TFS Navajo: The Terran Fleet Command Saga – Book 3 by Tori Harris

Author:Tori Harris [Harris, Tori]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: AuthorToriHarris.com
Published: 2016-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Marine Rescue Flight 901, Location Dagger

(3.3 light years from Earth)

“Marine Rescue Flight niner zero one, Theseus Flight Ops. Clamps released. Expected flight time to the Keturah is zero six minutes,” the controller announced over the secure tactical comm channel used by First Lieutenant Jacks and his squad of fourteen spec-ops Marines.

“Niner zero one acknowledged,” Jacks replied absently, still heavily engaged in the process of preparing for a mission that had commenced with virtually no warning and at least a couple of hours earlier than he had anticipated.

Anytime Theseus was engaged in combat operations — and even when she wasn’t, for that matter — at least one of her three Marine squads was on alert and prepared to go into action at a moment’s notice. At this particular moment, however, some of the platoon’s most important equipment was not. With the ship hurrying to conclude its recovery of the fourth damaged F-373, her aft flight deck and hangar bay were in a state of organized chaos. Although she was capable in her own right as a platform for conducting various forms of naval aviation, Theseus was no carrier. Her standard complement of twenty-four Hunter RPSVs (which were surprisingly compact in their stowed configuration), four Gurkha, and two Sherpa ASVs took up very nearly all of her available space.

This morning’s battle with Resistance forces had reduced the destroyer’s complement of Hunter RPSVs by six, freeing up a significant amount of room in the hangar bay. Shortly thereafter, however, all of that space and more had been taken up by three of the much larger F-373 fighters — with a fourth about to be brought onboard within the next half-hour. As a result, when the order had come down to prepare for an immediate launch and begin providing assistance to the Resistance cruiser Keturah, the status of all four of the Marines’ Gurkha assault shuttles had been listed as “occluded.”

Upon further investigation, Jacks had found that all four of his ships were so severely boxed in by equipment and other spacecraft that they were not even in a position to take on the required cargo of relief supplies, let alone be relocated to the flight apron for launch. Even after an impassioned plea to the on-duty spacecraft director, it seemed that there was simply nothing that could be done to quickly extricate the heavily armed and armored Gurkhas within the required launch window specified by the XO. So, rather than waste any additional time, not to mention his own credibility, by taking up the matter with Commander Reynolds, Jacks had acquiesced and instead had the two Sherpas loaded and prepped for immediate launch.

“Listen up, Marines,” he said, having just finished compiling enough information to provide at least some semblance of an adequate mission brief. “I’ll take the hit for getting our rides stuck in the hangar bay. I assure you that it won’t happen again. In any event, we don’t have a lot of time, so let’s brief this up with a standard estimate of the situation.

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