Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [19]
“Unknown number of hostiles, sir,” Ensign Sanders said without turning his head. “They’ve built some kind of reinforced position just inside the air lock where they’ve placed some kind of heavy automatic weapon. No small arms fire—yet. But they’re dug in as solid as a tick.”
“Then we’ll just have to put a hot match on their asses,” Jackson said. Peering just past the tarp, Jackson could see that the air lock door had been moved about halfway shut to block any view of what was inside the air lock itself. The thick metal of the hatch would be hard for the SEALS to shoot through with their 6.8-mm carbines, even with armor-piercing ammunition. And charging what was effectively a fortified machine cannon with unknown backup was not the way to keep his men alive.
What Jackson didn’t want to do was call in an air strike by the Pegasus or try to punch in some 30-mm high-explosive grenades from Falco’s underbarrel grenade launcher. In spite of the fact that whoever was in that air lock had just killed the four SEALS who had been in the Foxtrot rover, Jackson wanted intel, and one didn’t get a lot of intelligence from dead bodies. He wanted prisoners.
Looking over to where the other shooter pair of SEALS were crouching behind a stack of heavy building materials, Jackson smiled at the option he had just been given.
Even among the SEALS, Gunner’s Mate Wilson “G-Man” LaRue stood out. In the Teams, where physical fitness was almost a religion, G-Man was something of a legend. He had earned his nickname back during the fifth phase of training, when he had gotten up out of an acceleration couch during an engine burn, dropped down on the deck, and done push-ups while undergoing 5 Gs of boost. As a big operator, G-Man liked to carry a big weapon. In the man’s hands, Jackson could see that he had his G15 carbine up and ready to fire. But across G-Man’s back was Baby, the big SEALS’ favorite weapon.
The Shamani had not supplied a lot of weapons technology to the Earth forces when they first had arrived. Weapons were not what they did. But the power supply technology they did give their human compatriots could be adapted to power weapons. Not beam weapons—those were still only in the planning stages. But projectile weapons—they were something humans had been doing for a very long time. Every so often, new innovations were added to the concept of the old slug thrower, and Baby was just the latest generation in the long and storied genealogy of lethal firearms.
The Mark IV rail gun G-Man had slung across his back could punch out a slug of copper and uranium at velocities that couldn’t be reached by traditional means other than with a gun the size of a telephone pole. On Earth, the hypervelocity slugs could slam through heavy steel armor plate with the ease of earlier shaped-charge explosive rockets. In the thin Martian atmosphere, the two-meterlong weapon was even more efficient. The impact of its projectiles would make steel flow like water.
The drawback with the weapon was that it was big and heavy, and the backpack-sized power cells could fire only eight rounds. A large bulbous cylinder at the back of the weapon carried the eight annular explosive rings that would fire from the rear of the rail gun and help counter the recoil of the copper slugs. Eight shots could be fired as quickly as the operator could recover and pull the trigger again, and G-Man recovered very quickly indeed.
“G-Man,” Jackson said over the net, “can you take out that gun?”
“I can hit it, no problem, LT,” G-Man said back. “But as soon as I swing Baby here around, they’ll open up before I can get off a shot.”
“You just get ready,” Jackson said. “When we draw their fire, you put a round right into that position and take out their gun.”
It was a simple and very dangerous plan. Jackson intended for Ensign Sanders, Falco, and himself to open fire on the air lock hatch. When whoever was inside responded to their fire, G-Man would have a chance to take out their main weapon. Given that the SEALS didn’t know the capabilities of the unknown enemy or their weapon, things