He stepped over a body and looked out the port. They were waiting below with an alert but stoic patience. One of the terrorists was smoking. Dom calculated the chance of taking all five of them with a blast from the port. No way. The shots would also take one or more of his three friends. He moved back, jerked the mask from the ruptured head of the Firster who had been first to die. He cringed at the wetness, but fortunately the blood was mostly on the back side of the mask. He took a deep, shuddering breath and pulled it over his head. He stuck his masked head out of the port and made a hissing sound. They all looked up at him. He pointed to a hooded man and made a come-up-here motion. The man shouldered his weapon and came scampering up the ladder.
The plan was to have them come up one or two at a time, but it didn’t work. The man on the ladder saw the bodies of his companions and started to yell out. Dom clubbed him. He fell, half in, half out of the port. A burst of explosive rounds shattered the facade of the computer. Dom leaped to the view port and swept the room below with rifle fire, careful not to fire too close to the tight group of Art, Doris, and Larry. The two traitor space marines went down along with two of the Firsters.
Art Donald, moving with surprising swiftness, jerked Doris down, fell atop her behind a subconsole. They were out of the line of fire. Larry was not fast enough. He was seized by one of the two remaining men. The other one moved to stand on the other side of Larry, the three of them up against the control console below Dom and out of his line of fire. One of the terrorists began to shoot up the face of the computer with methodical thoroughness. Both of them stayed close to Larry. Dom was unable to fire. He had to dodge the fire which swept across the facade. The explosive missiles did not penetrate, but they sent small pieces of shrapnel flying.
“You can’t get out of here alive,” Dom yelled. “You can live, if you choose.”
In spite of the fact that terrorists were not executed, but merely confined as if the authorities wanted to keep them healthy until their friends could kidnap an important official to trade for the freedom of the imprisoned ones, they rarely surrendered.
“Put down your weapons,” Dom yelled.
A new burst of fire was the answer. When it died down he looked out the port. There had been a change in strategy. Having failed to destroy the memory banks, they would now try to damage the program by killing three important people. He watched helplessly as one of the surviving terrorists pulled out a grenade and lifted it toward his mouth to pull the pin. The grenade would take out Doris and Art, and they had their hands on Larry. Dom had a choice. By leaning out and pointing his weapon down he could take them, but it would mean sweeping Larry with the deadly explosive bullets.
The situation moved toward a point of no return in slow motion, for Dom could not bring himself, not even to save Doris and Art, to kill the smiling little man who was sandwiched between the two Firsters. He couldn’t do it. There was nothing he could do except cry out a protest.
But Larry Gomulka was a problem solver. It was his specialty. He, too, watched the movement of the grenade upward toward the white teeth of the Firster, and the direction of the man’s gaze revealed his intentions.
“Stay down,” Larry yelled, as he leaned forward and calmly flipped the manual exploder on one of the charges planted on the console. All Firster explosive devices were equipped with manual detonators. Public suicide was a popular hobby among the Firsters, and they liked to take people with them.
Dom felt the face of the computer blow inward, heard the concussion, felt himself falling. He was moving as he fell, scrambling to his feet as the echoes tore at his eardrums. Art was moving, trying to lift a portion of the console off his back. Doris was under him, screaming. Dom could see her face. He dropped the rifle. It struck what was left of a body and rolled to make a solid-sounding thunk on the floor. The body in the hatchway had been blown forward by the blast and was minus a leg. The console was a ruin, and a hole had been blown into the base of the machine. An armless torso rested against the remains of an overturned subconsole. It was not Larry. The chest was too big. The black body suit had been blown away to expose strong, young chest muscles. Dom heaved on the console, and Art was trying to stand up, shaking his head. Doris was swallowing, trying to restore her hearing. Dom helped Art to his feet and left him leaning against the shattered computer face. He lifted Doris.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice sounding faint. His ears still roared with the explosion.
“I can’t hear you,” she said. She spoke loudly. “Larry’s dead?”
Dom nodded. “He saved your life,” he mouthed at her.
Her face seemed to melt. There were no tears, just a heaving of her chest and strangled sounds from her throat.
The outer door burst open and space marines dashed in, looking young and impressive and futile. Dom recognized the young cadet officer who had assured him that the marines would handle the situation swiftly.
Now came the reaction. He trembled. He felt as if he was going to vomit. He never wanted to hear the name Folly again. Whatever she was worth, she was not worth the life of one small, slightly overweight, beer-drinking, smiling man. He leaned backward, almost falling before his hips found the edge of the shattered console. Doris put her hand on his arm and looked at him.
“He kept them from destroying the information banks,” she said. For a moment Dom thought she was talking about him, wanted to laugh, but then he realized that she was thinking of Larry. “He saved the project,” she said.
Dom knew that she’d get it straight in her mind later. For the moment, it didn’t matter what she thought. Larry had saved something far more important to him than the information in the computer. He had saved the life of the woman he loved and the life of a friend.
Chapter Six
At one end of the room thick plastic ports gave a view of the stars, bright, undimmed by atmosphere, hard and sharp points of light in a pitch-black sky. Among a small group of people at the far end of the room, so that the stars were not visible to them, Dom stood in full dress uniform. Doris, too, was in the parade dress of the service. Art Donald was, in fact, the only civilian present as a four-star admiral presented Larry’s medal to his widow. The ceremony was being televised live to Earth.
When it was over and the admiral was on his way back to DOSEAST in Washington, Dom watched Doris gulp a full ounce of raw scotch.
“I don’t want it,” she said, looking down at the small gold medallion in her hand.
“I think I know how you feel,” Dom said.
“Larry would have laughed his head off at this,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“He would have said, never was there a more unlikely candidate for the Space Medal of Honor.” She smiled faintly, but there was no joy in the smile.
“No man ever deserved it more,” Dom said.
“Amen,” Art said.
“Is your life worth so much?” Doris asked bitterly. “I don’t value mine that high.”
Art choked on his drink. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Oh, Art, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I think it’s all so funny. So very, very f-f-funny.”
“Easy,” Dom said, putting his hand over hers.
“There’s no way Art could have known that we, Larry and I, have talked about this very sort of thing,” Doris said. “He said heroism, especially the sort which entails the ultimate self-sacrifice, is one of our more cherished traditions, beginning with the Spartan boy who let a fox or a rat or something gnaw out his guts for some reason. Then the good soldier throws himself atop the grenade to save the lives of his buddies at the expense of his own. Isn’t it very strange, he would say, how the top medals, the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Space Medal of Honor, are so often awarded posthumously?”