Yngve, AR - The Argus Project

by The Argus Project (lit)

  Somewhere, in the complex clockwork of events he had spent thirty years putting into place, was a cog that might fail when he looked the other way. The Kansler was not yet arrogant enough to think himself infallible or invulnerable to random events.

  He thrashed and turned in his bed, racked his mind, but could not figure out what he had overlooked...

  And he was correct: the blind spot in his intellect made him unaware of one entire half of humanity - and what it was capable of.

  In the Kansler's mental universe, all women were cattle.

  23: Tough Mining Town

  Picture, if you can, a cigar-shaped zeppelin.

  Imagine in your mind's eye its shiny outer hull, made of synthetic spider-web fiber, measuring 200-190 meters in length, 100-95 meters in width - depending on winds, air pressure and day temperature.

  Then multiply this zeppelin by fifty, tie them together in a circular cluster, add scores of smaller airships and gondolas below... and you begin to get an idea of what Kun'Lun looks like upon approach from space.

  Argus was taken down into a low Jupiter orbit on a small Fleet ship. Then he boarded a "pumper", one of many regular transport shuttles fitted with inflatable helium balloons and helicopter rotors, and took an even lower orbit. The pumper went spiraling down toward Jupiter's North Pole - and Kun'Lun.

  On the shuttle radio, he heard a local station play popular songs. One was sung by a choir of Jovians and accompanied by a simple synth instrument:

  Seasick Charlie

  Had bad luck

  Went to Kun'Lun

  Had to chuck!

  Leaned over and threw it up

  And the big wind shot it back!

  Seasick Charlie, has no head

  Vomit smashed it - now he's dead!

  Listen to "Seasick Charlie" audio clip

  From far away, Argus spotted the airborne city of Kun'Lun, the northernmost deuterium-mining station, floating above Jupiter's North Pole.

  The sun never quite set on this latitude, just rushed around the vast horizon, caught in an eternal indecision whether to end or start a proper day. Stirred by the wondrous sight of the city illuminated by the golden sunlight, Argus thought that Kun'Lun literally sailed on the clouds.

  It was just an illusion, though - the white, yellow and brown cloud masses were thin and could not support any weight. The never-ending winds, less forceful than along the equator yet mightier than any on Earth, carried some of the city's weight as it went round and round the pole... At this altitude, the mighty horizon's curvature was almost invisible, and the sea of clouds seemed to stretch out into infinity below the dark-blue stratosphere.

  The illusion was heightened by the fact that Jupiter's extremely rapid rotation flattened out the atmosphere over the poles, and Kun'Lun's fifty-thousand-mile circular route rested on the very top of the North Pole.

  ***

  Rogan Din, Chief Security Officer of Kun'Lun, stood waiting to meet Argus as his pumper was towed in below the zeppelin section marked 01-ADMINSEC.

  Rogan was very, very short for a Terran. He might just about reach up to Argus's waist if he stretched his thick neck - which he didn't. The man wore a fur-lined pressure-suit with a motorized endoskeleton, and a robo-walker around his waist supported his posture.

  On his feet were the smallest electric roller-skates Argus had ever seen; he imagined they were a last resort, in case the man got too exhausted by the strong gravity. His protective mask, covering his whole face, was entirely transparent.

  No one carried oxygen-packs; the entire habitat was pressurized and filled with oxygen. But the indoor temperature in this badly insulated plastic city fell well below -70 degrees Centigrade.

  The squat, energetic Din enthusiastically shook hands with the much taller cyborg, and grinned with what seemed sincere joy. The man didn't even attempt to look up as he talked, which made Argus uncomfortable: Din seemed to be staring at his crotch all the time.

  "Welcome, welcome to Kun'Lun , Colonel Clarke... or should I call you 'Argus-A'?"

  "Whatever is the least bother for you. Gravity up here is not as strong as I expected, but it must put a strain on you. How do your workers cope with feeling so heavy, when they're so small?"

  "The gravity of Jupiter puts a strain on any body, Colonel - Jovian or Terran. All miners wear pressure-suits and endoskeleton reinforcements, and are fed a special diet to counter it.

  "In fact, it is precisely because Jovians are so short, that they endure Jupiter better than us. Terrans, Lunarians, or Venusians, even when they use all the counter-measures, get 'drunken feet'. If your heart lies more than ten centimeters from your head, and you come here to Kun'Lun, head pressure drops but increases in the lower body.

  "It's called 'drunken feet' because of the symptoms: blood-swellings in the feet, slurred speech, walking difficulties... and eventually brain damage."

  Argus smiled as he listened, for now he understood why Rogan Din appeared to be watching his crotch while talking. Jupiter's high gravity, even here up in the stratosphere, made it unwise to move one's head or eyes so much as an inch upward... unless one was a cyborg with superhuman strength and no blood pressure concerns.

  Funny, that Rogan was abnormally short by Terran standards, but he seemed to think of himself as "a real Terran" nevertheless, and also extended his delusion to include Argus among the "pure breed".

  Hey Rogan, Argus thought, better watch your back, or those miners might push you over the edge...

  "Please let me take you on a tour, and show a little of the mining process. Of course you know all there is to know, but please - humor me. I regret to say, Colonel, that you may only stay here for a few hours - the weight restrictions here, you see, are quite severe, and the new shift of workers, came in just before you did, was a few kilos heavier than expected..."

  "'Scuse me, Rogan," Argus interrupted, while they crossed a swaying, narrow rope bridge between two zeppelins, inside a transparent inflated plastic tunnel. "The Jovian miners don't talk to you very much, do they? I can imagine it gets lonely here after a while..."

  "Painfully obvious, isn't it?" the chief security officer snapped, laughing nervously. "Have you heard them talk? It's gibberish: blublublublub ... like fast-forwarding a film. And they have this peculiar smell ..."

  "Where is your staff?"

  "I have a few small robots for surveillance. Weight restrictions, you know..."

  "But - you alone, keeping an eye on the miners?"

  "Oh, but there's one Terran security officer on each of the mining stations! We network constantly! Smuggling, cheating with the gas quotas, suspect activity... we stay on our toes, I mean, metaphorically."

  "Doesn't it get too lonely?"

  "Really, Colonel. I can download Terran entertainment all the time; I am watching the official news on my implant now, as we speak. It says you'll be awarded for teaching those terrorists a -"

  "You were going to show me the mining process," Argus broke in; he couldn't stomach more anti-colonist talk.

  "Yes, yes! Right. The folks back home often misunderstand gas-mining, they think we literally scoop the deuterium right up from the ocean of metallic hydrogen beneath our feet, and just... beam it up into space. It's not quite that simple... metallic hydrogen isotopes have to first be properly ionized and skimmed off the solid core. The deep-core robots use methane-lasers.

  "Only then can the quantum-converters teleport the ionized proton isotopes up to the receptor disks, where they are converted back to ordinary matter. Teleportation is still very unsafe and crude, the mass loss is ninety-two percent... and that's an improvement over the way it was forty years ago, when the mining began!

  "There, below to the west, you can see the towing-cables for the receptors. The cables are one thousand miles long... and look up! There goes another load of freshly reconstituted deuterium up in its own balloon-transport! A freighter is scheduled to hook it up in just a few hours..."

  The tour of the city, the mining-proces
s, and the amazing view from the clouds actually excited Argus. He saw that Kun'Lun truly was a marvelous feat of engineering and can-do spirit, daring the second most hostile environment in the Solar System after the Sun itself.

  It was also bitterly cold - around -100 degrees Centigrade. The faraway, shrunken sun hit Argus with only a fraction of the heat of an ordinary day in Australia. The intense cold made his brain work better... but his artificial muscles felt more sluggish and had to be constantly heated by his own internal batteries so as not to grow stiff.

  Argus finally decided to demand a chance to talk to the miners in person, as he had asked for before the visit.

  Just then, one half of the sun sank below the immense horizon, and Argus forgot to speak. In this quasi-sunset, every feathery cirrus-cloud in the seemingly endless sky became fully visible, as a sheet of golden and purple threads.

  And on top of those, the Jovian northern lights also emerged - ten thousand times more powerful than those on Earth. The stretch of sky over which the northern lights illuminated the stratosphere, all visible from Kun'Lun, could house Planet Earth more than ten times over!

  Curtains of flaming, flickering energy seemed to assault the entire universe with bombardments of fire, with the floating city trapped just where the energy showers faded out...

  Even the busy miners, and their many smaller work-airships, seemed to slow down to admire the phenomenon. But in a few minutes, the wandering sun had risen again, and the overhead sky returned to its normal deep-blue tones.

  "Wow," was all Argus managed to say.

  "I see the northern lights set the sky on fire once a day..." Rogan said, "...and I never get tired of it. It really makes the job worth it. But you wanted to meet some miners. Right. I have checked and selected a few loyal ones who... whoa! Hold on."

  The entire platform and gondola on which they stood suddenly lurched; warning lights went on all over the floating city. Rogan activated his robo-walker, and eight thin legs extended out to support his feet.

  "It's nothing, Colonel," the struggling Rogan assured him, "just minor turbulence caused by atmospheric movements. Sometimes it catches a small airship, and it is dragged down into the clouds, but they as well as the main complex has altitude thrusters powered by laser-transfer, so we are quite safe..."

  The chief engineers called Rogan over the com-link, and informed him that one airship had just been damaged and was now drifting off course - already half a kilometer away, and soon beyond rescue.

  In an irritated tone, he told the engineers to send out a rescue craft and tow it in. Rapid conversation quickly established that this could not be done until it was too late. Argus listened in, in the artificial atmosphere of the gondola, and then addressed the engineers.

  "Give me a long, strong power cable and a couple of emergency jetpacks, and I'll try to recharge their thrusters manually."

  "No-no," one of the engineers objected in his rapid, nasal talk. "Winds out there tear you apart! Jetpacks last only fifteen seconds this gravity! And you heavy - three hundred K plus!"

  Argus snapped back in rapid fashion, catching up with Jovian speed-talk: "I ten jetpacks, then. Tie together, hang a harness under. Hurry up the cable, shorty! I meet you Section Five, in seconds. And clothes, my size if you have."

  Argus went to an airlock as fast as the flimsy floor would allow, and exited out into the cold, howling open air outside the gondola. He clicked a steel-hook around a cable, and slid off toward the next zeppelin section.

  Rogan Din froze in horror and stared after him. Should the Kansler learn that his top soldier had fallen into Jupiter's depths, Din would be punished most severely.

  24: He Flies Through The Air With The Greatest Of Ease

  The workers - all Jovians - were quick to accept the orders that Argus had given.

  But the looks they gave him were not entirely admiring, and he couldn't help but think they partly hoped he would get killed.

  He was still, for all practical reasons, the Terran enemy - and one reckless doomed rescue attempt would not turn their minds. He decided not to give a damn about their looks.

  Unknown to Argus, Caver Pi moved among the miners, having arrived shortly before Argus under a false identity. The request for jetpacks gave him a perfect opportunity for sabotage.

  Momentarily, the equipment was in his hands, being assembled, and he knew the other workers would look the other way if he cut something with his wrist laser.

  He had five seconds to make his move.

  "Faster!" Argus called out in the cold, thin air, and Caver threw him a quick, scared glance. No water vapor came from the cyborg's open mouth, even when he spoke.

  Not human, thought Caver Pi. The Kansler's puppet, shouting the Kansler's orders. Then he noticed how Argus was pointing urgently at the drifting airship out in the clouds, and how the cyborg kept following it with his artificial eyes that did not need a protective face-mask. Four men lost, to save my family. What does that machine care about us? It's worth it, it's worth it, it's...

  He waited too long, and the opportunity was lost; Argus started to watch his every movement. Caver Pi and the other miners finished assembling the improvised jetpack harness, undamaged.

  He turned to the taller, ink-black body that stood a few feet from him, and said quickly: "All done. Ship gone in half a minute or less. Go."

  With that, he and the other miners quickly evacuated the entire inflated chamber.

  Caver heard a miner in the crowd ask: "Can he?"

  Another miner said in the ensuing silence: "No. He Charlie. "

  The meaning of "Charlie", in miner slang, was obvious.

  ***

  Argus slipped into the harness, tried to avoid thinking how incredibly far below the "ground" was, lifted the jetpack bundle, and cut open the transparent plastic wall.

  It peeled like a burning cinder, and the raw atmosphere of Jupiter tossed him and his jetpacks out into the clouds. The fall was so intense, the wind so forceful it frightened him. He instinctively held his breath - as if it would make a difference - and ignited the ten jetpacks.

  On his internal display, the warnings came fast:

  DANGER!

  BODY TEMP DOWN 40%, SINKING

  EMERGENCY HEATING ON - TIME LEFT 20 SEC

  WARNING!

  IF BODY TEMP SINKS BELOW -100 DEG, SUPERCONDUCTING STATE OCCURS

  BODY MAY ABSORB STATIC CHARGES

  RISK OF SYSTEM FAILURE

  The jetpacks worked, and with his superhuman reaction speed Argus steered it quickly enough to overcome the winds. A normal human would have been blown way past the drifting airship in a few seconds.

  To Argus, it was like swimming through a raging river, and the power cable that stretched out after him twisted and dragged in the never-ending storm; it might be torn apart after all.

  He switched to infrared, then ultraviolet vision as he passed through a methane cloud and dimly saw the airship a kilometer away, a hundred meters below.

  The drifting ship with its crew of four had powerful engines, a large helium balloon, and normally received energy by laser-transfer from the many satellites above. v But the sudden turbulence had disturbed its position enough to disrupt the energy feed, and as it drifted into the cloud layers, less and less laser energy got through the clouds to reach the airship's receptor disk.

  Its crew sat silent in their work-cocoons, still in radio contact with Kun'Lun, desperately trying to raise their ship back into the light.

  But without an influx of power, it was impossible...

  Something hard hit the hull of the ship. It jolted a little, and they all started; then they heard another hit, and three rhythmic, smaller blows.

  Outside, clinging to the airship's plastic hull, Argus not only had to grab the railings of the hull with all his might. He also had to bend his lower body away from it, so as not to burn a hole in the hull with his jetpack.

  He spent a second pushing with the jetpack and himself against the ship, but dared
not try harder, for he felt the hull might tear from the pressure.

  He spotted one of several receptor disks on top of the airship, and directed more power to his arms.

  The railings creaked as he rapidly climbed up along them like a humanoid spider, twenty meters in less than six seconds, and reached for the power cable drum at his waist.

  The thin, very strong elastic cable was now used up, and its full length of 1.5 kilometers began to stretch between Argus and the floating city above. He had only a few seconds to connect it to the power feed.

  From the thickest, darkest nearby cloud, an electric charge materialized - and engulfed the airship instantly. Only a fraction of a second later, the crack of thunder sent vibrations through the entire ship, and through Argus as he dangled on top of it.

  Several smaller electric charges, fully visible as blue energy patterns across the airship hull, passed over his black outer skin, and he shut his eyes hard. Some of the electric charge passed through the skin and into him - it hurt like fire and cramp multiplied by ten.

  He recalled what someone had once said to him: It's all in your mind! He did not have to lose his hold unless he let it happen. He could ignore the pain, as long as the electric shock wasn't strong enough to override his own muscle control.

  There it was, just below the receptor disk: an isolated power socket made to fit the one on his power cable.

  He pulled the cable toward it - the cable began to stretch dangerously hard - only a few centimeters would do it - he pulled harder, concentrating all available power into his arms, until he thought the very metal skeleton would snap - and the sockets connected.

  The ship's engines hummed with the power surge, and the airship began to lift itself out of the clouds.

  Argus held the cable in place for a few more agonizing seconds, until the lamps on all the receptor disks lit up green; the ship was receiving full power from the satellite network again, plus some extra power to manage lifting the added weight of Argus.