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 pistolgrip 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.