Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [4]
Chief Ruiz felt only the slightest tug but glanced down to the end of the tether that was floating freely in space. One of those unseen objects had spun past and cut right through the line connecting him to the station.
“Damn!” he barked, tumbling helplessly to the side. He flailed his limbs in an unconscious and utterly useless motion. By the time he had completed a single tumble, he was twenty meters from the module, still cartwheeling away. He had no tether and a malfunctioning IMS—he was hip-deep in a shit hole of trouble, and the brown stuff was rising fast.
“Hold on, Chief!” Sanders shouted, his voice strangely calm through the tinny speakers in Ruiz’s helmet.
The master chief, drifting backward and moving away from the station—and away from planet Earth!—could only watch helplessly. He saw the ensign unhook his own tether and, with his knees flexed against the module, push off like a diver taking a plunge. Sanders shot through the intervening space, closing rapidly until he bumped into Ruiz, grabbing the master chief’s belt as he struck.
Ruiz could feel the ensign’s grip at his back but couldn’t see him because now he was facing away from the station. The chief did his best to roll when the ensign first grabbed him to absorb his momentum and try to turn it back toward the station as best he could. His efforts resulted in them slowly revolving, but at least they weren’t racing away from the station with the ensign’s full momentum.
“You know,” Ruiz remarked, “if your own IMS goes out, we’re going to drift around out here forever.”
“Couldn’t think of a nicer chief to spend eternity with,” Sanders replied, pulling Ruiz around so that he could see the young officer’s cheery grin. “Hold on.”
With a nimble twist of his control knob, the ensign released a blast of air. Ruiz clung to his belt as he guided them back to the training module, where Sanders reattached his tether.
Two minutes later, the hatch of the air lock was closing behind them.
“Welcome back to the nest, Chief,” the young officer said with a grin.
“Welcome to the Team…sir,” Ruiz replied.
For the last week Lieutenant Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson had been aboard the frigate USSS Pegasus as she went through her first training mission, a quick run out to the moon and back. He’d gotten to know her commanding officer (CO), Captain Carstairs, and the two men had quickly established a solid working relationship. Two decks of the frigate were compartments that would be devoted to the SEALS—one for the men and their equipment, the other a large compartment holding the two “drop boats,” small shuttles that could each carry eight men down to a planetary surface. Both officers were happy with the arrangements.
Having finished decelerating, the frigate pivoted into an orbit parallel to and slightly above that of the ship’s destination. SATSTAR1 was an ungainly looking collection of spheres glued haphazardly together. At first glance the large space station looked like a child’s toy somehow drifting in space, but Jackson had learned quickly that the globular compartments were crammed with equipment, living space, personnel, supplies, and a lot of high-tech gizmos that the lieutenant hadn’t even begun to comprehend.
“I hate to say it, but that place actually looks like home,” Jackson said, remembering the barren moonscape that had been the last view they had taken through the frigate’s bow-viewing dome.
“At least it makes a good base,” Carstairs replied. “We’ll have to do a checkdown on the frigate before we load up that rowdy lot of men you command.”
“I think we’ll be pretty comfortable,” Jackson allowed. “And we’ll try not to break anything.”
“Ah, it could be worse,” Carstairs noted. “At least you’re not marines.”
Jackson chuckled at the old navy joke, but his mind was occupied by the multifarious problems inherent in small unit command—problems magnified exponentially by the deadly environment,