AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 19
ARES III SOL 23
It was done, for now.
Fireball and the monkey both stank, even more so than the habitat in general. The dragon longed for a nice long lava bath, or failing that ten minutes in the decontamination shower. But the alien ape, despite several longing looks in the direction of the shower stall, had made no move to take off his equally stinky clothes. And if Mark was going to tough it out, then so would Fireball. It was a matter of principle. No alien, especially a mostly furless, scaleless, clawless, tiny-toothed monkey alien, was going to out-tough a dragon.
But both of them washed their hands in the chemistry lab sink, because nobody wanted to have horseapples on their hands when they were eating.
Cherry Berry, on the other hand, was in the shower, scrubbing industriously. She’d been the only pony helping the dragon and the human with the dirt-doubling project. The others had retreated into their space suits the moment Mark had opened the compost box. They still wore them, though the eight-hour self-imposed safety limit had to run out pretty soon. Starlight Glimmer and Dragonfly had one worktable covered with whiteboards and the manuals from the ship, while Spitfire had taken her medical manual and retired to a bunk. But Cherry had been up to her hocks in very smelly dirt and… other things… all day.
She emerged with two of the alien’s stupid sandwich baggies on her forehooves. (The alien kept dirt and pebbles in them, but Fireball had seen ponies use them back home, and they were sandwich baggies. He still didn’t know how a pony ever unzipped one without a unicorn to help.) The improvised plastic booties made sense, since the just-turned portion of the habitat’s new dirt floor included the part immediately in front of the shower. While Mark settled to his favorite work table and opened his picture-typewriter thing, Cherry walked over to the kitchen area and opened the refrigerator.
Well, walked wasn’t the word. Trudged was more like it, just like a dragon who’d been told by the Dragonlord that if they wanted any more gems for their hoard they’d have to go dig in the dirt. (And come to think of it, hadn’t he been digging in the dirt all day? Fireball felt he deserved some gems, even if it was mostly boring bland quartz.)
She walked over to a table, put the one and a quarter cartons of cherries on it, and pushed a stool up to sit on. Perched precariously on the stool, which had been built for tall bipedal aliens with no tails, she opened the basket and sighed a sigh that sang of more tragedy and heartbreak than a Smoky Mountain balladeer.
That sigh made Fireball’s spines tremble. After her first objections Cherry had personally overseen the composting without more than the occasional expression of disgust. She’d gone through the day’s hard, filthy work of moving and mixing dirt without a murmur. But now she looked ready to cry…
… and oh, how Fireball hated ponies crying. For some reason it got contagious.
Slowly, reverently, the pink pony removed her forehoof protectors, opened the mostly-empty fruit carton, and took out a cherry, rolling it between her hooves.
“What’s the matter, commander?” he asked as politely as he could bring himself to manage around ponies.
“They’re starting to go soft,” Cherry said. “Look, there are bruises on each of them.” She pointed into the basket, but Fireball shrugged. Fruit was fruit to him. “If I wait any longer, they’re going to spoil. So today’s the day.”
Oh. Fireball remembered Cherry mentioning something like this at some point- that at some point she’d have to either devour or throw out the fresh cherries she’d been carefully doling out to herself. Apparently the Time of No More Cherries had come.
“Yeah, that’s tough, commander,” he said, not particularly sympathetic.
“You understand what this means, though,” Cherry Berry continued. “You were looking at the same problem until a couple days ago.”
“That wasn’t the same at all,” Fireball replied. “I was going to suffer malnutrition before the geeks found that cave. You’ll still have healthy meals and then alfalfa to eat, if Mark the Monkey there can grow anything here.” The words were angry, but his tone remained soft, and Fireball didn’t understand why. Yes, sapphires were his favorite gem and plain quartz down near the bottom, but the spice of smoky quartz and the juiciness of citrine and amethyst would help with that, and… where was he going with this thought?
“But now you’ve got a gem mine,” Cherry said, putting the cherry in her mouth and, in a few moments, spitting out the pit onto the table. “Even in Equestria, famous for its magic and wonders, nopony ever had a cherry mine,” she continued, chewing bits of cherry in her cheek.
“Has anypony tried?” As pointless as the idea seemed to Fireball, some pony somewhere HAD to have done it. Ponies were like that- the more stupid the notion, the quicker they wanted to put it into practice.
“There’s never been any reason to,” Cherry sighed, swallowing. “The cherry orchards around the country produce several harvests a year, so even in winter there’s not really a shortage. And with proper earth pony care and attention you can grow a tree from pit to fruit in about two years. Nopony imagined you’d need cherries someplace where absolutely nothing could grow.”
“Hm. So what you’re saying is, you haven’t tried.” Before Cherry could respond, he bellowed, “YO! Starlight, c’mere!”
Starlight and Dragonfly looked up from their conference. Shrugging, the two slipped off their own chairs and trotted over, shaking a hoof now and again as dirt clung unpleasantly to them. “You roared, Fireball?” Starlight asked dryly.
“Yeah. The commander wants more cherries,” Fireball said. “How do we get more?”
“How do we get more? We get rescued, that’s how. That’s the only way.”
“Don’t you have some sort of mushy-gooey pony magic,” Fireball said, making oogy-boogy motions with his claws, “that’ll make new cherries appear?”
Starlight rubbed her head. “You two,” she muttered, “you two just interrupted an important planning session about what parts we’re going to need to rip out of the ship to make the cave airtight. For this. And we’re saving the first aid kit for major trauma, which means I have to live with the headache.”
“Just answer the question, Ms. Magic-Solves-Everything,” Fireball snapped back.
“Fine,” Starlight retorted. “If a unicorn knows where some cherries are nearby, she can teleport them to herself. A really powerful unicorn or alicorn on the top of her game can transmute something else into cherries. But I can’t remember even an alicorn creating anything, much less cherries, out of nothing but magic energy. At least, none that wouldn’t just vanish when the spell ended!”
“So no cherries out of nowhere.”
“Weren’t you listening? NO!”
Fireball didn’t like the unicorn’s tone of voice, but he settled for a snort without any flame in it. Flame was hard to come by here for some reason, and even dragons were cautious about dragonfire in enclosed places. “What was that middle part? Something about turning something else into cherries?”
“Transmutation,” Starlight said. “Can be temporary or permanent depending on how much magic power you put into it. Takes serious concentration and a strong ambient magical field.”
“Which we don’t have,” Cherry Berry sighed, in the process of eating her third cherry.
“We’ve got the magic batteries,” Fireball pointed out.
“For emergencies!” Cherry snapped.
“And in this environment it’d take a lot of charge to transmute something permanently into a cherry,” Starlight continued. “And before you ask, no, I can’t make it cost less energy. I could use dark magic, but there's always a bigger price after the fact- usually that it forces you to cast more dark magic spells. The cleanup is always more expensive than any savings from the original spell.”
“So give it a try,” Fireball said. “Let’s see how much juice it sucks up, and maybe we have a solution to the food problem in general. Heck, it would be worth it to get all this dirt out of here!”
Hah. There, he’d thought of something. He wasn’t just dumb muscle. By making this about more than cherries, he’d taken away Cherry Berry’s argument about the magic batteries only being for emergencies. The food issue was an emergency… well, not exactly, since everyone could see it coming, but it was definitely the most important issue facing them. If magic offered a solution, it had to be tried.
And sure enough, Cherry Berry, mouth full of cherry, didn’t say anything when Starlight looked to her for confirmation.
“All right,” the violet unicorn said. “Dragonfly, please bring me whichever battery has less charge on it. Also, I’m going to need something to transform into a cherry. Something we’re not going to need back.”
Fireball had just the thing. After all, there were precisely three things they now had more of than they needed, right? And air and water weren’t going to work for this. He went to his newly expanded gem hoard, rustled through the bits, and pulled out the smallest piece, an irregular fleck of carnelian. It looked like a cherry, and it was about the size of a cherry, and…
It took him two attempts to set it on the table in front of Starlight and let go. Parting with any part of a hoard… well, it went against everything dragons believed in. But if it prevented more pony crying, fine.
Starlight poked it with her hoof, verifying that the thing was a rock and not a fruit. “Maybe something a little bigger?” she suggested. “If this works we won’t be making food one berry at a time.”
“Just make with the light show, magic pony,” Fireball grumbled.
Mark, attracted by the noise, stood up and walked over, pointing to the little gem and asking, “Wux gnaw hingawn?”
“Cyaunts,” Starlight replied. The ape cocked an eyebrow, then leaned over the table to watch with interest.
Dragonfly brought the battered emergency battery #2 over to the table. “It’s only got six percent,” she said.
“That’s fine,” Starlight replied. “If this spell takes more than that, then it’s too expensive to use for food.” She flipped the switch, put one hoof on a mana terminal, and focused her mind on the spell.
The pebble, clipped off the edge of one of the narrow spots in the crystal cave, danced and spun, rising into the air in a sphere of light.
Sweat dripped down Starlight’s face, matting her mane to her forehead below her horn. “It’s… resisting…” she grunted. “More… power…”
The battery beeped and went dead.
A moment later the spell collapsed, and the piece of carnelian shattered with a deafening crack. A second crack sounded a split second later, followed by tiny glossy grains of semi-precious mineral settling down from the air onto the tabletop.
The underside of a table, Fireball realized, is particularly uncomfortable when four other bodies are pressing as tightly as possible against your own. Despite that he let the monkey expose his head first, because after all, it was his space house. Let him fix it.
A few moments later the alien said something in his sheep language, and the other bodies surrounding Fireball shifted away. Finally freed, he climbed out from under the table. Mark was standing next to a storage cabinet across the hab from where the group had been working. There was a huge dent in the cabinet door with a small hole in the center. Mark wrenched the bent door open, reached in among several plastic containers, and pulled out a piece of carnelian, about half the size of the original.
Without saying a word, Mark pointed first to the hole and then up at the fancy rubber canvas that was all that separated the warm, thick air inside from the freezing, almost nonexistent air outside.
Dragonfly was the first to speak, remarking, “I, um, I feel a sudden urge to visit the little changeling’s room.” She picked up the mana battery and carried it with her back to its usual resting spot.
“Six percent on one battery,” Starlight said, voice shaking wildly, “spell fails for lack of power, and the resulting backlash nearly kills us all. I think this experiment is over.” She laughed a hysterical laugh, shoved a hoof into her own mouth, and fled the table.
Mark pulled out a camera, took several photos of the hole inside and out, and then returned to his thing full of buttons and began typing about twice as fast as he had before. Cherry, still in shock, swiped up a hoofful of cherries and jammed them all into her mouth at once. The pits came back out, one by one, set carefully aside as she chewed.
Fireball stood, and watched, and thought, for about three minutes. Then, without saying a word, he stood next to Cherry, took the remaining carton of berries, and opened it. With a single flick of a claw he sliced a cherry open, and with a second flick he extracted the pit. Two more flicks, one more cherry pit, set carefully in the upturned lid of the carton. Another pit followed, and another, with the pitted cherries getting dropped into the top of the almost-empty carton in front of the pony.
“Hmmmph…what are you doing?” Cherry asked once her mouth was free enough to talk.
Fireball didn’t answer. Flick, flick, plunk, plop. Flick, flick, plunk, plop. Flick, flick, plunk, plop.
In two minutes the job was done. All the remaining cherries were pitted, and the pits gathered in one carton. The other carton sat in front of Cherry.
“Eat,” Fireball muttered. “They’ll only go bad if you don’t.”
He paid no attention to the utter confusion on her face, and he didn’t see her jaw drop when he walked over to Mark and practically slammed the carton full of cherry pits into the alien’s gut. “You!” the dragon growled, having got his full attention. He pointed a claw to the carton and shouted, “Make these grow! Understand?”
There. Job done. Fireball went back to the lab sink to wash the cherry juice from his clawtips.
Stupid pony crying disease, he thought. It’s contagious even when they DON’T cry.
This chapter made me smile.
Damn you.
Well, his heart was certainly in the right place, even if it was a terrible idea.
But yeah, those pits aren't going to be producing anything any time soon. Not without some serious bullhonkery.
...Yikes, that was way too close to a Bad End. I bet Mark is sorely tempted to ban any further magical experiments in the habitat.
Magic. The true cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
8671575
See, I would have tried transmuting the cherry pits for similarity bonuses. That, or using necromancy to age the cherries while Earth Pony magic lets them survive the process. Still probably wouldn't have worked, but might at least have come closer.
8671579 Not even to get the solar system's first underground cherry orchard? Talk about incentive for Cherry Berry.
Theres a couple things that can be used, or considered for an airlock design, but one of them is an obscure flood defence,a nd the other is so obscure I cant even remmeber where I saw it, but I think it was proposed many yers ago due to an Underground Tube fire.
Parachutes.
Take a tube with a pressure differential from end to end. Place a parachute in it so that the fabric lays along the sides on the high pressure side. The pressure pushes the fabric out to the sides, but at low differential at the fabric edge also helping it form a seal.
The equivalent flood defence structure is an inflatable tube dam, with a large fabric tail, which is pressed down by the water pressure, keeping the tube dam in place. And my GoogleFu is nonexistant 8(
Pity they cant get a reliable source of clay or claylike materials. Go for puddled basins, raised beds?
I'm LOVING this story so far, heck I saw the movie that the human characters are from and I can't wait to see what happens next to them all and to what will happen when video footage from what the space crew sends back to earth is plastered all over the net. Now here is one thing I would think would be cool, if in some way that the Core of Mars was given a 'Jump Start' that would allow it to heat up and start spinning again, if that were to happen then an atmosphere would start to exist on the planet and slowly oxygen would build up and ice would melt to become water and plants would start to grow then.
8671650 Instant death, no. Rapid death, yes. Leaving aside air, water is only liquid under pressure. In vacuum it either freezes or vaporizes. Corpsicles aren't that simple, but they're not far from true.
8671653 The notes would have been a rehash of what happened, with nothing new interesting aside from Mark making jokes about damn near being killed. So I skipped it. In fact, you should assume that Mark Watney is making a lot more logs than I'm showing you.
8671664 In order for core rotation to produce a magnetic field there has to be a liquid outer core. We're not certain if Mars's core has frozen solid, but that's the current bet, and if it is spinning it up inside a liquid mantle won't produce a magnetic field. And even if you get a magnetic field going, it's far from certain that Mars wouldn't continue to lose water through its low gravity. If a gas molecule's vibrational rate is higher than escape velocity, it will eventually leave. That's what happens to all Earth's hydrogen and helium that gets released into the open.
8671721
Except that human skin is perfectly capable of holding all that water inside the body. It's pretty tough stuff. Besides a bit of moisture on your eyes and in your mouth, that water never gets exposed to the vacuum. As long as you close your eyes, and breathe out immediately to prevent your lungs rupturing, you can survive in space about as long as it takes to drown; simply until your oxygen runs out. What little moisture evaporates from you is far from enough to freeze you.
(Exposure will eventually cause pressure-related issues like internal bleeding from popping veins and such, of course, but on your standard out-of-the-airlock trip, these issues only come into play quite a while after the oxygen factor makes them irrelevant. If you got back inside in, say, half a minute, the effects would be minimal)
Also, do note that given the fact space is a vacuum, the only exchange of heat (after these small amounts of moisture boiled off) is radiating, which means that anything that contains any kind of heat source (ohey, we're warm-blooded; we generate heat) has more of a problem getting rid of excess heat.
Also, since radiating is the only form of heat exchange, the temperature of space around a planet is pretty similar to the temperature on the planet itself, since everything will both absorb heat from the sun and radiate it out. Sure, planetary atmospheres and material compositions change this a bit, but overall, freezing to death would be the least of your concerns if you were in the same orbit around the sun as, say, Venus.
Oh, side note... when replying to a comment, go into the chapter the comment was posted in; fimfiction doesn't send reply notifications for replies made in a different chapter, and this all ended up in chapter 15.
Fireball: Stupid ponies and their feelings making me feel... THINGS!
8671891 Well, on top of general stress, she nearly got everyone killed. Whilst trying to make a cherry.
8671891
What Starlight? Nah she always handles stress well. Almost as well as Twilight!
An issue that might come up. The increased number of ponys, dragons, people, etc that are going to use the airlocks will probably have the airlock fail sooner than it did in the book and movie. It was a wear and tear issue after all.
Managed to
8671583 Magic is like alcohol? I never thought of it like that.
8671741
You'd probably suffer rapid evaporative frostbite around the mucous membranes, but otherwise yeah, not much rapid freezing going on in a better-than-thermos-bottle vacuum. IIRC you'd die slightly quicker than drowning, as oxygen would be rapidly diffusing out of your blood and into your lungs, but I suspect the difference is pretty academic. Fifteen to thirty seconds of useful consciousness, a couple minutes of being salvageable after that, and then you're done.
Cherry is an earth pony. Why doesn't she grow some cherry trees?
"Because her special talent is eating cherries, not growing them."
So what? A pegasus can fly and stand on clouds regardless of her talent. A unicorn can use magic even if her talent is for something else. An earth pony should be able to grow things regardless of her talent too.
8672416 Yeah, and remember what Cherry says. Best case scenario, on Equus, with a universal magic field and ponies whose special talent is growing things, it still takes two years for a cherry tree to go from pit to putting out its first fruit. On Earth it's at least twice that long. And this is Mars, where their resources for growing anything at all are extremely limited... and where a tree will use up lots of those resources for a lot less return than other options.
Excuse me while I gt this out of my system.
*Ahem*
D'awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
8671721
Speaking of Mars and atmospheres and magnetic fields, do we know how the heck Titan hangs on to a very dense atmosphere with so little gravity and hanging around a gas giant?
8671891
Exactly because of stress. Laughter is a fairly common reaction to the aftermath of stressful events.
8672697 The main difference appears to be that Titan spends almost all its time protected from the solar wind by Saturn's magnetic field. That said, Titan is still losing air at a slow rate.
You wrote opened twice here
8673056
Of course, have you never heard about the double-closed cherry boxes?
They are the latest fashion on pony space programmes.
8671575
If only they'd brought a minotaur scientist to contribute compost!
But seriously, with the space and water they have available, maybe it really would make sense to grow a cherry tree. If Cherry's cutie mark would enhance her earth pony magic enough to grow a cherry tree in a few months and make magically-high efficient use of soil, it might be worth it.
It might even be a way of indirectly using Cherry's cutie mark magic to grow non-cherries more directly, if Cherry A)uses her cutie mark to fast-grow cherry trees and B)the human pulls a george washington and cuts down those cherry trees to be used as biomass for other forms of food.
8672416
Stupidest talent ever since Troubleshoes´one
8673758 Not every pony is born to save Equestria. And it could be worse. Dr. Caballeron's henchponies have cutie marks that apparently indicate their special talent is getting beat up by the heroes...
8673055 Also there's the distance to consider as well as temperature. The solar wind is MUCH weaker by the time it reaches Saturn, and the extreme cold of Titan makes the molecules of its atmosphere rather sluggish, so they don't reach escape velocity as often. Instead, the ionized atoms and small molecules hang around and react, forming tholins and other organic compounds, which doesn't happen on any body further in than Jupiter's orbit. Another example of the difference in solar wind effect can be seen in comets approaching. Most do not begin to develop a corona and tail until they approach Jupiter, because the solar wind beyond Jupiter's orbit isn't strong enough to heat and ionize the gasses.
Starlight would be more succesful if she used similar material instead of a stone. For example excrements. The spell wouldn't need so much energy.
I’d probably be in the same boat as Starlight. Being that close to death, I can see myself being left with nothing but to laugh like a heyena and carry on. Jeez.
Next chapter, Mark complains about the explosive effects of magic.
reminds me of the "Treacle mines" and "fat mines" in the Diskworld books...
That went great.
At least he means well!
Good job. You nearly fucking killed yourselves.
8926680 Yeah, about that? Get used to that. People have thoughtless moments all the time, but Mars doesn't forgive them like Earth does.
Yup, it is contagious to ponies; just like laughter and (especially!) singing.
That's actually completely true.
Hah. He knows how to handle the dragon.
I'm with the dragon here, yes. That's a load more horseapples to dump into the soil
Ohhh, ouch
Umm... doesn't take a genius to see that "magicking up food" isn't a sustainable solution at all, especially with a shortage of magic
Was that "SCIENCE!" or "Silence!"
Hiding under a table won't help much if the hab decompresses from punctures
Yes, indeed
That's gonna be a trick and a half... a cherry tree on Mars
9185026
Don’t let George near it
i just remembered the "death gate" books by Margret Weiss and Tracey Hickman: the more powerful magic-users could create food, but only copies of what was at hand...so the protagonist had nothing to eat but Beans and Milk...
8926830
8926680
It wasn't really as close as the author's note suggests. If the volume of the hab is 200 m3 - which seems a reasonable estimate given its floor area of 92 m2 - then a 3cm diameter hole would take over half an hour to reduce the air pressure to dangerous levels.
10195219 If the hole doesn't propagate, sure. But it would be a hole in canvas under extreme strain.
10195346
It would be a pretty shitty hab material if it allowed a small puncture to turn into a full-on blowout. Sure, the airlock failure did - but that was after heavy mechanical wear in one of the weak spots of the structure, namely a join. To quote from the book: "The initial tear was less than one millimetre. The perpendicular carbon fibres should have prevented the rip from growing. But countless abuses had stretched the vertical fibres apart and weakened the horizontal ones beyond use." (Emphasis mine.)
Wow instead of almost blowing up in a explosion they almost died to magic backlash on the habitat wall...
A fantastic moment of totally-not-tenderness from Fireball. One of my favorite scenes so far.
9259205
George Washington chopping down the cherry tree never actually happened.
The incident was invented by the Reverend Mason "Parson" Weems for a biography of Washington. (He claimed it was to illustrate Washington's honesty.) There were a great many other, less famous, inaccuracies in the biography.
Thus, it sold well.
One close call after another... This is going to be a harsh adventure...
This hole digestion reminds me of Subnautica.
Just not so harmless as being surrounded by water and life, rather hostile dirt and no life at all...
Science... Just good noone named Glados was present...