In his near-lightspeed perception and infrared sight, the violent turbulence became a flowing, negotiable sea of colors. He could see ahead of the flaming heat shield and see Jupiter's clouds hurtle past him.
From somewhere he remembered that if the Earth had not had a Moon, its rotation might have accelerated until the atmosphere resembled Jupiter's - high-speed bands of clouds racing around the planet in a global, permanent storm.
His eyes felt strange, as if they were beginning to melt, but it had to be a delusion from the heat - and the eyeballs were solid quartz in shockproof, frictionless hollows.
Nevertheless, he squinted until he saw almost nothing, and let his other senses guide him for a minute.
Warning signals came from various parts of the ship and his body, but he blocked them out - like he blocked out the feeling of death breathing down his neck - like that first time he won his belt in the ring, and thought he was going to die - like that event he always tried to forget, when his stepmother pushed him into the pit where Dad kept a captured razorback - like when he floated in that tank after the accident, and was dissolving into a red mist...
Navbutler flickered back into activity; the cockpit was suddenly cooling off.
"Argus, why are you screaming?"
"What? Okay. Check all systems. Anything broken?"
Argus opened up his eyelids and became aware that he had shut off the antimatter spray sometime earlier, to prevent the ship from melting.
The roar from outside was receding to a lower, deeper rumble of the permanent storm around him. The electromagnetic field remained on, and it seemed a good idea; every few seconds, the clouds below flickered with lightning.
"Reactor was unstable for 0.00003 seconds, but has returned to within safety limits. All systems stable."
The stratosphere glowed dark-blue above the ship. A shrunken Sun was visibly speeding across the sky, in its frenzied race to circle the gas giant in just under 10 hours.
Ahead stretched an endless sea of clouds, the bands and swirls converging into the vertical horizon that seemed infinitely distant. Winds blew at 120 meters per second, faster still inside the giant hurricanes.
Argus flew with the general direction of the stream, keeping check of the regions running in the opposite direction. Wherever two large streams crossed, they formed turbulence the size of small worlds.
He tried to move his head, to inspect the ship from the side windows, and realized that it was stuck. His head and "ears" had been pressed into the headrest of his seat during the airbraking, together with his massive back. But he was still in one piece.
Argus started the supporting rear boosters, and set a southeastern course. Increasing speed as much as he dared to, he flew toward the darker area that was the Red Spot - the largest, oldest hurricane in the Solar System.
The spot was not really red, but brownish-orange; the colors were created by hotter gas that swelled up from the depths, spinning at incredible velocities, slamming into the colder outer gas layers. Other storms, as large as the Moon, flocked around the Red Spot but were dwarfed by its width.
In the rearview, the pursuing light was growing much brighter.
The flagship had used its boosters as a cushion and shield, but was keeping most of its momentum - and was now bizarrely balancing on its column of nuclear rocket fire, descending in a slow pirouette, spinning around its axis so that it drilled through the thickening atmosphere, speeding after him with single-minded purpose...
So rapidly was the flagship approaching, he could hear it from almost one thousand kilometers away, over the rumble of the Red Spot - a chorus of gigantic organ pipes sounding across Jupiter.
He wondered if the miners in the floating cities could hear it. Any human being still left inside that flagship must surely be dead by now...
***
In his console-bubble, soundly shaken, stirred and spinning, Admiral York was still alive and barely conscious.
The cushioning mechanisms had saved him and the bubble from being thrown into a wall during the atmospheric entry. Some of the bubble's drug dispensers had malfunctioned and shot an overdose of various stimulants and painkillers into his legs.
Sweating and drooling in his body-fitted seat, York gazed dully at the few screens that were still functioning.
He saw the immense dark storm clouds rush against the shaking, vibrating ship, the sight partly obscured by the glowing smoke-plume from the boosters turned toward the Red Spot. The speed of the swirling hurricane seemed to defy natural laws.
The flagship's instruments slavishly kept track of Argus's small ship. Carried on its two smaller boosters, the white and red-striped fighter-bomber dived into a brownish-orange cloud... and vanished from the human eye.
The instruments showed Argus taking an elliptic course inside the storm's upper center, where the upstream winds carry it. York could not get through the fog in his mind and understand why Argus was wasting fuel inside the Red Spot. Like he thought he could hide from the world's most sophisticated war ship in a cloud...
"I'm going in," drawled CENSTRATCOM with an authority that accepted no objections. "If I can get close enough and shoot the traitor down, we can move on with the business of destroying Ganymede."
***
Navbutler increased the pressure inside the cockpit, so that the outside pressure would not crush it.
The electromagnetic shield seemed to deflect the worst of the lightning-bolts. Blue curves of electron streams danced around the ship, trying to reach inside.
Apart from the flashes of lightning, the inside of the storm was too dark and clouded to see any details. The hot stream from the depths pushed at the ship, trying to fling it out of the Red Spot.
"Warning! flagship is now 800 kilometers away, and approaching."
"How long can it stay up?"
"Flagship has already exceeded its safety limits. Atmospheric pressure now at 9 atmospheres, this ship will break up if we descend further. Please start ascent now."
"Just a little -"
"What's wrong with you? We have succeeded. From the moment the flagship entered this storm system, it became physically incapable of leaving Jupiter's gravitational field. The flagship's mass, construction and aerodynamic properties can only uphold a stable course for a very limited time. It attempts to keep its boosters pointed downward, and is sinking at a velocity of ten meters per minute.
"Within an estimated four to twelve minutes, the flagship will start to fail and its thrusters shut down automatically. Then it falls down. It is too dense to glide on the winds and it lacks wings. Are you incapable of understanding the logic of my statement?"
Argus was so stunned by Navbutler's outburst, he could not think of anything to say. Had he taught that program to absorb his personality? Just like a couple living too long together...
He brushed aside the thought and concentrated on following the winds up, outward, back into Jupiter's stratosphere.
The spiraling course reminded him of how he ran on the inside walls of a centrifuge during his training. Unexpectedly, a large wall of clouds dissolved, and he experienced a rare second of clear sight.
Through the window on his left, he could just barely glimpse the center of the Red Spot: a gloomy, undulating cylinder lit up by intermittent, wandering bursts of lightning. As the tunnel receded in the distance, it curved out of sight.
Then he spotted the flagship - a glowing speck, so far away that the Earth's moon could have spanned the distance between them.
***
Admiral York could hear the flagship's hull wail and ring with the pressure building up around it. The pressure on his temples was increasing, too; he was beyond fear, in a half-waking state, and muttered to the flagship.
"Kansler's dead, you dumb machine... forget it... war's over."
"I say you're yellow, Admiral. I haven't yet received my counter-orders from Fleet Command, or from the Kansler's replacement."
"Don't you get it, you piece of crap, the orders
haven't reached us yet because Fleet Command is waiting for Islington to wake up from the freezer, so he can take over... you're following a dead man's orders!"
"I still say you're yellow. Fight like a man!"
" This is fighting? I push a button, an asteroid blows up. Push another button, a hundred civilians die. Push ... the machine feeds me drugs to keep me from going space-crazy. Push .... the machine sticks a toilet up my ass. Push ... a simulated woman. Push ... muscles massaged and stretched so that maybe I'll be able to walk when I get home.
"I'm a Terran. I can't live here. You hear me? I want to go home. Let them have Jupiter. I don't want it. Argus can live with no air, no water, no women. I can't. I'm sick of space, sick of the Fleet, sick of Fleetcom, sick of your strategies that never win."
"You, you're what this war is all about."
"We're going to die."
"I have now sent a report on your behavior to Fleetcom. You can expect disciplinary action. On the positive side, you will be awarded the Guardian Of Earth medal for executing a dangerous mission in enemy territory."
"We're going to die."
"You'll be a hero."
"We're going to die."
"There are things worth dying for."
"We're going to die."
"There are thi... thi... things wo-wo-wo-rth dy -"
***
The last Argus glimpsed of the E.S.S. William Jefferson was a disappointment - as if he had dropped a burning illegal cigarette from a high building, and was watching it fall.
It spun helplessly into the hot vortex of Jupiter's deeper atmosphere, bent in the middle. He looked up, saw shafts of sunlight shoot through the swirling clouds - and started up the prime booster.
I have something to live for, he thought.
46: K-O
Argus's ship flew out of the Red Spot.
The flagship bent in the middle, deformed by wind, pressure and gravity. Its nuclear-powered booster rockets shut down automatically - and the flagship dropped into the hotter depths of Jupiter.
No one was there to hear the strange whistling noise of the falling behemoth, mixed with the wail of bent beams and armor plating, and the hiss of melting metal...
Seconds later, at a pressure of over 300 atmospheres and winds hot enough to melt any known metal, the ship's protective plasma-field ceased to function.
The full weight of the gas masses above and below it were unleashed in a tenth of a millisecond, squeezing the giant ship into a superheated clump of metal - and vaporized the magnetic globules that isolated the anti-matter fuel stored in the ship's center.
When stored antiprotons met superheated metal, matter and antimatter instantly turned into sub-microscopic novas of gamma-ray energy - photons in their purest, most uncontrollable energy state.
Gamma rays split more atoms around them, which in turn split into energy fragments and multiplied the atomic fission. Mass turned into its equivalent energy - equal to the mass multiplied by 300,000 KMPS squared, plus the momentum of the clump's enormous mass and velocity.
The hydrogen atmosphere surrounding the fireball began to ignite.
For just a ten-millionth of a second, there was a slight chance that Jupiter's liquid-hydrogen ocean would explode in a nuclear chain-reaction.
But the force of the atmosphere's momentum was infinitely stronger, the chain-reaction too weak to overcome it. The winds pushed with the full force of Jupiter, dispersed the short-lived chain-reaction upward, to the colder outer layers... where it could erupt freely.
The Red Spot bulged out into space, a glowing orange bubble of gas fighting to escape Jupiter's gravitational field. Argus was already on his way into orbit, and could admire the awesome sight from a safe distance.
His ship had taken a few scratches, but he could fix it up; the tools existed, and he had the capacity to do it. There was plenty of time to do some painting and bodywork on his way to Mars.
But then he remembered something:
"Islington. Damn."
***
Caver Pi watched the big explosion on the screens. And he recalled Slush Delta's words from what seemed an age ago: The Nipple is rising. Then he thought: This is for you, Slush.
Caver Pi didn't bother with speculations about an afterlife, but he found himself hoping that somehow, somewhere, Slush Delta could see this - and laugh at the Kansler's insane power grab dissolved into a rude cosmic joke.
"The Nipple's rising!" Caver shouted out loud - astonishing himself, and the colonists around him cheered and laughed.
Intelligence reports appeared on the big screens around the assembled Jovians, with fresh statistics from Jupiter.
In the list of casualties was listed one Boulder Pi, last detected on his way to the Fleet flagship, now dead with it - or rather likely dead, at an estimated 90% probability.
Caver's grin shrank away, and he felt as if a ghost had passed through him.
He crouched down on his knees, too much the dwarf to hang his head like a Terran, and his head shook up and down in spasms, his fists shaking as he held them out, shaking imaginary prison bars.
Strata knelt before her husband and took his hands in silence. He embraced her and cried openly, oblivious to the people who looked on in shock and dismay.
Not only did Jovians consider it wasteful to show emotions in public places; it was the first time any of them including Strata had seen Caver Pi shed tears.
"My brother," he sobbed into the hollow of her neck. "My dear brother."
47: "I Am The Greatest!"
Mars, two weeks later. A sandstorm had just blown through Perkele Valley. The small white ship with the red strips came gliding down onto the dusty landing strip.
Its frictionless landing-skis touched (or, strictly speaking, almost touched) the concrete runway, and passed the Terran force that stood waiting on the ground.
On the side of the airfield facing the city stood Islington, in a protective suit, flanked by a company of war robots, plus two hundred freshly arrived Terran soldiers in full gear.
Islington waited, taking shallow, rapid breaths inside his helmet. A hulking black-clad figure jumped out of the white ship and rapidly walked toward him.
Without slowing his pace, Argus shouted to the troops, without radio - they could hear him through the microphones on their helmets. "I've come to pick up Venix, and I don't want any trouble with you! Okay?"
He came within five meters of Islington and abruptly stopped, fists by his sides, his eyes scanning the troops.
"I see you're all scared," Argus told them quickly and sternly, ignoring Islington as if Argus had usurped his rank, "and the drugs are not working. The sixth guy in the left front row - yeah, you! - just wet himself. That's good. Listen to your bodies! They know better than the drugs. I suggest you go home and look after Mother Earth. She needs you better there. I'm not asking you - I'm telling you - this war is over, go home! "
Islington cleared his throat and lifted a gloved finger to attract attention. Argus barely bothered to look his way.
"Colonel Clarke, we are actually not here to, uh, arrest you. As the new acting Chancellor of the Outer Defense Ring Charter, I have decided to pardon you for the murder of the previous Kansler, and offer negotiations for a new contract.
"However... in the interest of public safety I must order you to give up any stolen Fleet property. I'm talking specifically about your - uh, that ship, uh, over there. It is a security hazard and contains enough antimatter to -"
While he was talking, Islington made repeated, minute feet movements in his boots. Argus immediately saw that Islington was pressing switches with his toes.
"Oh, the new Direct Control isn't working?" Argus asked him with open, playful scorn. "On my way back I had a chat with some new friends in the Fleet, your own lunar scientists. Seems they had a change of heart, when it came out the Kansler murdered Boulder Pi and Amiella Minsky, and they understood none of them were safe. So we made a deal behind your back!
"While the
y pretended to give you a functional new Direct Control device, they figured out a way for me to block out the control signals - permanently . Now they just tickle me a bit. I've kinda learned to enjoy it, actually."
He squirmed and smiled in the most childish manner, delighting in his irreverence. I hope someone's camera is working, he thought. Ven is gonna have a big laugh when she sees this.
Thanks to generations of cultural indoctrination to repress emotion, transcending mere mood-controlling drugs, Islington managed to maintain his formal posture.
"I am confident that the Fleet shall find a counter-counter-measure. You cannot go on alone, Colonel Clarke. You need others to uphold your existence. You need a home."
"You're absolutely right, Islington. I resign from the Fleet."
"But why, man? Why? " Islington asked, in honest exasperation.
Argus had taken one step, was about to leave, but halted - and snapped. He towered over Islington, stared him in the eyes, and shot off a rapid-fire rant:
"'Cause I am the greatest! I can't be beat! I'm so tough, I eat planets for breakfast! Anyone tries bossing me or my girl around, I'll kick him so hard he'll make a new spot on Jupiter! You want a piece of me? You want to see if there's life on other stars? That's how far I'll kick your ass if you try to bullshit me! I can't be beat! I'm the greatest, baby! Bigger than the Big Bang! Elusive like a mist with an iron fist! I'm the king of the Saturn ring, the Terran Terror, the man with the plan, and I'm mad as all hell - you got a problem with that?"
Islington stood still until Argus had finished speaking... then rolled up his eyes and quietly fainted into a neat, discrete heap.
"Now 'scuse me, guys," Argus told the waiting, silent troops, "I'm off to meet someone. I could tell you, she's the best thing that ever happened to me -"
His sentence not quite finished, he darted away with superhuman speed, leaving a trail of dust blowing in the troopers' faces.
They waited until they were certain Argus was far away, and then quickly retreated to their landing craft.
***
He found her where she had promised to meet.
Yngve, AR - The Argus Project Page 30