A/N - This chapter is for my um... archaeology dig site buddy. You know who you are.

SOL 119

Mostly, Sojourner just wandered around outside the Hab. He'd slowly make his rounds, circling between the Hab and the solar farm and the rovers, never straying too far from Pathfinder. His rechargeable battery was long dead, and his solar panels had degraded in efficiency over the years; Sojourner couldn't operate in low light or when it was cloudy.

Every clear day, though, bright and early, Sojourner could be found, doing his slow roll, as Mark called it, around the premises. Sojourner could do analysis on the rocks and soil samples that Mark had carefully bagged on his way to and from Ares Vallis, take stereo pictures, inspections, and generally, observe whatever Mark was doing, when he did EVAs.

Sojourner was not a particularly fast rover; his top speed was a little better than one foot every minute. But that didn't mean that NASA couldn't find lots of jobs for it.

[09:04] JPL: Botany team would like Sojourner time in the Hab today. Please respond with timeframe.

[09:05] JPL: Also; awesome job! Guys here took a vote and this morning's sand castle was your best yet. Thanks so much for that.

[09:21] WATNEY: No problem. I take my duties as an astronaut seriously.

[09:21] WATNEY: Sojo will go to the Hab with me when I finish EVA.

The trick had been accessing an internal serial port, deep within the warm box. Originally used for loading its programming and processing systems while still back on Earth, it could nevertheless be accessed (once Sojourner had been disassembled) and hard-wired back to the Ares rover's computer.

Long, lonely years of -50C on the surface of Mars had ruined two of the internal connections for the power supply, but that had proven to be an easy fix, with JPL walking him through the process from the rover. After that, reassembly and a quick reboot of Pathfinder, and Sojourner had awoken. And from there, the team in Pasadena had taken the reins. They were guiding Sojourner around the surface of Mars once again, for the first time in nearly forty years.

Pathfinder and its rover were now working in tandem, and operating better than ever, with a trusty human to repair and adjust, clean, and maintain them. Pathfinder's connection to the Deep Space Network was solid if a bit slow, by modern standards; it took about thirty minutes to uplink one of its detailed, panoramic pictures. But the smaller, lower-res stereoscopic pictures that Sojourner could capture were transmitted much more quickly, and it was a lot more portable, to boot, and so Sojourner became NASA's preferred method of Mark-watching.

Mark was pretty sure that "astronaut spy" hadn't been one of its original mission objectives.

Since the day that he'd been observed en route to retrieve the lander, he'd learned, there had been a mad scramble to revive the disbanded Pathfinder team. Long-retired employees in their seventies and eighties didn't have to be asked twice to be coaxed into helping get the project off the ground.

They didn't even have to be asked once. They just showed up for work again. As consultants, as part-timers, as whatever they could possibly get categorized under, as department budgets and allocations went right out the window in those first crazy couple of weeks.

It had made for some interesting times at JPL, apparently, a homecoming of sorts. And an unlikely encore performance for the Pathfinder engineers, who now found themselves in the midst of the modern day Ares Program, while instructing team members fifty and sixty years their juniors in the mysterious ways of the 90s ingenuity that had produced Pathfinder.

[12:04] WATNEY: Can you keep Sojourner out from underfoot, guys? I almost tripped over him. Again.

[12:20] JPL: Sorry. When you get a chance, please sweep the undercarriage and clean APXS sensor. Geo reports a fault.

[12:21] WATNEY: Copy that.

If anything, that had seemed to inspire them to have Sojourner follow him around even more closely. They'd even come up with a protocol that allowed Mark to take Sojourner inside the Hab for brief periods, delaying its transmissions back to Pathfinder for up to a few hours. He'd gotten so used to having the little rover around that he barely took notice of it anymore, placing it back in the upper storage bunk after Sojourner had taken soil samples and images for the botany team, while he went about his business.

Annie Montrose had finally gotten a clear picture of Watney on Mars without his helmet, in fact, but she still couldn't show it to anyone.

[16:14] JPL: Okay. Thanks for the Hab images, Watney. Botany says two more days until harvest.

[16:14] JPL: A reminder that Sojourner has cameras at both ends. Be advised to keep your clothes on when rover is imaging.

[16:29] WATNEY: Copy that.

Houston

Watney certainly knew how to lighten the mood around this place, Mindy thought, wryly.

She'd had a good eye-roll at his antics of the previous day, and she was not at all convinced that it had been an accident! Remembering all too well the irreverent sense of humor he'd had, the notion that he'd casually just drop trou in view of Sojourner, just to fuck with everyone at JPL and NASA; well, it wasn't hard to believe.

On his first EVA of the morning, before Sojourner had finished booting up, Mark had begun to pile some sand and rocks into a castle shape, or a mound that resembled the Hab, or the familiar pyramid shape of Pathfinder, and poke a tiny American flag he'd made, into it. It was another silly and endearing gesture that, to Mindy, bespoke his ongoing good spirits.

He was managing to stay positive, in spite of everything, and it was good to see.

Caroline and Richard received daily notes from him, which were unfailingly upbeat. He gave a quick rundown of his day; what he'd done, what he planned to do, usually sandwiched between a snarky comment or two, and signed off. His parents were hopeful that soon, Dr. Shields would approve Mark for the unvarnished truth about what, precisely, was afoot, back on Earth.

The flashing light on her console broke her reverie, and Mindy blinked, as the newest set of

images were returned; her heart leapt into her throat as she saw that the Hab had breached.

Oh my god, oh my god, she pleaded, please be okay. Dr. Kapoor was sitting in her chair, as Henderson hung over his shoulder, anxiously. Nothing was happening, as the minutes ticked by. They were between satellite passes. The airlock had detached and tumbled fifty meters, and so far, hadn't moved.

Mindy was reminded of the night she had looked over the first images of the Ares III site; now the site looked exactly as she'd feared it would. The Hab was flattened, a cloud of debris scattered from the breach.

Factoring in the time drag, it had been nearly an hour since the breach, and the office was nearly silent with worry. If Watney had been in the Hab during the breach, then he was a dead man right now, simple as that. But if, as Henderson had suggested, he'd been in the airlock when it had torn away from the structure, then… maybe… he could still be alive, inside it. He'd have had an EVA suit on, at least. But that didn't explain why he wasn't coming out. Any injury that had rendered Watney unconscious for over an hour must be very serious, indeed, and not terribly likely to have been survivable.

Something occurred to Mindy.

"Could we use Pathfinder to take a panoramic?" she asked, breaking the silence. "Get us some eyes on the ground?"

"Yeah," Mitch said, looking at her, gratefully. "Tell them to get us a panoramic," he said to Kapoor, who was already dialing.

Forty-five minutes later, the black and white image was slowly emerging from the DSN, one vertical stripe at a time.

"There's the Hab," Dr. Kapoor pointed, waiting, "It's deflated, and… oh," he said, quietly, as the far-away airlock became visible on the Martian horizon.

It was laid out on its side, and as Venkat adjusted focus and tilt, and zoomed in on it.

"Hyperinflated," Mindy pointed out, the first thing that came to mind. The airlock canvas was stretched tight around its structure, bulging a bit in the center.

"Wait, why…" Mitch trailed off.

"Suit is compromised," they said, almost at the same time.

Dr. Kapoor nodded.

New satellite images came in, a series that showed the marks where the airlock had stuttered across the sand. They counted three, four, five different roll marks.

Two hours, now, and eventually Pathfinder returned a second panoramic much like the first. In this one, however, Watney's shoulder, and the shadow of his head, minus its helmet, were just visible, in the tiny window on the end of the airlock.

With the relatively slow camera exposure, there was a visible blur.

Watney was moving. He was still alive.

SOL 121

"Looks like a bomb went off in here," Mark muttered to himself, after the Hab had been reinflated, minus one of its three airlocks.

The hits just keep on coming, he thought, as he began to gather up the now freeze-dried potatoes from their frozen and withered stalks.

Plant life that was, once again, extinct on Mars.

Why did I not think to keep a few seed potatoes somewhere safe?

He'd long-since eaten the field peas and black beans, after being assured by NASA nutrition team that the potatoes held the most caloric potential; everything else was expendable.

The only other seeds and plant life he'd had were grass seeds and and a couple of small ferns, for a perchlorate experiment that had been part of the original surface mission, and even if they had survived the decompression, which was very doubtful indeed, the now-sterile cultivated soil couldn't grow anything, anyway.

He was screwed. Completely dependent on NASA to rush a probe out to him, in time. And now, there was just no way that that was going to happen without him starving a little.

A lot, really. He'd already lost a lot of weight. Never a particularly beefy guy in the first place, Mark estimated that he was losing around half a kilo every week or two, on his three-quarter rations. If that kept up, there wouldn't be very much of him left to greet a supply probe if NASA even managed to get one out to him before it was too late.

The weight loss would slow down, he thought, darkly, when his body ran out of muscle and fat to draw from, and it started in on his bones and organs, instead.

His heart. His brain.

Don't think about that now, he ordered himself.

Have to stay positive.

Have to look on the bright side.

"Don't cry kid. Laugh." he could hear his Dad's voice, but he couldn't feel anything besides despair, and fear.

It was hard.

Really fucking hard.

If anything, literally, anything else goes wrong, that's it, he thought.

I'm a dead man.

No, he argued with himself. I'm okay. I can still pull through.

I've barely been here four months and all hell has broken loose. Four years?! Who am I kidding.

He'd be okay, if NASA managed to pull some kind of probe together and launch it in time. It seemed like a really big if, though.

I'm not gonna get scared.

I like a good challenge.

The memory of saying that to Mindy, just as he'd kissed her, suddenly fluttered through his jumbled thoughts. The first time they'd kissed. It brought the tiniest hint of a smile to his face.

That's better, he thought. Focus on that.

He said it out loud, haltingly, as he gathered up more potatoes.

"I'm not gonna get scared." He tried out the words. "I like a good challenge." It was a good mantra, and he used it, repeatedly, to stifle the negative thoughts, as he worked through the afternoon, and into the night.

Early the next morning, though, when he'd uncovered the mangled remains of Sojourner, crushed beneath some tipped-over lab equipment, he found himself in a very dark place, indeed.

"Oh, no…" he said, softly, as his face fell. Sojourner was gone. Broken nearly in half, all of the internals bent and crushed... what remained of the shattered solar panels lay beneath it in shards. Even worse, the warm box had broken open and been exposed to the atmosphere.

He gathered the pieces into his arms, and wept.