Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [10]
“All right, you sailors,” the chief said at 2000. “The LT wants us all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when we get to Mars. Lights out for eight hours, starting in ten.”
The SEALS went to their bunks willingly after first reassembling weapons and equipment that had been taken apart for final inspection. The deck still looked like a scene of chaos, worse than a teenager’s bedroom, but Ruiz knew that the disarray was deceiving. His men knew where every piece of equipment was, and if necessary they could grab it all and stow it completely inside of a minute or two.
For six hours, the thin silver pencil that was the Pegasus raced toward Mars at steadily increasing speed. There came a brief period, some thirty minutes, of weightlessness as the main engines idled and the ship maneuvered through a serene pirouette, until her stern in effect became her bow, aligned directly with the red planet, which from there appeared even brighter and more strongly hued than it did from Earth. Even so, it seemed to be no more than a bright-looking, somewhat reddish-colored star.
The engines kicked in again, this time to decelerate the speeding ship, and with the inertial dampening system, courtesy of the Shamani, again activated, gravity of 1 G was restored. The Teammates spent the next five hours resting and preparing, checking equipment, and reviewing the schematics of MS3. They got steady updates from the CIC over the intercom, and when they were sixty minutes away from orbit and the drop point, they collected their gear, packed their backpacks and belts and pouches, and made ready to move out. Twelve hours and forty-five minutes after leaving SATSTAR1, the overhead hatch opened and Lieutenant Jackson and Ensign Sanders slid down the ladder to announce that it was time to go.
Now the SEALS were all business. Fully protected by pressure suits, they gathered their equipment and filed through the hatch down to I Deck. This was a long hold that was almost completely filled by the two specialized shuttles—the drop boats—that would carry the men down to the planetary surface. One was the Norris, the other the Thornton. To the SEALS they were simply Tommy and Mikey.
Seven SEALS enlisted men and one officer would go in each boat, which was crewed by an additional three sailors: two pilots and a gunner. The pilots guided each boat from the bow, much like the first and second seats in an aircraft’s flight deck. The gunner manned a nose turret with two coaxial weapons: a high-powered recoilless cannon that was the boat’s main gun, and an electronic cannon that fired an electromagnetic pulse of energy that could have all sorts of nasty impacts on an enemy’s electronic, computer, and sensory equipment.
Directed energy beam weapons still didn’t work as well as the ordnance people back on Earth would have liked in spite of the power systems supplied by the Shamani. Kinetic energy was a known factor and did work—very well. Thus, even in space, humankind was still throwing rocks—sophisticated ones from exotic launchers, but still pretty much rocks. Jackson and the SEALS were happy to know they were there.
Though the Team had drilled boarding and debarking from the drop boats countless times, this would be their first real drop from an actual ship. Since this mission had come up before the Pegasus could be worked into their training regimen, it would be the first time they actually had ridden them down to a planet. Despite the adrenaline rush, every man moved precisely to his assigned place in the column. They embarked smoothly, sliding one at a time through the ventral hatch on each shuttle—a reverse procedure, but in its smooth precision not unlike paratroopers filing out of their C-47s over Normandy 106 years earlier.
Quickly the men settled into the seats in each boat. There was plenty of extra stowage space, or there had been a few