by David Drake
But it was the only thing Tom Kelly did that his gut knew he could win at, and he was only really alive during those rare moments that he was winning.
The edge of the spherical hub began to rotate past the open door of the cage. A gray-haired woman in a skirt and bemedaled jacket glanced over her shoulder toward the cage. Kelly squeezed the valve lever in the pistol grip and, as the nozzle began to buck, fired an ignition cartridge with the lever under his left hand.
Recoil from Kelly’s shot, a five-pound stream of napalm, thrust him back against the wall of the elevator cage, but that was of no significance to the effect of the short burst. The veteran had only a momentary glimpse past the uniformed woman before his flame obliterated the scene, but there were at least two dozen figures in the center of the hub. They all wore formal uniforms and were attempting to stand braced in formation, despite the tendency to float in the absence of gravity.
Kelly’s flame devoured them. The effect of his weapon under these conditions was beyond anything he had seen or dreamed of on Earth.
The compressed air tank could send the jet of fuel fifty yards, even with gravity to pull it down. Here it easily splashed the thickened gasoline off the far side of the hub, barely a hundred feet from the weapon. The lowered air pressure, half that of Earth, combined with the high relative oxygen level to turn what would have been a narrow jet of flame into a fireball which exploded across the open area like the flame-front filling the cylinder of a gasoline engine on the power stroke.
The gush of orange blinded Kelly and kicked him back against the wall from which he had begun to recoil from the thrust of the napalm itself. The suit he wore was designed to protect its wearer against the unshielded power of the Sun and insulate him against the cold of objects which had radiated all their heat into the insatiable black maw of vacuum. Its design parameters were sufficient to shield him here against the second of ravenous flame he had released. Blinking and wishing he had flipped down the sunshield over his faceplate before he fired, Kelly thrust himself off the wall of the stationary elevator and into the hub proper.
The great domed room was filled with violent motion. Smoke and occasional beads of napalm still afire swirled in the shock waves rebounding from the curved walls.
The men and women who had shared the room with the fireball cavorted now like gobbets spewed from a Roman candle. Their hair and uniforms blazed, fanned by the screaming, frantic efforts of the victims to extinguish them. Nazis, blinded as their eyeballs bubbled, collided with one another and sailed off across the dome on random courses, pinwheeling slowly.
Slender poles were set every twenty feet or so in the floor and walls of the room to give purchase to those who, like Kelly at present, were drifting without adequate control. The veteran snagged one of the wands in the crook of his left arm. He locked his body against it to kill the spin he had been given by the elevator cage which rotated with the spoke. When he had anchored himself, he was able to survey the room and the possible threats it held.
The bodies, some corpses and some still in the process of dying, which drifted like lazy blowflies over carrion, were no danger to anyone. A touch on the back of Kelly’s leg caused him to twist in panic, cursing the way the helmet limited his peripheral vision. Something smoldering had brushed him, surrounded by a mist of blood from lungs which had hemorrhaged when they sucked in flame.
Here in the hub there was a walkway seven feet wide at the point the spokes mated with it and the elevators debouched.
The plane of the walkway was continued by solid flooring across the hub, so that the sphere was separated into slightly unequal volumes. The larger one was the open, northern portion which served for zero-gravity transport between the lobes and from them through the docking module to the rest of the universe. Beneath the flooring, the other moiety of the hub was given over to the controls which ruled both the defensive array and the three thousand fusion warheads waiting for the command that would trip their retro rockets to set them on the path to reentry.
The elevators to the other lobe of the dumbbell were not moving, and the circular doorway to the control section was closed and flush with the floor across which Kelly’s boots floated. The portal to the docking module above him, however, at the north pole, was sphinctering open. Keeping the pole within the circle of his arms, Kelly leaned backward and aimed the flame gun toward the opening portal.
The recoil of two gallons of thickened gasoline shoved him down against the floor this time, but the pole anchored him well enough to send most of the three-second burst into the docking module. Ammunition carried by some of the men inside blew up with a violence that sprayed bits of metal, plastic, and bodies down into the dome.
Only after the explosion did it occur to Kelly to wonder whose arrival had caused the personnel who had conquered Fortress to draw themselves up for inspection. Well, it didn’t matter now.
The second jet of flame, though of longer duration than the first, had a more limited effect because the chamber’s oxygen had been depleted faster than the ventilation system could replenish it. Napalm spluttered, each drop wrapped in a cloud of black smoke as it drifted lazily back toward Kelly.
It was time to move anyway. He dropped the flame gun and let it trail behind him from its hose as he thrust himself toward the control room door.
The doorway was surrounded by a waist-high trio of inverted U’s made of aluminum girder. There was room for a man, even suited and laden as Tom Kelly was, to walk between each adjacent pair, but the U’s provided not only handholds the way the wands did but also protection for the doorway in the event that any high-inertia object sailed down from the docking module.
Kelly braked himself left-handed, tensing his muscles fiercely to halt his considerable mass without using his gun hand as well. The trigger guard of his shotgun had been cut away so that he could use the weapon with gloves. He was by no means certain that his motor control in his present garb was fine enough that he could count on not putting a charge of shot god knew where. He might well need all five of the rounds in the gun. The door handle was a flat semicircle that the veteran had to flip up before he could turn it. The men who briefed him on the Airborne Command Post assured him there was no locking mechanism, but that didn’t mean the Nazis hadn’t welded a bolt in place after they took over. There was the explosive tape if they had, but—
The handle turned. Kelly swung the door up, gripping a stanchion between his booted feet so that he could point the shotgun muzzle down the opening with his right hand. If the job Kelly set himself had been to clear Fortress of the Nazis who had captured it, he would have squirted his remaining gallon of napalm into the control room before he went in himself with the shotgun. Some of the men arguing on the Airborne Command Post had considered that at least the most desirable option.
The trouble was that the Soviets, driven to the wall by the fact of Fortress, had almost certainly been pushed beyond that point when the weapon was actually used against them. If something very final did not convince Moscow of America’s good faith, the Soviets would themselves precipitate the holocaust they assumed was certain in any event.
And a final, unequivocal act of good faith meant that the controls had to be intact.
Kelly went through the doorway, swinging the panel closed behind him against the rain of napalm—though most of the droplets had sputtered to expanding globes of soot by now. He expected someone to meet him in the enclosed hallway—a squad of aroused gunmen at worst, at best a trembling technician left on watch while the ceremony went on above. But there was no one in the hall, and no one in the computer rooms past which the veteran drifted, their cryonic circuitry made practicable by radiation through heat exchangers on the shaded surface of the station.
Even the control room itself, at Fortress’s south pole, was empty, though the defensive array was live and programmed, according to its warning lights, for automatic engagement.
He couldn’t possibly have been the one who had been arriving? Christ,
he’d have been almost a century old. Though in a low-gravity environment like the Moon . . .
It didn’t matter. There was a job to do.
The control room of Fortress was designed to have three officers on duty at all times. Under full War Emergency Orders any two of the consoles could be slaved to the third—with an appropriate accompaniment of lights and sirens. The arrangement was a concession to the paired facts that nobody in his right mind wanted a single individual to have the end of the world under his fingertip—and that if Fortress really had to be used, there wasn’t going to be time to screw around with authorization and confirmation codes.
The Nazis had, as expected, linked the consoles already. Kelly unstrapped the flamethrower and settled himself into the seat at the master unit, drawing himself down by chair arms deliberately set wide enough to fit a man in a space suit. There was a palm latch that would have permitted Kelly to move the back cushion to clear his life-support package. Rather than fool with nonessentials, he scrunched forward, aimed the waiting light pen at the screen, and began to press the large buttons.
Kelly was not trained to operate the console, to understand the steps of what he was doing. There had been neither time nor need for that aboard the Airborne Command Post. This was rote memory, the same sort of learning that permitted his fingers to strip and reassemble a fifty-caliber machinegun in the dark.
There were twelve weapons in the first rota which the Nazis had punched up on the screen. Their targets were given as twelve-digit numbers, not names—zip codes to hell. Warhead data appeared on the line beneath each target designator. The first target was selected for a 1.1 megaton warhead. Rather than change those parameters, Kelly flashed his light pen to target two, already set for a 5 megaton weapon, and engaged the launch sequence with the button whose cage was already unlocked.
When the launch button was pressed the first time, the printing on the screen switched from green-on-white to black-on-yellow. All data for the other weapons in the rota shrank down into a sidebar in the left corner, while ten additional data lines for the selected target appeared in large print. A black-on-red engagement clock began to run down from 432 in the upper left corner.
Kelly drew the light pen down the screen to the seventh data line, time delay, and pressed the cancel button. The number 971 blinked to yellow-on-black. Kelly keyed in the digit one, bending awkwardly to see the alphanumeric pad through the curve of his faceplate. He palmed the Execute key.
A gong went off loudly enough that Kelly heard and felt it through his suit. The top two inches of the screen pulsed Invalid Command in blue and yellow. The engagement clock continued to run down, but the top half of its digits changed from red to blue. Kelly hit the Execute button again. The data line changed from 791 to 1, and the visual and aural alarms ceased.
The veteran’s hand reached for the Launch button to confirm. He was warned that something was happening behind him, not by the sound but rather because when the door to the north section of the hub opened it reflected a shimmer of light across the console at which Kelly was working.
Reflex sent his hand to his gun instead of completing the motion it had started; instinct wrapped his gloved fingers around the butt of the weapon he had laid across his lap, though he could neither see nor feel it, garbed as he was. He twisted in the seat.
Three men, all of them wearing what looked more like aircraft pressure suits than anything intended for hard vacuum, were groping hand over hand down the passageway, past the computer rooms. Kelly fired before he could see whether or not the newcomers were armed. He had to aim overhead, and, even though gravity was not a factor, the awkwardness of the position made the fact that his buckshot missed almost inevitable.
The newcomers were in straggling echelon across the width of the passage, so one pellet glancing from the wall paneling gouged its way across the flank of the rearmost man—without drawing blood. The cut-down shotgun recoiled viciously from the heavy charge, making the veteran’s right palm tingle through the glove. Kelly clamped his left hand on the fore-end before triggering a second round.
If the trio of newcomers had startled Kelly, then the clumsiness with which they started to unsling the submachine guns they did in fact carry suggested that they had not recognized him as an enemy until that moment. The veteran could not tell whether they came from the other lobe of the dumbbell, from the docking module and the vessels positioned there, or even from some other location. All that mattered was that the chest of the nearest surrounded the front sight of the shotgun as Kelly squeezed off.
Recoil thrust the veteran against the seat cushion as he swung the muzzle toward the next man; the buckshot punched a dozen ragged holes through the first target’s chest in a pattern the size of a dinner plate. Kinetic energy chopped the victim backward, into his fellows, with his limbs windmilling and a spray of blood swirling from the pellet holes.
The third of the newcomers fired wildly as the dead man tangled with him, the muzzle blasts cracking sharply despite Kelly’s muffling helmet. The veteran switched his aim to the man who had his gun clear. He fired, shattering the face shield and hitting the target’s own weapon with several pellets which drove it off on a course separate from that of the man who had used it.
The German in the middle of the group still had not managed to unsling his gun when Kelly’s buckshot slammed his lower abdomen and spun him back up the aisle. The center of the passageway was now a fog of blood.
Kelly paused a fraction of a second to be sure that the trio’s movements were the disconnected thrashing of dying men. Then he turned his head down to the console and the screen on which the engagement clock had run down to 221 seconds. Enough time. He thumped the Launch button again, setting the new parameters which would detonate the 5 megaton warhead one second after Fortress released the reentry vehicle.
There wasn’t a prayer of getting out the way he had entered the space station, but the docking module was a relatively short path to vacuum. There was at least a chance that Wun would be waiting wherever Kelly exited Fortress. Might as well hope that, because otherwise Kelly didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving.
He launched himself up the passageway, suddenly terrified by knowledge that in a little over three minutes, Fortress was going to reach the orbital position from which it would automatically release the weapon he had cued.
Thrust in weightlessness had its own rules. The veteran moved in a surprisingly straight line, but his body tumbled slowly end over end, so that he had to catch himself with his free hand on the jamb of a computer-room doorway at the midpoint of the aisle. One of the men Kelly had just killed floated in the same doorway. The German looked to have been about Kelly’s age when he died . . . and there was a radio with a loaded whip antenna set into the right side of his helmet.
The veteran, poised to jump the rest of the way to the door, had an instant to wonder what his victims might have reported. The burst of fire from the doorway answered the question even as it was being formed.
Lighting in the passageway was dimmer than that in the domed room above, and the gunman was sighting past the bodies of his fellows besides; his target was not Kelly, lost among the corpses, but rather the motion down by the control console. The burst of submachine gun fire rang on the flamethrower twisting gently in the air currents, rupturing the pressure tank with a bang louder than that of Kelly returning the shots from his doorway.
The last charge of buckshot lifted the German, now faceless, up in a slow arc toward the top of the dome.
The flamethrower air bottle was still pressurized to several hundred atmospheres when it burst, so bits of it gouged deep holes in the aluminum panels nearby. The control consoles had been protected from the blast by the napalm tanks, so the engagement clock continued to count down, unimpaired.
Kelly snatched the submachine gun, a Walther, from the unresisting fingers of the body beside him. The three-shot burst he fired emptied the doorway of the figures already poking guns over the ci
rcular lintel . . . but there was no way the veteran was going to escape in that direction.
He pushed himself fiercely back toward the control consoles. No one had briefed him on the way to abort a launch sequence, and the clock was down to 97 seconds. A shot through the console or bursts into each of the incredibly complex computers up the hall would probably shut down the operation—but that would not save Kelly, only delay his end until hostile manpower overwhelmed him, and it would pretty well guarantee the failure of his mission. Fortress contained too many warheads for their release onto Earth, even unguided, to be an empty threat.
Tom Kelly was a fox with hounds waiting to rend him at the mouth of his burrow. Well then, he’d dig out the back—and if it didn’t work, it was still a long step up from resigning himself to his fate.
The south pole of the hub, like the north with its docking module, was clear of the doughnut of shielding which surrounded the lobes of the dumbbell. Kelly flattened himself against the curve of the control-room floor which corresponded to the roof of the dome at the other axis. Locking his boots around the chair bolted in front of a console, the veteran reeled off a strip of his blasting tape. He was duck soup for any gunman who came through the door just now—but if the survivors weren’t more cautious than their fellows had been, they were bloody suicidal.
The adhesive was only on one side of the thick tape, so when Kelly folded the strip at an angle to make a corner, the second length did not stick to the bulkhead against which it lay. Fucking bad design, but he should have checked it on the ground himself, and anyway it’d have to do. . . .
Kelly stuck down the third side of the square he was taping as a long burst of automatic fire squirted from the north side of the sphere. The muzzle blasts were blurred by the helmet and the shots’ confusion, with their own multiple echoes, but the ringing of bullets which hit the bulkhead near Kelly was clear enough. Dust puffed, and the tip of his left little finger, extending the final length of tape, flicked away from a hole in the aluminum.