Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [86]
“You mean if they break out, right, sir?” Sanders queried.
“Yes,” Jackson replied grimly. Once again, his thoughts turned to Mirowski, the SEALS who had sacrificed his life to save the CO. “If they break out.”
Three hours later, the SEALS were all strapped into the seats of a large shuttle. They had found the ship easily by following a subterranean passageway and quickly determined that it was fully fueled and ready for launch and had more than enough room for the Teammates and their navy companions. The roof that enclosed the place had been a slab of steel, covered by ice and snow on the outside so that it had been indistinguishable from the terrain all over the ice moon. Fortunately, the controls were right there in the hangar, and they had opened it with no difficulty.
Harry Teal, who had augmented his earlier pilot skills with actual training in spaceflight during the past year, sat in the captain’s chair. Jackson rode shotgun, though he would leave the flying up to the corpsman. Baxter was behind the pilots’ chairs, ready to try the radio as soon as they broke free from the ice moon’s powerful shield of electrical interference. The rest of the men were below them in the long hull, reclining in seats that were oriented toward the bow of the shuttle so that for now they essentially were lying on their backs.
They had brought a number of computer files that Baxter had downloaded from the command center consoles before they had demolished that equipment and made their way down the long, cold tunnel to the remote launching hangar. Sanders sincerely hoped that those files would provide some useful intel on the Eluoi mission in this system and their thwarted capture of the shield drive.
“The sixty-four-million-credit question,” Sanders muttered through his communicator, “is whether we’ll find the Pegasus waiting for us in orbit.”
That was indeed a matter of life and death, Jackson and all the Teammates understood. If the frigate, which had had no contact with the landing party since the drop boats had penetrated the moon’s atmosphere, had moved to a new location, they would simply orbit above the ice world until their supplies gave out.
But Stonewall Jackson knew Captain Carstairs very well, and he was willing to bet the lives of himself and all of his Teammates that the captain would have his navy ship somewhere nearby when they finally burst through the clouds.
“Everybody hold on,” Teal said by way of warning. He started to flip switches, and very soon they felt the rumble of powerful rocket engines firing. The shuttle held in place, trembling, for another few seconds and then blasted upward with enough acceleration to plaster the SEALS hard into their cushioned seats. Jackson barely had the strength to turn his head sideways. By the time he did, the snow-encased landscape had vanished below them, swallowed by the constant murk.
The G-force of the ascending rocket was extreme but not fatal. The men simply allowed the pressure to hold them against their seats. Here and there a SEALS crossed his fingers or whispered a nearly silent prayer; they knew they were basically powerless to influence their fate on this risky launch.
The ship blasted upward through the stormy atmosphere. For half a minute snow and ice created a whiteout against the windows of the pilot’s cabin, but the rocket swiftly rose above the planetary weather. Soon it was coursing through the region of electrical disturbance, and Jackson was worried when he realized that his hair, even on the back of his hands, was standing on end from the powerful ionizing effects. Within another minute even that was left behind, and the strangely reassuring blackness of space yawned before them.
Teal eased back on the throttle, the acceleration force backing down to a couple of Gs as the shuttle continued to rise away from the ice-coated moon. Jackson was amazed by how happy he was to be back in space;