THE ARGUS PROJECT
She had already figured out how to take over the descending shuttle, before its crew of ten humans and one robot pilot could react.
On her internal display, she set a stopwatch to start counting minutes, seconds and microseconds:
00:00.254
She faced only human enemies, no robots. Even the slightest hesitation would almost certainly get her captured, possibly killed. Back on Earth, in Fleet propaganda movies, MSF's men were "the red frontier's steel-eyed guardians of justice" - but many Terrans openly called them "thugs in spacesuits."
00:01.639
The emergency door had no key, only two handlebars in niches, and opened easily. She shoved herself in under as it slid up. Suddenly, with her back to the floor, she was inside the cramped passenger cabin, where ten heavily armed men in armored spacesuits were fumbling with their safety belts.
The foremost two MSF troopers sat just within arm's reach of her. Ten pairs of human eyes stared down at her. Perhaps the squad had expected to capture a grossly overweight skysurfer - and not a slender, athletic female with long copper-red hair, seemingly dressed in a filthy white bodysuit with a single black stripe.
00:01.969
Venix was on her feet, hunching down in front of the first soldier on her right. He grabbed her collar. From her point-of-view, he reacted so slowly she could evade his every move.
00:02.447
As the trooper began to try and wrestle her away, she had already grabbed the knife in his belt - and stabbed him between his helmet and chest-armor plate, upward and into the helmet.
00:03.081
The tear in the soldier's punctured suit sent out a high whistle of escaping air - his hands flailed to grab her, but now she had her hands on the mini-gun turret on his right shoulder.
It wasn't enough to depressurize his suit; he would stay conscious long enough to shoot her - and the suit was the common self-repairing type. With one strong twist of her left hand, she aimed the turret at his head - her right hand squeezed the gun-trigger that was sewn into the palm of his glove.
00:04.002
The soldier's transparent helmet suddenly went dark and cracked up, spouting smoke - she twisted the turret again - and shot the remaining nine soldiers with a volley of lasers and high-speed bullets.
00:06.070
Only one of them managed to fire back with his shoulder-turret, and hit the wall just behind Venix. She heard a sharp noise from the cockpit, and the ship began to lurch in its almost completed landing sequence.
00:07.084
She unclipped the mini-turret harness from the dead trooper's shoulder, grabbed the ammo-pack from his back, and tore off the trigger cable from the arm of his suit - but the gun-trigger, still stuck in the man's suit, was ripped apart.
00:10.851
She put on the shoulder-turret, rubbed the exposed wiring against her hair, and produced enough static electricity to set off the firing-mechanism. As she covered her face, the mini-turret fired again. The cockpit door lock exploded, leaving only a blackened gash.
Venix pushed aside the door and dashed inside the even smaller shuttle cockpit, ignoring the small scratches and burns the explosion had made on her outer skin.
00:13.017
The shuttle hovered just inches above the ground, and the stray shot from the MSF trooper had wrecked the pilot-robot; the craft ran on its emergency autopilot.
00:13.623
Venix spotted the PRESS FOR MANUAL CONTROL button, flashing on the control panel - and hit it with her fist, nearly smashing the panel. The seat holding the pilot robot swiveled aside, leaving the control-seat and its in-built throttle open to her.
00:17.500
She got into the seat and pulled the throttle toward her; the landing rotor engines squealed. This was not the modern type of vehicle with frictionless drive-plates. The autopilot's synthetic voice automatically asked to assist her, and requested a flight route.
"Map a course for the Martian capital," she told the autopilot. "Take us there now.
The autopilot voice said in a formal tone: "Course mapped and in progress." Then: "Command control authority override! Your shuttle's weapon systems are now shut down. Surrender to MSF personnel when we land in the Martian capital. You are being monitored and cannot escape. Thank you for cooperating. You are now wanted for the deaths of ten MSF personnel."
Venix looked around, and found a bottle of water-rations with spray-lids, in a small cabinet next to the pilot-seat. She squirted water into her eye sockets, and managed to clean out the sand and dust that her internal workings couldn't get to.
Then she saw the many very small cameras placed in various spots in the cockpit, all plugged into the MSF computer network. Using a metal tool, she smashed the cameras one by one, under the polite protests of the autopilot-voice.
"There," she said, a trace of weariness in her soft, husky voice, "I guess you can still hear and follow me. Let me think..."
Her shuttle had now ascended and folded up its rotors, and accelerated through the valley escorted by the pursuing MSF shuttles. Did they really think, after all this, she was just going to surrender?
That the Kansler needed her alive to pressure Argus, she knew. But that was no absolute safety guarantee; the war might end, and then the Kansler might decide both cyborgs had served their purpose.
It horrified Venix to think how helpless Gus was against the Kansler's mysterious remote-control. It could be the key to everything, if only she learned how it worked. Hopefully, "they" might help her once she had found safe asylum in the Martian capital.
Distaste rising within her, Venix looked at the shuttle's various weapon controls on the instrument-panel. Electric stun-bullets, glue nets, pacifying gas, cell-bubbles, psychotropic needle-bullets, infrasound intestine-busters, paralyzing lasers, blinding lasers... all designed to clobber flesh-and-blood humans, but useless against her cyborg form.
All the MSF could use on her, for now, was lethal force. Her instincts were sound, after all; for her it was kill or be killed.
And the Martians, how willing were they help her? Venix worked the panel to gain access to MarsNet, and scanned the public channels.
Still no news about her escape, except: "Skysurfer Kolya Keaton Still Not Found". She wondered if "they", the ones who had put out the reward for her escape, were monitoring her.
Maybe they didn't really care whether she lived or died, as long as she caused trouble for "Mother Earth" in the war. Since her agenda could not be theirs - how could it? - she'd make it their concern.
Venix tried to send a call for help to the public channels, but something had happened to the shuttle's computers; anything she tried to send out was scrambled into nonsense.
And she had none of the communication implants in her body that billions of flesh-and-blood people used to e-mote and e-talk to each other on Earth and Venus. Twenty billion people could talk to each other right across the Solar System - in their sleep if they so desired - but she had been rendered mute.
The logic of war took hold, caused her brain to ache. She must not only strike down or kill the Kansler's minions, but brazenly so - with the greatest amount of visibility - and stir the Martians' support and protection. They had demanded independence for decades; it could be turned to her advantage.
And if she lived through it, would she be the same person that Gus had first loved? The next time they fused minds, he would see her past wrongdoings - and she would see his. They would both be killers.
Her only hope was that she loved him enough, was wise enough to understand. Venix suppressed any further thought on the matter.
61:00.050
Less than an hour passed. The Martian capital came within her view: A sprawling city of low, round buildings growing inside the huge Perkele Valley that connected to the even vaster Vallis Marineris, shielded against the worst sandstorms.
A storm column was dimly visible to the ship's left, ten kilometers away. A hundred meters below her lay a deep open mining-pit, from which dust and flames were coughed up by smokestacks, drilling-towers and mining machines that dwarfed the tiny human figures among them.
It was time to jump ship. The MSF troopers had jetpacks, but flying out in the open she would be an easy target. She had to reach the ground under cover.
61:45.903
Venix began to sob again, and raised a heavy machine tool in both hands. Three blows were enough to wreck the shuttle's autopilot. Another series of blows caused enough damage to set off the emergency-landing sequence.
The rotor blades folded out and brought the wobbling, careening craft down among the flame-spouting smokestacks of Veinemoynen - the second largest combined quarry, water-drilling field, and strip-mine on Mars.
All vehicles and machines on the ground polluted the air terribly with their chloro-carbon emissions, and on purpose: they produced more of the precious greenhouse-gases and slowly transformed the thin atmosphere.
The digital counter in the corner of her vision kept going, and Venix prepared herself. Some of the stored firearms and weapons remained unaffected by the remote override, and she picked up as many as she could carry.
She stuck her fingernails into a pair of power sockets and tried to soak up extra juice for her batteries. It tickled, but she could see her battery charge rise. Her outer skin was still covered with dust and caked mud; the skin membrane might not be able to absorb enough sunlight to replenish her after landing.
64:00.04
The vibrations of the mining machines and enormous trucks could now be felt through the shuttle's insulated walls. She went to an exit doorway, checked the equipment she had gathered, and set the dust-goggles over her eyes and nose.
Venix read again the label on the yellow pack she had strapped across her chest:
CAUTION!
65:20.27
Like a leaf floating down from a tree, her shuttle slammed into a smokestack and made a deep dent in its aluminum hull. It bounced off, spun across a refinery, skimmed a gravel heap, slid 60 meters down a slope, and crashed into an enormous digging-machine.
Fire-extinguishing foam cascaded from every opening of the shuttle and buried it in a white mass.
Above, warning sirens from the refinery mixed with sirens from the descending fleet of MSF shuttles.
30: A Storm Coming
1-PERSON CRASH BUBBLE
INFLATION MAY CAUSE EAR & EYE BLEEDING
MEDICAL EXAMINATION AFTER USE RECOMMENDED
(NEXT CHAPTER)
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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