CSP Livewriting: Kicking Up Some Dust (Patreon)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Skxg6E0Y7XkDiHs3rdAzQeXlJHVmyExGLnSLcZmLWi4/edit

Hopefully, tonight, Cherry Berry lands on Minmus. (I'll be busy at Okashicon in Pflugerville (Austin) on the anniversary of Neil Armstrong's landing, alas.)

Here's last week's work:

“... that’s affirmative, Twenty-two, we show green on the temperature scan, repeat green. Good work.”

Cherry Berry snorted as she hung in her flight couch straps. Somewhere below her was the daylight side of Minmus- not that she could see it, since neither of her tiny windows pointed towards the ground. Since her ship was coasting along well above the surface, with no danger of crash and no need for maneuver, all she’d had to do was ride along and wait until the computer told her she was flying through the target zone. Fresh-picked cherries required more effort than that test. 

But at least she knew now that the test system worked. 

“Okay, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis’s voice continued, “there’s one more in-flight temperature scan to go. It’s coming up on the dark side of Minmus this orbit. The target altitude is below forty-nine hundred meters. That’s below safety limits, so be careful. We’re uploading targeting info to your computer now.”

“Okay, Horseton,” Cherry replied, reaching forward to key the trajectory computer back on. There was the zone, slowly creeping towards her current orbital trajectory on Minmus’s night side, well down on the moonlet’s southern hemisphere. A quick burn right now would probably be the best choice to get the target altitude, she thought, and so a quick flip of the ship later she gave the landing engines a couple of short, soft bursts. 

And then a couple more.

And then... Oops.

Cherry had miscalculated just a little. Yes, after the burn she now had a trajectory to come in below the ceiling for the requested temperature scan. The problem was, that same trajectory would bring her up close and personal with the floor, i. e. the frozen surface of Minmus, about three minutes later, not far from the south pole. 

The Cherry Berry who lived in Ponyville took one look at the trajectory line, which came to a clear and broad break at a certain point on the line-drawn circle on the screen, and wanted to run and scream in total panic. But here and now, with flight controls at her hooftips and plenty of air(403) between her and the ground at the moment, the Cherry Berry who flew got the overriding vote. That Cherry stopped, and studied the trajectory, and thought.

Okay, so it’s a suborbital trajectory. That’s fine. Do I have time to do something about it after the temperature scan?

Three minutes, give or take. Yes, that’s plenty of time. 

So, this is not really a problem, is it? Treat it just like the last low-altitude test. Nothing has changed.

“Twenty-two, Horseton,” Chrysalis called through Cherry’s headset. “We show you on a suborbital trajectory after that burn, over.”

“Affirmative, Horseton,” Cherry Berry said. “I’m on top of it.”

Significant pause. “We copy, Twenty-two,” the voice came at last. “Twelve minutes until target zone.”

“Roger, Horseton.”

And that, so far as Cherry was concerned, was that, aside from a moment of irritation that Chrysalis had called her attention to potential messy death a million miles from home just as she’d got the little screaming panicky voice in the back of her head muzzled. 

Fortunately, she had ten minutes to suppress her Ponyville moment(404) and get her head together. She did this by doing a mental checklist of all the readouts: altitude from zero fifty-five hundred meters and falling, altitude from surface wobbling up and down like a drunken breezie, battery showing two hundred forty-four and dropping slowly, landing stage tanks at about forty-eight percent each, view outside the hatch pitch black. Trajectory map showing directly on course for a pass through the target area marked on the map. By the time she’d checked everything, her pulse rate had dropped, and the desire to run in circles and scream for someone to save her had mostly gone away.

And- she checked the map again- she still had nine minutes to lie back and remind herself that, since she was now suborbital, she was technically flying in an alien sky again. 

The only flaw was- darn it!- she didn’t quite have enough time to dig out one of the cherry snack packs to celebrate.

Footnote:

(403) Strictly in the metaphorical sense. Minmus had no atmosphere worth speaking of, and rolling down the window to enjoy the breeze would have been a most foolish thing to do at that point. But in the sense of, “Am I going to hit anything solid in the next five seconds?”, Cherry’s mental point was valid enough.

(404) “Ponyville moment” is Cherry Berry’s term for the urge towards mindless panic regardless of whether or not panic is either justified or helpful. The name derives from the fact that Cherry calls Ponyville home, and also from the fact that the citizens of Ponyville have had so much practice panicking at anything between Tirek’s invasion and a stampede of cute adorable bunnies that they have raised panic into a high art form. Indeed, in their secret heart of hearts, a good many Ponyville ponies secretly enjoy those moments when they can demonstrate their well-practiced craft, and those ponies consider the property destruction and risk of life a small price to pay in the name of Art.

“Twenty-two, this is Horseton,” Chrysalis said into the microphone. Midnight had come and gone, and there was a bed calling her name two buildings over(405). “That little burst of power has you good for one clean orbit.” Just barely; at one point the ship would clear a highland by only four hundred meters. “We recommend one more burn at apoapsis to raise orbit to a minimum of six thousand meters, and then free time for the remainder of your flight day.”

“Twenty-two copies.” On the telepresence screen, the helmeted face of Cherry Berry smiled, still wide awake and ready to fly. “Just give me a minute to recharge the batteries. I just crossed back into daylight.”

“Roger. Also, there’s one more high-altitude temperature scan which will happen after the overnight team comes on.” The overnight team consisted of old George Cowley in the bullpen, Gordon the Griffon at capcomm, and Dragonfly- Dragonfly, of all bugs!- as acting flight director. Not Chrysalis’s first choice, but it had been either her or Leonid the Yak, and Chrysalis would rather have dragged Carapace out of the kitchen and stuck him with the headset than put a yak in charge of not smashing things up. “You’ll get the target data on your computer before the handover.”

“Okay, Horseton,” Cherry said, her face frozen in concentration as she twitched the controls. “There, okay. I show apoapsis in fourteen minutes. Confirm?”

Chrysalis caught the tired nod from von Brawn. “We confirm, Twenty-two,” she said. 

And then she noticed something else on the big telepresence screen- on the projection of the landing ship, floating above the surface, with the glittery snowy slopes of Minmus speeding along underneath it.

There was a tiny black dot keeping pace with the ship. 

“Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said carefully, “please give us current altimeter from surface reading.”

“Altimeter from surface reading approximately four hundred forty meters,” Cherry said promptly. “You said that was safe, right?”

“Yeeeeeeessss,” Chrysalis said, not the sinister hissing yes she preferred but the uncertain, worried one she would have squelched if she wasn’t so tired. “It’s just that we can see your shadow below you. On the ground.”

“Really? Wish I could see it.” Cherry made a face in her little corner of the projection. “But I don’t think it’s worth flipping the ship over for it.”

“Well, just keep an eye on the altimeter until you make your next orbital burn, okay?” Chrysalis asked. “All of us down here will sleep better for it.”

“Aww. It’s nice to know you care, Your Highness.”

Chrysalis choked down the hisses and snarls that wanted to come out. “You-you- you just bring my ship back here in the designed number of pieces, understand?” she barked. “I don’t want to have to waste two weeks going up there to rescue you if you screw up!”

“I like you too, Horseton,” Cherry said. The projection showed a big, toothy grin on the wall. 

Chrysalis wanted to throw a brick through it. A big brick.

Footnote:

(405) And also the newest masterwork from Ruffly Crinoline, Paperwork Passions, about an attractive young mare who lusted for a study certified public accountant while the humble but diligent Department of Wagon Vehicles worker attempted to prove his own love. Forty-pound triple-layer dresses were somehow involved, including the removal thereof. Chrysalis was looking forward to threatening with death the first changeling who caught her reading it.

Time passed. Mission Twenty-two made several more loops around the bedazzling pale sphere far, far above Equus. On Equus the sun was raised(406) and set(407). 

And then the silence of space was broken by a squeaky voice: “Horseton, Twenty-two, comms check.”

“We read you, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis replied. “Good morning, and you’re go for a landing today. Stand by for some housekeeping details.”

“Good to hear, Horseton.” Cherry Berry fumbled around the cabin for the notepad and wax pencil. “Ready.”

Separated by a million kilometers, Chrysalis and Cherry exchanged a checklist’s worth of little chores- trash and waste disposal, ship maintenance checks, final procedures before the landing began. “And finally,” Chrysalis said, “if there’s fuel left in the landing stage, we want you to go for a second landing in different terrain. After the second landing, you come home. We’ve decided to send a robot for the temperature scan that got missed.”

“Did you figure out what went wrong with that?” Cherry asked. 

“Transcription error,” Chrysalis said. “The mission specs, and the computer program provided, had the temperature scan down as above the target altitude. The protocols we wrote up for you, and for us here in mission control, listed it as below target altitude. It’ll take a couple of days for another try in your current orbit, and we don’t want to mess with that or leave you there that long. So we’ll send a robot. This is your third day up there. It’s going to be a longer trip back than you had going. We want you down as soon as possible, Twenty-two. Understood?”

“Roger, Horseton,” Cherry said. “Scrub on further in-flight temperature scans. What about the surface scan?”

“That’s still on. The landing site for the temperature scan comes up tomorrow morning our time- about dinner time on the mission clock. So we want to attempt that first.”

“Really? I thought the plan was to take the safe landing zone first, on the lake.”

“We changed our minds. We figure if you have to abort the first landing, there will still be fuel for a second one. If you abort the second one- or if you have to make a second pass at it- you might not have fuel to get home afterwards. So you’re going to the south polar highlands first.”

“Okay, Twenty-two copies.”

“I want- we want to make this clear, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said firmly. “If something goes wrong, even a little, you abort. We don’t want you to put the second landing at risk.”

“No problem, Horseton,” Cherry said. “I know what to do.”

A prolonged silence crossed between the worlds. 

“Okay, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said at last. “You have free time until 1430 mission clock. At that point we go through the final descent checklist.” Pause. “Good luck, Twenty-two.”

“Roger, Horseton, and thanks.”

A little metal can connected to three bombs floated around a gigantic ball of ice, again and again, high above a distant blue planet the size of a hackberry.

Footnotes:

(406) Again, strictly from the perspective of ponies standing on the surface. What really happened was that an alicorn’s magic held the planet and everything on it and nudged its rotation a little bit. This required less magic than actually moving a class G0 star, but it still qualified as a major miracle. Other species thought the fact that ponies took this miracle for granted twice a day said all any other species ever needed to know about ponies.

(407) The same as above, except that whereas most ponies regard footnote #406 with reluctance and a mug of something caffeinated, most ponies greet this footnote with celebration and relief, and occasionally a nice garden wine.