The ride back was a gradually escalating storm of hysterical laughter, as we gradually realized that we had done exactly what we set out to do.  I think part of what happened was that most of us were only partly willing to admit how grim our situation was before that.  If you decided to ignore the fact that (without this extra water) the geothermal would keep melting ice out from the regolith beneath our buildings, make more and more quakes, and that the solar could not keep powering the Colony at night because our batteries were gradually wearing out, you could have pretended that things were going reasonably well.  But, to think that things were going well, you had to ignore the problems we all knew were waiting for us, like not daring to look the Monster in the eye.  Now that we had a potential solution to the problem, we could look that problem square in the eye, and there was a wave of relief from not having to try not to think about it.  That's one of the problems with being in denial about your problems: denial takes a lot of effort, and it never stops, you never get a rest.  Until now, because now we didn't need to be in denial any more.  We had a solution instead.

We stopped briefly near the geothermal station, where Olivia perfectly backed up the tank alongside it, we disconnected it, and then we drove back to Building 3.  The youngers were happy to see us back, of course, but Charlotte was the one who seemed happiest.  I clenched my jaw a bit when Lucas came up to say something to me, ready for him to say something about how we hadn't really solved anything at all.

"So, if it's happened a couple times in just a few months," he said, "it's probably going to happen again, huh?  That means we could have a pretty steady supply of water, maybe."

"Maybe," I agreed, "but the records on my dad's tablet said the geologists back on earth thought that this much extra water would be enough to keep things stable for a long time.  I think if we're careful with it, we can keep using the geothermal every night for a long time, even if it doesn't happen again."

Whew.  Any time Lucas opens his mouth, I tend to cringe just a little; sometimes because he's about to say something blunt and thoughtless, but sometimes because he's going to say something that means our situation is worse.  It's not easy to notice things which you don't want to be true, as if some part of your mind wants to blot it out, and Lucas seems to be better than most other people at seeing it anyway.  But this time, maybe we really are in a better situation than before.  I'm sure we'll still have lots of problems, but we now have enough energy to deal with them.  We're not doomed.  And, we're not scared.  When the Monster rears its hydra heads again, we will know we've beaten it before, so we can do it again.

Emma, it turned out, had a couple cracked ribs, but the medscanner said if she just doesn't do any physical work for a while they should heal all right.  The Monster injures another one of us, but not too badly; it turns out that Martian kids are hard to kill, I guess.

So, Gerard, that pretty much brings this up to the present day.  This is probably more than you were asking for when you said you wanted to hear the current status, but it was a while before I felt ready to send it to you, and I just kept adding to it over time while I tried to decide if I should send it or not.  Then later we were all too busy for me to think about that but I did find that writing in it helped me organize my thoughts.  So, it got pretty long, as you can see.  If you're really cut off from the internet and still waiting for the malware complex to die out or whatever, maybe you've got a lot of time for reading anyway.

Oh, I remembered to check with Alexander.  He says the bad dreams aren't happening much any more.  I wasn't sure whether or not to believe him, but I notice that I'm up before he is most mornings now, so it's probably true.  The sunrises are beautiful, but so is sleeping soundly.

By the way, in case it's not clear by this point: we're not going to Earth.  It would be great if anybody from Earth wants to come here to help out, we've got plenty of room, but you can tell everyone there that if they're thinking they will come take us, even if it's to the Moon where the gravity wouldn't be too heavy, we're not going.  We're Martian, and we're going to live, on Mars.