Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [63]
The capture did an awful lot to enhance their options, Jackson and all of them realized. With an aircraft, they could cover vast distances of the planet’s surface. The control panel was pretty basic—certainly compared to a shuttle or even a comparable aircraft on Earth—and Consul Char-Kane had felt comfortable at the controls. Many of the actual details of flight, she explained, were handled by automated and computerized controls. Falco, probably the most technically proficient member of the unit, had been enthusiastic about the prospect of learning to pilot it, and so the Shamani woman and the SEALS had embarked on a shakedown flight.
In the meantime, the lieutenant and Chief Harris also donned uniforms claimed from some of the slain Eluoi. They felt pretty lucky, at least a lot more so than the previous owners of the uniforms, when they found out that the material they were made of didn’t stain easily. A quick rinse in one of the small streams nearby and the uniforms were clean and mostly looked like new, except for the odd small hole.
The rest of the SEALS would go in their standard fatigues, since there were not enough intact uniforms to outfit the rest of the Team. When he stopped to think about it, Jackson wondered if they were crazy to try to infiltrate an alien city, a place of a size suggesting a population of teeming millions. But his objective remained to get off this planet, and since the alternative seemed to be to try to survive in that trackless jungle for the rest of their lives, his options were reduced to this one desperate tactic.
Finally, he heard the welcome roar. Swelling from the distance, the noise exploded into a thunderous wave of sound as the transport aircraft skidded to a halt, then slowly settled into the middle of the clearing. Bits of smashed trees and leaves swirled through the air, propelled by the power of the rushing jets, but the craft landed with surprising quickness in the exact middle of the open space.
“She’s still got a good reserve of fuel, LT,” Falco reported, grinning like a teenager who just had been handed the keys to a sports car as he emerged from the tail ramp. “Those turbines just seem to sip away at it. And so much of the flight is automated that a kid could probably fly it.”
“Well, we don’t have a kid, so you’ll have to do,” Jackson said. He turned to the Shamani woman. “Our best bet is to get a message back to Earth, see if they can send Pegasus for us. What are our chances of finding a communications center? Where are we likely to find a broadcaster powerful enough to send a signal beyond the star system? I know you Shamani supposedly cannot create an FTL broadcast, but maybe the Eluoi?”
“That will not be possible,” Char-Kane answered with a shrug. “There have been attempts to create such pulse transmitters, but all have failed. We Shamani lack the technology to send a faster-than-light broadcast, and we are the most advanced culture in the galaxy.”
“So it’s not possible to send a message back to Earth?” Jackson summarized, his heart sinking at the prospect.
“That is correct,” she replied.
“Okay,” Jackson said, conceding the point for the time being. “It looks like we’ll just have to steal us a spaceship and get home on our own. Let’s go, Team.”
The ramp descending from the rear compartment was the main means of access to and egress from the craft, though there also were emergency escape hatches to the port and starboard of the flight deck. The SEALS filed up that ramp into the passenger compartment. Rodale, LaRue, Ruiz, Harry Teal, Harris, Robinson, Marannis, and Sanchez would take up positions on the benches in there. They could see out through a series of viewports, but the windows were too small to allow an outside