It ain't dawn yet...
GroupsConvenient link to the Master List.While Squeegy continues brooding in his padded redoubt, Faris decides he's seen enough of Mars by remote. Time to bring the scrapbot back in and reassemble the space suit's air pumps, so at least one of them can go outside.
Yet the dust storm is rolling in fast. The scrapbot's small size lets it take cover from the wind in between boulders and rises, but the constant buffeting keeps it from staying on course. Every gust threatens to cast it wild. The inevitable finally happens, and the last thing the scrapbot and Faris see is some upside-down rocks before the signal disappears.
Left a little lost, Faris stammers into the radio for a minute. With two working vehicles roaming around, and a couple points of reference, getting a ride to the lifeboat shouldn't be too hard. Just slightly delayed.
With no way to leave, nothing to be busy with, and no contact to the outside world, Kallev and Long John fall back on comparing their stories of the last two hours over some unheated freeze-dried snacks. Long John does most of the talking, as Kallev has a hard time focusing on where John is, much less the conversation. Getting food down is a chore as well.
Searching around, there's no actual medicine in the refrigerator, as there wouldn't be. But there are a few test formulas for various diseases and aliments kept in cold storage, some of them Long John's own experiments.
As long as you've got the equipment to do it, and a pressing storm to watch, you order the robots to secure themselves as best they can and monitor the weather pattern. You're going to be here a while, and setting up a stable base of operations will be this much harder – need to learn to prepare.
While the bots occupy themselves, you get back on the radio, to help navigate anyone around. But the only people around are Vlad and Qwerty's band of survivors, heading back to the Hydroponic Lab. Except for Trippy in his tower, no one else is even under the storm yet.
The robots observe the storm for a while, and give you what looks like information about a storm. Not being a meteorologist, you can't make much sense of it. You're rapidly losing a clear channel to the Hyrdo Lab crew, and none of the engineers riding with Harry have any real experience with climate science either.
So far, the robots are digging in well enough to hold themselves.
The crowd at the Medical Bay greets each other briefly before loading up the medical supplies in the rover. Introductions continue over the short ride back to the Hydro Lab.
Meanwhile inside, Serg and Rosie fidget for a while. When the others arrive, Vlad starts to lay out his plan to save some air (after losing a bit more getting back inside). With some double chambers of greenhousing material and the lab's pumps, a functional and repeatable, if not perfectly efficient, airlock could be built outside the office door. With a direct link to the rover, it would also allow them to share air, and people could move between them for space. This whole conversation takes some time in itself, but encounters no resistance – except from Serg, who's fed up with trying to fit anything through the office airlock in the first place.
Vlad being the self-appointed leader of this little barnraising, he takes a quick stock of the resources on hand. He's in fine shape, along with Serg, Rosie, and Simon. Qwerty says he's good to go, after a quick rest. Roy claims likewise, but Dr. Saberi had to sew up a lot of bad cuts on him after landing. The Doctor herself knows she has a sprained arm. Andrezj is ready to help to, but banged himself up when the rover tumbled. The rover itself is dented up and missing a wheel, but more importantly the antennae snapped off. There are five external activity suits to use between eight people, though Qwerty's is in rough shape and Simon knows where to get another one.
Only Dietrich knows now...
Turning the metal frame of the Engineering Bay into a transmitter, instead of a big metal box around your transmitter, should be a simple enough task. And with a little stripping and splicing, it indeed is. The space suit's radio can now use the hull of the bay itself as an antenna. Dispersal saps the suit's batteries quickly, so you hook the power supply to the bay's capacitor, and start cranking and the mill to ensure you have some juice.
And with that, you're connected to greater Martian society. Your signal strength is erratic, but eventually you manage to join into a party line with more than a dozen people already talking.
Among other news, Louise, Geoffrey, and Vernon are relatively nearby, riding on Harry Samper's Auger.
The Auger arrives at the last of the three large blocks. Remembering the mission plan, the engineers know that there were originally four such cubes – the Engineering Bay, the two Vehicle Bays, and the Reactor Pod. And with the first three accounted for, this can only be one thing.
Unfortunately, it's obvious from the placement of the doors, that the module landed upside-down. Tapping on the walls returns no signals – it's clear from the large seams in the frame that all the air has already escaped. Since the doors are inaccessible, Harry has everyone just pile off while he drills a hole in the wall.
Inside is a mess. Despite his broken arm, Strife leads an inspection. There's no power, the air was indeed already gone, and what little supplies were stored with the reactor are scattered about now. Strife also recognizes two frozen pretzels as reactor technicians, probably doing one last storage check when everything went to hell. There's no way of knowing what state the reactor is in – the coolant and rods were stored elsewhere, and the computers certainly won't turn on. By Strife's estimation, the reactor should be in working shape, or close to it, it'll just have to be rolled over first.
Your stint as a mission controller/switchrouter was frustrating and uneventful, and you're quickly being supplanted by more commanding people at each site. It's a burden you're more than happy to give them.
Meanwhile, the whirling dust outside has rendered your windows useless, and the static buildup is starting to foul your radio. You do get a worrying remark from Faris that the robot he built was made of a few parts of a space suit, and has been lost in the storm. With a couple solid vehicles roaming around elsewhere, it should be too hard to get one to the lifeboat soon.
Nothing else to do, you recline back to rest your eyes for a few minutes.
It was the hacking that woke you up. A mouthful of something hot and acrid.
You fly up in a panic, practically breathing in open flame, just in time to scramble away from danger. As you crawl blind through the smoke, the adrenalin brings your nerves back quickly. You're in a spaceship, headed for Mars, and something just went wrong.
It's not until you pull yourself into a hallway and manually slide the door shut behind that you remember exactly where you are - in one of the large habitat modules, setting things strait before decent. It slowly sinks in that you must have missed that somehow. You can feel real gravity for the first time in months, and it's nowhere near level. The more your head clears, the more you take in. The entire module is in broken shambles, full of smoldering electrical fires and trashed furniture. And quite a few corpses as well. So far, it appears no one else was so lucky as you.
You're not in such great shape yourself. You can feel a few spots that didn't get away from the fire fast enough, and you know you must have taken a bad tumble to not know what happened. Checking your suit watch, the last time you remember seeing was nearly two hours ago. Finding a tiny window answers the final doubts – you're on Mars alright.
So, you're probably alone, in the burning remnant of a spaceship, somewhere on Mars. Now what to do...
No big changes here, except Pitor has made radio contact now. The dust storm is causing some interference.
The Next TurnAlright, I let this one hang around too long. Nobody is in trouble yet, so what the hey, let's give everyone a sense of accomplishment. Turn will be a whole hour – that should give some time to actually do something. Anyone outside, beware the big ass windstorm blowing in.
As of first posting, I've been awake for nearly 36 hours straight, so there might be some inconsistencies. But as time consuming as all the cross-referencing is, I think I've got a good pattern down.
The astute will notice that another character has been added. This would be Dr. Dyane Ariello, Military Paleontologist. As yet, nobody else knows where she is or that she's alive. But like every character, everyone does know she at least existed during the flight. Do whatever you want with that knowledge.
Sorry about the whole delay. Makes the general shortness of the responses seem a little empty. Like I've said, with everyone bunched up together, I have a little less to write, so I should go a bit quicker.
Other corrections will go here as they inevitably arrive.
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Topic: Angry Red Planet - Totally And Completely Dead (Read 48110 times)