Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (78 page)

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 hundred 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.

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.