My alarm clock woke me up at 7:45 like Boundary Layer suggested. I had thought about trying to wake up earlier to see a full morning’s operations, but realized that I might want to have a better idea of what actually happened first. As I completed my morning preparations and exited the bathroom, I encountered Bounder coming down the hall.

“I’m about to head to the Pav, if you want to join me for breakfast. Lemon Hearts should be there and we can give you a basic rundown.”

“Sure, that’d be great,” I replied, “I just need to stop in to my room to grab my saddlebag with my notepads and pencils.”

As we walked over to the Pav, I noticed ponies both solo and in little groups also heading from the bunkhouses to breakfast. Most wore some combination of vests and hats against the cold. Nearly every pony also wore adjustable tool bands near their forehooves; such bands were a sign of skilled manual labor. The tool bands and their straps allowed ponies to attach and lock tools in order to exert force in a magnitude and direction not easily done with hooves alone. Many earth ponies preferred to use mouthgrips when possible, but there were certainly times when one would want to keep their mouth as far away as possible from something nasty.

We got into the breakfast line as Bounder told me about what was left in Pea Ridge. “The liquid soup was almost entirely pumped out, it’s true. What liquid is left isn’t economically worth recovering. But Pea Ridge has tremendous amounts of completely dry, nearly rock-hard chunks of solid material that used to be liquid soup.”

He piled his plate high with soy sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and pancakes as he continued, “Soupbrick is, shall we say, an underutilized potential resource. Most soup fields have some mines that are heavily soupbrick, or have even completely dried out into soupbrick. Best estimates are that even the easily pumpable fields will have some soupbrick deposits. Pea Ridge, for example, is suspected to contain soupbrick deposits that could rehydrate in a volume of anywhere from twenty to forty percent of its original liquid soup.”

“I’ve heard that ponies can dig out blocks of hardened concentrated soupbrick like that at a few surface mines,” I commented as I loaded my own plate. “But it sounds like that’s not a big industry.”

“Exactly. And those open-pit surface mines are few and far between because even when the lode is near the surface and the concentrate can be rehydrated into acceptably palatable soup, digging for soupbrick with picks and drills and shovels is serious toil! To make things worse, most soup mines are far enough underground that a dried-out dome full of soupbrick would be difficult to even reach. Then the effort and cost involved in removing overburden and potentially having to build a mining tunnel far outweigh the soup yield, especially because unlike the few mountainous coal mines Equestria has, we’d mostly be digging down instead of in.

“But, what if we didn’t need to send ponies – or others – down to drill and dig out the soupbrick? Despite the name, dehydrated soup concentrate isn’t always found in mostly flat brick-like pieces. Sometimes they could just be lattices of dried out soup, like stalactites and stalagmites in caves. What if we could turn it liquid again?” asked Boundary Layer as we approached the table where Lemon Hearts was seated next to a boxy contraption. The mare was munching on soy sausage pigs-in-a-blanket, the pancakes drowning in lemon curd.

Finishing her bite, Lemon Hearts picked up from Bounder, “We call the process we’ve come up with in-situ leaching. You know how your instant soup packets require heat and liquid to dissolve the soupbrick? Just pouring water, even boiling water, down a borehole into a dried-out soup dome wouldn’t work. There simply isn’t enough heat content in the water to dissolve more than a small portion of soupbrick, and a lot of the heat will quickly transfer to the surrounding rock. And even if a little of the soupbrick dissolves, trying to use a pumpjack with that much more solid material in place is nearly impossible.

“But boil water into wet steam, and it carries a lot more heat. When using a properly designed boiler, we can even superheat the wet steam into dry steam, bringing it to temperatures well above the boiling point. We’ll use a boiler and borehole to dump in eight times as much heat as just boiling-temperature water. That steam will eventually either displace or warm the cold air of the empty soup dome with relatively little transmission to the surrounding rock. It will raise the overall temperature to a point where the condensing steam, coupled with the boiling-temperature water it condenses into, will be able to finally break apart the soupbrick and liquefy it. Or at least liquefy much of it, with the rest dissolved into smallish pieces that the pumpjack can handle. Once we pump some of the reconstituted soup out, we can also pump still more steam in to keep the heat up and continue the dissolving process.”

Lemon Hearts gestures over at the small mine model next to her. It was clearly built just for the purpose of demonstrating the new technique and sat upon a sturdy metal cart. The bulk of it resembled a transparent crystal cube with each edge about half a yard long, with five of its six sides solid. The top was removable, and heavy. It resembled a well-crafted crystal plug nearly a third of the height of the cube, with a pair of cylindrical holes drilled down on opposite corners of the plug as tiny boreholes. Lemon Hearts’s horn glowed, and the plug smoothly slid up and out of the cube. Meanwhile, a rectangular lattice block – on closer inspection, made up of miniscule “bars” of dehydrated split pea soupbrick connected together – was levitated into the bottom of the cube. The plug was replaced as Boundary Layer wheeled over a small water-tube boiler, barely the size of a large adult pony. The steam exit tube of the boiler was connected into one of the holes in the plug. Lemon Hearts attached a miniature walking beam pumpjack to the other hole.

The transparency of the cube meant that I could watch the entire process take place on a small scale while eating. Boundary Layer checked to make sure the boiler tank was full of water, then opened up the boiler door and scooped in a load of lump charcoal. Lemon Hearts poured some vegetable oil onto a large piece, lit the chunk with a spark of her horn, and tossed the flaming carbonized wood into the boiler furnace and closed the door. We soon heard the tinkling sound of igniting charcoal as the pile began to burn. Five minutes later, we watched as the first trickle of steam flowed out from the metal pipe and down the plug’s simulated borehole. For the next quarter of an hour, we watched steam flow into the artificial crystal mine, gradually fogging the crystal slightly and sometimes condensing upon the bars of dehydrated soup lattice, then dripping down to collect on the crystal floor. I could imagine the steam slowly seeping into and through the soupbrick, gradually weakening the structure.

There was a sudden small splash within the cube. Lemon Hearts pointed, and I could see that a part of the soupbrick lattice had given way. That small piece began to dissolve in the still-boiling water condensed at the bottom of the cube. Over the next half-hour, the remainder of the lattice fell apart as steam continued to flood into the crystal chamber. Once the lattice had broken apart into pieces, Lemon Hearts turned on the pumpjack and it began to suck hot soup out from the now partially-flooded miniature mine and depositing it into a waiting cup.

At a nod from Boundary Layer, I inspected the contents of the cup. Unevenly mixed, to be sure, but it did resemble split pea soup. I took a sip of the slightly chunky green liquid, and while the underlying taste itself was similar to what I was used to from my home soup faucet, the consistency was lacking and there were a few small chunks of concentrate still floating within. On the whole, it resembled what might come of a foal’s first attempt at adding boiling water to the “instant soup for one” packages of single-serving soupbrick while not following all the instructions. Flawed, yes, but not irredeemably so and putting the mixture in a blender for a bit then reboiling would likely turn out a perfectly acceptable soup.

“Show me more,” I say.

Author's Note

Click here for the notes to the prologue and first two chapters!