Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “It’s an old wives’ tale that carrots improve vision,” said the passenger who had arrived with the van. They were idling beside the low terminal building until the rest of the entourage had mounted up. The cavalcade of locally available transportation included a pair of canvas-topped Army three-quarter-tons. At least they’d put Kelly in something air-conditioned, though that was probably because he was riding with Pierrard. “Are you having trouble with your eyes?”

  “You’re a doctor?” Kelly asked, squinting. The thirtyish man had short hair and a short-sleeved shirt with a tie.

  The car radio sputtered. The driver with a plug earphone turned and said “Sir?” to Pierrard.

  “Drive on,” ordered the white-haired man, scowling.

  “I’m an MD, if that’s what you mean,” the passenger said. “Also a Ph.D. Name’s Suggs.” He offered Kelly his hand.

  The veteran shook it, saying, “Then you ought to know that carotene helps the eye adapt to rapid changes in light level—which is the only eye problem I’ve got.”

  Dr. Suggs jumped as though Kelly had hit him with a joy buzzer.

  “Kelly, calm down,” said General Redstone. “Doctor, you’re here to do a quick physical, not to talk. Why don’t you get on with it?”

  The landscape beginning to slide past the van’s windows was not dissimilar to that in the vicinity of Diyarbakir, though the mountains in the distance here seemed neither as extensive nor as high.

  “Will you roll up your sleeve, please?” said the doctor distantly as he took a sphygmomanometer from his case.

  “How tight’s the timing?” Kelly asked Redstone. The van rocked more violently than the condition of the road seemed to require. The vehicle was loaded well below its normal capacity of nine persons and luggage, so the springing seemed unduly harsh.

  “This isn’t the time to discuss the situation,” Pierrard said in a flat voice.

  “It’s the goddam time we got,” Kelly snapped back as Suggs started to fit the rubber cuff on him. “Look”—Kelly waved and the doctor sucked in his lips with a hiss of anger, poising as if to capture the arm when next it came to rest—“you’ve got a lieutenant colonel driving, for Chrissake. If you’ll go that far for a secure environment, then use it. Even if you don’t like me, okay?”

  The uniformed driver’s eyes flickered back in the rearview mirror, though he neither spoke nor turned his head.

  Pierrard had taken his unlighted pipe from a side pocket of his suit. Unexpectedly, he dropped it back and said, “I don’t like very many people, Mr. Kelly, and that has not in general affected my performance.”

  He smiled, and though the expression itself was forced, the attempt was significant. “I think it may be that you don’t cringe enough.”

  “Naw,” said the veteran. “When I’m scared, I fly hot. And you scare the crap outa me, buddy, that I’ll tell you.”

  Redstone, seated behind Pierrard and kitty-corner across the van’s narrow aisle from Kelly, looked from man to man and squeezed unconsciously against his own seatback.

  “The gun in your pocket,” said Pierrard, nodding toward the borrowed trousers over which Kelly let the tail of the borrowed shirt hang. “That’s the one that killed Blakeley?”

  “That’s the one,” Kelly agreed. He kept his hands plainly in sight on the back of his seat and the one in front of him. Suggs, on the other half of the double seat, tried again to fit the cuff.

  “I assumed so,” Pierrard said. “I think I can say that at least we share common emotions, Mr. Kelly, when we’re forced to deal with one another.”

  The old man paused, then went on. “We—the proper parties—are in negotiation with the parties who claim to have captured Fortress.”

  “Claim?” repeated Kelly, glancing over at Redstone.

  “I misspoke, Mr. Kelly,” Pierrard said. “Litotes when bluntness would have been appropriate. They have accurately targeted and released a number of the nuclear weapons from Fortress, so common sense indicates that they are fully in control as they claim.”

  Pierrard’s hand began to play with the hidden meerschaum. “They did not,” he continued, “expect that news of a nuclear attack could be obfuscated; I cannot claim that it was totally concealed for over a day in both the countries which were victimized. There has been a considerable outcry at ‘launching disasters’ with attendant loss of life . . . but the, the ‘Aryan Legion,’ as they choose to style themselves now, has received no publicity. As you can imagine, the capabilities designed into Fortress do not include general broadcast equipment.” He permitted himself a tight smile.

  “So you figure they’re going to up the stakes with something you can’t cover up,” Kelly suggested.

  “Moscow and Washington, we feared,” agreed Pierrard. “Perhaps only Moscow, if they are what you tell us, Nazi holdouts . . . but the result will be the same, since the Soviets can be expected to respond against the presumed perpetrators, the West.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that estimate already,” the veteran agreed, remembering the rain-swept walls of Diyarbakir and the thing, Wun, that spoke to him there. “Shit.” He made sure he held the older man’s eyes as he added, “How did the X-ray lasers work?”

  Something else he hadn’t any business knowing, Kelly thought and Pierrard knew quite well. That one wasn’t going to be decoyed into answering a question whose premises went beyond anything Kelly was cleared for.

  “Perfectly,” Pierrard said coolly. “The Soviets attacked with three flights of twenty missiles apiece. Each salvo was destroyed by a single unit of the defensive constellation, operating presumably in an automatic mode. We do not know that the”—he coughed— “Aryan Legion can launch additional defensive satellites as the normal complement would have done . . . but since on the next pass both the silo farms from which the Soviets launched received multiple bombs from Fortress, neither superpower is likely to proceed further in that direction.”

  “Yeah, well,” Kelly said. He turned to look out the window, although without seeing much of the scenery—one-story buildings, mesquite bushes, and dust. “Yeah. Well, I’ll be glad to get it over with myself.”

  “You can’t see out the cockpit windows,” said Tom Kelly cautiously. “I can’t see through the windows.”

  “Ummm,” agreed Desmond, the project scientist who had been the bright spot in Kelly’s previous visit to the Biggs Field installation. “You’re going to have enough problems, Mr. Kelly, without being cooked by the beams that raise the ferry. They’re very precisely directed, but both the distances and velocities involved are considerable and will magnify slight misalignments.”

  “Check,” said Kelly, nodding ruefully. “And we’re talking the same wavelengths as the warming racks at the local hamburger joint. Sorry, should’ve thought.”

  The suit—the space suit, though it shocked Kelly to think of it that way—was bulky and constricting because of its weight and stiffness, though it did not feel tight. His mind was treating the garment as protective armor rather than a burden. That was good in a way, but the suit really was both—and the fact that his subconscious was more concerned about the threat to him than the object he had to achieve was more than a little bothersome.

  “You won’t be able to do anything with the controls anyway.” The scientist seemed to think he was offering reassurance. “So it doesn’t matter whether or not you can see.”

  “Great.”

  The makeshift crew vehicle pulled up at the ferry pad.

  Well, it wasn’t really any different from a night insertion by helicopter; you couldn’t see a damned thing, you couldn’t change a thing either, and you had to trust not only the hardware but the skills of the man in control of it. On the plus side, nobody’d be shooting at him on this leg of the operation; lift-off would occur while Earth eclipsed Fortress from El Paso. The battle station was not a reconnaissance satellite, but there was no point in risking disclosure because some Nazi glanced at southwest Texas and wondered what the bright flash wa
s.

  Desmond opened the door of the van. This one had been modified by the removal of the three seats across the middle to provide more room for a man wrapped in the bulk of a space suit with breathing apparatus in place. “I’m sorry,” said the physicist, “you’ll have to walk the remainder of the way. We don’t have proper equipment for this.”

  Kelly ducked to look out the door at the monocle ferry, over which waited a castered framework meant for the maintenance crews. There were no crew accommodations here; all the testing was ground controlled, as this flight would be as well. “Guess I can make twenty yards,” he said, and, when Desmond did not precede him, he stepped past the physicist onto the ground.

  The pad was hexagonal, for no particular reason, and four feet above the surrounding soil, higher than most of the dust stinging along on the constant wind. A tank truck preceded by dust and steaming with the blow-off of its remaining load of liquid hydrogen drove away, downwind.

  Kelly led the scientist to the pad’s steps, realizing as he walked that his center of balance was farther back than he was used to. Desmond, who carried the helmet, was simply making sure that he was in position to support the veteran if he stumbled backward. The ferry looked larger at each of the six upward steps. That was reassuring. Though Kelly had been close to the Frisbee-shaped vehicle before, his mental image throughout the planning was of a tiny disk beneath his seat in the helicopter, preparing to disintegrate as an even tinier speck above him.

  “How will you arrange for transfer?” Desmond asked as Kelly reached the top of the pad. Several men in coveralls stood beside the ferry, but they were service crew rather than a send-off committee. The brass was all in the control bunker; there were no choppers orbiting today.

  Kelly tried to glance over his shoulder, but the suit got in the way and his balance wasn’t that good anyway. “Honest to God, I don’t know,” he called against the force of the breeze. He had no idea of how much the physicist had been told. From the fact that Desmond had scrupulously avoided comment on the attempt, whose risks he knew and for whose failure he would feel responsible, Kelly assumed that the man must know a great deal.

  “Right up here, sir,” said a technician, steadying the tube and steel mesh service bridge with one hand and gesturing toward the nearer flight of steps with the other. “Please don’t touch the mirrored surfaces when you step into the cockpit.”

  The bridge was two flights of metal steps supporting an angle-iron walkway that skimmed the upper surface of the cockpit, either closed or clam-shelled open as now. The railing appeared to be one-inch ID waterpipe, and the whole ensemble had clearly been built in a base workshop. It was sturdy, functional, and almost certainly superior to anything General Dynamics would have achieved with a $350,000 sole-source Space Command contract to the same end. There were advantages to being the poor relation.

  The upper surfaces of the ferry were dazzling, the structural members even more so than the sapphire hexagons that accepted the laser beams. Kelly had expected the windows to be bluish, but the segments had only the color of what they chanced to be reflecting—the bridge, the pale sky, or the sun like the point of a blazing dagger.

  “We’d better lock this down,” Desmond said, offering the helmet to Kelly.

  The agent bowed slightly so that Desmond could fit the helmet instead of just handing it over. “There’s a certain amount of dust on the surface anyway,” he said without inflection.

  “Yes, the raised platform was only to lessen the accumulation,” the physicist agreed as he lowered the helmet, “not to eliminate it.” His voice becoming muffled as the padded thermoplastic slid down over Kelly’s ears, he continued, “It burns off cleanly in the laser flux. We’ve retrieved enough of the earlier test units to be sure that wasn’t the cause of failure.”

  The locking cogs began to snap into place around the base of the helmet. Very softly, the veteran heard Desmond conclude, “Enough pieces.”

  There was a crackle in Kelly’s ears as the project scientist connected the earphones to the power pack. “Do we have a link?” demanded a compressed voice. “Dancer One, do you read me? Over.”

  “Yes,” Kelly said as he mounted the steps, bending forward at the waist because the base of the helmet cut off his normal downward peripheral vision. The pure oxygen he was now breathing flooded his sinuses like a seepage of ice water. “Now get off the air. Please.”

  “Dancer One, are you having difficulties with the boarding bridge? Should we get you some personnel to help? Over.”

  Kelly paused, found the power connection with his gloved hand, and unplugged the radio. Then he resumed trudging to the middle of the walkway where the railing had been cut away. He lowered himself carefully, one leg at a time, into the cramped cockpit. Where they thought there’d be room for anybody to lend a hand with the process was beyond him. Maybe a gantry, but there weren’t any available on-site.

  His position in the saucer was roughly that of an F-16 pilot or a Russian tank driver: flat on his back with his head raised less than would’ve been comfortable for reading in bed. In the contemplated operational use, there would have been a condenser screen in front of the pilot and a projector between his knees to throw instrument data onto that screen.

  For this run, the heads-up display had been removed so that the fuel and pressure tanks of Kelly’s additional gear could fill the space. More than fill it, as a matter of fact; what would have been a tight fit now nearly required a shoehorn. The boarding bridge clattered as a technician and Dr. Desmond climbed on from opposite ends.

  “I’m all right, dammit!” Kelly snapped, his scowl evident through the face shield, though his words must have been unintelligible.

  The physicist nodded approvingly, reached down for the throat of the fuel tank, and lifted it the fraction of an inch that permitted Kelly’s legs to clear to either side. The veteran sank back thankfully onto the seat, aware of his previous tension once he had released it.

  The technician began to close half the cockpit cover. His hands were gloved; a handprint in body oils on the reflective surface would dangerously concentrate the initial laser pulse. Desmond stopped the man, pointed at Kelly’s helmet, and then mimed on his own neck the process of reconnecting the veteran’s radio. It would be next to impossible for Kelly to mate the plugs himself in the strait cockpit.

  Kelly smiled but shook his head, and the doors above shut him into blackness.

  Then there was nothing to do save wait; but Tom Kelly, like a leopard, was very good at waiting for a kill.

  Kelly’s mind had drifted so that when the monocle ferry took off, its passenger flashed that he was again riding an armored personnel carrier which had just rolled over a mine.

  That—the feeling at least—was an apt analogy for the event. The ferry lifted off without the buildup of power inevitable in any fuel-burning system. The laser flux converted the air trapped between the pad and the mirrored concavity of the ferry’s underside into plasma expanding with a suddenness greater than the propagation rate of high explosive. Kelly left the ground as if shot from a gun.

  The roaring acceleration was so fierce that it trapped the hand which reflex tried to thrust down to the shotgun bolstered alongside Kelly’s right calf. The ferry shifted to pulsejet mode as soon as the initial blast lifted it from the pad. The low-frequency hammering of the chambers firing in quick succession, blasting out as plasma air that they had earlier sucked in, so nearly resembled the vibration of a piston engine about to drop a valve that anticipation kept the veteran rigid for long seconds after g-forces had decreased to a level against which he could have moved had he continued to try.

  The rim of the ferry with the firing chambers spun at high speed around the cockpit at the hub. Kelly had expected to be aware of that gyroscopic motion, to feel or hear the contact of the bearing surfaces surrounding him. There was no such vibration, and it was only as he found himself straining to hear the nonexistent that the veteran realized he had not been blown to fragments
above the Texas desert the way the test units had gone.

  Worrying about minutiae was probably the best way available to avoid funking in the face of real danger.

  There was a pause. Thrust was replaced by real gravity: lower than surface-normal, but genuine enough that Kelly felt himself and the couch on which he lay begin to fall backward.

  Instinct then told him falsely that there had been a total propulsion failure. His mind flashed him images of air crashes he had seen, craters rimmed with flesh and metal shredded together like colored tinsel, all lighted by the flare of burning fuel—

  Fuel. And the slamming acceleration resumed. The chambers began valving the internal hydrogen as reaction mass in place of the atmosphere which had become too thin to sustain the laser-powered ferry’s upward momentum.

  This was worse than insertion by parachute—at least Kelly’d done that before. If the Nazis didn’t scare him any worse than the manner of the reaching them was doing, he was still going to wind up the mission with white hair.

  Though that, unlike carrots for the eyes, was wholly myth.

  Because operation of the monocle ferry was new to Kelly, the occurrence of something that would have amazed Dr. Desmond did not cause the veteran to wonder what was happening. The reaction chambers continued to blast in rapid succession, but the feeling of acceleration faded into apparent weightlessness. Only then did the vibration stop, leaving Kelly to think about when and how Wun and his fellows would reach the ferry.

  Whether they would reach the ferry.

  And then the cockpit opened, the two halves moving apart as smoothly as if they were driven by hydraulic jacks instead of the arms of gray, naked monsters like the creature dead at Fort Meade.

  Kelly’s first thought was that the pair of aliens stood in hard vacuum, having somehow walked to the rising ferry without a ship of their own. He began to lift himself against the cockpit coaming, gripping the metal firmly with his thick gloves for fear of drifting away. There was, to the veteran’s surprise—weren’t they in orbit?—gravity after all; a slight fraction of what he was used to, perhaps a tenth, but enough to orient and anchor Kelly while he untangled his suited legs.