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The Maretian

by Kris Overstreet

Chapter 86: Sol 141

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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 141

ARES III SOL 141

Starlight Glimmer regarded the hexagonal crystals partly wrapped in metal cups with no love at all. What was she missing?

She’d checked the terminals. She’d checked the contacts. She’d tested the gauges. She’d found microfissures in the casings salvaged from Amicitas’s engine deck and fixed them. She’d even cast a mana-wasting spell just to make sure that the huge amethyst crystals she’d chosen for her first experiment were flawless down to the molecular level.

But the new batteries refused to charge. She’d even tried charging them directly, and so far as the battery gauges or the thaumometer could tell, she’d thrown magic into the void.

That left her where she was- draining one of the working mana batteries in order to conduct a detailed scan of the enchantment, looking for errors.

“Starlight! Cherry wants you on the comms!”

She sighed and dropped the spell. Trying to look for errors, she meant. She levitated her space helmet from the suit storage area, jammed it on her head, and activated the comm system. “Amicitas, Glimmer,” she reported.

“There you are!” Cherry said in her headphones. “We need you to tell us what these checklist items are! We keep bucking up the activation order! I’m sick and tired of this sim giving me a mission abort for a stupid main bus overvolt!”

Starlight sighed. “You could try just turning things on in the order on the checklist, Cherry.”

“We’re trying! Spitfire and I have taken turns doing this, but we keep getting switches mixed up! We need to know what we’re doing out here!”

Starlight sighed. “Cherry, I’m busy with the new batteries right now. We’re going to need them if we have another emergency like the Hab blowout or the perchlorate fire. Can you please just keep trying?”

“Starlight,” Cherry sighed with exasperation, “the worst thing about failing a sim due to electrical system crash is that you get more than halfway though the sim, no matter what you do, and it looks just fine until the moment it crashes!”

“Keep trying anyway,” Starlight sighed. “I’ll try to get Mark to help you. Glimmer out.” She turned off the suit comms, removed her helmet, and reactivated the scan spell. The problem had to be in the enchantment. Once a crystal was enchanted it was virtually impossible to remove the enchantment, but sometimes you could correct-

“Starlight, gimme a hand, willya?”

Starlight growled, turning the mana battery off again. ”What is it, Fireball?”

“This essay you told me to write,” Fireball grumbled. “How do you spell ‘dementors’ again?”

Starlight rubbed the side of her head with one hoof. “The book is on that same computer,” she said. “You can look it up there.”

“Oh.”

“And remember to use your verb tenses,” Starlight added. “I want to see some –eds and –ings.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the dragon grumbled.

Shaking her head, Starlight switched on the battery again, recast the scanning spell, and tried to remember where she had left off. If she was lucky there would be only one little flaw in the enchantment, possibly the same one in both-

“Hey, Starlight? Do you have a minute?” It was Mark. “Since we have enough salt for a while now, I was thinking that we’re running really low on soap, and maybe you could conjure up some potash- that’s potassium hydroxide- and-“

“ENOUGH!” Starlight switched off the battery again and hopped off the workstool. “Dragonfly, would you like to walk with me to the farm? I need to work on this somewhere that I won’t be interrupted!”

Mark looked at Dragonfly, who had trotted up at the sound of her own name. “I caught most of that,” he said, “but what’s incinerate mean?”

“AAAARGH!” Starlight shouted.

“You meant interrupted,” Dragonfly replied quietly. “I’ll show you. Just say a long sentence.”

Mark shrugged. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade,” he quoted. “We choose to go to the-“

Dragonfly shouted, “INTERRUPTED!”

Mark blinked. “Oh,” he said. “You could have just told me.”

“This was funny,” Dragonfly said, unashamed. “And the most important part of com-“

“Timing,” Mark said, grinning. He added, “We have that joke, too.”

This might have continued if Starlight hadn’t thrown Dragonfly’s suit helmet at her.


Mark ended up driving them to the cave. Starlight’s leg was still weak, her EVA suit was still patched with a wad of changeling gunk, and there were four batteries to carry the ten-kilometer distance.

Once inside, while Mark and Dragonfly wasted time on checking the water heating system for leaks, Starlight set up the two old batteries and the two new, nonfunctional batteries as close to the middle of the field as she could manage. The trickle of magic produced by the plants in the room didn’t register on the battery gauges, but it would slow the discharge a bit while she worked.

Finally, settled down with no interruptions, she tuned out the occasional chatter from the two engineers and focused on her scanning spell. Where was the enchantment… where… ah, there it was… and, as she’d expected, it was perfectly intact and correct.

So… nothing wrong with the enchantment, right? And nothing wrong with any other component. So the thing ought to work… but it didn’t.

Why not? What was the difference between the batteries she’d made here on Mars and the batteries she herself had made back in Equestria?

Her attention wavered, and the scanning spell drifted from the new batteries to one of the old.

The next thing she knew, Mark and Dragonfly were standing over her. “Are you all right?” Dragonfly asked.

Starlight tried to sit up. She lay flat on her back in one of the field rows, alfalfa rising on either side of her. Her head hurt from the feedback loop she’d mistakenly locked herself into. She could only hope the battery hadn’t taken any damage.

But it had been worth it. Because, for just an instant, she’d seen.

With help from the other two, Starlight got to her hooves and walked back over to the batteries. The old batteries hadn’t been damaged by the feedback, although the one she’d been locked with had been drained down to a meager 2% charge from its prior 10%. In a proper magical environment, she suspected, the thing would have exploded rather than just knocking her back several ponylengths. The new batteries, naturally, hadn’t been touched.

With Mark’s help she rearranged the batteries, setting the nearly-drained battery next to one of the new ones, leaving the other good battery directly behind her. Tapping this battery, she cast the scanning spell again, switching back and forth between the good-but-drained old battery and the dead new battery.

The difference was as clear as a slap in the face- or a feedback loop spell failure to the face. She had to concentrate to perceive the enchantment on the new battery. The same enchantment on the old battery, by comparison, stood out so boldly that it might as well have been physically etched into the crystal.

So, that was it. The new batteries weren’t charging because the enchantment was too weak. The greater mass of the crystal wasn’t properly attuned to its purpose. The heavy mass of rock might as well be a gemstone in a horn-ring.

But Starlight had cast the new enchantment precisely the same way she’d cast the old. The difference wasn’t her fault. The only differences were Martian crystal and Mars’s no-magic environment… and to be blunt, amethyst is amethyst no matter where it’s mined, right?

Well, if the crystal was different, there was nothing Starlight could do about it. But she could do something about the magical field, at least temporarily. But, unfortunately, not here and now. The rig she’d cobbled together to make the battery project a magic field was back in the Hab.

But… but… but…

… all she really needed was two lengths of metal, right?

“Mark?” she asked quietly. “May I borrow a wrench?”


Half an hour of explanation and cobbling later, it was done.

Mark’s tools had been designed by NASA, who had a profound interest in not having their astronauts electrocute themselves every time they tried to fix something in space, where static electrical buildup was a serious hazard. The handles of every tool he possessed were plastic or rubber.

But Mark suggested a replacement. The cave still had the scraps of hull plate metal the crew had used to clean up the mountain of perchlorate from Starlight’s little misjudgment. They’d been tossed over by the cave wall after their last use (turning soil to mix in compost) and left until wanted again. A quick trim of the edges of the improvised shovels produced makeshift aerials of equal length, which Mark fastened to the terminals of one of the mana batteries.

Starlight carefully balanced the remaining stored mana between the two batteries. One battery would hold the magic required for the spell itself, as far as Starlight could estimate. The rest of the magic would be used by the other battery, poured out to make- for a few seconds- a magic field comparable to Equestria’s.

The experiment would drain the batteries completely. They’d require over two weeks to fully recharge. But one way or another, this experiment would be worth it. Either they’d have one new battery… or they’d know for certain that the batteries they had were all there would ever be.

With this thought in mind. Starlight placed her hooves on the terminals of the battery with the magic for the spell, fixed the matrix for the enchantment in her mind, and nodded to Mark and Dragonfly. The two switched on the good batteries and scrambled back as arcs of magic energy rose from the improvised Jacolt’s ladder, arcing and sparking. The entire cave sparkled and glittered with light reflected and refracted off the crystal-studded walls. Sympathetic sparks danced around Starlight’s hooves as the other working battery tried to tap into the field.

Starlight ignored the light show, ignored the itching of raw magic power striking her hooves. She focused her mind on the target, one of the failed batteries, focusing on the weak enchantment at its core. She gathered magic from the battery under her hooves, wrapped it around her horn, and hammered the crystal with it, giving the enchantment spell everything she had to give.

There. Done.

And, since I just flopped over like a beached fish, it better be done. Hello, empty reserves. I hadn’t missed you. I got used to having spare mana in the batteries.

But, as she struggled to lift her head, she could see little sparks around the terminals of the target battery, just like the ones on the battery she’d drained.


TRANSCRIPT – WATER TELEGRAPH EXCHANGE, ESA BALTIMARE and ESA SHIP AMICITAS

AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, use suit DF for responses, over.

ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, over.

AMICITAS: SG- Breakthrough in mana battery work. Recasting enchantment in artificially boosted magic environment produced enchantment strong enough for battery to function in low-magic environment. Over.

ESA: Good news. You’re breaking new experimental ground with enchantments. We’ve never had access to a pure null-magic environment before. Over.

AMICITAS: You can have your null-magic environment. Also my headache from draining reserves down to nil. Again. Over.

ESA: Good job, anyway. Status? Over.

AMICITAS: Emergency mana battery A and B at less than 1% charge. New battery at 2%. Too soon for precise measurements, but EMB C appears to have 40% capacity of A or B due to insufficient environmental magic during casting and interference from existing failed enchantment. Over.

ESA: Understood. Do you have a procedure planned? Over.

AMICITAS: In sixteen days the batteries should all be at or near 90%. Avoid use until then. Then, harvest several battery crystals from cave, mount them in engine battery casings, use EMB A and B for double-strength magic field, use C to cast enchantments until power exhausted. Over.

ESA: Sounds good. Don’t overwork yourself. Out.

AMICITAS: You have no idea. Out.

Author's Notes:

Ugh. This took two days to write, and I'm really not happy with it.

Buffer is still at 3, because I blew over an hour of today's writing time re-writing some of yesterday's work to make it not suck so bad. But I don't have time to do the same with this, so warts and all, it goes up. I have to start packing up, which will take more than three hours, and then six hours of driving to my overnight stop. That might buy me an hour or two of writing time at home, in addition to whatever I need to do to catch up on things, before I head northwest.

Fireball is writing a hundred words about why using dementors as prison guards and enforcers is just plain dumb. This is only difficult because of Fireball's weakness in English and in writing with general. Fireball has a lot of words on the subject during reading of the books. Starlight assigns homework appropriately.

And no, I've not seen the Season 8 opener yet.

Next Chapter: Sol 144 Estimated time remaining: 20 Hours, 60 Minutes
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