"Sir, I think we should at least go out fighting—"
"You think? I'm still the commander of this station and I want those men ordered back. Do it."
There was a short pause, then the reluctant reply: "Yes, sir."
But it was already too late. Moyer called over stationwide interphone. "General, I can see one of them. He's made it to the spare Thor racks."
Wearing large MMUs, the manned maneuvering units, on their backs, Baker and Yemana unstowed two Thor missiles, refrigerator-sized cylinders with dozens of arms sticking out of each side. After the missiles were hauled out of their containers Baker opened an access panel on one side of each missile and activated a series of switches that bypassed the SBR controls and made the missiles autonomous. Next he removed a maintenance access-cover on each missile and manually activated the Thor's radar-seeker head. Finally he and Yemana helped each other to attach the missiles to brackets on their MMU cylinders, and together both men slowly, carefully edged their way underneath opposite sides of the central station keel and maneuvered the seeker-heads of their missiles around the edge of the keel and up toward where they had last seen the Soviet spaceplanes.
Their only, shared radio transmission came after they had maneuvered their bulky missiles around the keel and aimed them at the point in the sky where the Soviet spaceplanes had been parked. Yemana put a finger on his MMU thruster, took a deep breath, and called, "Now."
Yemana jetted forward six feet, stopped and swung his missile up. Ironically, since the SBR antenna on his side had been blasted away he had a perfectly unobstructed shot at one of the Soviet spaceplanes, which he could see as a dim oblong shape against the backdrop of stars. He waited a few moments until a tiny flashing green light on the removed maintenance access panel illuminated, then hit a button on the engine control panel, unclipped the missile and pulled back his right-hand MMU thruster controller. He had jetted only ten feet away from the Thor missile when it's engine ignited…
Baker had to move forward a few extra feet to clear the large SBR antennas on his side, but it took only a few extra seconds. Then he swung the front of the Thor missile upward, twisting the hand thruster controllers to counteract the huge inertia of the Thor missiles. It took a few moments longer for him than for Yemana, but Baker soon had his Thor missile pointing right where the Soviet spaceplane had been parked…
Except it was no longer there…
"General, missiles pointed right at us," came the startled call from Colonel Voloshin. The Soviet pilot couldn't believe what he saw: an American astronaut maneuvering a Thor missile around in open space. The sight would have been merely weird if it weren't such a clear warning of imminent attack.
Govorov reacted instantly, pulling his Elektron spaceplane straight up ninety degrees and applying full throttle. As an added measure he overpressurized one of the small tail-thrusters of his Elektron spaceplane, then cut the thruster off, sending a cloud of monomethyl hydrazine rocket fuel out behind the spaceplane. In seconds he had darted several hundred meters away from the huge American space station.
The Thor missile ran straight and true. Yemana fought the sudden back-blast of the Thor's main thruster and quickly regained control of his MMU. He watched, fascinated, as the missile's steel-mesh snare began to unfurl and quickly expand to nearly its full one-hundred-foot diameter. There was no way it was going to miss…
Except at that moment the Soviet spaceplane heeled sharply upward, and literally in the blink of an eye it was gone. The Thor missile ran straight toward the spot where the spaceplane had been, but it made no attempt to turn upward to pursue the fleeing Soviet intruder. Although Yemana had no way of knowing, the missile's radar-seeker head had locked onto the dense cloud of hydrazine fuel. When it reached the slowly dispersing cloud, the missile computed zero distance to its target and detonated its one-thousand-pound flak warhead.
Yemana saw the flash of the exploding warhead but saw or felt nothing else. The missile had exploded less than three hundred feet away, sending five hundred pounds of metal chips flying in all directions. Unimpeded by any obstruction or even the resistance of gravity, the chips easily found the astronaut and tore through his body, detonating the MMU's pressurized tanks and adding their explosive fury to the carnage. Yemana's ragged corpse was propelled by the explosion's shockwave out into space.
"General, the missile has exploded behind you. I'm beginning my attack."
Govorov kept the throttle of his Elektron at full thrust until he heard Voloshin's message, then selected the roll thrusters and did a fast four—"g" dive back down toward the station. He heard a few pings of metal against the silica tiles of his Elektron but ignored it. He saw nothing now but his quarry in the sights of his Scimitar missile-launcher…
Will and Sontag saw the flash of light and heard the rumbling explosion of the first Thor missile. "Yemana. Baker. Where are you?"
Sontag unstrapped and quickly propelled himself between the two flight deck seats and across to the aft crew station. He pressed his face to the windows facing into the cargo hold and scanned the sky behind Enterprise toward the center keel and lower pressurized modules. "I see one of them," Sontag called out cross-cockpit. "I don't know if it's Baker or Yemana…"
Baker saw the Soviet spaceplane almost on top of him, but there was no time to reacquire his target. He tried to maneuver his MMU down and over to aim the Thor missile's sensor at the spaceplane, but in his rush to steer the missile he activated the MMU thruster controls too rapidly and sent himself into a violent forward spin. When he tried to apply opposite thrust to correct his spin, the Thor missile broke free from the attach point on his MMU, and he had to watch Silver Tower's last hope for defense spin away toward earth.
Colonel Voloshin saw the flash from the first exploding missile, and the sudden glare made him furious. He immediately activated his laser target designator and centered the aiming reticle on the first target in view: the white-suited body of Dr. Kevin Baker just beginning to get his spinning MMU under control. He squeezed the trigger. A single Scimitar missile ejected itself from the rotary launcher in Elektron Two's cargo bay. Its tiny rocket engine ignited. The missile's seeker-head followed the reflected laser energy from Elektron Two straight to its target.
The laser seeker-head broke apart on Kevin Baker's MMU chest-mounted control pack, but the hypervelocity Scimitar missile kept on going. Right behind the seeker head was a nonexplosive arrow-pointed warhead made of an alloy of molybdenum and depleted uranium, designed to penetrate the thickest armor — Baker's chest offered no resistance to the missile, which was now traveling at well over a mile a second. The missile pierced Baker's body, his MMU, went completely through the storage module fifty yards behind Baker, and through the outer bull of Skybolt's MHD reactor before deflecting off one of the four-foot-thick MHD reactor walls and off into space.
"Oh… my… God."
Will strained around and saw Sontag move back slowly from the cargo bay windows. "What is it, Rich…?"
"One of them… oh, God… they shot him point-blank with a missile."