Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  The monocle ferry floated against light-absorbent blackness that held it as solidly as had Earth gravity and the concrete pad. The aliens who had undogged the cockpit had firm footing also, on something invisible a hand’s breadth above the mirrored surface.

  Kelly could see the monocle ferry, his own suited limbs, and the aliens clearly, though without the depth that shadows would have given. There was, however, no apparent source of light nor any sign of stars, of the Sun, or of the Earth, whose sunlit surface should have filled much of the spherical horizon at this low altitude.

  The veteran was still supporting himself on the lip of the cockpit. Grimacing, he took his hand away and found that he did not fall back onto the seat. He reached down into the cockpit for the equipment he had brought with him, noticing that he moved without resistance but that, apart from volitional actions, his body stayed exactly where he had last put it.

  “Very well done, Mr. Kelly,” said Wun’s voice through the helmet earphones that Kelly had not reconnected. “How much time do you need before we place you at your Fortress?”

  “Wun, can you hear me?” Kelly asked, turning and wondering whether he should open his face shield. The two visible aliens, stepping back on nothing now, wore no clothing, protective or otherwise.

  Wun stood a few yards behind the veteran. Unlike his fellows, he wore a business suit and a human face which was at the moment smiling. “Yes,” he said, his lips in synch with the voice in Kelly’s earphones, “very well. And please do not open your helmet. It will not be necessary.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Kelly. He pursed his lips. “Wun, where the hell are we?”

  “It does what a ship does,” said the alien. “Therefore I described it as a ship. We will be able to return you to Earth whenever you please now that you have reached here.”

  “Yeah, that’s great,” said Kelly, checking his equipment. Looked okay; and if it wasn’t, he’d use the shotgun that weighted his right leg. Hell, he’d tear throats out with his teeth if that was what it took to get the job done.

  Or he’d die trying . . . but that would mean he failed, and failure wasn’t acceptable.

  “How quick can you get me to Fortress?” the veteran asked, returning to Wun’s initial question but not answering it until he had further data.

  “Momentarily, Thomas Kelly,” said the alien, bobbing his head in what was either an Oriental gesture or something indigenous to his own inhuman species.

  “Okay,” Kelly said, a place holder while he thought. He met the alien’s eyes, or what passed for eyes in the human simulacrum. “You showed me—the dream, I mean—the balance half of the dumbbell was blown open. If that’s still the case, can you land me at that opening instead of the docking hub?”

  “Yes,” Wun said simply, bobbing again.

  “You know—” Kelly began and caught himself. Of course the aliens knew that the lobes were spinning around their common center. If Wun said they could land him there, that meant they would match velocities and land him there.

  Now that he was within the alien “ship,” he could understand Wun’s confidence at being able to avoid the radars and X-ray lasers guarding the space station. Previously, he had taken the alien’s word for that simply because there wasn’t a damn thing to be done if Wun was talking through his hat.

  The Nazis had probably achieved surprise by approaching in a wholly-unexpected trajectory, claiming to be from the American lunar base when they were finally challenged—and having only a minimal German crew with the Kurdish shock troops aboard the leading saucers, the ones that would take the salvos of Fortress’s close-in defenses. Even so, the highest leaders of the Dienst would have waited well apart from the attack, in Antarctica or on the Moon, until the issue was decided.

  “Okay,” said Kelly again, hefting his gear. “Gimme a hand with this. It’s been modified to strap on me, but the suit doesn’t bend so well I can even get the straps over my shoulders myself.”

  He was starting to breathe fast. Hell, he’d hyperventilate on oxygen if he didn’t watch out. “And then,” the veteran concluded, “you set me aboard Fortress. And keep your fingers crossed.”

  Between the air supply on his back and the weapons pack slung across his chest, Tom Kelly looked like a truckload of bottles mounted on legs. The bulk felt friendly, though, even without the weight that should have accompanied it.

  The thing that nobody who directed war movies understood—and why should they? It would have come as news to rear echelons in all the various armies as well—was that the guys at the sharp end carried it all on their backs.

  The irreducible minimum for life in a combat zone was water, arms and munitions, and food. In most environments, heavy clothing or shelter had to be factored in as well; exposure in a hilltop trench would kill you just as dead as a bullet.

  Helicopters were fine, but they weren’t going to land while you lay baking on a bare hillside traversed by enemy guns; so you carried water in gallons, not quarts, and it was life itself. If you ran out of ammo, they’d cut you apart with split bamboo if that was what they had . . . so you carried extra bandoliers and extra grenades, and a pistol of your own because the rifle you were issued was going to jam at the worst possible time, no matter who designed it or how hard you tried to keep it clean.

  Besides that, you carried a belt of ammo for one of the overburdened machinegunners or a trio of shells for the poor bastard with the mortar tube on his back. You were all in it together; and besides, when the shit hit the fan you were going to need heavy-weapons support.

  And the chances were that, if you were really trying to get the jump on the elusive other side, you had a case of rations to hump with you as well. Every time a resupply bird whop-whopped to you across hostile terrain, it fingered you for the enemy and guaranteed that engagement would be on the enemy’s terms.

  So you didn’t move very fast, but you moved, and you did your job of kicking butt while folks in strack uniforms crayoned little boxes and arrows on acetate-covered maps, learnedly discussing your location. That was the way the world worked; and that was why Tom Kelly felt subconsciously better for the equipment slung on his body as he shuffled into combat.

  “All right,” Kelly said with his shotgun drawn in his right hand and his left extended to grasp the first hold chance offered. Recoil from the charge of buckshot would accelerate the veteran right out of business if he hadn’t anchored himself before he fired. Not that there was supposed to be anybody in this half of Fortress.

  “Just walk forward, Mr. Kelly,” said Wun’s voice, “as if it were a beaded curtain.”

  There wasn’t supposed to be a gang of Nazis in control of Fortress, period—if you were going to get hung up on supposed-to-bes.

  “Right,” said Tom Kelly, shifting his weight and stepping through a wall that was nothing, not even color, into Fortress.

  The alien ship—the place, if even that did not imply too much—from which Kelly stepped could be seen only as an absence of the things which should have been visible behind it, and even that only in a seven-foot disk without discernible thickness. The disk, which could only be the point of impingement between the universe which Kelly knew and wherever the hell the aliens were, rotated at the same speed as the space station, so that the veteran had not expected to notice motion as he stepped aboard Fortress.

  He had forgotten the shielding doughnut of lunar slag within which the two lobes of the dumbbell spun at a relative velocity of almost two hundred miles an hour. The gap between the portal and the space station was only a few inches wide, but that was enough to give Kelly the impression that he was watching a gravel road through the rusted-out floorboards of a speeding car. This job was assuredly finding unique ways to give him the willies.

  The first thing he noticed when his feet hit the bare aluminum planking of the dumbbell’s floor was that he had weight again, real weight, although not quite the load that he would have been carrying in full Earth gravity. Fortress spun at a rate which gave i
t approximately .8 g’s at the floor level of either dumbbell. The arms revolved at nearly two revolutions per minute, fast enough to displace a dropping object several inches from where it would have fallen under the pull of gravity instead of centrifugal force. It would play hell with marksmanship also, but Kelly with his gloves and helmet hadn’t the least chance of target accuracy anyway.

  The corpse in the SS uniform lay exactly where it had in Kelly’s dream.

  The chamber was brightly illuminated by sunlight reflected through the solar panels above. Where it fell on the dead Kurd, his skin appeared shrunken and darker than it had been during life—a shade close to that of waxed mahogany. One outflung hand was shaded by a structural member, however, and it gleamed with a tracery of hoarfrost. Ice was crystallizing from the corpse’s body fluids and from there subliming into vacuum, leaving behind the rind of a man that would not age or spoil if it lay here until the heat death of the universe.

  Perhaps houris were ministering to ben Majlis’s soul in Paradise. Ben Majlis deserved that as much as any soldier did; and as little.

  The next part was tricky. Kelly stepped past ben Majlis’s body to reach the door the Kurd had tried to open. The doors of Fortress did not lock, but it was possible that the Nazis had welded this one shut before blowing their Kurdish cannon fodder into the void at the end of their perceived usefulness. If the door was welded, Kelly would have to punch his entrance with explosives, and that was almost certain to warn those who had taken over the station.

  Awkward because of his glove and the fact he was using only his left hand on a mechanism meant for two, Kelly rotated the large aluminum wheel that latched the door between this compartment and the remainder of Fortress. The dogs freed with no more than the hesitation to be expected when plates of aluminum are left in contact long enough for their oxide coatings to creep together.

  The agent pulled. Nothing gave. His lips curled to rip out a curse; and as he reached back for the self-adhesive strip charge hanging in a roll from his left hip, he noticed that the panel was beveled to open away from him instead of toward him as the plans and instructor on the Airborne Command Post had assured him. Somebody had misread the specs, or else the construction crew had reasonably decided that it didn’t matter a hoot in hell which way they hung the doors so long as the seal was good.

  Kelly hit the panel with a shoulder backed with all his mass and that of the equipment he carried. The seal popped enough to spray air from around half the circumference. Then the door opened fully, and the veteran lurched inside behind his shotgun.

  The air that escaped around Kelly scattered and softened the light which until then had lain flat on the panel of aluminum/ceramic fiber sandwich. It ruffled the sleeve of ben Majlis’s uniform as it surged past, but it lacked the force and volume that would have been required to eject the corpse from the open chamber.

  As soon as he was inside the undamaged compartment, Kelly thrust the door shut and fell to his knees with the ill-controlled effort. Despite the air that had puffed into the void, the residual pressure within the compartment slammed the door firmly against the seals.

  This compartment was about as empty as the one whose wall had been blown away. It had attachment points up and down both long walls, but nothing was slung from them and there were no bodies on the floor. The vertical lighting did display a line of oval punctures stitched at chest height across one wall: bullet holes punched at an angle through the metal facing but swallowed harmlessly by the glass core—all save one which was covered by a piece of Speedtape. Somebody from the original complement of Fortress had made it this far; and then, no doubt, made it into vacuum as just another body, shortly to be followed by the Kurds who had gunned him down.

  And now it was the turn of the Nazis.

  The atmosphere-exchange vents which had swung closed when air surged through the open door had reopened when the pressure drop ceased, bringing the chamber back in balance with the remainder of the space station. Kelly turned the inner door wheel to lock the dogs home, keeping his eyes and gun on the door at the far end of the chamber.

  The quantity of air lost when Kelly entered the space station had probably registered somewhere; but since the “leak” had shut off immediately, the new owners of Fortress would probably not notice anything amiss. The pointed shotgun was cheap insurance, however . . . and by the time Kelly had finished latching the door, he was sure that the chamber’s oxygen level had returned what was normal for Fortress, a partial pressure equal to that of Earth at sea level, although the quantity of nitrogen in the atmosphere was only half that of Earth by unit volume.

  With the atmosphere back to normal, Kelly could unlimber the flamethrower he had brought as his primary weapon.

  The two cross-connected napalm tanks and the smaller air bottle which pressurized them weighed almost fifty pounds here, even though all were constructed of aluminum. The flame gun itself had a pistol grip with a bar trigger for the fuel valve, easily grasped and used despite Kelly’s protective clothing. The ignition lever just behind the nozzle was of similar handy size.

  The veteran went to the far end of the compartment and twisted the latch wheel of the door which would be, according to the plans, the central one of the five in this lobe of the dumbbell. Then, with his hands on both controls of the flame gun, he kicked the panel open.

  The third compartment was stacked with crated supplies, primarily foodstuffs, and one cage of the dual elevators waited beside the helical staircase which also led toward the hub. There was nothing alive to see Kelly burst through the doorway.

  Each of the elevator shafts was fifteen feet in diameter, large enough to handle any cargo which could be ferried to orbit on existing hardware. The elevators’ size had determined the thickness of the spokes connecting the lobes of the dumbbell to the hub, since strength requirements could have been met by spokes thinner than the thirty-five feet or so of the present structure.

  The elevators were intended to move simultaneously and in opposite directions, one cage rising as the other fell, though in an emergency the pair could be decoupled. As a further preparation for emergency, stairs were built into part of the spoke diameter left over when the elevator shafts were laid out, and it was this staircase by which Kelly had intended to cross to the hub.

  Using the elevator that gaped like a holding cell would be crazy, Kelly thought as he shuffled to the stairs. With one hand on the railing to keep from overbalancing, he bent backwards to look up the helical staircase. Dabs of light blurred like beads on a string on the steps and the closed elevator shafts beside which the steps proceeded upward. From the bottom they seemed an interminable escalade.

  Hell, he’d take the elevator. If he weren’t crazy, he’d have stayed home.

  Kelly hadn’t been briefed on the elevators, but the controls could scarcely have been simpler. The door was a section of the cage’s cylindrical wall. It slid around on rollered tracks at top and bottom when Kelly pulled at its staple-shaped handle. The door did not latch, nor did there appear to be any interlock between it and the elevator control.

  After considering the situation for a moment, Kelly slid the door open again, faced it, and prodded the single palm-sized button on the cage wall with the muzzle of the flame gun. Nothing happened for long enough that the veteran reached for the door handle again, convinced that he must have been wrong about the interlock. The cage staggered into upward motion before his arm completed its motion. There was simply a delay built into its operation, probably tied to a warning signal in the other elevator, which would start at the same time.

  That might or might not be important. Holding the flame gun in a two-handed grip, Kelly grinned toward the elevator shaft that slid past his open door.

  He did not see the metal sheathing, however. His mind was trying to imagine the face of the next person it would direct the veteran’s hands to kill. Over the years, he had come surprisingly close a number of times. . . .

  The elevator shaft was almost nine hund
red feet high—or long, in a manner of speaking, because the cage ceased to go “up” as it neared the hub and the effect of centrifugal force lessened. The drive was hydraulic and very smooth after the initial jerk as the pumps cut in. As the impellers pressurized the column to raise the cage in which Kelly rode, they drew a partial vacuum in the other column to drag the cage down from hub level. Ordinary cable operation would not work in the absence of true gravity, and a cogged-rail system like that of some mountain railways would have put unbalanced stresses on the spokes, whose thickness and mass would have had to be greatly increased to avoid warping.

  The portion of the design that was critical at the moment was the fact that the pumps were in the lobe, not at the hub, and that the elevator’s operation was therefore effectively silent at the inner end. It didn’t mean that the approaching cage would not be noticed; but at least there would be no squalling take-up spool to rivet the attention of all those in the hub on the elevator shaft.

  Kelly’s hands were clammy, though his gloves would keep them from slipping on the triggers of the flame gun. This wasn’t like Istanbul, where he was in too deep too quickly to think. Three hundred yards, three football fields end to end, with the cage moving at the speed of a man walking fast. Plenty of time to review the faces of the men you’d already killed—only the ones you’d really seen, not the lumps sprawled like piles of laundry on the ground you’d raked. . . .

  Some people had nightmares about the times they’d almost bought the farm themselves. Kelly saw instead faces distorted by pain or rage or the shock waves of the bullet already splashing flesh to the side. He was as likely to awaken screaming as those who feared their own death; and he was surely as likely to slug his brain with alcohol to blur the memories he knew it could not erase.