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.
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.