He grinned, this time genuinely – not that the difference was noticeable. “Only thing is, it’s a lot bigger’n the ones I’ve had to jump out.”
“You bet your ass,” the crewman agreed proudly, then reported on his commo helmet as he settled himself in a seat by the tail ramp.
The flight was uneventful. It would have seemed uneventful even if Kelly had not spent much of the air time asleep. The crew had a job to do, and they were cruising at twenty knots above normal speed; even with the agreed need for haste, there was no reasonable way to wring more out of a big bird optimized to move cargo.
The cockpit windows showed the clouds below or, through the clouds, the Mediterranean. The wall of gauges and displays in front of each flight engineer had more potential interest, at least – the possibility that boards would suddenly glow red and the sea would take on a reality beyond that of a backdrop for the hole the C-141 was punching through the sky.
But sleep was useful, once the demands of socializing had been met. The new routing was to Torrejeon, just outside Madrid. That could change at any moment; since this Starlifter was a B model with air refueling capability in addition to a lengthened fuselage, their final touchdown could be El Paso – if the Powers That Be decided.
Kelly dreamed of Fortress, but not as he had seen it in photographs and artists’ renderings. Now there was a trio of saucers tethered near the docking area. Their design prevented them from using the airlocks in normal fashion, but a saucer was still connected to Fortress by a thick umbilicus configured at its nether end to mate with the station in the same manner as the nose of a Space Command transporter.
Fortress showed no sign of the struggle in which it had been captured. The outer doughnut of raw bauxite and ilmenite from the Moon, the same material that was refined and extruded in the solar furnaces with which Fortress built itself, was beginning to weather into greater uniformity under the impact of micrometeorites and hard radiation. It was not scarred by anything more major, the high-explosive or even nuclear warheads against which it gave reasonable protection.
The close-in defense arrays visible from the north pole of the space station were empty, the spidery launching frames catching sunlight and shadowing one another at unexpected angles. Two of the launchers were missing, sheared down to their bases when their rockets gang-fired.
The space station itself was a dumbbell rotating within the hoop of shielding material. Each lobe of the station was a short length of cylinder connected by a spoke to the spherical hub. Now the dream-viewpoint shifted, angling across the center of the doughnut toward the windows through which mirrors deflected sunlight into the living quarters of Fortress. Polished slats repeatedly re-reflected light while filtering the radiation which would otherwise have entered through the windows as well. –
As Kelly’s mind watched, the trailing end of one of the lobes flew outward in slow motion. The aluminum panels twisted under stress but kept their general shape and even clung in part to the girders on which they had been hung. Glass-honeycomb insulation disintegrated, providing a spinning cloud which mimicked the bloom of white-hot gases to be expected from a normal explosion.
The real blast had been only a small one – strip charges laid along the inner frame of the panel. The difference in pressure between hard vacuum and the part of the space station which had just been opened to that vacuum was sufficient to void most of the chamber’s contents, however. Flimsy furniture, sheets of paper, and over a hundred living men spewed into space along with the metal and shredded glass.
Some of the men flapped their arms vigorously, as if they were trying to swim to the hub or the brightly-sunlit saucers docked there. In the event, when a few of them did collide with bracing wires, they spun slowly away; they had lost the ability to comprehend what might seem a hope of safety, though they still were not legally dead.