Now, he supposed, the door to space was about to be destroyed, and he along with it.
So far, though, his luck seemed to be holding out. The explosions were coming from the direction of the Nostromo—and the fuel depot. The first near miss occurred when a piece of generator, trailing an arch of flame, pounded a crater into the ancient roadbed, two meters from the rail.
No damage.
Simultaneously, a leather glove with a hand still in it struck his face. The slap sent Voorhees and his assistant running, as more pieces of blast debris fell—lighter material now—sheets of tin roofing and glowing red embers of paper.
By the time Voorhees reached the Silverbirds, Hanna Reitsch was already seated in the cockpit of the first ship, impatiently waiting as Dr. S?nger recited the prelaunch checklist. The two rocket-bombers sat on adjoining forks of a Y-shaped section of track that converged onto the monorail.
“Scrap the goddamned list!” she cried abruptly, pulling the canopy shut so fast that it nearly clipped off the rocket designer’s fingers. Without hesitation, she began locking it down.
“Get off!” she screamed at S?nger, who made no reply as he leaped down, then ran toward his young protégé.
Voorhees noticed that the cockpit of the second ship was open and empty.
“Where’s Lothar?” Voorhees demanded over the sound of machine-gun fire, but S?nger did not hear him. He seemed to be thinking about something else.
Voorhees brushed past the rocket man and climbed up onto Reitsch’s Silverbird I.
Avoiding eye contact with Reitsch, he performed a last double check of the canopy’s seals. He felt a sudden bump, then a rush of relief as he saw that the movement had been caused by a miniature locomotive that was struggling to slide the Silverbird I and its sled into its final launch position.
Voorhees jumped down to the ground and shot a glance at the second rocket. It was still empty. “Where is Lothar?” he shouted at S?nger.
But once again, the rocket man never heard him. As the words left Voorhees’s mouth, another wave of explosions occurred, much nearer this time, but luckily still too far away to have an effect on the monorail.
This won’t last, he thought, and almost immediately, more gunfire erupted nearby.
Even before the Silverbird I hit its mark on the straightaway, Reitsch fired the sled engines—which thundered to life, blast-furnacing the locomotive and its driver before the man could back his vehicle out of the way. Several technicians working nearby dove for cover as hot gases and locomotive fragments blew past them, instantly setting the Silverbird I’s vehicle assembly building aflame.
Incredibly, given his lifelong love for rockets, it never occurred to Voorhees to watch, or even to realize, that he was in the very midst of nothing less than the launch of the first “manned” spacecraft.
But now was not a time for watching. There was no time left for anything except the Silverbird II.
MacCready’s plan had begun to go south the very instant that his first sticky bombs detonated next to the fuel tanks. Some never exploded at all, while those that did failed to penetrate the tanks, which were more like Thermos bottles, well protected by layers of insulation. What the bombs did accomplish was to alert the entire base.
After the blast, the trio tried to take refuge in the forest, a safe distance from what they hoped would be a base-ravaging ball of flames. But there had been no fireball. Instead it was as if they’d stepped on a hive, and the base defenders were swarming like wasps, firing their weapons in a hundred different directions, shredding trees up to a quarter mile away but finding no targets.
“What are they shooting at?” Thorne wondered out loud.
“Us,” Yanni replied.
Now came a new sound, the velocity-driven buzz of enormous blades cutting through the air at high speed.
“What the hell is that?” Thorne cried, pointing to something that looked like a giant dragonfly rising above the tree line. The machine’s rotors were so powerful they tore holes in the fog, drawing down clear air from above.
“They’ve spotted us!” MacCready shouted, as a round buried itself into a tree nearby. He could see the aerial marksman, as unlikely a candidate as any for an assassin. The man was fat and clad in what appeared to be a kimono and the sheer incongruence of it held him spellbound until—
In a flash of recognition, R. J. MacCready saw the perfect geometric alignment.
Raising Private Woessner’s MP-43 skyward, he sent a stream of lead toward the helicopter’s port-side blade. The whole machine shuddered and whined, then tipped suddenly to port.