Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [115]
“Any external weapons on this tub?” Jackson asked.
The pilot, still studying the vidscreen, shook his head. Then he cursed, a sound so guttural and explosive that the translator chip in the lieutenant’s ear didn’t even try to render the word into English.
“We’ve got company—hostiles!” Olin Parvik barked suddenly, pointing to the screen with the blip designating the derelict warship. That image was suddenly lighting up with multiple contacts, all of them closing in on the shuttle.
Jackson counted them on the screen: four blips of red color approaching rapidly from two directions. They flew in pairs, just like fighter pilots and their wingmen in standard air-to-air combat tactics. It seemed likely that they were closing in for what they expected to be an easy kill.
“Dammit! They were waiting up here in orbit for us,” the officer guessed.
“Everybody, hold on!” the pilot shouted. By the time Jackson repeated the command in English, Parvik had flipped a switch and the shuttle was heeling violently, tumbling through a sharp change of course. G-forces slammed the passengers into the sides of their seats.
“We got nothing to shoot at them, but I can try to make us a tough target. I don’t like our chances much, though,” the Assarn declared grimly.
A rocket flashed past the shuttle, close enough for Jackson to make out the hieroglyphics on the tube. The Assarn pilot veered to the side—only the straps held the lieutenant in his seat against the violent maneuver—and the weapon exploded in eerie silence a short distance away.
“That was too close,” Jackson grunted.
“And we’re burning up most of our maneuvering fuel,” the pilot noted. “Not only that, but there is another ship coming from space. We look to be trapped here.”
Jackson looked at the display, which showed the array of ships in three dimensions. The two Eluoi vessels before them and the second pair astern were holding position. A fifth bogey was zooming toward them from a higher orbit. A glance out the viewport showed the latter ship as a spot of brightness that was growing more brilliant with each passing second as it sped closer.
There was no place to go, no direction that offered even the slightest hope of escape. Jackson grabbed the arms of his chair and held on, hating above all else the thought that he and his men were going to die without even having a chance to shoot back.
Twenty-One: Alliance
A sudden brightness sparked through the interior of the shuttle’s cabin, light strobing through the windows in a stuttering series of flashes. Jackson winced, waiting for the explosion, the rush of expelled air that would, likely as not, carry him and his men into cold, deadly space. But there was no impact, no sound. When he looked out the porthole, he saw that the flashes had come from the flaming exhaust of rockets, a veritable stream of them, that shot through the dark vacuum but completely bypassed the vulnerable shuttle.
Through the porthole Jackson saw one of the Eluoi ships tumbling away, spewing flames from a massive rupture in its hull. Tiny figures were expelled through the breach, and he knew without a doubt that they were Eluoi sailors carried into the vacuum by the violent decompression of their dying ship. The newcomer, the ship from far above the five orbiting shuttles, had blasted the Eluoi ship with the volley of missiles, some eight or ten bolts spewing toward it with lethal force. Now the firing ship veered enough for the SEALS to get a good look at it.
More sparks flashed from the approaching starship, and a second barrage of missiles streaked one after the other from a hull-mounted battery. The deadly darts curved past the SEALS’ spacecraft and impacted in lethal succession on the hull of the second Eluoi shuttle. That ship exploded with such force that it left nothing but a cloud of debris.
“That’s Pegasus!” Ruiz whooped in pure elation. “The cavalry is coming over the hill!”
The navy ship was visible to the naked eye now, its powerful