AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 498
ARES III SOL 489
Dragonfly watched as Sojourner navigated the walkways between Amicitas’s flight couches. The little rover crept along at a snail-like pace, navigating based on orders given by her laptop and relayed via wireless network to Rover 2’s computer and out through its radio to Sojourner’s receiver. Every two minutes it paused, slowly rose up to take stereograms with its forward cameras, then rocked forward to do the same with the aft-mounted color camera.
“C’mon, bug, put Robo-Bug away.” Spitfire, still wearing Starlight Glimmer’s space suit, walked out of the habitat deck. The helmet made her voice sound very muffled to Dragonfly without the suit comms to transmit it. “And help me off with this thing. I gotta hit the head.”
“Good morning, Spitfire,” Dragonfly said. “How are you feeling today?”
“I’m going stir crazy,” the pegasus said. “I want out of this suit full time. I want to stretch and start doing exercises again. I’ve got a lot of work to get back in flying trim.”
“Uh huh. Now try that with symptoms added.”
“Ugh.” Spitfire turned her head away, as much as the suit helmet would let her. “All right. I still have a headache, there’s still pins stuck in my fetlocks, my new feathers itch horribly, and I can’t put three words of English together. But it’s all better than yesterday.”
“It must be,” Dragonfly agreed. “After all, you couldn’t put three words of English together before.”
“Fuck you.”
“Two, however, you manage just fine.”
“Look, if this was your suit I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t want to fill Starlight’s suit full of roadapples when I don’t have an undergarment anymore. Y’wanna help me out of this?”
“Sure, Spitfire,” Dragonfly said, rearing up to grip the helmet between her forehooves. “But once you’re done in the head, you go back in the suit and lie right back down. You’ve got two days of treatment to go, and treatment is high pressure, oxygen, and lying down. No exercise.”
“But I’m feeling better-“
“How does it feel to swap places with Starlight Glimmer, by the way?” Dragonfly asked pointedly.
When the helmet came off, Spitfire’s ears slumped in shame. “Yeah, all right,” she said. “You made your point. I’ll be good.”
“That’s our hero.”
“And don’t you forget it,” Spitfire muttered, wiggling out as Dragonfly helped unseal the rest of the suit. “I may be flying a desk after this, but at least I have one record Rainbow Dash is never going to beat.”
Dragonfly looked at Spitfire’s wings. They were in tatters. Another couple of primaries had come out overnight. The Feather-Fix potion had begun growing replacements for all the feathers they’d had to chop up to get the gunk-lined suit wings off her, but it came a lot more slowly than it would have done at home. The new feathers were barely barbs. A lot hadn’t even broken the skin yet.
Spitfire noticed Dragonfly examining her wings. She looked the changeling straight in the eyes and said, “Worth it.” Stepping free from her suit, she walked to the head, wobbling only a little as the deck underneath them rocked gently. The morning was young, and the Whinnybago was rolling along at top speed through an uncommonly smooth stretch of Martian terrain.
Dragonfly returned her attention to Sojourner. The little probe would have to scoot back to its corner in a while; it didn’t get a lot of sunlight through the cockpit windows to recharge its batteries. But learning the commands to make the little rover go gave her something to take her mind off of other things, like the hunger she imagined she could feel building up after days of almost no magic.
It had to be imaginary. A daily two minutes had to beat out twenty minutes every seventeen days. But… well, she felt weaker, she felt hungrier, and she couldn’t stop feeling that way.
She hadn’t mentioned it to the others, though she knew they would want her to. It just didn’t seem to be helpful. There were very good reasons why magic time had been cut back so drastically.
The batteries recharged at 1.4 percent each per sol- they’d triple-checked the rate- for a total mana recharge of 29.4% of a single battery’s capacity. 7.5% of that went to top off the jumbo batteries to compensate for their slow bleed. Two minutes of magic field, the new daily ration, ate up another 5.6%. That left just over 16% per day to recharge the eleven batteries they’d used defeating the Great Black Spot, as NASA was calling it.
At noon of Sol 483, they’d had ten full batteries and eleven empty ones. By tonight, assuming no emergencies, they’d have eleven full batteries and ten empty ones, or the equivalent. According to Mark’s travel estimate, they might be able to recharge four more batteries before they reached Schiaparelli. After that work on modifying the MAV would eat more power- who knew how much. And at the end of the process- with recharging the jumbos, with MAV mods, with daily magic doses, with emergencies if more cropped up- they had to have at least seven full batteries, minimum, for installation with the Sparkle Drive.
Bottom line: recharging the batteries against future emergencies took absolute top priority- even if it meant pushing the edge of magic starvation again.
The Great Black Spot had totally bucked Spitfire- but to be fair, she’d got the last kick in. But it was still bucking Dragonfly over, too, and it wasn’t around for the changeling to get her own kicks in. And it didn’t help that she had entirely too much time to work all of that out, especially with Starlight borrowing her suit and taking her place scouting alongside Cherry Berry.
Spitfire eventually came out of the head. “Okay,” she said. “Help me back into the flour sack.”
“Rarity would have a fit if she heard you call it that,” Dragonfly chided.
“Would she?” Spitfire asked. “Oh dear. Did this suddenly become Ponyville instead of Mars while I was on the can? Sure fooled me!”
“You’re getting better,” Dragonfly muttered as she helped Spitfire shrug the borrowed suit back on. “It takes energy to be sarcastic. What do you want for breakfast?” Mark had dug out a few of the precious non-meat food packs, formerly reserved for use if they had to take the MAV straight to Earth, to give Spitfire more incentive to eat full meals.
It hadn’t worked as well as Mark might have liked. “What’s the entrée?” Spitfire asked, not bothering to fake optimism.
“Cowboy beans and rice,” Dragonfly said.
“Bring on the hay,” Spitfire said, allowing Dragonfly to walk her back to the mattress-covered floor of the habitat deck.
Watching Spitfire eat breakfast (and getting a snuggle-snack for her trouble) occupied twenty minutes of her attention, but that was over once the helmet was back on the suit, the life support turned back on, and a computer left beside her so the pegasus could read one of the mystery novels Fireball had recommended from the NASA stash. To make things worse, Sojourner had completed its pre-programmed little dance, so Dragonfly didn’t even have watching that to occupy her mind.
Well, the Whinnybago was still rolling, so there was at least the entertainment of watching the gently rolling terrain of Meridiani Planitia slowly passing by and behind the rear-facing cockpit windows. She dragged Sojourner back to its usual resting place, then trotted forward to the co-pilot seat.
The flight couch was occupied, however, by a potted plant.
“Hey, Fireball?” Dragonfly asked.
Fireball reached over to switch off his outgoing suit mike, then said, “Done playing with the mini-rover?”
“Why do you have Cherry’s shrub in a flight couch?” Dragonfly asked.
“I’ve been helping take care of Groot,” Fireball said. “I think he likes looking out the windows. Of course, we’re at the wrong angle here for him to get much sun, but I think he likes the view.”
Dragonfly had her mouth open to say something like It has no eyes, it can’t see the view, or How do you know what a plant does or doesn’t like, or, most probably, It’s a bucking TREE, before her brain caught up and turned all of it to a meaningless, “Errr…” After all, how many times had she talked about her delusions of sensing what this or that thing felt about anything? Where did she have room to scoff at what saner people thought an inanimate object felt or thought?
Come to think of it…
She could feel Sojourner’s smug feeling from its corner, as if it were saying, I did work today! She could sense the Whinnybago’s confidence: I am rolling, and I will continue to roll, because I was reborn to roll. But she’d never bothered to try tuning her insanity to Radio Free Twig before. Why not?
She turned all her attention to the leaf-covered branch stuck in mildly damp soil.
Must get bigger. Must get stronger. Must get big and strong real soon.
“I don’t think it notices the terrain,” Dragonfly said carefully. “It’s really focused on growing as fast as it can.”
“Really?” The dragon actually smiled at that. “That’s good. Good Groot.”
Dragonfly sensed a sudden spike of… delight? “It knows we’re paying attention to it,” she added. “It likes attention a lot.”
“Who doesn’t?” Fireball asked.
“You mean, besides dragons?”
“Dragons love attention,” Fireball said. “We just don’t like visitors.”
“Pardon me for asking,” Dragonfly said, “but why are you fooling with Cherry’s plant anyway? If she finds out she’s going to have your hide.”
“I asked first,” Fireball said, a little primly. “Ever since the cave farm, I’ve been wondering how it feels to take care of something of my own.” He reached over to the copilot seat and turned the sample-box planter a quarter turn. “Feels kinda nice so far.”
Dragonfly could just barely hear Cherry Berry’s voice through Fireball’s headset as she broke in, speaking in English. “Small crater ahead. About a kilometer wide. Rubble field for two hundred meters around the rim. Scattered rocks a lot wider.”
“Roger. Any problem with taking it on the south side?” Mark asked from the rover’s driver cabin.
“Negative. No sign of any serious obstacle on either side,” Cherry said.
“Okay. Fireball, prepare for plus ten.”
Fireball switched his mike back on. “Copy plus ten,” he replied, also in English.
“On my count… five, four, three, two, one, turn!”
Fireball turned the flight yoke on the word turn.
“Hold… hold… and zero!”
Fireball re-centered the flight yoke, and with barely a wobble the Whinnybago rolled on.
“Battery check?” Cherry called.
“Twenty-one percent,” Mark answered. “About half an hour to go.”
“Roger. Looking forward to lunch. And some hot cherry tea.”
“Me too. Fireball, get Dragonfly on the headset, will ya?”
“Roger.” Fireball took his claws off the flight yoke long enough to remove his headset. “It’s for you,” he said, handing it down to Dragonfly.
Dragonfly squeezed between the pilot and copilot seats, carefully placing her forehooves away from any important active controls. “Dragonfly here, Mark. What’s up?”
“How did the Sojourner test go?”
“By the numbers,” Dragonfly said. “Should be a lot of new pictures in the rover’s data storage.”
“You might want to have it wave out the port side windows,” Mark said. “We’re passing by Opportunity right now.”
“Opportunity? What’s that? Where is it?”
“We can’t see it. It’s over three hundred kilometers south-southwest of us. This is as close as we get. But Opportunity was one of the two rovers that came immediately after Sojourner. A bigger younger sister, if you like. It was expected to last one hundred sols. It survived for years and years.”
“I don’t suppose we could stop by and visit?” Dragonfly asked.
“Over three hundred kilometers south? Nope, sorry. We need to keep moving. Besides, Opportunity is a lot bigger than Sojourner. It wouldn’t fit in the airlock.”
“I wasn’t thinking of taking it with us,” Dragonfly protested.
“I know. But the Opportunity mission is detailed in the Project Ares database. Go read about it if you’re bored. It was one of the most successful space probes of all time. I think only the Voyagers beat it out.”
“Oh? Where are they?”
“They left the solar system decades ago. They were deep space probes, sent to fly by our outer planets. Have you tried anything like that yet where you come from?”
“No. We were going to just use the Sparkle Drive to go there direct.”
“Well, you’ve got some wonderful things to look forward to, then,” Mark said. “Anyway, put Fireball back on. I think I see that crater Cherry found, and we may need to make some turns in a minute.”
“Okay.” Dragonfly hoofed the headset back up to Fireball, then left the dragon and the plant to their driving.
Reading about Opportunity and its sister Spirit consumed the remaining driving time for the day. Thirty minutes of distraction.
Only about twelve more waking hours to go…
Good to see Groot's getting some seat time in case he needs to drive...
I don't know why tgis only struck me now but... They'd probably make a movie avout this in-universe right? Once it's all over of course.
I've only ever seen fiction-in-fiction written about the fiction once, in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Wonder how that movie would go. I bet no one gets portrayed anywhere close to right.
That shout-out to Opportunity tho...
9160340
The end of Disney's Chicken Little here.
9160340 There's a glimpse of it in Batman Beyond. Imagine Grumpy Old Man Bruce Wayne getting dragged to see...
... Batman: the Musical.
Pssst Fireball try some singing:
I think newegg.com is doing some sales on SSD drives samsung ones too
Sojourner is a good robot pet thing.
Nothing or not, this was a good chapter. #GrootLives
I want to know what Groot thinks is coming that will require it to be big and strong...
I wonder if Groot knows something they don't.
Yay cabin fever...time for Cherry to find some make work for everyone. Maybe get some data analysis going.
9160340
Is it fiction though? In-inverse I mean.
I can think of a few.
There's the 'Red Book of Westmarch', Bilbos version of LotR.
I remember: releasing the true account of what happened in 'the Core' was the ending to the film.
The Kingkiller Chronicles open with a flash-forward of 'the Chronicler' writing down the story of the main character, and there are a few 'Story of someone telling a story of someone telling a story...' moments in those books.
And many books which open as if the book itself was written as a true account by a character within it, but I'm not sure that counts.
9160393
You haven't read the same things about "based on a true story" films as I have, I'm guessing.
9160398
Heh! Point taken.
I meant the literary classification though, not how dramatized it might be.
Sojourner is quickly becoming the most adorable character in the book! I wonder if there is a way to get them to talk. I can just imagine the aneurism everyone on the Hermes and NASA would have over that.
Guilty of the same. I went to the Udvar Hazy Air and Space Museum, and spoke to the vehicles. A lot. Especially the space shuttle Discovery. Probably a good thing she didn't answer...
9160432
I would like to rebuke your statement by pointing towards your avatar.
Nothing trumps the snugglebug. Nothing. o.o
Are they within range for radio contact with opportunity at least? It they aren't within visual range
So, assuming I'm reading this right, the ponies are actually better off not topping off any of the batteries in the whinnybago and leaving them all a bit short of full while they need to gather magic charge.
I've been thinking about it for a while, and it's been consistent throughout the story that the percent gain on each battery is constant, no matter how many batteries are charging at once. So if you're trying to gain as much charge as fast as possible, you're better off having all of them gaining charge every day instead of topping them off one at a time.
I love chapters where "nothing" happens! Great character building, fun to voice.
Have you thought about writing on something connected to cloud-based storage, so it automatically saves on an internet server while you write? Or at least, every time you manually save on your computer, it also re-uploads the updated file to your online copy?
XKCD had something to say about Opportunity.
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/opportunity.png
I can see Mars populated by the cherry tree plant people and magic rainbow crystals.
"or doesn’t like or, most probably"
"or doesn’t like or, most probably"?
And good luck Monday.
Sweet chapter, nice to see Sojourner again. I was wondering what souvineer Dragonfly grabbed.
9160534
Yes, and I think they are doing that. They are topping off the big batteries outside. Those batteries do not charge on their own (isolated from magic) and discharge slowly due to the always-on charge meter.
Well, I love this nothing and it was perfect after the action-filled previous chapters.
Also, do you think dragonfly can get some love from Sojourner, I mean it looks like they are becoming friends?
9160569 Yeah. Magic finds a way. They've infected Mars with life, and magic, and all it can do is grow.
One thing that would be a game changer. A low power magical shield that acts as an atmospheric containment field, like mag-con fields from Star Wars. If you were really clever, you'd have a multi-ply shield with an outer liner that absorbs radiant energy (with a band pass in the visible light region so you can see, and any radio bands you want to use) and converts it to magic to power both shields. A third layer would handle charged particles and absorb their momentum. Possibly also feed them to some grounding point to discharge them.
Obviously, you'd want the energy generated to exceed the output to maintain the shields, and some form of storage for when it isn't. While sunlight is the most obvious power source, cosmic radiation should provide some power, and is pretty much omnipresent in the areas you'd need this kind of shield for anyway. Inside you'd have a zero radiation, pressurised environment ideal for life. If the energy input from the absorber layers didn't generate enough magic to power the shield, this could make up the short fall.
If you put this enchantment into the rainbow crystals, and a way to grow more, life could spread out from the cave and ultimately cover Mars.
Interesting, why would Groot want to grow quickly?
9160030
Considering Lauri mentioned using the Hermes Nuclear reactor, I can only assume doing stuff on and to the Hermes spacecraft.
9160699
Just guessing, but I think it's to avoid getting eaten by grazing animals, like cows? If it had any situational awareness it would be trying to shrink.
9160540
This is the kind of thing where I used to recommend Dropbox. But maybe Google drive or OneDrive are better now.
I am going to assume an easy to lose/break/corrupt drive is not the only copy?
I am Grooot
Flour sacks. I like it. Does make you wonder what the ponys will do with the gear they bring back. What museums will be built to hold them.
Glad to see Groot is getting some character development! At least we're not hearing "Feed me Seymour."
Huge flat area? Frozen lake bed flooded from an impact in the last hundreds thousands years or so?
Will Sojourner have to be the one Left Behind, so as to pull the manual launch switch?
I think-while very considerate of the crew- it's also dangerous for them to continue getting the "thoughts"/"feelings" of objects from Dragonfly.
Otherwise that small issue, it was a good chapter and felt myself chuckle a couple times. Sorry Dragonfly
Glad to see Groot is getting some character development! At least we're not hearing "Feed me Seymour."
9160836
I doubt they have the mass budget for that anyway. Pity there's no lichen or moss to grow along with Groot, I expect the additional fraction of mana regen is going to be critical.
9160738
If it's really situationally aware, it either wants to make cherry trees, or be big enough to make more mana, or be big enough to make lumber.
9160511
Opportunity's reciever is pointed up, and they don't have line of sight 300km away, nor a multi kilowatt transmitter for that band. Remember that at ~100km Mark got a two second burst from either the HAB or Aries IV MAV radio beacon, and was suprised it reached that far.
9160534 The batteries recharge themselves. It's not like they're plugged in to a separate Magic Slurping Up Machine. They're all interconnected and can be manually set to transfer charge from fuller batteries to empty ones.
They're taking the trouble to push charge into as few batteries as possible because, for practical use, seven absolutely full batteries are massively more useful than fourteen partially full batteries.
9160540 I used Google Docs to do this, as an experiment in live-streaming the writing process. The problem is it's only useful if I have reliable unlimited Internet connection- something not guaranteed on the road. As it is my draft docs and notes are on my business flash drive, which gets dumped to laptop HD about once a month.
9160579 Sojourner isn't a souvenir. It's going to stay behind on Mars, using the abandoned rover and a backup comms system from the MAV to run an extended mission.
Incidentally, I don't know what, if anything, Dragonfly has for a keepsake besides her copy of the scrap-metal medallion. She's had the worst time of all of them.
9160785 ... what deodorants will be invented to de-stink them...
9160836 In this case, more likely an ancient lava bed weathered flat.
9160511
Opportunity's radios are all configured for offworld transmission; and sadly, Mark did say years, not decades, so Oppurtinity almost certainly finally died. It's radioisotope internal heaters are definately burned out by then; and it's already gotten lucky several times now when martian winds blew most of the dust off it's solar panels. It likely met its end during the Martian winter, running its batteries dry trying to protect its electronics from the extreme cold.
9160900
I actually looked at the numbers from the story, and the numbers you're showing are, in fact, assuming that all 21 batteries are under at less than 100% charge and are gaining the 1.4% or whatever is was toward the total each day. If they top off a battery, that's 1.4% per day that isn't being stored, which lowers the total amount being gained each Sol, which slows down their total gain.
Over the course of the story, it hasn't been a case of one battery gains 29% each day, or a bunch of batteries gain some fragment of that. There's a constant recharge rate per day that applies to ALL batteries in range, no matter how many there are. Whether you have one battery or a hundred, each one gains the same amount each day. So for maximum gain per day, you have to have every battery in range gaining charge, since any battery NOT gaining charge is just charge lost from the total possible gain.
Assuming their equivalent of Jupiter doesn't kill them all via radiation poisoning.
9160915 Let me state this clearly: if you hook up a full mana battery and an empty mana battery together, the charge regenerated by the full battery will be passed on to the empty one. The full battery does not stop absorbing environmental magic.
9160393
I only know of one of the ones you mentioned, but Biblo's recounting doesn't count. That's not fiction-in-fiction. That's in-fiction recounting of events. Totally different from what I was talking about.
A nice quiet chapter for Star Trek Day.
(Star Trek premiered Sept 8, 1966)
9160349
I never finished that show... Now I think I have to.
9160924
In short, all batteries are smart enough to, if they're full, charge other batteries in network instead of trying to overcharge themselfs.