Reflex sent his hand to his gun instead of completing the motion it had started; instinct wrapped his gloved fingers around the butt of the weapon he had laid across his lap, though he could neither see nor feel it, garbed as he was. He twisted in the seat.
Three men, all of them wearing what looked more like aircraft pressure suits than anything intended for hard vacuum, were groping hand over hand down the passageway, past the computer rooms. Kelly fired before he could see whether or not the newcomers were armed. He had to aim overhead, and, even though gravity was not a factor, the awkwardness of the position made the fact that his buckshot missed almost inevitable.
The newcomers were in straggling echelon across the width of the passage, so one pellet glancing from the wall paneling gouged its way across the flank of the rearmost man – without drawing blood. The cut-down shotgun recoiled viciously from the heavy charge, making the veteran’s right palm tingle through the glove. Kelly clamped his left hand on the fore-end before triggering a second round.
If the trio of newcomers had startled Kelly, then the clumsiness with which they started to unsling the submachineguns they did in fact carry suggested that they had not recognized him as an enemy until that moment. The veteran could not tell whether they came from the other lobe of the dumbbell, from the docking module and the vessels positioned there, or even from some other location. All that mattered was that the chest of the nearest surrounded the front sight of the shotgun as Kelly squeezed off.
Recoil thrust the veteran against the seat cushion as he swung the muzzle toward the next man; the buckshot punched a dozen ragged holes through the first target’s chest in a pattern the size of a dinner plate. Kinetic energy chopped the victim backward, into his fellows, with his limbs windmilling and a spray of blood swirling from the pellet holes.
The third of the newcomers fired wildly as the dead man tangled with him, the muzzle blasts cracking sharply despite Kelly’s muffling helmet. The veteran switched his aim to the man who had his gun clear. He fired, shattering the face shield and hitting the target’s own weapon with several pellets which drove it off on a course separate from that of the man who had used it.
The German in the middle of the group still had not managed to unsling his gun when Kelly’s buckshot slammed his lower abdomen and spun him back up the aisle. The center of the passageway was now a fog of blood.
Kelly paused a fraction of a second to be sure that the trio’s movements were the disconnected thrashing of dying men. Then he turned his head down to the console and the screen on which the engagement clock had run down to 221 seconds. Enough time. He thumped the Launch button again, setting the new parameters which would detonate the 5 megaton warhead one second after Fortress released the reentry vehicle.
There wasn’t a prayer of getting out the way he had entered the space station, but the docking module was a relatively short path to vacuum. There was at least a chance that Wun would be waiting wherever Kelly exited Fortress. Might as well hope that, because otherwise Kelly didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving.
He launched himself up the passageway, suddenly terrified by knowledge that in a little over three minutes, Fortress was going to reach the orbital position from which it would automatically release the weapon he had cued.
Thrust in weightlessness had its own rules. The veteran moved in a surprisingly straight line, but his body tumbled slowly end over end, so that he had to catch himself with his free hand on the jamb of a computer-room doorway at the midpoint of the aisle. One of the men Kelly had just killed floated in the same doorway. The German looked to have been about Kelly’s age when he died . . . and there was a radio with a loaded whip antenna set into the right side of his helmet.