Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (77 page)

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.

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 it 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.