Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [111]
For now, he would use them as a diversion. There was nothing else to do.
It was more than fifteen minutes later when they drew near the crater where they had concealed themselves on the side of the pyramid. The former prisoners’ hands were raw and blistered from holding the ropes, and sweat sheened every forehead. Even through their exhaustion, though, they were elated at their success. Even Char-Kane, as she greeted them at the crater’s edge, allowed herself a rare smile of pleasure.
As Ruiz came by, she reached out and gave his hand a squeeze. Touched and moved, he almost hugged her, but some memory of that frosty aloofness held him back, and he merely squeezed her hand in return.
“Someone’s coming, Master Chief,” Sanders noted. They watched an Eluoi jetcar bank past, engines almost whispering at low idle as the machine wobbled back and forth in the prearranged signal.
“Check your boarding passes and carry-on bags, people,” the master chief said in delight. “This looks like our ride. If everything’s gone all right, he should have the LT, Chief Harris, and Falco on board.”
Twenty: Unfriendly Skies
“Those are the refueling docks,” Olin Parvik explained, guiding the jet transport in a careful descent toward Batuu City’s spaceport. “We’ll want to take a shuttle that has a full load on board, I assume, so I suggest we keep an eye on where the fuel is delivered.”
“Of course,” Jackson said. He was busy gawking like a tourist out the window as they approached the massive installation. He had never seen the like for the simple reason that there was nothing like it on Earth. During their telephoto scrutiny earlier, when Zaro and Tezlac Catal had debarked from the shuttle, they hadn’t flown directly over the port. Now he found himself overwhelmed by the sheer size of the place.
The shuttle port was a rough square some twenty or thirty kilometers on each side. Much of the space was overgrown with brushy wetlands and thickets, though there were no tall trees within the compound. Roads crisscrossed the whole place in a network of pavement that looked from the air like a great spiderweb.
Huge enclosures contained rows of massive silver tanks, and he guessed that they were the fuel stores. An array of equipment resembled a chemical plant or a refinery, and he assumed that that was where the volatile propellant mixtures were prepared. The nerve center of the installation was an array of huge white buildings, many of them with monstrous doors suggesting that they were used as hangars or warehouses. Several shuttles rested, nose up, on pads around the massive central complex. One of them was a winged craft attached to the stem of a tall, slender rocket, not unlike the original space shuttles on Earth. But most of the ships had self-contained, sharp-nosed shapes with stubby bodies resting on struts, with two or three downward-tracking engines.
The bristling array of the central complex was only a small part of the huge spaceport. At a single glance Jackson could see at least two dozen landing zones in the distance, each connected to the central hub by a surface road. Massive tractor-trucks crawled along some of the roads, and at least two of them were pulling shuttles into position on the launching pads. The shuttles were pointed upward, in launch orientation, ready to streak toward the stars or, more likely, toward starships and space stations in orbit around Batuun.
He was relieved to see no evidence of an overt military presence: There were only a few jetcars, similar to their own, on aerial patrol. He couldn’t see any indication of land-based batteries, but neither could he rule out the possibility that guns might be concealed in one or more of the massive buildings. The SEALS and their civilian comrades were crowded into the captured transport. Doctor Sulati had set up an emergency IV for Robinson and had declared herself guardedly optimistic that the man would recover, mostly as a result of Harry Teal’s skilled treatment.
“Any preference where you want to set down?” Parvik asked, banking gently and easing them away