Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [65]
“What about security?” the officer asked. “Will there likely be some kind of radio signal we have to countersign?”
“I think it is most likely we will be pulled in on an automated flight path. These craft move too quickly for manned posts to control the dense flight patterns over populated areas. If we relinquish the controls, the aircraft will be taken to one of the military landing sites around the city. These will typically be small posts, with landing zones on top of the tall buildings. Once there, of course, we will have to see what develops.”
“I’d like to see if there is some kind of communications center—someplace where we can try to broadcast a message to the Pegasus—even if the consul thinks it’s a long shot,” Jackson declared, thinking aloud. His eyes swept the landscape below, where the tall trees of the jungle at last had been left behind. “If we strike out, we’ll have to scout the spaceport and make a plan to steal a ship.” If the first option was a long shot, he didn’t even want to think about their chances of implementing the backup plan.
The outer band around the city, he now saw, was a swath of fields, ponds, and orchards at least a hundred kilometers across. There were roads crossing the farmland, and many types of ground transportation were moving along those roads. These resembled Earth-type trucks and cars, though they seemed to be moving very quickly. Smaller roads and tracks fed into wide, multilane highways, channeling the road traffic along at speeds that would have been utterly reckless on Earth.
As they approached Batuu City, he could see that the whole place was surrounded by a lofty wall and that all the roads converged to pass through a relatively small number of gates in that high barrier. Lakes and streams meandered across the ground, and some of them were spanned by graceful bridges.
Many other aircraft, including fixed-wing and VTOL, moved from the city out and over the surrounding farmland. The flying machines, like those on the ground, seemed to follow defined flight paths that were like highways in the sky. A few of the other vehicles were sleek, armed military aircraft like the one the SEALS had captured, but the vast majority seemed to be civilian machines. Some were large, lumbering cargo haulers with broad wings and massive turbofan engines that blasted mostly downward; others moved more quickly, with thin fuselages and multiple windows suggesting that they were transporting passengers. They tended to have swept, graceful-looking wings, and darted here and there, sometimes at nearly supersonic speeds.
Falco kept his hands lightly on the controls, and they fell into line, following a stream of aircraft moving between two lofty towers. The spires bracketed one of the large gates at ground level, where the highways converged to pass through the city wall. A glance down suggested that the roadway consisted of ten or twelve lanes going in each direction. There was no sign of a gate or even a tollbooth at the boundary of the city, a fact that Jackson took as encouraging.
Nevertheless, he hunkered down in his seat and watched out of the corner of his eye as they approached the nearest of the great towers. Somebody somewhere down below them eventually was going to notice that two aircraft and a military unit were missing. The SEALS had buried the bodies of the slain enemy and cleaned up the area. But scavengers could dig up the corpses, and the camouflage they had piled on the other burned-out aircraft wouldn’t last forever. Still, it was better not to think about the things he couldn’t control and to pay attention to the layout of the city section they were approaching.
The two towers were about a kilometer apart, and all Jackson could see was a vast bank of tinted, almost black windows. A number of domes were visible across the top and on balconies and parapets on the sides of the tower, and it didn’t take a lot of imagination to picture those domes