Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (80 page)

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 opening. 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 attachéd 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.

The bombs were coming into sight again, past Kelly’s toes. He
was
going to collide with them; the retro rockets of the nearest were within two yards and growing as the—

The rockets fired.

There was a puff of exhaust that clouded the metal from the ablative coating of the reentry vehicle itself. Then the cold vapors became three glowing blossoms while the bomb broke away from the cluster, the equivalent of five million tons of TNT fused to detonate one second after release.

With a horrified scream in his throat, Tom Kelly drifted through an invisible portal that left him collapsed at the feet of Wun, who still looked like a swarthy businessman, in his human suit and face.

When Kelly wanted to watch the destruction of Fortress a third time, the aliens looped the final twenty seconds of the event and played it over and over while they worked on the human’s finger.

“Does that hurt, Mr. Kelly?” Wun asked through the speakers of the helmet now resting beside Kelly.

“Just a little,” said the veteran, though his wince a moment before had been diagnostic. “Look, it’s okay.”

Three aliens with no concession to human design or accoutrement bent over Kelly’s outstretched left hand. Beyond them and seemingly as much a part of present reality as the five figures—theirs and Kelly’s and Wun’s—hung a vision of Fortress from about a kilometer away. The doughnut was viewed at a flat angle from the south pole, so that the four saucers at the docking module were partly visible over the curve of shielding material. Dora had joined her three dull-finished aluminum sisters and was linked to Fortress by an umbilicus.

The webbing holding the nuclear weapons was illuminated by a flash so intense that aluminum became translucent and only the warheads themselves remained momentarily black.

Most or all of the weapons which absorbed the sleet of radiation from the first 5 megaton warhead also detonated a microsecond later. Fortress—the space station, the saucers which had brought the Nazis to it, and the kilotons of shielding material—became vapor and a retinal memory in a blast that devoured the entire field of view . . . and faded back to the start of the explosion.

“Mr. Kelly,” said Wun peevishly, “the question is not whether you can
stand
the pain but rather if we can eliminate it. Which we can do unless you pretend stoical indifference.”

Another of the aliens poked toward (though not
to
) the stump of Kelly’s finger with an instrument that looked like a miniature orange flyswatter. “Does
that
hurt?”

“There’s a dull ache on the—the lower side,” said the veteran, pointing with his right index finger. He hated to look at the amputation, though the aliens had closed the wound neatly with something pink the texture of fresh skin. He’d get used to the loss, as he’d gotten used to other things.

The orange instrument twisted. The ache disappeared. Fortress vaporized again in the ambiance beyond.

“Where will you have us place you when your injury is repaired, Mr. Kelly?” asked Wun, his eyes on Kelly while his voice came disconcertingly from the helmet at an angle to the figure.

“You’re going to get in touch with governments now?” Kelly said. Lord knew what that blast would do to communications on the planet below, but there’d be auroras to tell the grandkids about. There’d
be
grandkids for those who wanted them, and that made it worthwhile. “Formal contact, I mean?”

Hell, it’d have been worthwhile if Tom Kelly had become part of the ball of glowing plasma he’d created with the help of Wun and a lot of luck. And whatever.

“We can return you to the base from which you were launched into orbit, for instance,” said Wun. The other three aliens stepped back as if to admire the repair work they had completed on the human’s finger. It was as perfect as it could be without the portion the bullet had excised.

The loop of destruction flared again. Cheap at the price.

“I’ve been told in worse ways I oughta mind my own business,” said Kelly, grinning at Wun. “And no, I don’t want to go back to El Paso any time soon.”

The stocky human stood up and stretched. It felt good to move without the bulk of the suit, good to breathe air that smelled like Earth’s on a spring day. It felt very good to win one unequivocally.

It would have felt even better to have forgotten the scene in the dome as he left it, the drifting, smoking bodies. At the time, that part had seemed like a win also. . . .

“No,” he said, “there’s a couple people I owe . . . I dunno, maybe an explanation. Maybe just a chance to take a shot at me.”

Kelly’s face softened as he thought about his past, recent and farther back, as far as he could remember. “If I had good sense, I’d just walk away from that,” he said. “But I never did have much use for people who walked away from things.”

The three evident nonhumans had vanished. “You wish to be returned to the neighborhood of the woman Tuttle or the woman Romer?” said Wun, who either was psychic or understood how Kelly’s mind worked better than anybody born on Earth seemed to have done.

“You can do that?” the veteran demanded.

“Either one,” responded the alien. “Which would you prefer?”

“I—” began Tom Kelly. He laughed without humor, a sound as sharp as the warheads outlined against the first microsecond of the destruction of Fortress.

Then he reached into his trousers pocket to see if there were a coin he could flip.