Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [21]
“Good.” Jackson’s reply was curt, his mind full of memories of the dead men. “Tell ’em to send a shuttle for us while you’re at it. We’re going to need transport back to MS1.”
Her red eyes narrowed at his commanding tone, but he was too tired to notice, and she apparently was pragmatic enough not to make an issue of it. She went back to the station’s communication center with Electrician’s Mate Falco, while Jackson found Chief Harris still looking over the wreck of the enemy’s automated gun.
“This thing didn’t just drop here, LT,” Harris remarked. “And I’m wondering where we might find the assholes that set it up.”
“I’m thinking along the same lines, Chief. Why don’t you set up an OP and keep your eyes open while we secure the rest of this joint?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the chief responded. “I saw a glass lookout tower on top of the biggest dome. I’ll get up there and have a look around.”
With an observation post established, Jackson spoke to the rest of his men, then determined that Falco had established communications with Master Chief Ruiz back at MS1: “They have a shuttle they’ll send for us on an emergency basis, but it didn’t sound like they were happy about burning the fuel. I think the master chief had a few choice words with them.”
For a moment Jackson’s temper flared, the familiar tension tightening his hands into fists. He drew a long slow breath, but the haze of fury didn’t go away. Four dead men and they were griping about fuel? “Tell them—” he started.
And just like that it was gone. He could breathe again, and he simply shook his head. “What’s their ETA?”
“Ninety minutes, they tell us.”
Within a half hour the rover returned with Teal and Falco and four bundled bodies. Jackson watched silently as the two SEALS carefully, even reverently, set the corpses next to the vehicle, neatly laid out on the Martian surface. They came a long way from home just to die. The bitter thought arose, and he roughly forced it away.
“Skipper.” Chief Harris’s voice crackled in Jackson’s ear. The officer glanced up to the observation post on top of the large dome and saw the bosun’s mate staring through a magnifier toward the horizon of the vast canyon, which was looming as a cliff a dozen kilometers away.
“Yeah, Chief? You see something?”
“I think I got something—a visual. We’re expecting a friendly, right?”
“A shuttle from MS1. It should be coming from that direction.”
“Here’s comes our ride, then.”
The SEALS and the consul de campe took shelter in the factory dome—carrying the lifeless bodies of their comrades in with them—and watched the shuttle land, the rocket thrusters throwing up a great cloud of swirling dust. They all hustled aboard and secured seats in the boxy hull. Jackson made his way to the flight deck to find that the ship was flown by a USAF captain wearing an ID that named him as Joseph Cheever, with a Chinese Air Force lieutenant in the copilot’s chair.
“Any chance we can bring that rover back with us?” Jackson asked.
“Your master chief said you would want to do that,” the pilot said. “It’s the only reason he didn’t come along and bring the rest of your men. I’ll drop the hatch. If you can drive it into the hold, we can carry it.” He grimaced for a moment. “And Lieutenant, sorry about your men. We heard you had some casualties.”
Jackson bit back a sharp retort. Whoever was complaining about fuel usage, it wouldn’t be these men who flew the shuttle. “Yeah…thanks,” he said.
Twenty minutes later the remaining rover was stored, and the crew and SEALS strapped in for liftoff. The shuttle blasted upward with explosive force, arcing high above the planetary surface as its coursed back toward MS1.
On the short flight, Jackson briefed the two pilots on the unknown threat that had destroyed the station. They were suitably alarmed, and all the occupants of the shuttle kept their eyes on the ground as they neared MS1.
“Look for any kind of anomaly,” Jackson suggested. “Whatever’s out there, we don’t know what it looks like, but it’s lethal as