Jovian underground-based missile and laser turrets, scattered across the many rebel moons, shot 99% of all approaching enemy craft out of the sky. Those few Fleet ships that still managed to land, were instantly targeted by cruise missiles and lasers, and blasted to bits.
The bombcrater-scarred outer moons of Jupiter had turned into spaceship graveyards. Entire plains were riddled with the deep-frozen fragments of hundreds of robots, ships and a dozen Fleet astronauts. The Kansler, who stood to lose his post if Earth surrendered, had promised the Fleet and home opinion that his latest expensive "wonder-weapon" could break the stalemate. Even though public support remained strong, the Kansler knew well that this might quickly change if he couldn't present a decisive victory soon.
Argus himself showed little concern with the politics of the conflict; all he wanted was to get his duty done with, so he could return home...
Escorted by two guard drones, Argus entered the main control of the William Jefferson . The control-room centrifuge spanned a diameter of thirty meters inside the flagship, and measured ten meters in length - twice the space of the crew's centrifuged quarters. Around it were scattered twenty console-bubbles, inside which officers and technicians "plugged" their brains into the computer banks, which in turn controlled the entire Fleet.
Their work-shifts could last for weeks without interruption; the console-bubbles took care of all bodily functions, massaged their muscles, and maintained their skeletons with injections and exercise equipment. The best of the "bubblemen" could work in their sleep, resting one part of their brains while other parts remained plugged in.
As the flagship was braking and the centrifugal forces pressed on its insides, the side of the control-room facing the ship's rear was used as "floor".
Admiral York sat plugged into his console bubble when Argus approached him; they communicated through holo-presence. The Kansler was in fact the only man in the Fleet who showed no signs of ever "plugging in"; he stood outside the console, jogging incessantly to stay in shape.
"Colonel," York's holo-presence asked, "has the Kansler given you any prior information as to the specific details and purpose of your first combat mission?"
Gus Thorsen would have replied with a "What?" Argus-A could calculate several possible interpretations of the questions in the second he waited to reply. He answered in a rapid jargon that he knew the plugged-in "bubblemen" would pick up easily - but which the Kansler must make an effort to follow.
"I'm taught only general facts, sir - astro-nav, topography and flight conditions of the Jupiter sector, simulated missions over Io, Europa, Callisto, Amalthea, Ganymede, bomb launching, orbital combat, ship maintenance, strategic advisory from Fleetcom, emergency protocol, military history et cetera..."
"Cut the crap, Colonel," York said curtly, "we're always busy in this sector of the Solar System. Do you understand what will happen to you down there?"
"We have run simulations for weeks, admiral. I know the Io mission inside out."
"Do you, now? Io is a world turning itself inside out. A lake of molten sulfur quickly turns into a plain. The plain gives birth to an eruption, which grows into a volcanic mountain in ten hours. So we have no maps, just snapshots. Even as you approach the surface, it changes.
"And even if your cyborg construction withstands the radiation-belts around Jupiter, like Boulder Pi promised us, the smaller moons can give you problems. Amalthea, for instance, is charged with an enormous amount of electricity from orbiting in the strongest part of Jupiter's magnetic field. Sometimes a passing spacecraft or probe gets jammed by the field, and can get hit by random lightning-charges if it flies too close. Even Jovians avoid it.
"Io and Amalthea are what we call 'hot' moons. The Jovian colonists have built powerplants there, and Io holds several important automated refineries and defense stations. If we can bomb those, their industry is weakened - and the supply route from Jupiter to Ganymede is left open to attack. This could force the rebels back into negotiations... I hope."
"That Clarke was with the Martian Security Forces doesn't make him an idiot, admiral," the Kansler interrupted. It was a standing joke in the Fleet that "MSF" stood for Most Spoiled Failures. "He knows a great deal about the Outer Planets. Right, Colonel?"
"Right. So, there are no people at the target on Io? No spaceports, no habitats, nothing?"
"Nothing living can stay there. The plants, guns and missile batteries just float on the surface."
"Let's do it, then," Argus said. "The sooner we finish this, the better."
"Didn't I tell you, admiral?" the Kansler said in his trademark hearty manner. "He's our 'Gus! "
Argus excused himself, and headed toward the flight deck. During the entire trip to Jupiter, his main problem had been to avoid the Kansler's increasingly annoying presence. The man turned out to be more overbearing when he tried to fraternize, and lapsed into incoherent ramblings about astronomy and trivial matters.
On day five of their Jupiter journey, Argus had started a conversation about sports, to find out what the Kansler knew about boxing. It failed completely; the commander immediately started to recount recent sports results, as if reading from a script.
Argus could never quite figure out when the Kansler was speaking to a camera, to an imagined audience, or to another human being. The early spell had been broken; when not preoccupied with his obsession for victory, the supreme commander bored Argus half to death.
The flagship stopped braking just long enough for Argus's ship to fly out and assume a sweeping course toward Io. Argus could reach this small volcanic moon without passing too close to any of the other 15 moons. Unfortunately for him, the rebels spotted his ship as soon as it left the flagship... and he flew without any support, as the flagship was forced to continue its braking run after the fast flight to Jupiter.
It struck Argus, as he sat watching the view from his ship: Jupiter looked much bigger in reality than in simulation. Probably, he thought, because his senses registered its actual size with such detail and precision.
The sheer insight of how vast this gas giant was filled him with a near-religious awe. When a swarm of comets had collided with Jupiter's atmosphere in the late 20th century, the gigantic explosions were powerful enough to destroy a planet on the scale of Earth. One and three-quarters of a century later, the string of dark spots in Jupiter's upper clouds, scars left by the comet impacts, had vanished - absorbed.
He understood, in a way he hadn't until now, that the Red Spot really was a hurricane the size of a planet. Argus thought that if the whole of Earth somehow plunged into the Red Spot, it would dissolve in Jupiter's deep ocean of electrified, liquid metallic hydrogen, at a pressure of 4 million atmospheres. Squeezed out of existence, absorbed into the dark plasmatic void...
He could barely imagine the bravery of the colonists who dared to fly in uncertain orbit through Jupiter's upper atmosphere, scooping up the precious deuterium gas. No Terran was fit for the job. Argus felt a growing admiration for the midget-like colonists. Perhaps they weren't all as pitiful as that renegade Jovian, Boulder Pi...
Carried by the momentum the flagship had given him, Argus and his ship speeded toward Io. In just hours, instead of the days it usually took remote-controlled fighters, he came within a thousand kilometers of the small moon. One of its many volcanoes were spouting a plume of sulfur into space; the surface resembled nothing so much as a rotting apple from Gus Thorsen's childhood.
He began to brake, slowly preparing for flight very close to the actual surface. Io having no atmosphere, no friction at entry was to be expected; Argus could fly in almost as fast as he wanted.
"Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee," he whispered to himself, and an old reflex made him wipe his forehead. It was, of course, devoid of sweat - but the idea of the sweat was quite real to him.
***
On Ganymede, the arrival of the Terran flagship had been anticipated for two weeks. As Argus approached Io's surface, Caver Pi and the rest of the pla
netary defense council were gathered in a command center at Node Prime on Ganymede's North Pole.
The ten men and women were "plugged into" the defense systems, and could direct the defense posts directly as well as coordinate their efforts with the other thirteen settlements.
Despite all the preparations, the time delay in signals between planets created a disadvantage in the attacker's favor. Caver Pi, in his console bubble, had trouble concentrating. The fact that his brother had helped create the pilot of the ship that attacked them, kept blurring the focus he needed to effectively communicate with the council. And the others could sense it.
"I'm with you," he reassured the council, and merged with the many voices, his identity becoming one with the greater mesh of minds and computers...
"The Terran Fleet may not know all about the Io outpost."
"Our agents told us much about the pilot himself. He's Terran all right, recruited from the MSF."
"But why? The MSF are the dregs of the Fleet - brutal scum with little talent except for harassing Martian civilians."
"This one is different. See that flight path. He's coming in so fast, yet braking in hard enough to enable a surface fly-by... no human pilot could do that, and live."
"Our space-mines will get him."
"No. He has very good counter-measures."
"But the mines use microwave-bursts, he'll be fried or his ship will cease to function."
"Should have, but isn't. Battle report says ship still navigates. Must be his lead shield is too thick."
"It's in the hands of our reserve down there, then."
"The reserve is just a bunch of radiation-sick old men. They're doomed even if the Terrans don't find them."
"That's why we decided to send them, and they volunteered. It's better than sending no one at all."
"Quiet, all of you.... the enemy ship is in surface fly-by..."
"Come on, boys, don't let him reach you..."
***
Argus put his ship on a 70-second course of near-surface flight to reach the designated target area, where his one DF charge - a "driller" - was to be dropped.
No previous attack on Io had yet scored a successful bomb drop. The boiling, fluid terrain of Io rushed past below him at a velocity of 10,000 KMP, yet his super-fast perception could discern every detail of the landscape. Two seconds into the course, without warning, the radar display ceased to work.
ENEMY JAMMING ALL FREQUENCIES
RADAR DOWN 90%
COMLINK DOWN 96%
He would have to fly on visual and manual control alone. The ship passed over a wide black lake of liquid sulfur, in which floated melting white and pink blocks. Around the lake lay a red shoreline - it resembled infected skin surrounding a boil. The erupting volcano he had seen during the approach from space, now lay less than a mile from his path.
From the volcano, which he could not hear, black rivers of sulfur flowed down and filled the bubbling lake. A few geysers spouted up from the lake and shot a mile up into the airless sky, but he could dodge them in his nimble craft.
And then the lake was behind him; he flew into a low chain of garishly yellow hills, leading straight toward the target area. He could see the first eight enemy turrets, two seconds ahead.
"Zero! Two! Four! Five! Eight!"
The little white and red ship spewed out laser and proton rays - and the terrain ahead of it seemed to explode like fireworks. Two of the nearest gun turrets fired back, failed to hit the rolling, ducking craft, and vanished in bursts of flame. Argus took his ship into a dive between the hills and speeded through a trench-like valley, no wider than seventy meters.
He fired without aiming, so close were the enemy. More turrets exploded ahead of him almost as soon as he could perceive them; clusters of decoy bubbles detonated behind his ship as more enemy fire hit them.
DECOY SUPPLY EMPTY
SUGGEST LEYDENFROST SHIELD
Argus switched on the shield and beheld its effect on the surrounding terrain. Wherever the shield-plume, trailing after his craft, hit the ground the surface billowed upward into walls of vapor. The few undamaged gun turrets he flew past shook and got buried in cascades of hot molten sulfur.
He concentrated on the target area, now less than ten seconds ahead: it spread out along the small valley, partly floating on a shallow delta of liquid and semi-solid sulfur. The floating refinery stretched one kilometer on its pontoons; from a magnetic accelerator-track, new shipments of whatever the plant produced were shot into orbit. Argus used two precious seconds to scan the approaching compound, and braked by just a fraction.
Something wasn't right. Using all spectrum wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared, he could sense life somewhere inside the cluster of floating, spheres. There were small shapes, humanoid ones, in there. Enemy fire intensified again. He sent a text message directly to the flagship's command center.
LIFE SIGNS IN TARGET AREA. ABORT BOMB DROP?
The reply came in two seconds from the "plugged-in" Admiral York.
PROCEED. KANSLER'S ORDER.
With only four seconds left, Argus appealed once more.
REQUEST ABORT!
The next reply - on his internal display - came almost simultaneously, and he had not seen this kind before:
DIRECT CONTROL
He watched it as if being outside his body: someone rapidly moved his hand to the launch button and pressed it. The driller fell out of the opened bomb bay and dived forward, into the sulfur delta. Then he regained control of his limbs - the hills came up toward him and he instinctively climbed into space.
In the ship's rearview display, Argus saw the driller disappear, a metal cone no longer than two meters. A moment later, the entire sulfur delta seemed to rise up like an impossibly large, dirty oil bubble, and it burst into a bright blaze.
There was not a sound to be heard in the ship, as the refinery that was supposed to be empty of people turned into a nuclear fireball. It was as if the blast opened a gash also inside his head. His hands became paralyzed with terror. As in some childhood nightmare, he couldn't tell whose mind had guided his hands.
"Argus," Navbutler broke in, "you are off course. Request autopilot takeover?"
The cyborg, mute, looking before him with blank eyes, made a slight nod. The ship's computer took them back on course for rendezvous with the flagship.
"Control to Argus - great job! That showed them -"
"Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP! SHUT UP!!
The "bubblemen" in the flagship's command center heard Argus shout in rage over the radio. The defense councils on the colonized moons were stricken with horror. All of their defenses on and around Io - rays, missiles, decoys, mines, satellites, drones - had failed to strike down a brightly visible, single fighter-bomber even once.
The Kansler was on his seat in the ship, watching the screens; York's holo-presence congratuled him. "Your boy hit the target, Kansler. But why did he react like that?"
"Don't worry," the Kansler told him. "I'll talk to him. He needs to practice better... control. We'll arrange a medal ceremony... later. I'll get Marketing on it right away. Islington?"
"Yes, Kansler?" the deputy chimed in from the seat behind him.
"Send a secure message to Boulder Pi on the Moon. Tell him... everything works just fine. His security clearance is to be renewed for now. That's all."
"Er, Kansler, what do we do about Venix? The... situation?"
"Oh yes, I almost forgot. Tell Marketing to go with the duplicate. It's all been arranged for. Forget the original. She has nowhere to hide and she knows nothing about military matters or politics. Let Fleetcom calculate her likely escape routes and we'll have a couple of squads waiting for her. She'll turn up soon enough, and we claim her to be an impostor. That'll be all for now."
"Thank you, sir."
It's just another woman, the Kansler thought confidently. I can get Gus other women, or pleasure droids. What does she matter now?
18: The Crew
N
ews of the Io bombing reached Foss and his full crew less than an hour after the fact - and several minutes before the official newscast from Earth. The shuttle's booster phase had ended, and they were in the beginning of several weeks of freefall, before the braking phase.
"This is Radio Free Jupiter. Eighteen volunteers on the Io Refinery Station Two were just killed in a hit-and-run bomb attack by the Terran Fleet, as it returned to the system in full force after a previous failed raid led by the E.S.S. Ford. The attack, led by the E.S.S. William Jefferson, was executed by a single space-to-surface interceptor craft, identified as built for Colonel Haruman Clarke of the Martian Security Forces, also known as 'Argus-A'..."
"Oh no..." said Venix, as she and the shuttle crew listened to the underground station. The broadcast struggled to get through the static and distortion of Terran jamming-transmitters.
"You sound involved, ma'am," the extremely gaunt, bald Moravia said in his nasal Moon accent. "Pardon my asking, but haven't I seen you somewhere on the networks?"
"Quiet, stickman," the obese, hairy Keaton said between mouthfuls of food, "Cap's listening."
Christof Foss listened intently to the broadcast while the ship's leisure droid, a slightly old-fashioned female model, massaged his legs and arms. He put a cigarette in his mouth and just chewed on it, his mind occupied. Then he switched off the cabin radio.
"Boys," he told the crew, "I think I know why they're willing to pay so much for Venix. She's with the Fleet. Some sort of high-level defector."
Keaton coughed out a chunk of synthetic food and it flew, weightless, into the opposing wall. Moravia clutched his bony knees where they stuck out from his frayed coveralls, and shook his head.
"You should've warned me before you picked me up," Moravia reproached the captain. "That was sneaky, man, not telling me about her. When they find out, we're in real trouble... the MSF messed up Eric Malta's crew real bad a month ago, remember? Blood all over the place, man..."
Yngve, AR - The Argus Project Page 13