The veteran, poised to jump the rest of the way to the door, had an instant to wonder what his victims might have reported. The burst of fire from the doorway answered the question even as it was being formed.
Lighting in the passageway was dimmer than that in the domed room above, and the gunman was sighting past the bodies of his fellows besides; his target was not Kelly, lost among the corpses, but rather the motion down by the control console. The burst of submachinegun fire rang on the flamethrower twisting gently in the air currents, rupturing the pressure tank with a bang louder than that of Kelly returning the shots from his doorway.
The last charge of buckshot lifted the German, now faceless, up in a slow arc toward the top of the dome.
The flamethrower air bottle was still pressurized to several hundred atmospheres when it burst, so bits of it gouged deep holes in the aluminum panels nearby. The control consoles had been protected from the blast by the napalm tanks, so the engagement clock continued to count down, unimpaired.
Kelly snatched the submachinegun, a Walther, from the unresisting fingers of the body beside him. The three-shot burst he fired emptied the doorway of the figures already poking guns over the circular lintel . . . but there was no way the veteran was going to escape in that direction.
He pushed himself fiercely back toward the control consoles. No one had briefed him on the way to abort a launch sequence, and the clock was down to 97 seconds. A shot through the console or bursts into each of the incredibly complex computers up the hall would probably shut down the operation – but that would not save Kelly, only delay his end until hostile manpower overwhelmed him, arid it would pretty well guarantee the failure of his mission. Fortress contained too many warheads for their release onto Earth, even unguided, to be an empty threat.
Tom Kelly was a fox with hounds waiting to rend him at the mouth of his burrow. Well then, he’d dig out the back – and if it didn’t work, it was still a long step up from resigning himself to his fate.
The south pole of the hub, like the north with its docking module, was clear of the doughnut of shielding which surrounded the lobes of the dumbbell. Kelly flattened himself against the curve of the control-room floor which corresponded to the roof of the dome at the other axis. Locking his boots around the chair bolted in front of a console, the veteran reeled off a strip of his blasting tape. He was duck soup for any gunman who came through the door just now – but if the survivors weren’t more cautious than their fellows had been, they were bloody suicidal.
The adhesive was only on one side of the thick tape, so when Kelly folded the strip at an angle to make a corner, the second length did not stick to the bulkhead against which it lay. Fucking bad design, but he should have checked it on the ground himself, and anyway it’d have to do. …
Kelly stuck down the third side of the square he was taping as a long burst of automatic fire squirted from the north side of the sphere. The muzzle blasts were blurred by the helmet and the shots’ confusion, with their own multiple echoes, but the ringing of bullets which hit the bulkhead near Kelly was clear enough. Dust puffed, and the tip of his left little finger, extending the final length of tape, flicked away from a hole in the aluminum.
The veteran had been wounded in worse ways, but nothing had hurt him like this since an ant buried its mandibles in the joint of his big toe. Kelly screamed and crimped the igniter lever in the end of the roll an instant sooner than he had intended. Five seconds – and at least the pain of his missing fingertip as he lunged away gave him something to think about besides the blast radius and the question of whether the gunman was aiming shots or just spraying them down the passageway.