Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [116]
The copper and uranium slugs punctured the hull of the first enemy ship without losing velocity; Jackson saw them spark and burn like meteorites as they struck the atmosphere below. Gas, vapor, and debris spewed from a dozen holes in the stubby shuttle. Its interior lit up with flames as debris, bodies, and fiery wreckage scattered down toward Batuun’s atmosphere. The fire was snuffed out almost immediately by the vacuum, leaving the hulk drifting and dark.
The remaining Eluoi craft simply turned and fled. The last they saw of it was the fiery tail of its rocket engines propelling it along the outer reaches of Batuun’s atmosphere toward the safety of the far side of the world.
The SEALS’ shuttle, having expended the last of its fuel in desperate evasion, was dead in space, drifting in orbit around that planet. The hemisphere below them was dark, but they knew that dawn—and the bustling Eluoi city—lay not far beyond the horizon. Even with the planetary defense battery destroyed, Jackson wasn’t eager to attract the attention of the numerous shuttles, some of them outfitted with weaponry, still on the ground at the spaceport.
Thus, the SEALS and their companions watched intently as Pegasus maneuvered closer, its helmsman expertly using the auxiliary rockets to match the frigate to the shuttle’s orbit, only a few dozen meters away. It was a simple matter for a bosun’s mate in the I Deck of Pegasus to extend a robot arm and secure a grip to the shuttle’s tail, temporarily locking the two vessels into one object.
The air locks of the two ships, each alien to the other, didn’t match up, and so two sailors in pressure suits emerged from the frigate’s air lock and floated into the shuttle’s pressurized entry hatch, towing a string of sixteen spare suits behind them. The twelve SEALS and their four companions—Parvik, Char-Kane, Dr. Sulati, and Director Parker—all suited up and easily made the short journey over to the frigate. Almost immediately the shuttle was released, and the warship powered up, making sure that it stayed over the portion of the planet where it could not be tracked from Batuu City. Luckily, the Assarn had taken out most of the satellite defense grid.
Jackson and Dr. Sulati wasted no time in finding the frigate’s medical officer, who, accompanied by the doctor and Harry Teal, quickly saw that the injured Robinson was taken to the infirmary, a high-tech compartment with a surgical center in the space between the batteries on D Deck.
Captain Carstairs greeted the rest of the Team warmly and was especially interested in meeting the Assarn pilot when Jackson introduced him.
“Ignore the fact that he looks like a pirate, sir. He saved our lives,” the SEALS officer said sincerely.
“No more than returning the favor,” the pilot replied graciously. “I would be bound for an Eluoi slave ship right about now if these men hadn’t come along when they did.”
With that endorsement, the captain was pleased to show the pilot some of the features of his frigate and led Olin Parvik and Stonewall Jackson up through the battery deck, to the CIC and the officers’ wardroom, and finally up to A Level, the flight deck in the warship’s nose.
“Seems like your FTL drive checked out okay, Captain,” Jackson observed. “Or else you wouldn’t be here and we’d be sucking vacuum right about now.”
“Your message took us by surprise just as we were getting ready for a shakedown cruise out to Alpha Centauri. It didn’t take much to alter the coordinates to Batuun, though we could only hope we’d get here in time.”
“You did. The very nick of time, it’s fair to say,” the lieutenant replied gratefully.
“What happened back on Mars?” Carstairs asked. “We got a message from MS1 saying