes:

This was always how our heroes' stay on Mars was going to end- mainly because, for the most part, Equestria wasn't able to provide much material help for most of the story. They could send suggestions for spells for Starlight to cast, and that was about all. Letting them have the rescue seemed to be a balance for the two sides of the story, at least when I first planned it out.

The original plan was for something to happen to the rockets that would cause the MAV (which didn't get the name Phoenix until the day the ponies decided it needed a name, just a week or so ago) to miss its rendezvous with Hermes. The original plan, which I have lost the details of, didn't survive the abandonment of recycling Amicitas's main engines as boosters.

Whatever happened, the next step was to engage the Sparkle Drive, which, being directly connected to a human computer's vastly faster processors, would go to warp until, in short order, it ran out of power, at which point the whole thing would disintegrate just as in the Sol 6 accident. That plan died when Twilight Sparkle came up with the idea of making the Sparkle Drive's frequency and jump distance adjustable. It was implausible in the extreme that an adjustable setting Drive app would default to top speed. I toyed with the interface causing confusion and leading Starlight to set it for highest instead of lowest setting by accident (the clickable sliders), but I decided against that, too. The sticky-key failure mode only came to mind a couple of weeks ago.

Incidentally, I did the math to work out two things:

(1) How much energy would be used at my pre-determined "indefinitely sustainable" setting of 0.5 meters, 250 kilohertz. Answer: 0.00008% of the power of the seven batteries linked to the Drive per second.

This let me work out (2) How long would the batteries last at maximum velocity of 1 gigahertz? Answer: slightly more than 313 seconds, or five and a quarter minutes (0.32% of total battery power per second). This was, well, longer than I'd originally planned... and far longer than the crew would have let things continue without a Really Damn Good Reason.

I seriously considered having the batteries disintegrate from just plain overstrain (which would be understandable- after all, this is getting warp speed out of a system about the size and weight of a work truck's diesel engine- not even a semi!). But at the last minute I decided that the near brush with total disaster was actually more dramatic than the total failure... provided I had a chapter break between our heroes being stranded in deep space and their rescue.

Even without a pony rescue, the crew could probably rescue themselves, at least as far as getting to Earth. Meeting Hermes would still be the smart solution- slightly more so, since repairs on the Sparkle Drive ate up half their stored magic power, turning the Direct Earth Abort option from doable-but-chancy to no-margin-for-error. But now, fortunately for all concerned, those problems have been bypassed.

It's all epilogue from here, and since you can work out most of how things go from here, I will drop a couple of spoilers:

(1) No, Mark is not getting stranded on Equus. Concordia is not broken, and they now know how to get to and from Mark's world safely.

(2) No, there will not be another sequel, at least not one written by me. There are a ton of other "first contact" and "culture clash" stories by other authors, many better than I can do. And since this first contact is going to result in an earth-shattering explosion of new technologies on both sides of the dimensional barrier, the kind of "scarce supplies, bare survival" adventure that defined this story becomes nigh-impossible. Both worlds are headed for, if not the Trek-style post-scarcity economy, such vast social and technological changes that they surpass my ability to imagine it. If someone else has ideas, they're welcome to roll their own, with the caveat that I may or may not pay any attention to spinoffs.

(2A) Also, I still have CSP to complete.

(3) The epilogue will be short-ish, but not instant. There are not less than three chapters remaining, maybe a couple more depending on how I play things out. We will get at least one glimpse of each of our six principals After.

And finally, (4) the remaining few chapters may not be daily. They will post when complete. I say this because I'm over 3,000 words into the chapter after this one and it's nowhere close to done.

There are some details I'm keeping mum about for the moment, but be patient. You've not got long to find out for yourselves, after all.

Next Chapter: Phoenix Day 22 Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes
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