45: The Permanent Storm

Argus spent 20 hours flying toward Jupiter. As he approached it in an orbiting spiral, he got the impression that the nightside was rushing around the surface.

With each night making its lap around Jupiter, the storms in its nightshadow became larger, the flashes of lightning more powerful.

Incoming audio messages reached Argus through the small cockpit speakers that pushed against his ear bulbs, carrying the sound-vibrations across in the airless environment.

He heard a drawling, archaic accent ordering him to surrender. After a few seconds he had had enough, and switched off the audio.

"Why is the flagship talking that way?" Argus asked Navbutler.

"The CENSTRATCOM personality-construct is designed by the Fleet's marketing department, based on the motion-picture performances of Marion Morrison."

"Never heard of her."

"His artist name was 'John Wayne.' Morrison died from double lung cancer in 1976, after exposure to radioactive fallout during the making of the motion-picture narrative The Conqueror in the Nevada Desert of -"

"Stop it! What's wrong with you?"

"Sorry. Request more on Marion Morrison?"

"You're raving."

"I am? I am obliged to obey Fleet directives or ship survival?"

"This ain't no time to go wobbly on me! Focus on our lives!"

Navbutler responded by rapidly showing a number of animated graphs on the front viewplate: plotted flight courses, the pursuing flagship, all superimposed on the view ahead.

Outside, Jupiter's horizon flattened out by the minute. It seemed to Argus they would never arrive, as if the planet was just swelling without limit... and for each minute, more and more detail showed.

Bands of clouds grew and split into smaller bands, which in turn grew and separated into more complex swirls and bands.

Oval storm centers contained smaller storms. Vortices within vortices within vortices...

Argus shut off the prime booster, and used the retro thrusters to make small adjustments in speed and position. Together with the rear flaps, that was all he had to keep the ship from tumbling off course during re-entry. The ship's fall was now an almost horizontal course.

The radar display indicated the flagship was turning around to brake. Argus saw on the rearview screen how a bright star was born in space. It was the bright light of the flagship's booster rockets, aimed straight at him, more than a thousand kilometers distant.

"Closer..."

Now his ship was just about to skim the uppermost atmosphere, where charged particles hopped and boiled on the edge of the vacuum.

Navbutler said: "Increasing cockpit pressure to match atmospheric pressure." Air hissed into the narrow space.

"Closer..."

Gently, he grasped the hand and foot controls and set the electromagnetic shield to increase, until it reached maximum charge and reach. With still greater care, he set off the lowest possible emission of antimatter ions into the charged field.

"Vibro-dampers on full... now!"

The planet's thinnest gas layers hit the shield at a relative velocity of 50 kilometers per second, and the ship shook so intensely he almost lost the controls.

The impact sounded like a dense explosion, followed by a loud, unending roar. At this speed, the momentum of the onrushing gases could crush the vessel in a fraction of a second.

Argus switched to infrared sight and could see the antimatter ions as they hit the atmosphere and exploded in microscopic flashes - millions of detonations per second, scattering and fanning out in the force field's veil.

He increased the ion emission by a small fraction, and the explosions merged into a flickering layer of flames and bright light across the magnetic shield. The ship's temperature rapidly rose to several hundred degrees, but it shook less - he could still hold the controls.

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.



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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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