Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [85]
Another aircraft shot past their window of sky as they looked up from the circle in the trees. This one staggered visibly in the air as it opened up with some kind of heavy automatic cannon. Another plane exploded a short distance away. Their view of it was blocked by the trees, but Jackson felt certain another of the Eluoi craft had been destroyed.
Ruiz moved into the smoking clearing to confirm. “Looks like these bastards have a few other enemies besides us,” the master chief reported. “We got us a box seat for the dogfight.”
Indeed, there were dozens of newly arrived aircraft wheeling through the skies overhead. The sleek twin-engined jetcars of the Eluoi had been bounced from above by a motley collection of clearly lethal machines. Firing rockets and the tracers of automatic weapons, the newcomers had plunged from the heights in a very loose formation, scattering the Eluoi craft. Already Jackson counted five or six fresh pyres of black smoke, with clouds billowing up over the tops of the trees, marking places where the jetcars had crashed.
There were at least a dozen of the newcomers. Some of them were much larger than the jetcars and bristled with guns and other armament. Volleys of rockets hissed through the sky, curling around nimbly as guidance systems steered them into Eluoi engines and hulls. Roaring jets whirled past, and more aircraft—the white fighters of the Eluoi—came diving toward the fray.
“Harris, Rodale, Sanchez!” Jackson barked, seeing the three men nearby. “Move into the woods—give me a sitrep!”
The air was full of screaming aircraft, crackling rockets, stuttering automatic guns, and blasting explosions. On the ground, however, Jackson couldn’t see any of the Eluoi soldiers in the woods. Just a couple of minutes later his men reported back.
“The bastards are pulling out, sir,” Rocky Rodale shouted breathlessly from a dozen meters away. “They must be pretty shaken up.”
“Then let’s keep shaking!” Jackson shouted. “SEALS, advance—these woods belong to us, dammit!”
Grenades crumped through the trees, and the silenced G15s fired away as the Team surged through the woods, the men retracing the route of their retreat less than an hour earlier. Their targets were few: Most of the Eluoi ground troops had simply run, and the few who stood and fought were quickly cut down. In a couple of minutes the Team had fought its way back to the edge of the woods, where they had a view of a whole swath of sky over Batuu City.
One of the attackers soared overhead, banking sharply, spitting shells from a nose-mounted cannon. The stream of shots caught a jetcar in the side, and the nimble little craft came apart with a searing explosion. Bits of metal and fire rained down while the two engines broke free from the disintegrating body and tumbled forward, rolling along the field until they splashed into a nearby pond.
The surviving Eluoi soldiers were fleeing headlong across the field. Jackson watched dozens of them scrambling into four of the transports that had brought them to the fight. Jets whining, the transports lifted off one after the other.
But the same strafing fighter that had just flashed past was coming around again. With an impressive display of marksmanship, the newcomer poured fire into the first of the four transports, exploding it in a dramatic fireball; in quick succession, the pilot shot the second, third, and fourth transports out of the sky. They crashed in a row, almost exactly where they had been resting. Searing flames swirled around all of them, and no one got out.
“Nice shooting,” the lieutenant remarked, impressed.
Jackson and Ruiz knelt behind a tree trunk at the edge of the grove, where they had a clear view of the dramatic aerial battle. The lieutenant looked up to see Consul Char-Kane and Chief Harris behind a neighboring tree, and he quickly scrambled over to her.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked. “Who are these new guys?”
“They are the Assarn,” Char-Kane said in disgust. “Pirates, as I told you before. Brutal, violent savages!