Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [11]
Lieutenant Jackson sat between the pilots on Tommy. Ensign Sanders would drop with the boat crew on Mikey. It took less than ten minutes for the Team to get secure in each boat. The keels and hulls of the drop boats were solid carbon-reinforced titanium and were fastened to the axial shaft of the Pegasus. The overhead deck was Plexiglas and clear, and so the men had a great view as the massive hold doors slid back.
Mars was there below them, filling the sky from one side to the other in a great rust-red swath. Beautiful and forbidding, the place looked dry and lifeless, scarred by eons of bombardment and erosion. Some of the gaps were small cuts; others were deep wounds that had been torn into the planet’s surface with almost palpable violence. Jackson immediately thought of the Roman god of war. The planet, he decided, was aptly named; the bulk of its surface was the color of dusty dried blood.
Jackson was surprised to see another shape in orbit around Mars, larger than Pegasus but also a ship. It was silvery metal and long, not like the haphazard attached spheres of a POD station. It had four massive engines near the stern and consisted of many compartments connected by short booms, rather like the segmented body of an ant. He pointed it out to the pilot, Coxswain Grafton.
“That’s a Shamani ship, Lieutenant. Called the Gladiola, I think.” Grafton replied. “Captain Carstairs told me it was up here. It arrived a few weeks ago on a supply run.”
Jackson replied, “I knew the Shamani had researchers down on the Martian stations to collect some of their own data. Quite a vessel,” he added, impressed by the size and apparent intricacy of the long ship.
“Well, yeah, if you like that sort of thing, sir,” Grafton acknowledged. “I’ll take Pegasus any day. Like a speedboat compared to an oil tanker, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” Jackson acknowledged.
“Still, that sucker is plenty fast,” Grafton allowed. “And that fat section near the engines? That’s spare fuel for the reactors. She can travel something like 300 light-years without replenishment—something like six times the range of our frigate. At least, that’s what we think.”
“I know,” Jackson replied. “Your CO is looking forward to shaking her down on a trip to another star system. One of these days.”
“You know it, sir. Won’t that be a ride.”
Pegasus had settled into an orbit around the planet, and they were rapidly coming up on the dark side. The officer was amazed at how quickly the surface of Mars slipped by. Even though there were no seas, rivers, clouds, or coastlines—the features he’d thought gave Earth its character when viewed from space—he could make out tremendous variation in the dry surface. He spotted some low mountains and numerous channels—the famous “canals”—that scrolled by in a hurry. They passed over the massive canyon known as the Valles Marinaris, a gulf so broad that it was visible by telescope from Earth. Soon they passed the line of sunset, or dawn, and the features were darkened by shadow.
Except for one sparkling diamond of light.
“That’s MS1,” the coxswain informed him. “The station that sent out the SOS.”
Jackson knew about MS1; he and his men had the schematics and relevant information for both MS1 and MS3 uplinked to their wristers. Most of his transit time had been spent reviewing MS3, but still, he already had known that MS1 had begun under the auspices of the United Nations some ten years earlier; it was the first Earth-manned outpost on an alien world. It had been a small workstation, staffed by some two dozen scientists, until the arrival of the Shamani. With the aid of POD technology, MS1 had been expanded to a village-sized base manned by more than a hundred people. Three other research centers, MS2 to MS4, had also been recently established on the red planet,