Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [36]
Considerably lighter for the ammunition they had expended, the Teammates moved at an easy lope. The domes of the station were clearly visible before them, still three or four klicks away, when Jackson heard a voice—Chief Harris—crackle in his earpiece.
“Eyes on the sky, Team.”
Jackson looked up, and his first thought was that a meteor was blazing down toward them. Yellow fire seared and flared against the backdrop of the dark sky. The blaze was descending, but slowly. When he squinted, the fiery brilliance quickly focused into four individual blazes—rocket engines. A vehicle, similar to the station’s shuttle but larger, was descending toward MS1.
“Who the hell is dropping in at this hour?” he demanded crossly. “Let’s pick up the pace, men.”
The easy jog became a run, the file of eight SEALS closing in on the station as fast as they could. Even with the load and the bulk of their pressure suits, they made good time. But they were still two kilometers away when the strange shuttle came to rest just outside the main air lock. It was a bulbous, almost spherical craft that was resting now on four legs: one support beneath each of the rocket engines. There were windows atop the craft, as if to indicate a flight deck or small bridge.
They saw a ramp descend from the belly of the craft, and a number of figures, all wearing pressure suits, emerged from the ship and hurried to the air lock. The suits were white instead of camouflaged for the Martian surface, but in every other respect they looked identical to the pressure suits worn by the garrison of the station they had just wiped out.
The air lock to the station stood open, and that indicated that at least one person in MS1 was welcoming the new arrivals. Even so, Jackson felt a frisson of alarm; something wasn’t right here.
“You two”—he indicated Sanchez and Maraniss—“go in through the back way. The rest of you, follow me.”
A quick check of their meters showed that they had nearly two hours of air left, and so Jackson decided on a roundabout approach. Still moving quickly, they pulled close to the large dome of one of the docking bays, using the building to block them from the view of the newly arrived shuttle.
Pressed against the base of the dome, the SEALS skirted the perimeter of MS1 until they could peer around the edge and get a view of the craft. There were markings on the hull, but they were not in any language Jackson had seen before. He wondered if this was the scrawling, ornate script of the Shamani, with which he was relatively unfamiliar.
“Harry?” he asked Teal, the platoon’s intellectual. “Would you know Shamani writing if you saw it?”
“I would, LT,” replied the corpsman. “That looks like it. Couldn’t read it to save my life, though.”
“Still, I don’t like the looks of it. I wonder if it’s a trick by those goddamn Assarn,” the lieutenant told him.
There were two figures, apparently guards, holding weapons at port arms and standing to either side of the sloping entry ramp beneath the shuttle.
The intruders that had entered the station through the open air lock emerged again. They were carrying limp bundles, one bundle per carrier. The first four were long sacks that looked disturbingly like body bags; Jackson couldn’t see what they contained, but the contents were the right size and shape to be humans. He could discern no movement of the bags. If they held people, the people were either dead or unconscious.
“Dammit—sir! Look!” Chief Harris spit.
Jackson saw a fifth figure being carried out of the station. This one was not in a bag, probably because he wore a pressure suit. At this range, less than a hundred meters, Jackson recognized the SEALS trident on the arm of the suit. The buzz of black hair visible inside the helmet meant that it could only be Master Chief Ruiz. He was not moving.
“LT!” hissed