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The Maretian

by Kris Overstreet

Chapter 74: Sol 113

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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 112
ARES III SOL 113

[08:14] JPL: Good morning, Mark. Venkat Kapoor here. In your email you’ll find a schedule for your scientific and medical experiments. We’ve highlighted all EVAs required on that schedule so you can ask your friends if they’d be willing to take over as many as they can. We want you to reduce your physical activity and your EVAs wherever possible.

Also please ask permission to take photos and do a close inspection of one of your friends’ EVA suits. We understand all of them were made by the same people. Since they have no spare suits or parts, we want to evaluate the potential for using Hab canvas and sealant for emergency repairs should another accident happen. We want the photos in tomorrow’s upload queue if possible.

In the news today, the Fantastic Four reboot surprised everyone by topping the box office in its debut weekend. The Cubs signed Luis Bautista y Ortega to pitch for them; Grapefruit League play begins tomorrow with the Cubbies facing the Diamondbacks in Tampa.

In less cheerful news, NASA is putting together a committee. They want to see if there were any avoidable mistakes that led you to being stranded. Just a heads-up. They may have questions for you later on.

Finally, although we’re not sending you music, we can send you digital books in text-only format. Today’s download will include a book we think your friends will enjoy. Let us know how it goes over.

[08:31] WATNEY: Venkat, I’ve been playing nice and watching my language for the most part. So it is with deliberate forethought that I tell you that I fucking refuse to cooperate with any motherfucking witch hunt investigation. You’ve got my logs and my incident report, and that’s enough. My flight suit got destroyed in the perchlorate incident before I thought of photographing the damage. I felt guilty before, but now I’m fucking delighted about that, because it’s one thing your inquisition won’t have when they try to nail Lewis to the wall for a freak accident that no amount of chickenshit protocols could have predicted or prevented.

Kindly inform your investigation committee that their mothers were all whores and that their fathers smell of elderberries.

This isn’t a joke and it’s not up for further debate. I’ll do your science and write your reports and poke and prod at my friends here, but where it comes to the investigation I refuse to play. If you want I can put Dragonfly on and let her tell you how sincerely angry I am that this is even a thing.

P. S. Their sisters, too.

[08:53] JPL: Teddy Sanders here, Mark. We understand and commend your loyalty to Melissa Lewis, and we want to make it clear we’re not looking for a scapegoat or a target. We agree that Lewis followed protocol to the letter. Her only error was to spend too long looking for you, and we can’t fault her for that. But we want to be sure that no oversights or misjudgments like the suit helmet visor issue remain which might have protected you from being stranded.

We are coming to rescue you. But once we have you, we have Ares IV, and Ares V after that. A spending bill in Congress is pending to approve Ares VI. We want to make sure that six crew land and six crew leave in each of those missions. So we’re going over the Sol 6 incident with a fine-toothed comb to make sure that what happened to you never happens to anybody else. We won’t ask you to second-guess Lewis and her decisions, but we do have some questions about the MAV, the Hab, the antenna farm, and your flight suit that we hope you’ll answer.

We hope you’ll change your mind.

[09:08] WATNEY: No promises. Thanks for the endorsement of Lewis. I hope you told her all this yourself.

[09:22] JPL: We did. The inquest into Lewis’s actions began on Sol 22 your time and took seventeen days to clear her completely. She was commended for not waiting on Earth to abort the mission, and if she leaves NASA and returns to the Navy she’s been fast-tracked for promotion to captain, depending on a physical fitness review when she lands. We didn’t mention this before because we knew you’d have strong feelings on the subject.

[09:35] WATNEY: No shit. Awaiting downloads. By the way, a quick report: the water reclaimer efficiency is down to 15 liters per day. I’ll be doing a diagnostic this afternoon. It’s not mission critical, since we have unlimited water if we need it via pony life support, but it’s nice to have the system in place.


“Rich.”

Rich Purnell snored.

“Rich.” When raising his voice didn’t work, Mike grabbed Rich’s shoulder and shook it roughly. “Wake up.”

Rich had two means of waking up, when he’d fallen asleep at the cubicle. If he’d only been asleep a short while, he would come to slowly and peacefully. But if he’d had enough sleep to be rested, he would jerk awake with a violent spasm, usually sending limbs flying. If the waker-upper stood too close, they risked an unaimed but surprisingly powerful punch or slap to the face. If they avoided getting hit, they would get their shins barked when Rich’s chair shot back under the sudden shift in his weight. If both those obstacles were avoided, the waker-upper had the dubious pleasure of picking up from the floor Rick, whatever papers or books he’d been using for reference, and somewhere between three and a dozen coffee mugs, mostly other people’s, looted from the break room.

Mike had painful experience of all these things. It was one reason he usually made sure Rich was out of the building no later than six and back in no earlier than nine. But JPL and Kennedy had both requested refinements on the trajectories for the three Sleipnir probes, due immediately, and so Mike had handed the job to Rich.

Luckily, Rich hadn’t been dozing long. His head left the wall of his cubicle slowly, reluctantly. His yawn seemed to echo in the almost-empty Astrodynamics work room; it was still well before shift. The used coffee mugs barely shifted in their huddle (not, Mike was relieved, tower) next to his computer. “Mike?” he asked.

“Do you have those trajectories done?” Mike asked.

“Jus’ got started,” Rich muttered.

Mike’s jaw dropped. “Rich, JPL needs the Sleipnir trajectories now!” he barked.

Rich turned his head and blinked. “Oooooh,” he said. “You meant the Sleipnir trajectories. Yeah, those are done. Just a moment.” His head was moving slowly, but his hands danced across the keyboard, finishing what looked to Mike like an email. Rich clicked Send, and the monitor cleared to desktop. “There. In your email box now.”

Mike didn’t say thank you. “Rich,” he asked carefully, “what other trajectories would there be, besides the Sleipnir ones?”

“The other ones,” Rich muttered. “Is there fresh coffee in the break room?”

Mike weighed his options. Rich got mulish when asked to show incomplete work. It took far too much effort to be worth it most of the time, especially when Rich’s work never failed to check out under peer review. But for some reason Mike wanted to push it now.

But no, he didn’t have time. He couldn’t even send Rich home to sleep and bathe, as he ought to. “Not yet, Rich,” he said. “It’s only seven-thirty. I just got here.”

“Oh.” Rich began looking in the dirty mugs to see what might be left.

“Rich.” Mike put a hand on his best mathematician’s shoulder. “Today I need you to work on adjustments for the Mars recon satellites. We need the best photos we can get of the area around the Ares III Hab for the Sleipnir landings. They’re tumblers, so we can’t drop them directly on Watney. So find me the lowest-energy course corrections to bring the sats in close and straight over, all right?”

“Okay.” Rich picked up a piece of paper to look under it for more coffee mugs, then noticed his own handwriting on the paper. “I need this,” he said, handing the paper to Mike.

Mike read, in Rich’s tiny, sloppy handwriting, under the coffee stains:

To: Dr. S. Glimmer, Mars

From: NASA JSC Astrodynamics Office

Please confirm the following calculations for the Sparkle Drive, assuming a total weight of drive and batteries combined of five hundred kilograms and a power draw of 0.00008% of total battery capacity per second, for the following range of mass of ship…

What followed came a set of seven different numbers in kilograms, each with its own neat sets of data and an equation showing the work.

“Rich, I…” Mike didn’t know how to explain to Rich that he was three levels of management below the minimum level required to get time on the Pathfinder chat with Mark Watney. Rich barely seemed to understand that Mike was one level of management above Rich. “I’ll clean it up and ask Dr. Kapoor to email it to them,” he said instead. “I can’t guarantee they’ll answer.”

“Thanks,” Rich said. “I’m going to need some supercomputer time.”

Mike shrugged. Satellite orbits never needed supercomputer projections- the trajectory tools on the cubicle computers were more than good enough for such simple calculations- but Rich might have something in mind. “Okay, I’ll see about getting it this afternoon,” he said.

“Won’t be ready this afternoon,” Rich said.

“When, then?” Mike asked.

“Don’t know when,” Rich said. “But I’m gonna need it.”

It was too early in the morning, and Mike had skipped breakfast to check on his problem child. “Rich,” he said, “just please get me those satellite orbit adjustments. But first?” He picked up one coffee mug (with the words WORLD’S GREATEST MOM written on the side) and put it in Rich’s hands. “First take all these mugs back to the break room and wash them. Now, please.”

Mike helped Rich carry them only because his next stop was the break room. He needed some fresh coffee… and some donuts.


Instead of a video player, the computer showed a wall of text.

“Where’s the TV, Mark?” Dragonfly asked, on behalf of the rest of them.

“No TV today,” Mark said. “NASA sent a set of books I read when I was a little kid. They’re pretty good. I’m going to read the first part of the first book to you tonight, and then you can decide if you want to continue.”

“More Agatha Christie?” Starlight Glimmer asked from a stool. She'd been regaining mobility, though the inflatable cast remained on her foreleg, and as such she took every opportunity to not be in her bunk.

“Agatha Christie? No,” Mark said. “This is by an author named J. K. Rowling.”

Ears perked up. “Adventure story? Hot forest? Stone buildings? Traps?” Cherry Berry asked eagerly.

Mark considered this. “Maybe?” he asked. “It’s about a boy who goes to a magical place to learn about his past.”

Cherry Berry’s ears drooped a little. “Oh. Was hoping…” She shrugged and quit trying to talk about whatever it was.

Mark looked at the others, who sat up, attentive if not enthusiastic about being read to for an evening. “The book,” he said quietly, “ is called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. A sorcerer is a wizard, like Starlight. This book has lots of wizards in it.” He smiled a little and added, “Just to be clear, it’s a made-up thing. Not real. Just like the TV shows, understand?”

Five heads nodded.

“Chapter One,” Mark began. “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense…

Author's Notes:

I wrote half of this chapter just now, instead of pushing on. So, as I post this, the buffer is zero. There will be buffer before I go to bed, though.

I'm not happy with how the book handled (mostly ignored, except as an opportunity to show Mark both loyal and balky) the inquest into the Sol 6 incident. It's over and done with in a couple of paragraphs. True, the focus of that book was Watney's work to stay alive and escape Mars, but if an investigating committee was as fearsome as Watney made it out to be, re: Lewis, there should have been more to it. Also, the idea of the committee waiting over a hundred sols before even being picked is ridiculous- particularly in the book, when Mark had been presumed dead for over a month. Dead astronauts equal investigation IMMEDIATELY. There might be reasons for some delay, but not for almost four months.

So I expanded the scene, to show NASA's boss trying to talk Mark down. And yes, there are good reasons why an investigation should go forward. Yes, the Sol 6 storm was a freak, but a long, tall MAV that topples at twelve degrees of tilt? A fragile antenna farm? Durability of flight pressure suits? Protocols for when a camera's biomonitor goes dead? Drills for landing abort procedure? There are a lot of potential flaws in the scenario that might lead to a change that would save lives on future Ares missions, and Teddy and Venkat are very correct to want to find out.

And yeah, Harry Potter had to happen to the ponies. Other books might come across the beam, depending...

Next Chapter: Sol 114 Estimated time remaining: 22 Hours, 8 Minutes
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