19: Bullet Time

His private room was wide, for the flagship - twice the space of an admiral's quarters, four times larger than a crewman's hold. The crew's private quarters were lined up in a separate centrifuge.

During the four-week journey from the Moon to Jupiter, this was the only space of privacy that Argus got.

Argus entered the room, shut the airtight door, lay down on his body-fitted, naked metal bunk - sheets only irritated his skin - and shut his eyes. He thought about Venix, the night they met, and that seemingly everlasting time of bliss when their minds connected. The memories were quite detailed, and easy to get lost in...

Maybe he could get in touch with her relatives on Venus. He pictured the awful event: "Hi, folks. I'm your daughter's new boyfriend. Don't look so frightened... I know I'm shorter than I look on the screens..." He laughed inwardly. Five ship-days to his next mission.

In his absence, the flagship was sending out more remote-controlled fighter-pods to attack defense positions on the rebel moons. Would more people he had never known get killed, for reasons he had not learned?

He regarded his hand, remembered how he had nearly bitten through the skin, and focused his vision on the spot.

He found that he could discern details in the skin texture smaller than a twentieth of a millimeter. There was no scar, no blood. The micro-bots inside him had repaired the dent - it was gone.

He closed the hand to a fist. There was one way of preventing that hand from pressing the bomb button again... if he had the nerve to do it. The cyborg body was powerful, but far from invulnerable. The arm could get caught in something, torn off, lost in space. He might even survive it. No more "hero" bullshit. Just a war cripple, asking strangers: "Got spare PP for an ex-soldier?"

But he wasn't sure what price Venix might pay if they lost the war, or what would happen to Earth itself. Giving up was easy; it wasn't right. For the first time in weeks, he asked himself: What would Ali have done?

He recalled the story he knew so well from the old book, how the 20th-century fighting champion had sacrificed his rightful title to stand up for his beliefs. Ali would have refused to take part in a war he did not believe in... not out of fear, but personal conviction. Argus still thought he believed in this war, at least enough not to quit.

It was important to preserve some sort of safety for the Inner Planets. But at what cost, he asked himself... and the Kansler, in his public speeches, had only suggested that the war must continue until decisively won. That word "decisively" held so many frightening meanings...

The ship's bulletin-board screen informed him that another squadron of fighter-pods had just returned to the docking-bay. The flagship moved to a wider orbit outside Jupiter's system of moons, and the crew was given an extended leave. Leave? Where to?

He had an idea, and switched on the room's voice-mail.

"A request to Admiral York and the Kansler: I wish to make a visit to one of the gas-mining stations in Jupiter's atmosphere." He hesitated, for one-thirtieth of a second, then added: "We need this opportunity to raise the morale of those Jovians who are friendly with Terrans, and show that I bear no ill will toward them as a people. We should give them a chance to talk instead of fight. Send mail."

Argus left his room and went to the recreational centrifuge to mingle with the crew. He felt awkward around the higher officers, and avoided them when he could. This was a mixed crew, and large enough to demand adequate diversions.

According to rumors, the Fleet put drugs in the spaceship crew's food to deaden their frustrations and hormone levels during long flights.

Drugs had no effect on Argus-A's electric nervous system... so he had to deal with his drives alone. In a way, not having genitals was a kind of relief: no hormones to cause involuntary outbursts of anger or desire. It had gotten easier not to think about it, though the feelings had not vanished from his mind.

If only in his mind, Argus felt a desire for Venix that wouldn't go away... for only with her could he be a whole man again.

The directional light strips on the corridor walls pointed out the way to the Recreational Section with glowing green arrows. He walked past scores of men and a few women, all in signal-color coverall uniforms.

Orange for pilots, yellow for officers, blue for maintenance personnel - the great majority - red for weapons and reactor engineering; white for medics and physicians; ink-black only for Argus... and plain gray only for the Kansler.

Argus caught a glimpse of himself, on a small eye-screen worn on a passing officer's forehead. In that brief glimpse, the cyborg got the impression of a man-shaped hole in reality - a cutout silhouette where a person should have been. The impression stayed in his memory.

A door opened up into the Recreation section, and he paused in the doorway to watch the forty or so people in their jogging suits and coveralls, working out and playing games.

The drug rumors appeared to be true, for the men didn't ogle the women and the women didn't flirt with the men. Only Argus looked at the women with something like a male interest.

He walked in, trying not to make himself big. It didn't help: everyone stared, or tried badly to pretend they didn't stare. As they stared, he noticed, they struggled to get a clear focus of his body, but failed - it was so dark, they couldn't get a fix on his volume. The stares turned into confused drifting glances, and then went past him.

He'd become almost a shadow.

In one section of the large centrifuge stood a boxing-ring, where crewmembers worked off their grudges in boxing and kickboxing bouts. Argus hurt inside when he saw it, and his fists grew tense. The ring wasn't for him anymore.

His visual perception worked so fast he saw lip movements before he heard the words, and it got worse with increasing distance. During the long, boring flight to Jupiter he had taken to a new hobby: lip-reading.

A look across the room, and he could easily see what the crewmembers were saying as they lowered their voices in his presence... as if they pretended he couldn't hear.

"Look what just walked in."

"Fark... he's bigger than on the screen."

"Gina, would you let your daughter marry one?"

"Quiet, he's got super-hearing... now you're gonna get it, big mouth."

"It's the future you're looking at, folks... we're obsolete."

"What's wrong with you people? He's one of us, he's 'Our 'Gus'."

"Yeah, he's great."

"But does he ever breathe...?"

One crewman in orange shirt and baggy pants greeted Argus - not with a salute, because even in the centrifuge section of a spaceship, it was bad form to waste a good arm and risk losing your balance.

"Hello, Colonel, sir... good to see you here. We don't get the officers much. They keep to their own section mostly. You really impressed us all out there yesterday, sir. I've never seen a ship maneuver so fast."

This was the first time a private had addressed him off-duty. Again he began to feel noticed by the others - but this time it was fear of his superior rank that made them watch, not him.

"Sir," the smiling crewman said, his eyes flinching ever so little, "would you mind giving us a small demonstration of your speed and strength? We've all seen your tour, but never with our own eyes. If you're fed up with people asking, sir, then I apologize..."

The man backed away a step. And Argus became aware of something new: his acquired habit of standing absolutely still when other people were near, for their own safety, also intimidated them. His inherited flesh-and-blood reflexes were rapidly fading away; he barely blinked at all, and had ceased to "breathe".

He gave the man a disarming smile, hoping it didn't appear too fast to seem natural - his facial muscles were somewhat too rapid, and his expression could sometimes change like the frames of a primitive cartoon.

"Yeah, sure. Tell your friends to come closer. Let's find something to demonstrate on."

Instinct, or habit, made him walk along the centrifuge floor until he came to the boxing-ring. The crewmembers urged him to step inside the ring. He shook his head in friendly denial.

"It's no use, guys. I could punch someone's head off with a blow. That'd be a mess for the guys in blue to clean up! You got a dummy, or a pugilist bot?"

He had only half an idea of what to do if the crew actually offered him a droid to spar with. Sure, he could hold back his strength and speed, but then what was the point of belittling himself and lowering the morale of the onlookers?

After half a minute, the crewmembers in blue carried a device toward the boxing-ring that Argus had not seen before. It mostly resembled the rusty outdoors tripod grill he had used in Australia, back when he was a teenager. But the device was twice as large, black and without rust.

One man in a red engineer's coveralls explained.

"This is a remote-controlled mini-turret, sir. From the ship's armory. We've got hundreds, most of them never used. The mini-turrets were meant for holding positions on hostile surfaces, during a large-scale landing of troops on the rebel satellites. But... they turned out to be too vulnerable to counter-measures. We only use missiles and electromagnetic weapons now."

In the second that the engineer spent to pause for breath, Argus figured out what the man had in mind.

"Okay... for a test, make it shoot one projectile against that sand-bag over there. Careful, or you'll puncture the centrifuge." The engineer hesitated; no other officers but "Colonel Clarke" were present. The sole security officer on duty watched it all, but made no objections.

Argus suspected the whole show was staged by Marketing to just seem spontaneous. The engineer put on the remote-control headset and took control of the mini-turret.

The device's legs locked its clamps into the floor niches, and the upper lid of the turret lifted itself open. A small gunbarrel inside rotated and took aim at a large sandbag five meters away. The crewmembers cleared away from the area, as the engineer counted to three and fired.

With a rather loud BANG, that made the entire audience flinch - the device used an outdated chemical propellant - a metal projectile was fired and lodged itself inside the sandbag.

Argus was the only person in the room who could actually see the bullet move. His intuition, or what passed for intuition, told him the safety distance he needed to catch a bullet in mid-air.

But he wasn't quite sure what would happen if he tried to stop the bullet with just his bare hands. He consulted his internal display and searched for anything about "stress tests".

The cyborg's built-in databank came up with a list of basic recommendations. His titanium-and-steel skeleton could resist so-and-so-much pressure for X seconds; the arm and leg joint motors could press Y number of tons; the outer skin would melt at Z degrees with the internal coolant still working; a sharp object could tear open the skin at such-and-such speed and pressure...

All those data couldn't account for Argus in a moving state; catching bullets was not part of his training. He spent a whole half minute pondering the problem; the crew began to look confused, for he stood absolutely still like a statue. Argus faced the engineer and enthusiastically pointed at his own body.

"Aim at my chest... no wait, I got a better idea. Give me that apple over there!"

A woman in Engineering took an apple from a bowl in a food dispenser, and handed it to him. Argus placed himself in front of the sandbag, dented the bottom of the apple slightly, and put it firmly on the top of his hairless, ink-black head.

He spread his feet a few inches, put his hands in front of his head, facing the gun, and made an urging gesture with his index finger.

"Shoot the apple off my head. You get one try."

Every onlooker stood very still and quiet, as the engineer with the control-headset aimed the mini-turret at the apple on the cyborg's head.

He counted to three, and fired. The second bullet flew out from the gun-barrel, pushed by an expanding cloud of gas and smoke. Argus saw the bullet hurtle toward him very fast - he would only get one chance to try his trick.

The BANG of the gunfire slouched after the bullet, and Argus heard the bang only after his hands had reached the apple and moved it. To the bystanders, it seemed as if Argus's hands disappeared when the bang sounded, and instantly re-appeared just above his head.

The bullet impacted into the sandbag behind Argus's head - the apple on his head appeared to vanish in the same instant.

"Hey," one crewman objected to the woman who had given Argus his apple, "that wasn't a real apple. Just a hologram?"

Argus grinned with his set of white artificial teeth, and held up the apple for everyone to see. It was halfway squashed, but recognizable - and it had no bullet-hole. The off-duty crew applauded enthusiastically. He was having fun, yet couldn't help thinking that Marketing was staging the event.

But if he pushed the limits...

"Again, but this time aim at my forehead," Argus told the turret controller.

He remained standing in front of the sandbag, this time with his hands behind his back, and switched to infrared sight.

"One. Two. Three."

H e
w a t c h e d
t h e
b u l l e t
a p p r o a c h
o n
t h e
w a v e f r o n t
o f
h o t
g a s
t r a i l i n g
b e h i n d
i t . . .

And he head-butted the bullet, with a force just about exceeding its impact. He felt its metal tip pierce the skin of his head, just above where the human-looking face ended, then bounce back from his steel-and-titanium skull.

The stunned crew saw the deformed bullet bounce back three feet, before it dropped to the floor. Argus rubbed his sore forehead, and got a message from his internal display that the skin damage was being repaired.

He looked up and saw the faces of the crewmembers: wide-eyed... and not as enthusiastic as after the "apple trick".

He watched the colors of the heat spectrum play on their faces and in their brains. But the looks on their faces told him enough: they were all afraid of him now, not as an officer, or a walking shadow, but as the thing-to-be-feared.

He walked past the livid, silent crew, out of the Recreation section, and headed for his own ship. Duty not merely called, it offered an escape. His next mission, though still secret to him, couldn't be more than a week away.

***

The Kansler watched the surveillance records of the scene from his private quarters. He quickly ordered the Surveillance section to send a copy of the filmed event back to the Fleet's Marketing department on the Moon, then erase all records of it happening.

This was not how he had intended the staged demonstration to end... eerily close to a suicide attempt. A trickle of sweat worked its way down the side of his head.

The Kansler could not quite put his finger on why, but the event with the bullet was a bad omen. Still, other matters pressed for his attention.

Admiral York's holo-presence asked him what to do about Argus's request to visit Jupiter. The Kansler seemed, for once, uncertain.

"It could be done," he admitted to York, "but the outcome propaganda-wise... all bets are off. It could be a boon, putting a mixture of fear, respect and even - I mean it - security in the hearts of those Jovian miners who are queasy about upholding the export route to Earth. They are a funny bunch, Jovians. Could never quite figure them out. So fiercely opposing Terran authority, yet willing to do business with us. Boulder Pi is one -"

The Kansler hesitated there, and a moment's anxiety passed across his middle-aged face like a flash of white over the ruddy skin.

"Sir?" asked the admiral's holo-presence, waiting for him to finish the sentence.

"This is what we do. Islington! Boulder Pi is to be shipped over to the flagship immediately. Have Control send our fastest long-distance ship to lunar orbit and pick him up."

"But the E.S.S. Ford's just been docked at the Ceres Station for extensive repairs, Kansler. It would take at least three months to -"

The Kansler's face turned a shade redder, as he addressed his deputy directly.

"I did not invite discussion! Strip the Ford of all weaponry and personnel except a skeleton crew, and send it off at top speed to get Boulder Pi. That is a Chancellor's executive order."

"Yes, Kansler. At once."

"As soon as we have that Jovian here, under direct supervision, we can send Argus off to Jupiter. You see what I mean, admiral? 'Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.'"

"Do we have evidence of Boulder Pi being a security risk, Kansler? Without him, our new weapon would never have been."

"That's not important, admiral. What matters is that Boulder seems a traitor in the eyes of the gas miners, when they see him by my side... and Argus seems to be their friend when he walks among them. Argus has a knack for mingling with the rabble, so let's make use of it."

"Now I understand, Kansler. It's brilliant." He had learned when to grease his superior's ego. "Play the Jovians against their own, while strengthening their ties to our side. The Marketing department couldn't have come up with a better tactic."

"I am all the tactics Marketing's got."

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THE ARGUS PROJECT INTERNET EDITION (c)A.R.Yngve 1999, 2000, 2004. All rights reserved. May not be copied without permission.

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