John and Argent by cmsix

Chapter 97

Already well acquainted with my wants, needs and appetites; the mates that were accompanying me on this trip had made sure that the coffee thermoses were full and that we had sandwiches in abundance. I had asked for a mug of coffee before we were very far past the horse cave and I begged for a sandwich before we reached the logging site we'd been working before the snow started. They had planned for this of course and didn't even slow down, getting what I wanted from the sled without bothering smiley for a stop.

It seemed to me that I should be in an ill mood at least, since I was headed away from hearth and home on a trip to deal with assholes that hadn't had the decency to die in the way I'd intended. Nothing could be further from the truth; I was enjoying myself immensely, now that I had something to do and someplace to go. Just a little bit of sitting around with time on my hands had been plenty for me. I decided to keep my eyes and ears open for anything else I could twist into a semi-logical explanation for another expedition.

With smiley to do the real work the rest of us were just out for a walk in the snow. It was going to be a pretty long walk but what the hell. My mates were accustomed to such even if they didn't usually take long trips in the winter. If their clothes were performing like mine they had to be almost as comfortable as they would have been in the cave. In fact, since smiley was carrying all our gear the walk was quite pleasant.

We took our usual route to Caato's former camp and were there within five hours. It was a good place to take a break.

Getting a fire going would have been tough if not for all the fuel left around after Dutono's earlier raid brought a quick end to things here. We had to brush snow out of the main fire pit but it was only a little extra bother to lay down a few of the larger pieces of wood and get the fire going on them. By the time the fire started melting snow it was doing well enough to keep going without a lot of extra bother.

My mates fixed a hot meal of bison, beans and warmed bread and they made another couple of pots of coffee. After we'd eaten we sat around on the sled, mainly to give smiley more of a breather. I decided to fish out my new laptop and see what kind of job Ralph had done for me.

Ralph and his partners did this up right. Somehow they had contrived to mould the bottom of this laptop so that, when I was sitting, it fit snugly on my legs and ended up at just the right height for typing. It didn't have a touch pad as I'd suggested but after looking around I didn't see anything else that would serve the purpose. I was surprised when Ralph's synthetic voice came to me from the speakers.

"Well John, how do you like it?" he asked.

"It's fine as far as it goes Ralph, but I don't see what you included to take the place of the touch pad that I told you I didn't want."

"Just guide the cursor with your eyes and it will follow them. When you want to click, double click or right click just think it and it will be done," he said.

"How did you manage that little trick?"

"We took the liberty of placing a small neuro interface/transceiver in you, since you haven't noticed it we're assuming that it isn't a bother," he said.

I didn't know if I liked this or not but I thought about it for a moment and I could see that it was the kind of thing that could have made a computer company all powerful back on my old earth. It was true that I hadn't noticed the device, wherever it was in me and after trying it out it did work perfectly. In fact after only a minute or two it was much more intuitive than a mouse.

"I am stunned Ralph. I tried to think of a reason to be mad about it but I just can't. It's just too bad that I can't just think what I want to type and skip the keyboard all together."

"Oh, there's no problem there. You can use it instead of the keyboard too," he said.

"Then why did you include the keyboard?"

"You asked for the keyboard John and you were very specific about the type and size of it," he reminded me.

Before I said anything else I decided that there was no way to win this argument and so I shut up and thanked him. I did tell him he could feel free to remove the keyboard now since I hadn't even considered being able to have an input device like he had come up with.

"Well then why don't we do away with the screen too? We can memory map a small portion of your brain and the output can just stimulate it as if the signal had been coming from your retina. It will make the whole thing much smaller," he said.

"Well why stop there Ralph, why don't you just build the whole business into me and I won't have to worry about carrying anything?" I asked, trying not to sound too sarcastic.

"Excellent, we had no idea you could be convinced so easily. It will be better all around this way. You will have much more functionality and you won't have to worry about carrying it around all the time," he said and I'll swear he almost sounded excited.

I didn't say anything; I was too surprised to. In a few seconds the laptop was just gone, then about two minutes later it was as if I was looking out of another eye, except this one just showed a GUI interface that was frighteningly familiar. My first thought, I swear it, was to worry about what would happen if explorer.exe crashed on the hardware that was now running it.

"You're sure that this won't end up bothering me or going haywire or something like that?"

"We aren't Microsoft if that's what you are thinking, even though we made the interface similar. You are not going to have any 'invalid page faults' to deal with," he said and almost sounded huffy about it.

"I didn't mean any offence Ralph. It was just a thought."

"I think that you'll find that it can do more for you than any computer you've ever had and it has the benefit of being invisible to anyone else. When you want to use it think about it and when you want it to go away just think of that," he said.

"How much access does it have to your data?"

"You can see anything that you could see in your office and in a much better format. For instance, if you are looking at our video you won't have to choose from thumbnails, just think of what you want to see and it will come up," he explained.

I did, I thought about Dutono's camp and my new third eye flashed up video of the cave's entrance. It seemed that I could look at different views and it was almost like moving my eye around to focus in another direction. It got a little disorienting after a few minutes and I wished it off and it was gone.

"It works perfectly but it got to be too much after a few minutes."

"You will become accustomed to it after a while and it will cease to be unusual to you. If you don't like it we can always go back to the laptop," he assured me.

"We'll see but I'm pretty sure that this is something I want to keep. I didn't ask for it before because I had no inkling that it was even possible. Thank you for it."

"You are more than welcome John. It makes it much easier for us too," he said.

I didn't even want to know what it made easier for them or how it did it so I didn't ask. After a few minutes I wished it back on again and called up different views for a while. When it was time to move out again I wished it off, deciding that I would wait a while before trying to use it and walk at the same time.

Thirty minutes after we started walking again I thought the video back on. At first I brought its viewpoint where we were and then I moved the focus out ahead of us. Roweea was right in front of me so I put a hand on her shoulder to let her guide me while I used the video in my head as a type of forward scouting tool. I was able to keep it up for about thirty minutes before it began making me tired but for the last five or so minutes I was able to walk without Roweea's guidance and also pay attention to my mobile point of view.

Thirty minutes later I tried another session. Nearly from the first I was able to keep an "eye" out ahead of us and still navigate under my own power and senses. It was like having a point man that could scout ahead but was in no danger. I switched off this time as soon as I got a little tired of it.

After giving it an hour rest I called it up again and once more we had a point presence without having anyone in danger. In this weather it wasn't really such a valuable tool since chances were slim that boogy men were out and about but this was a good time to try getting used to having another eye.

The penny dropped on another aspect a few minutes later and I switched my new perspective behind us to watch our back trail. It wasn't as disorienting as I'd feared and soon I was switching between views without much trouble at all. I was able to go nearly two hours this time without getting tired.

I guess that tired wasn't the actual feeling I got from my new perspective. It did give me an uncomfortable feeling with prolonged use though. The period of useable usage did seem to be lengthening each time and I assumed that sooner or later I would cease to become uneasy with extended use.

After the sunset I had discovered another wonderful feature. I now had night vision, at least in my new eye, like never before. Its display was only slightly diminished after the sun went down and it wasn't the normal shades of green from thermal imaging. I would have to ask Ralph how this could be.

It was around eight PM now and we stopped for another trail break; not so much for smiley's benefit but because I wanted some fresh coffee and something to eat.

We would soon be close enough to our destination so that a fire might be spotted if one of the men happened to come outside for a look around. I wanted a hot meal and that would require a fire. I didn't want to warn our soon to be victims so the fire needed to be now. After we'd made ourselves known to them it wouldn't matter and we could build all the fires there that we wanted to.

There were more rocks around out here in the middle of nowhere so we took a little time to gather some to build the fire on. We were able to gather plenty of squaw wood too and with that a fire was soon making coals to cook on. I brushed the snow off a likely sized rock and took a seat while my mates were fixing a nearly real meal.

After sitting a few minutes I turned on my new toy again and took a look around our destination. There were still no new footprints anywhere and I wasn't surprised.

Left to their own devices they might not stray out of their cave for days. I was going to have to think up something else to get them stirring around after I was in place and ready to let them know I was there.

Supper was ready by now and when Roweea brought me a plate and a mug of coffee I gave it the attention it deserved. Eating outside in the wild wasn't a novelty to me at this late date but food did seem to still taste better this way.

We'd turned smiley loose as soon as we'd stopped and he had slipped off into denser cover, looking for a meal of his own I suspected. It was nearly two hours before he was back with us but he seemed well fed when he showed up. After putting the harness back on him and hooking it to the sled we were on our way again.

By three AM we were at the end of the trip. We made camp but didn't bother with a fire. Shucking my clothes, I used my cell phone to call Ralph and asked him if he'd keep an eye on the cave's entrance and wake me if some of them came out.

"You no longer need equipment to contact any of us John, just think to us and we can communicate. I will wake you if it seems they are about to come out of their cave," he told me.

I should have realized this myself. Now I remembered that earlier Ralph and I had continued our communication even after the laptop, with its speakers and microphone, had disappeared.

Having that settled let me forget my worries and get in the furs with my mates. I was a little tired but not tired enough to keep me from spending quality time to show them all some attention and I'm not talking about a salute on the parade ground.

Even though we were in our tent and all of us had our heads under the bison fur covers I still woke before sunrise was over and done with. I was surrounded by beautiful naked women and I started teasing nipples and lightly fondling asses until my mates were waking up.

Ralph hadn't bothered me with any news of our intended targets so we all had a good morning screw before poking our heads out. It helped warm us up for the cold cruel world outside.

We were dressed and had put together a semi-permanent place for our cooking fire and in fact had it well on its way before any smoke started drifting out of the cave's smoke hole and our breakfast was nearly done before their fire was going good.

After eating we put more wood on our fire and then checked our weapons. Sure that they were all in working order we each found some cover and waited to watch the opening.

After about thirty minutes a couple of men came out, probably to take a look at today's weather or maybe to find a place outside to piss. They hadn't made it twenty feet before they both seemed to realize, at nearly the same time, that there was a pretty big fire burning about a hundred and fifty yards from them and in a place it had no real reason to be doing so.

They went back into the cave, no doubt to tell the others, and fifteen minutes later ten of them came back out with spears in their hands. They were bunched up and they came toward our hiding places slowly and suspiciously.

I let them get within fifty yards of me before I started putting them in the shape I'd intended for them to be days earlier. Once I fired my mates joined in and the whole bunch of assholes were on the ground dead or dying in seconds.

I guess it was a mean trick and I probably should have been ashamed of myself but I wasn't. I knew that if the positions had been reversed I would be the one on the ground. They'd already proved that at Caato's old camp when they killed the four men there and captured their women.

I poked around inside my head looking for a feeling that I'd been unfair or that I'd done something dreadfully wrong. There was no deep burning pain in my conscience though. This time and place wasn't a dog eat dog world because there were no dogs; it was a man kill man world though and the one that was considered right was the one firstest with the mostest.

If I'd been sent back in time to show these cave men a kinder and gentler way of dealing with their fellowman I was going to be a big disappointment. I wasn't on a crusade to bring truth, justice and the American way to Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal man.

In the first place it would be a downright shame to introduce them to something as repulsive as politics or government. That would be a first step down the slippery slope to lawyers, lobbyist and elected hogs at the public trough. The kind of men who tried to make their own slimy existence seem better by making their betters lives' worse.

I was keeping my eye on the skin covering of the cave's entrance now. Sure enough I saw it move a little and it was a cinch that someone was looking out to see what all that banging had been about.

Ralph had already assured me that there were no innocent bystanders in the cave so I pegged a shot where I estimated the looker's chest would be. I must have guessed right because I heard a yelp from inside and the skin wiggled as if someone was trying to hold himself up by gripping it.

Smiley came up to stand beside me just then and I asked him if any of the dead men looked like breakfast to him. He didn't say anything of course but he did saunter over to one of them to have a bite or two.

I noticed at once that he'd gone to one that was off to the side a little and I wondered if he understood that he'd picked a spot where he wouldn't impinge on our line of fire. Maybe it was only coincidence.

"What will we do now, John?" Ameliea finally asked me.

"We'll wait. It won't be any fun for us but we'll have a lot easier time doing it than the men left in there will."

"One of us had better get you a mug of coffee then. You get so cranky sometimes when you don't have one in your hand," Maia said, teasing me.

"Now that you mention it I would enjoy some coffee but I can hardly believe I've ever been cranky."

"Believe it," said Delia but not unkindly.

Roweea got up and went back over to the fire, where the coffee pot was doing its job. She brought me a mug and I sipped it with a little feeling of contentment.

We waited and waited and waited some more. It seemed like days but I only lasted an hour before I asked Ralph if he had any video inside.

"Of course, all you have to do now is look," he said.

I opened my new eye and it was showing me a much wider field than the two I grew up with. It seemed like I was looking down on the scene from behind my position and from higher up. I concentrated on the skin covering of the cave and was suddenly able to see behind it.

Moving my attention around inside let me see that when I concentrated on different places it seemed that my point of view would change as if I was looking from a new spot.

There was a dead man, no doubt the one I'd shot through the skin covering, on the ground in the entrance. The rest of the men were huddled near the back of the cave and they were starting another fire there. The first one they'd built this morning was much closer to the cave's entrance. Even though they had no real understanding of my weapons they had tumbled to the fact that the skin was no defense.

"Ralph," I thought to him since he'd told me it would work.

"Yes, John," he replied inside my head.

"Can I use my new eye to aim a rifle?"

"We had anticipated that request and we made provisions for it. I'm sure that you understand that you won't really be aiming through the rifle's scope. If you put the rifle to your shoulder, as if you were aiming it, your new perspective will acquire a set of crosshairs similar to the ones in the scope. They will be pointed to whatever the bullet will strike. If the bullet will pass through something you will have a nearly transparent representation of it and the crosshairs will show you what you will most probably hit after the bullet passes through," he explained.

"What I will most probably hit?"

"Yes, I'm sure you understand that passing through something will make a difference. When there is a question about the bullets impact point, the intersection of the crosshairs will change to a circle; the circle will become larger to include all areas that the bullet might strike," he said.

"In other words the circle will describe the area of the most probable impact."

"Exactly, I will say that we did careful work on the algorithm that is used to predict the impact point and we feel that it is at least as accurate as your normal method of sighting," he told me.

"So if I point to the cave's wall I will only see the rock but if I aim toward the skin covered entrance I will see through it and farther on I will see what I will most likely hit beyond the skin?"

"Yes." he said.

Hell I couldn't think of a better time to get some empirical data on the effectiveness of this procedure. I took up the rifle and aimed at the cave's skin doorway. I saw just what I expected to see, the skin covering appeared faintly and my new eye's crosshairs were settled on a spot on the back wall of the cave. As I moved the rifle around "aiming it" the crosshairs moved and it was no trouble to put them squarely in the middle of one of the men's chest. I saw that the crosshairs wiggled around a little just as they would in any normal scope sight.

I put down the rifle and went to the tent, retrieving one of the smaller bison furs. I rolled it into a tight bundle and brought it back to use as a rest for my rifle. I stretched onto the snow in a standard prone position for firing and took up the rifle. When I sighted through the skin this time the creep of the crosshairs was greatly diminished. I also noticed some numbers in the lower left corner of my new eye's display.

"I'm assuming that those numbers are for the range, windage and such," I thought to Ralph.

"Yes, they are range to the first impact, the next impact and so on as far as the bullet is calculated to go. There will also be a read out for windage if there is enough wind to matter. You won't need to pay any attention to them if you don't want to. They are simply there because we have the data already and we felt they would give you more confidence in using this method. The windage you are seeing is an average of the winds effect over the entire length of the bullet's travel. We felt it might be confusing to fill the display with the calculated results for every inch of the bullet's flight path," he said and almost sounded smug.

"Thank you for that, while I'm trying to shoot a man dead I don't really want to know the exact wind speed along every inch of the distance from me to him."

I concentrated on aiming again then and soon had the same man targeted. When I thought about zooming my view it did. As the man appeared closer I saw that the intersection of the crosshairs swelled into a tiny circle and kept growing as the picture kept zooming. I saw that another set of numbers had appeared and concentrating on them I discovered, without asking, that my view was now equivalent to a forty-three-power scope. I thought it to ten-power and steadied myself for a shot.

My mates had been watching me and probably wondering what in the hell I was doing while Ralph was giving me a shooting lesson that they couldn't hear. Out of the corner of one of my real eyes I noticed that they were now anticipating my shot. I concentrated and squeezed the trigger.

The M1 barked and sure enough my mates weren't surprised. I concentrated on the scene inside the cave again and I saw that the men inside had been surprised, very surprised. One of them, the target, was lying still on the ground with a big dark-red stain growing from the center of his chest. The rest were in the "don't know whether to shit or go blind" mode and were asking a lot of questions to each other in very loud voices. I doubted they would come up with any good answers.

I gave them some time to settle down while I studied their faces. I found one of the ones that I had let leave last time and about ten minutes later I gave him his exit pass.

Panic set in again inside the cave and when I noticed that one of them was pretty still and seemed to be thinking, I shot him too. This time one of the others noticed the entrance skin jerk as the bullet came through. He shouted his discovery to all the others and they finally decided that I did in fact have a way of killing them through the entrance.

His leap of inspiration surprised me when he told the others to get out of sight of the entrance, behind other walls or outcroppings in the cave. They were clutching at straws anyway and with a suggestion for relief, they scrambled to get it done.

They'd done a better job of it than I would have thought. I was now out of targets. I kept a close watch on them but since this tactic seemed to be working they stayed put. No matter, I had another idea or two.

"Smiley, are you finished eating?"

Of course he didn't answer out loud but he did come over to stand beside me and then nudge me a little with his big head. I petted it and scratched behind one of his ears for a few seconds.

"How would you feel about going into the cave to bring one of them out?"

He rumbled a pleased little sound that seemed to come from deep in his chest and he actually wagged his tail a stroke or two.

"Be careful, don't let them hurt you."

He turned to looked at me as if I were a slow-witted child and if he could talk I'm sure he would have said I needn't try to tell my grandmother how to suck eggs. Then he headed for the cave's entrance to make his way inside.

I watched his progress with my new eye. The men had noticed the flash of light as the skins parted and they all had their eyes glued to the spot.

Many of them cried out in dismay when they saw smiley. I guess he realized that he was plainly visible because he didn't try to go carefully. When he heard them pissing and moaning about him he sprinted to the nearest one before any of them could think to pick up a spear.

When smiley latched his long teeth into the man's neck and shoulder he yanked him up and left with the man trying to think of a way to get loose. Apparently his options were limited.

One of the other men, probably braver than smart, grabbed up a spear and ran after them as if he were going to save his friend. Of course this put him in my range again and I shot him as soon as I was sure that smiley wasn't in danger of being hit.

Once outside with his prize smiley brought him about halfway to our fire, let him go and then backed off a few steps. After a few seconds the victim got up and tried to run back to the cave. Smiley let him run for a few seconds and then sprang after him, knocking him over and picking him back up with two long teeth in his ass this time. The screaming and moaning almost made me feel sorry for him.

"Finish him please," I shouted to smiley who did it with a bite through the neck.

I'd kept my new eye inside the cave during this and it was chaos of fear. I walked up near the skin to yell at them.

"If you all come out now I won't let the cat have you."

There was silence for a few minutes and then one of them replied.

"Are you going to kill us if we come out?" it asked.

"Yes, but I will do it quickly this time and I won't make you suffer much."

"Why should we come out if you are going to kill us?" the voice asked.

"Because if you don't I'll let the cat come back in and he will make you suffer, a lot, before he kills you."

They didn't say anything else and I thought they were probably trying to decide what they wanted to do. I asked smiley to try tearing down the skin at the entrance and he walked over to give it a whirl. He had trouble getting hold of it so I joined him and when I bunched it up he brought those long teeth to bear and with this grip he ripped down half of it. We moved to the other side and finished the job in only a few more minutes.

I walked back over to sit with my mates and wait some more. I told smiley that he might as well hunt if he wanted to and he walked off into the woods. My mates asked me what we would do now.

"We'll wait some more. Since they don't have a covering anymore it will start to get really cold in there and late tonight I might be able to slip inside since there will be no skin to wiggle and announce me."