There was movement in the direction of the door, the floating bodies twisting under the impact of bullets and fresh men plunging down the passage to finish the job. The submachinegun Kelly had appropriated had vanished, drifted off unnoticed while the veteran worked with the blasting tape. He looked desperately for the gun, wondering if the Nazi bullets had already shattered the launch control mechanism. The attackers were acting with a furious disregard for the equipment on whose capture they had invested so much effort. Maybe they –
The outline of PETN explosive blew a square out of the bulkhead so sharply that a green haze quivered along Kelly’s optic nerves. He dived forward blindly, over the console that had shielded him from his own blast and into the stream of air rushing out the open. Vacuum would not affect the suited Germans, but neither should it harm the control-room hardware. The shock of the blast might or might not cause an abort. It’d be okay if the designers had done a proper job of isolating the computer banks from the structure of Fortress, and it was too late to worry about that anyway.
Kelly’s head and the hands he had thrown up to protect his faceshield were sucked neatly through the opening, but his thighs slammed the edge. He hadn’t realized just how fierce was the outrush until that blow; it felt as though a horse had kicked him with both hind legs. Kelly spun head over heels from the space station, like a diver in an event which would continue throughout eternity for anything he could do to change it.
The tip of his left little finger stung. The veteran reached for it instinctively with the other hand and squeezed the glove instead against the portion of finger above the second joint – the part that remained. The tears that burned worse than the blood freezing on the stump were not shed for pain but rather for loss. A part of Tom Kelly’s body was gone as surely as his youth and his innocence.
The plume of air from the hub was dazzling where the reflection of the north polar mirror caught it. Closer to the hull from which it spewed, the venting atmosphere was a gray translucence lighted only by rays scattered higher in the plume.
The array of nuclear weapons through which Kelly tumbled was as black and brutal as a railroad marshaling yard at midnight.
The weapons that were Fortress’s reason for being were anchored to the south hub by a tracery of girders, balancing the docking module and lighting mirror at the other pole of the axis. In schematic, the framework suggested precise randomness like that of a black widow spider’s web, each crossing of strands supporting a nodule of thermonuclear warheads. The blunt curves of individual reentry vehicles were encased in aluminum pallets which supported clusters of small solid-fuel rockets.
The rocket motors simply counteracted the orbital momentum which each bomb shared as part of the space station. The pallet dropped away from the reentry vehicle after no more than thirty seconds of burn. For the remainder of its course, the warhead followed a ballistic trajectory governed by the same principles which had controlled the projectile fired by a fourteenth century bombard.
It was only after the reentry vehicle reached its target that advanced technology took over again, and the warhead detonated with more force than all of the explosives used in all the wars until that time.
There was no sign of the aliens who Kelly had prayed would meet him.
He had come out of the hub at an angle, but the nest of warheads was spread widely. Kelly saw that at each of his own slow rotations, an outlying node of bombs – six of them attached like petals to a common center – was growing in silhouette against the blue-white splendor of Earth. Distance was hard to judge in the absence of scale and atmosphere, but it looked as if the array were going to be close enough to touch.
The bomb should have gone off by now; he had drifted for what seemed at least five minutes. His strip charge or the flying bullets must have aborted the sequence. Kelly twisted, trying to follow the framework as it floated behind his head. He could not move even his body for lack of a fulcrum, but if he could catch hold of some solid object he could halt himself. Then he could wait for the aliens. Or for the Germans to locate and riddle him. Or for the moment he emptied the air pack from which he had been breathing since the monocle ferry was sealed.