Chapter Text
LOG ENTRY: SOL 6
I’m pretty much fucked.
That’s my considered opinion.
Fucked.
Let’s see… where do I begin? The Ares program. Testing off-Earth colonies to fix the single point of failure for our species, blah, blah, blah. Honestly, once everything settled down with Earth not freezing to death, there were just a lot of star-crazy folks who wanted to play with astrophage-powered spaceships.
Not that I can throw stones. That stuff is magic. Scientifically speaking.
It was supposed to be a few short missions. Now I’ll be “Mark Watney, first human to die off Earth since Ryland Grace”, but I signed up to prove we could send people to a different planet, have them survive there, then send them back. Mars is a natural test site. And it worked for Ares 1 and 2. Plus the rest of my crew. I hope.
What I wouldn’t give to have a Beetle of my own. Or any means to send a message. There isn’t a single object capable of launch on this entire godforsaken planet. See, we had to evacuate on the sixth sol of a thirty-sol mission. And I missed the bus.
To my crewmates, if you’re there: It wasn’t your fault. I’m glad you survived.
I guess I should explain how these missions work, for any layman who may be reading this. The answer isn't just “astrophage”. Yes, we use it (we’d be idiots to not use the most efficient energy storage that could possibly exist) but it's not as simple as gluing spin drives on a can.
First we caught a little ship up to where Hermes was in Earth orbit. All the colony test missions use Hermes. It cost a lot and the permits were a nightmare so NASA only built one. If you’ve heard horror stories about the approval process for tiny amounts of astrophage in research, imagine how much worse it is to get legal sign off on engines powerful enough for spaceships.
Then NASA sent us unmanned missions with supplies for the trip, and fuel. Why didn’t they have Hermes be fueled already? Because astrophage is nasty explosive death if you handle it wrong around an engine, or really at all, so they wanted a human there to do it.
And that human? Yours truly, as the mission engineer/botanist, and shush the combination made sense at the time. Oh, you would not believe the trainings they made me do about How To Not Blow Yourself Up. I know, I know, there was the Baikonur Incident that almost led to the whole Project failing. Still, did I really need to attend that many safety lectures?
Though I have more sympathy for paranoia, now that I’m living a worst case scenario.
As I was saying, the mission. The space travel bit wasn’t all that exciting. It was fast, compared to pre-astrophage days. No spending months and months in the middle of empty space when we can dump a star’s worth of energy out the back of the ship.
Once in Mars orbit we took the MDV (Mars descent vehicle) to the surface. This one is a can with thrusters attached. Badabing badaboom, and we’re on another planet.
And now we come to the real trick of colonization: having all of our shit there in advance.
The purpose of the Ares program is to prove humans can live on other planets. To that end, NASA provides us plenty of supplies for interplanetary Manifest Destiny. They send these before us, and we don’t launch until they’re sure everything is ready for use.
The most important piece of the advance supplies, of course, was the MAV. The Mars ascent vehicle. We may have discovered (or been discovered by) the Holy Grail of spaceship fuel, but fuel don’t mean squat unless you have a spaceship to put it in. The MAV was another can with thrusters, and it was how we would get back to Hermes.
Enter Asshole Dust Storm. And its three lovely accomplishments: one, send the communications dish flying, two, knock me out with Dr. Communications Dish, and three, force everyone else to evacuate. On, you guessed it, the MAV.
I'm on Mars without my ride. Or my crew. Or a way to call home. And with limited food.
So yeah. I'm fucked.