Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Attack on Mars Research Station #3
One: Weigh Out
Two: Mission to Mars
Three: Down in the Valley
Four: It’s Personal Now
Five: Counterattack
Six: Treachery
Seven: Tezlac Catal
Eight: Through the Void
Nine: A World of Trees
Ten: Ambush Applied
Eleven: A Trip to Town
Twelve: Turning the Tables
Thirteen: Out of the Frying Pan
Fourteen: Custer Had It Easy
Fifteen: Fight in the Skies
Sixteen: Olin Parvik
Seventeen: A Phone Call
Eighteen: Nuclear Diversion
Nineteen: Prison Break
Twenty: Unfriendly Skies
Twenty-One: Alliance
Preview for Operation Orion
Copyright
To all the men of the Teams—
past, present, and especially future.
Hooyah!
Attack on Mars Research Station #3
The Gamma rover came to a halt and the four SEALS bounced out. Each carried his weapon at the ready, and they spread out at a fast jog.
The LT steered their rover toward the right while Chief Harris kept his eyes on Sanders and his men. The fire team advanced in a leap-frog formation, one pair moving forward while the other covered it with their weapons. The chief kept the outboard multibarreled machine gun ready to support them.
“Flash—got a flash out of the supply building!” Lt. Jackson barked.
The Foxtrot rover vanished in a silent blast, fire flashing for an instant as fuel and oxygen combusted with searing force. The explosion broke the vehicle in two, and left a mist of pulverized material—a vapor with a sickening tint of redness—slowly settling to the surface. One lone wheel rolled a short distance, wobbled, and fell onto its side.
The command rover heeled violently as the LT accelerated, veering unpredictably as he steered a zigzag course. Harris fired at the place where he had seen the flash, the rapid-fire weapon spraying so many tracers they looked like a fuzzy laser beam licking at the target.
Another flash brightened the gap in the supply shed’s doorway, and their rover lurched hard. The depressurization warning flashed, shocking Harris into an instant of panic until he remembered he was wearing a suit.
“We’re hit!” snapped Jackson. “Shit—I lost power!”
Chief Harris saw the hole in the cockpit dome where the shell had entered; it must have passed out through the body without exploding. Outside, the SEALS were pouring fire while still moving toward the barracks building. He glanced again at Foxtrot. The wreckage was scattered in a wide circle, dust still settling. There was no prospect of finding a survivor. But the SEALS never left one of their own behind, alive or dead. When they could, the squad would search the wreckage for their teammates.
Right now, they were in the fight of their lives on alien soil…
One: Weigh Out
Master Chief Petty Officer Rafael Ruiz was more than mildly irritated by the need to conduct another six-hour training regimen without even a break for a hot meal, let alone a catnap. After all, he had been outside the SATSTAR1 station for the last ten hours, enclosed in his suit, breathing bottled air and watching his men go through the paces of a weightless/vacuum survival drill. The six SEALS had passed with flying colors and were floating toward the mess hall and then their bunks, but the chief had to take one more man outside and check him off the list.
But verbal displays of selfish displeasure were for lesser mortals than master chiefs, and so Ruiz carefully replenished the air supply for his breather and the mobility jets on his suit again, double-checking all the connections for his life support pod. The Mark III Survival Suit/Vacuum/Military was a marvel of engineering, but it wasn’t exactly a pair of silk pajamas. It weighed more than a hundred pounds at 1 G—and though they were working in a weightless environment, the suit, like everything else up here, retained every ounce of mass when it came to moving it or stopping it from moving.
The suit was triple-lined with layers of rubber, plastic, and metal foil. Even so, it was thin and supple, riding close to the skin and not restrictive of movement. The gloves allowed the fingers