Star Force: Penance (SF49)

1

July 18, 2534

Corvio
System

Admat

Kara spun through a corkscrew zigzag, throwing off the
golden plasma orbs coming her way from the Scionate Valeries that had broken
off from the transports they were escorting. They missed easily given the
range,
then
one of the fighters fired its scattergun as
she neared it, catching her shields with a few pieces.

They held, but the Valerie’s did not as Kara delivered
a green/white orb the size of an apple that punched right through and exploded
inside the pointy nose of the fighter. She zipped past it as it began its fall
to the ground, giving the pilot at least a 50/50 chance of surviving the crash.
Had she wanted to, she could have shredded the entire fighter with a larger
orb…which she began summoning up once she was past the Scionate fighter screen,
with the other Valeries circling around to chase her as she angled in towards
the nearest transport as it descended down through the atmosphere heading
towards the surface.

Checking her power gage and seeing that her Vorch’nas
was nearly full, she unloaded the first orb at range, sending the
watermelon-sized Dre’mo’don glob of energy shooting out from her extended palms
at incredible speed. A split second later it hit the distant transport, sucking
most of the energy out of its shields at the point of impact and Kara could see
the matrix react with her enhanced HUD as energy flowed from other portions to
fill the breach.

With that one test she determined the shield strength
and matrix type of the transport’s shields, which were decent for Alliance
standards but nothing compared to the V’kit’no’sat. As she approached anti-air
fire from both the transport and the fighters trailing her filled the surrounding
area, but very little of it even came close given the wavy approach path she
was taking as she split her hands apart and summoned up two orbs, one in each,
from the small addition the Vorch’nas had made to the armor over either palm.

When Kara got close to ramming the ship she
decelerated a bit and fired the first orb off, hesitated a split second, then
fired the second before decelerating heavily and landing on the burnt hull of
the transport. She ducked down as the Scionate shield reformed over her back,
ironically giving her protection from the fighters as she crawled/flew across
the hull in the 1.3 meter gap between shield and ship.

Scurrying like an ant, she moved around and blew apart
two anti-air batteries and a conventional plasma cannon before she came across
an airlock and blasted her way inside. From there she tore through the hallways
on foot, mowing down every Scionate she came across with an adjustment to her
forearm weapons. The plasma orb emitters were now gone, retracted into their
holdings as nubs formed on her wrists that shot out pale green stun energy, but
that was Kara’s only consideration for the Scionate as she busted through the
crew and every sealed door she came across enroute to the bridge.

With a stun weapon on both wrists she entered and
unleashed a fury of blasts, some hitting individual Scionate multiple times.
After three seconds the bridge crew was down and she had a moment of peace as
the rest of the crew struggled to figure out what was happening and send
reinforcements to the bridge…for what little good that would do.

Kara ran over to what looked to be the most intricate
control panel on the otherwise unfamiliar bridge and raised her right hand,
fingers spread wide and firm, then rammed it down into the machinery, breaking
through the outer layer and into the guts of the interface. From there she
switched over to a different HUD, setting up a proximity alarm function while
focusing on the specialized hacking program her armor used.

Little mechanical tendrils, not unlike a regenerator,
extruded from her fingers and created a hardline access to the ship’s computer
system, with Kara mentally controlling the interface without having to do any
manual hacking. The protocols were already in place, she just had to choose
which to use and how, with her Vorch’nas doing all the legwork itself. Within a
number of seconds she had helm control and sensor interface, allowing her to
see from the ship’s perspective as she turned the transport to the left and
accelerated it faster than normal…causing it to close range with the transport
coming down just below it.

With the blue grasslands below them only a few
kilometers away, all the transports were decelerating as they headed towards
the grid that Kara also saw tagged in the navigational computer. Each transport
had already been assigned a position, with the first one just now setting down
on the wide plain that ran north and south for some 170 miles, bisecting two
large forests and several Star Force cities.

Flying the transport over top the one beneath it, Kara
played bumper cars and rammed the two ships together, forcing the one below her
down faster than it wanted to go as well as heading towards the right and the
one already on the ground, nearly missing another that just managed to veer out
of the way as the tangled pair passed it in their uncoordinated fall.

Kara kept the pace heavy, adjusting the ship as much
as she could to stay on the back of the other as it tried to maneuver aside,
resulting in a partial pancake on the surface. She pulled out of the control
console a couple of seconds before impact, letting physics do the rest, as the
rectangular transport twisted to the left with only the right side coming down
on the other ship.

Both vessels smashed into the ground hard, digging in
and throwing up a huge plume of dirt that rolled out and showered the other
transport, missing a second collision by a mere 148 meters. Hulls bent and
beams burst, but more or less the ships were intact, just buried in the ground
and pinned on top of one another…which Kara made sure would stay that way,
taking a little side trip to the engine room and disabling the gravity drive
before exiting the ship and flying over to the undamaged one as more came down
from above, though relocating around the perimeter of the wreck and off their
original landing pattern.

Kara zipped over low to the ground and came around to
the rear boarding ramp that had not yet lowered. She waited a few seconds, then
got tired of it and flew up to the ‘door’ and started blasting a hole through
it. Half a meter of melted metal later and she slithered inside, dropping in on
a tightly packed army of armored Scionate clustered around and under 18
hovering tanks.

“Killing spree,” she announced, seeing so many closely
packed targets as she popped out her wrist bumps and unloaded hundreds of tiny
Dre’mo’don shots, her own version of a scattergun, on the assembled troops,
blasting through their shields and damaging their armor by the dozens. She
followed that up with stun blasts, now that their shields were down, dropping
them by droves as the bay doors finally started to open.

A few plasma blasts came up at her, but most of the
troops were too close together to avoid shooting each other, which was why she
kept low and just tore through more than a thousand of them before pivoting
around and chasing after the first tank to get out, with it not even waiting
for the boarding ramp to lower completely. It pushed itself out the moment the
upper gap looked large enough, then got a little distance and spun around, but
not before Kara got up to it.

Like the transport she knocked down its shields with a
single orb blast, then used the scans of the tanks from yesterday to place
three smaller orbs through its armor and into key internal components before
zipping up into the sky for a quick loop-over, coming down on the next tank as
the first dropped to the ground, its power systems now trashed.

By now the Scionate commanders knew something was
going terribly wrong, so Valeries from the other landing zones began to
redeploy, crossing the miles in between quickly and filling the sky over the
crash site as they saw a tiny red spec jumping about from tank to tank and
hitting them with some kind of green energy weapon…with very little infantry
resistance around her.

That they used to their advantage, picking open areas
and laying out assault strikes, often firing own on their own tanks’ shields to
try and make a hit, but Kara managed to dodge most of it until a pair of
Valeries flew in and hovered twice the height of the tanks and started blasting
away at her with their scatterguns…no matter that they were also hitting some
of their own infantry in the process.

Those Scionate scattered, losing their shields and
chunks of their armor while Kara ducked behind and underneath a tank, then shot
out like a bullet and came up on one of the Valeries from below. She fired into
the underside, easily penetrating its shields and knocking out its
antigrav
with the single shot, then zipped out from under
it as it fell.

The other Valeries swiveled backwards, swinging around
and firing another scattergun blast at the Scionate fighter, knowing it
wouldn’t kill it but hoping to nail the enemy…whatever it was.

What the Scionate didn’t know was how good Kara’s
shields were, and that she could take several direct hits before they breached,
meaning she took one full scattergun shot face on, with most of it missing
around her tiny form, then she rammed the nose of the Valerie and emitted an
orbit that literally vaporized that section of the hull. As it fell she climbed
forward, pulling open the canopy and ripping the Scionate pilot out of his
bathtub-like cockpit, then flew him down to the ground beside where the fighter
crashed and pinned him there with a forearm as she stared into his muzzle.

“
Did not know
who you were messing with
,” she said slowly in the trade language before
slapping him half-unconscious and flying off towards the other Valeries
streaking through the air. On her sensors she saw a plume of them rising up
from some of the now grounded transports, coming out of tightly packed racks
and reinforcing the few that had been on escort duty.

Kara took after the ones above her, knowing that she
only had a slim window of opportunity before the others arrived to take them
down. She tore after one of them, using her superior speed and maneuverability
to get on top of it before it knew what was happening and rip it in half, now
very angry. She’d been deliberately avoiding targeting the cockpits, wanting to
disable the craft rather than kill the pilots, but as more and more transports
came down and began to unload infantry, tanks, and fighters by the hundreds of
thousands she pictured the Star Force troops they were about to go up against,
and some of whom were likely to die…which quickly diminished her compassion.

She took down the next fighter in a similar manner,
then the others began to space themselves out and treat her more like another
fighter than a flying bug, meaning she couldn’t get to them as fast and they
could set up attack runs and blanket the area with scattergun fire that would eventually
wear her down…and as soon as the reinforcements got to her that was almost a
certainty, which made her even more mad, knowing that she needed to take down
as many of the enemy now as she could before they got fully deployed.

Then a squadron of skeets flew in, taking on the
Valeries and strafing the transports and the ground troops coming out, with
some of them taking hits by the anti-air on the transports. Kara saw one
fighter go down, ramming kamikaze into a transport, but knowing that it had
been a drone controlled by a more heavily armored fighter still in the air.

That was the last straw, now that her own people were
taking hits, and she flew back down to the ground level, letting the fighters
deal with each other. The Scionate shouldn’t have been here and even though
these troops were only following orders she no longer had the luxury of
treating them as misguided allies. They were here as enemies, and if that’s
what they wanted to be…then so be it.

Kara zipped across the ground, barely a meter over the
blue grass all the way up to the nearest intact transport as it unloaded in
excess of 1000 troops, with more still pouring out but no tanks in sight. The
little armored cats were loping along with shallow hops as they ran out and
formed into tendrils that began running across the ground faster than a Human
could move, enroute to what looked like staging points where the tanks were
forming into anti-air groupings and leading the way towards the nearest city,
which was only a 22 mile hike away…but with the way the Scionate moved that
wasn’t very far at all.

The honorary trailblazer turned into the back of one
of those lines and popped up her Dre’mo’don nubs on either wrist, jacking up
the intensity to 55%, which she calculated would be more than enough to
penetrate their infantry shields, armor and flesh, then she flew directly over
them and fired down one shot into each as she passed, melting through their
armor and wounding/killing them on contact.

She didn’t slow down any more than necessary to maintain
her accuracy, running up the line and mowing them down before swinging around
and over to another line and pushing all the way back to where they were
exiting the transport…all the while moving quick enough that the infantry
couldn’t mount any considerable return fire, though she did take a few lucky
plasma hits on her shields.

The third time through the line finally broke and the
Scionate scattered, followed by a Valerie strike at nearly the same altitude.
Kara took several hits while bringing down two of the fighters that bowled over
more infantry as they crashed, then to recover some shield strength she dropped
down to ground level and flew/ran into a knot of the Scionate, taking it to
them hand to hand so fast that they couldn’t get a shot off at her and their
fighters couldn’t target her without hitting their own.