Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [123]
“Damn!” snapped Falco, dropping his long sniper rifle and tumbling backward, head over heels. Jackson saw a jet of air puffing from his shoulder, where his suit had been punctured; but the quickly equalized atmosphere served to stop the leak. The lieutenant was relieved to see no sign of blood emerging from the tear in the suit, and the self-sealing material was already closing over the breach.
Meanwhile, the rest of the SEALS took the adjacent corridor by storm. Several of the G-15s ripped out their streams of slugs, while one man launched a flash grenade that sparked brightly in the midst of the enemy fighters. Bodies floated, pirates bleeding and motionless where the initial bursts of fire had caught them. Jackson saw three men drifting grotesquely over a heavy machine gun, the weapon propped behind a half-bulkhead and trained toward the airlock where the first blast had occurred. There was a second, interior, hatch behind the first, and the pirates had been covering that entry with a dozen weapons. Clearly the diversion had worked—the enemy had expected a frontal attack, but the Team had taken them in the flank.
With devastating effects, the CO saw as he powered himself forward, through the debris of the brief, violent clash. At least a dozen pirates, all of them in space suits and armed with a miscellany of very deadly looking weaponry, had been prepared to defend against the breaching of the airlock. Some of them had been blasted by the force of the breaching charge, and the others had been too stunned to aim when the SEALS had come pouring through the hole.
“A few of ‘em got away,” Sanchez reported. “They were heading farther into the ship.”
“Let’s not let them catch their breath,” Jackson admonished. “Full pursuit, Team.”
Even in their haste, the men did not forget their training, or their partners. Two fire Teams—Sanchez with Marannis, and Dobson with Robinson, probed down the corridor in a coordinated advance, one man covering while his partner moved. Sanders took several men down a side passage, while Master Chief Ruiz and the new man, Gunner’s Mate Mirowski, settled in to guard the rear.
“Permission to take off the helmets, L.T?” asked Chief Harris, as he and Harry Teal accompanied Jackson deeper into the ship. The two SEALS were propelling themselves along near the upper deck, while the officer flew steadily forward just above the “floor”.
“Denied, Chief. There are too many ways these bastards could surprise us,” replied the CO. He checked the readout on the interior of his Plexiglas faceplate, confirming that the air in the corridor was in fact quite breathable. Even so, he worried about a sudden breach—accidental or planned—that could result in an almost immediate vacuum. Nor could he afford to ignore the threats of poison or disabling gas.
A burst of gunfire ripped out before him, still silent but bright with muzzle flashes and tracer rounds. Marannis sprayed a juncture in the corridor before them, and Sanchez lobbed a grenade from his under barrel launcher. The device exploded twenty meters ahead, concussion and flash punching through the compartment where the enemy seemed to be making a stand.
“I got six or eight hostiles up here, L.T,” reported one of his point men. “They got cover, and don’t look to be backing up any more.”
As if to punctuate the point, a barrage of tracer fire erupted from the large compartment ahead of the SEALS. Immediately the Teammates flowed toward the edges of the passageway, taking cover behind arches, chairs, and within the closed doorways that occasionally dotted the bulkheads. They returned fire, adding a few more grenades to the party, but even after the explosions the enemy returned a heavy volley, keeping the Team pinned in place.
“Sanders—do you copy?” barked Jackson into his helmet mic. He knew that his subordinate had embarked down a side corridor twenty meters back from