Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [50]
Finally Ruiz and Harry Teal came floating down the causeway, pulling themselves along at high speed. As soon as they were in the shuttle, Jackson closed the hatch, and Char-Kane pulled the release lever. Immediately the ship broke free, propelled by compressed air right out through the hangar doors. They tumbled into orbit, suspended very close to the utterly massive ship just above them.
Char-Kane flipped some switches, and the shuttle’s rocket engines fired immediately.
“We’re away!” she called. “Are you sure you disabled those batteries?”
Ruiz looked at his watch. “Give it another twenty seconds,” he said tersely.
“We don’t have twenty seconds!” she cried as the little rocket ship tumbled farther from the belly of the great ship. Char-Kane applied a surge of power to the rockets, and the shuttle raced away from the massive vessel.
Jackson was at the copilot’s porthole. He could see the massive barrels of the EMP cannon start to swivel, moving to track the shuttle as it tumbled toward a very green-looking world. An electromagnetic blast would disable all the shuttle’s controls, he knew: They would tumble to the planet as violently as a meteor and probably burn up on the way down just as thoroughly.
“Four, three, two, one,” Ruiz was counting down as the barrel almost drew even with the shuttle.
There was neither sight nor sound of the blast occurring somewhere in the guts of the great spaceship. But something must have happened, because the gun stopped tracking. The shuttle sped freely into the unknown and alien atmosphere of Batuun.
Nine: A World of Trees
“What about ground defenses?” Ensign Sanders asked, perhaps a little belatedly, as the shuttle bumped and rocked through the Batuunian atmosphere, descending steadily and blasting along at thousands of kilometers per hour. “Will they try to shoot us out of the sky?”
“In a word, yes,” Consul Char-Kane said tersely. “That is why I am trying to lose altitude as quickly as possible. The horizon is our best line of defense from their batteries.”
She was guiding the shuttle with both hands on a control stick, with the ensign and Lieutenant Jackson occupying the two other seats in the cockpit. There was a bewildering array of dials, levers, switches, and controls before them, and the two humans had been instructed to “touch nothing.” It was advice they willingly accepted.
The world below them seemed to be a place of vast green lands surrounding small serpentine seas, and those seas had an emerald cast that was clearly alien in contrast to Earth’s blue oceans. Wisps of cloud stretched over both land and water, but they were thin and vaporous in appearance; none suggested even a modest low-pressure front, much less a cyclone or another great storm.
True to Char-Kane’s intention, the ground was coming up fast. The shuttle shook violently, and though the four rockets were thrusting steadily, they seemed to be falling fast. There were no wings to provide lift in the atmosphere, and Jackson wondered if they would, in fact, burn themselves up to avoid getting shot.
“Hey, LT, have a look at this.” Sanders indicated a viewscreen to starboard, just below the cockpit window. The picture showed an image that matched the green horizon, only in much greater detail. With a sidelong glance at the pilot, who was totally focused on the controls, the ensign worked a small knob just below the screen, and the image zoomed into an even more detailed picture.
“That’s some kind of city,” Jackson guessed as he studied the gleaming metallic whiteness that showed on the screen. Domes and spires and walls came into view, and when he looked out the window, he saw in the distance the same alabaster locale that was being magnified on the screen.
“Yeah, it’s huge,” Sanders agreed. “Maybe the size of New England.”
Jackson could only nod. The sprawling center covered a stunningly wide swath of the planetary surface. Everywhere else, there was just that wide, vast green.
And it was still coming up fast.
Finally, Char-Kane reached out and twisted a knob. Immediately the