And a final, unequivocal act of good faith meant that the controls had to be intact.
Kelly went through the doorway, swinging the panel closed behind him against the rain of napalm – though most of the droplets had sputtered to expanding globes of soot by now. He expected someone to meet him in the enclosed hallway – a squad of aroused gunmen at worst, at best a trembling technician left on watch while the ceremony went on above. But there was no one in the hall, and no one in the computer rooms past which the veteran drifted, their cryonic circuitry made practicable by radiation through heat exchangers on the shaded surface of the station.
Even the control room itself, at Fortress’s south pole, was empty, though the defensive array was live and programmed, according to its warning lights, for automatic engagement.
He couldn’t possibly have been the one who had been arriving? Christ, he’d have been almost a century old. Though in a low-gravity environment like the Moon . . .
It didn’t matter. There was a job to do.
The control room of Fortress was designed to have three officers on duty at all times. Under full War Emergency Orders any two of the consoles could be slaved to the third – with an appropriate accompaniment of lights and sirens. The arrangement was a concession to the paired facts that nobody in his right mind wanted a single individual to have the end of the world under his fingertip – and that if Fortress really had to be used, there wasn’t going to be time to screw around with authorization and confirmation codes.
The Nazis had, as expected, linked the consoles already.
Kelly unstrapped the flamethrower and settled himself into the seat at the master unit, drawing himself down by chair arms deliberately set wide enough to fit a man in a space suit. There was a palm latch that would have permitted Kelly to move the back cushion to clear his life-support package. Rather than fool with nonessentials, he scrunched forward, aimed the waiting light pen at the screen, and began to press the large buttons.
Kelly was not trained to operate the console, to understand the steps of what he was doing. There had been neither time nor need for that aboard the Airborne Command Post. This was rote memory, the same sort of learning that permitted his fingers to strip and reassemble a fifty-caliber machinegun in the dark.
There were twelve weapons in the first rota which the Nazis had punched up on the screen. Their targets were given as twelve-digit numbers, not names – zip codes to hell. Warhead data appeared on the line beneath each target designator. The first target was selected for a 1.1 megaton warhead. Rather than change those parameters, Kelly flashed his light pen to target two, already set for a 5 megaton weapon, and engaged the launch sequence with the button whose cage was already unlocked.
When the launch button was pressed the first time, the printing on the screen switched from green-on-white to black-on-yellow. All data for the other weapons in the rota shrank down into a sidebar in the left corner, while ten additional data lines for the selected target appeared in large print. A black-on-red engagement clock began to run down from 432 in the upper left corner.
Kelly drew the light pen down the screen to the seventh data line, time delay, and pressed the cancel button. The number 971 blinked to yellow-on-black. Kelly keyed in the digit one, bending awkwardly to see the alphanumeric pad through the curve of his faceplate. He palmed the Execute key.
A gong went off loudly enough that Kelly heard and felt it through his suit. The top two inches of the screen pulsed Invalid Command in blue and yellow. The engagement clock continued to run down, but the top half of its digits changed from red to blue. Kelly hit the Execute button again. The data line changed from 791 to 1, and the visual and aural alarms ceased.
The veteran’s hand reached for the Launch button to confirm. He was warned that something was happening behind him, not by the sound but rather because when the door to the north section of the hub opened it reflected a shimmer of light across the console at which Kelly was working.