Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [12]
Captain Carstairs’s voice came through the comlink. “One minute to drop, SEALS. Good luck to you all. We’ll be up here just in case you need a little backup.”
“That’s good to know,” Jackson replied. “And thanks for the ride.”
With that, the bay doors opened and the residual air in the hold immediately gushed into space. Once the atmosphere was completely gone, the drop boats were released from their docking brackets and expelled from the hold with a lurching blast of air pressure.
The pilots fired the small rocket engines, and the two shuttles began a long, curving descent toward MS1. Tommy was in the lead, with Mikey a kilometer higher and about five klicks back. Though Mars did have a very thin atmosphere, the boats had no wings for gliding. Instead, the descent would be controlled totally by a series of downward-firing but adjustable rockets arrayed on the underside of the hull. Those boats were designed to get downplanet fast; they weren’t designed for air support. Rumor had it the air force was working on some sort of fighter, but it would be years before they would have something operational.
Jackson kept his eyes on the planet’s surface as Tommy sped forward and down, rumbling slightly as it passed through an atmosphere that didn’t really deserve to be called air. In fact, it was so thin that it would be fatal to a man exposed to it almost as quickly as would the hard vacuum of space.
Now they were riding over the dark portion of the planet, and it was harder to sense their speed. Still, it seemed as though the light speck that was MS1 was gradually drawing closer. That spark of illumination was some distance away when Tommy was rocked by a sudden hard jolt.
“What the hell?” the coxswain barked, wrestling with his control stick as the bow dropped and the vessel started a long forward tumble. In seconds they were looking through the overhead deck at the planet underneath them.
“I got an energy pulse, sir,” came a voice over the intercom. It was the gunner, Jackson realized. “Came from just about below us, still a hundred klicks this side of the station.”
The copilot, meanwhile, was flipping switches on a console beside him, consulting a dazzling array of dials and gauges. “Restoring control, skipper,” he said. “Our EMP shielding protected us. That blast would have fried all the electronics on a civilian ship.”
“Turn up the shields to full.”
Jackson knew that like the Pegasus herself, the drop boats were fitted with adjustable shielding. Some equipment—especially the communication and detection arrays—was of necessity disabled by the full shielding, but it gave the vessel the best chance of surviving an electromagnetic pulse attack.
“Gunny, you got a bead?” the coxswain asked.
“Still looking, sir. Tracking the ground—wait, yes!”
Even as the gunner announced the affirmative, another jolt knocked into the boat. This time the coxswain was able to right the craft quickly. The starboard rockets punched in, and the vessel kicked into a hard left turn.
“Fire!” the coxswain shouted.
Jackson and everyone else aboard felt the pulsating recoil of the bow cannon as the gunner sprayed the unseen area of the planet’s surface. “I’m tracking a power source, sir,” he said. “But I’m shooting blind.”
The boat was rocked by another jolt, and this time the craft started to yaw with a sickening sense of falling.
“Full power!” Grafton demanded, his voice taut. The rocket engines roared with a power that could be felt and heard through the solid conductivity of the drop boat’s hull.
“Still shooting at us, sir,” came the gunner’s voice. “An unknown attacker with a lot of power. I can get a general fix but not a bead on the target.”
“Dammit, this is no time to screw around. I want to lay an egg on that sucker,” the skipper muttered. “Line up a shot with the Mark 90. Hit them with a sledgehammer.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Jackson knew about the Mark 90. It was a small-yield tactical nuke, a fractional-kiloton weapon similar to what his men had available as major demolition charges. As he thought of his men