Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [33]
Tentatively, he reached out and flicked a toggle switch beside one of the controls. Immediately one of the lights indicating a tank turned from green to red and began blinking. The tank was one that had been moving; when Jackson had flipped the switch, it had stopped in its tracks.
One by one, he turned the other toggle switches, stopping each tank, making the steady green lights into blinking red dots.
“I think,” he said with a tight grin, “we’ve just knocked out about a company of tanks with the turn of a few switches. Good work, SEALS.”
It hadn’t been enough, but the payback for their lost Teammates had started in a satisfactory manner.
Six: Treachery
Master Chief Ruiz paced around the confines of MS1 like a caged tiger. In a rational sense, he understood why he, Ensign Sanders, and two other SEALS had been left behind while the LT led the attack mission. But damn! It just didn’t feel right to be here with all these civilians, useless as tits on a bull, while his Teammates were out there risking everything and maybe taking apart the bastards responsible for their lost comrades.
Ensign Sanders was with Director Parker and Professor Zaro in the station headquarters, and so Ruiz avoided that stuffy office. Instead, he made the rounds of the perimeter. He was wearing his pressure suit but didn’t have his helmet closed and latched because the atmosphere inside MS1 was fully pressurized. Still, he was ready at a moment’s notice if he needed to go outside.
He checked on the shooter Team, Dobson and Robinson, who were positioned just inside the main air lock. They were alert, with weapons loaded, and had planned out zones of fire that would enfilade anyone who burst through the station’s main entrance. Even so, such was Ruiz’s mood that he gruffly ordered them to move back a few meters, to double-check their magazines, and to make sure they had smoke and fragmentation grenades handy—which, of course, they did.
They followed his instructions to the letter, no complaints, but when Ruiz stomped away, he only felt worse for taking out his frustration on two good men. Still, he didn’t go back and apologize. He was a master chief, goddammit, and by definition didn’t make any mistakes that would be acknowledged in the presence of his men. Still, he was dour and worried as he continued to stalk the corridors of the research station.
Once again he gave the HQ offices a wide berth, instead checking on the two pressurized docking bays, one of which held the Tommy, and other the Mikey. The station’s shuttle, the ship that had brought them back from the Valles Marinaris, was too large for either bay. Instead, it rested on its four legs about 200 meters away from the station. He studied it through the viewport and couldn’t see anything amiss out there.
Next he made his way through the laboratory area, conscious of the eyes of the scientists and researchers as he carefully made his way between crowded tables. The work was proceeding only in a desultory fashion, he sensed; these people were freaked out by the unknown danger visiting the planet. Ruiz felt acutely the hopes they placed in him and his Team. The SEALS were up to the challenge, but he still felt like a bull in a china shop in the middle of all this crowded academic activity. With a few desultory greetings followed by a terse farewell, he fled from the lab.
He breathed easier as he made his way past the barracks and through the mess hall, where a half dozen staffers were eating reconstituted freeze-dried food. The chief politely declined an offer to join them.
“Gotta finish the rounds,” he said.
Following a corridor between several storage compartments, he looked in the window of each door, again observing nothing amiss. He saw several large chambers in storage that looked like spare air locks and made a mental note that if they needed to fall back to a hardened redoubt, these storage compartments would be the place to do that.
One more stop with Dobson and Robinson gave him