Star Force: Penance (SF49) Read online

  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 ow
n 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.

  That little ‘respite’ resulted in dented armor and several dozen Scionate unconscious on the ground before a pair of tanks dispersed them and hit her with a wash of their own anti-air…with one of them managing to land a plasma cannon shot on her.

  That shot melted through the armor of the two Scionate next to her, killing them on contact while her shields, weakened as they were, canceled out the entire blast, but the anti-air following it got through, starting to absorb on her armor and actually give her a bit of a recharge…but doing tiny bits of damage in the process.

  Now enraged, Kara shot off towards the nearest tank and flew underneath it, then put as much thrust up under it as she could, flipping it over and shoving it onto the other tank, catching it partway across and pinning it to the ground. Before either could even attempt at righting themselves she popped out her orb launchers and skewered both of them, hitting some of the crew in the process and no longer caring.

  She ducked underneath the top one as another Valerie shot by and peppered the area with plasma orbs and scattergun fire, then blasted into the tank again to make a hole it the armor that she climbed in through. She punched the toppled Scionate back, knocking them unconscious with a single blow each, then she tore into the section of the machine that held the power conduit to the main cannon.

  She reached in and grabbed it, siphoning off energy to recharge her capacitors while giving her shields time to reform their intricate matrix. She didn’t linger there for long, pulling only a ‘small’ amount of power from the now wrecked tank before moving back to the hole and dropping onto the grass underneath her impromptu lean-to and looked out the opening…seeing a sea of Scionate infantry and tanks moving across the landscape.

  She checked her battlemap, seeing that the Star Force fighters had already pulled back to the city…save for one, which was showing as having crashed. Kara’s jaw clenched and she shot out from under her cover and fired indiscriminately into the ground troops underneath her as she flew over their armored heads towards the fighter, knowing/hoping that the pilot was still alive inside the protective cocoon.

  When she got there enemy infantry were all around the crash, but not paying it too much attention save for a few that were climbing on top and trying to figure out how to get inside the grey T-shaped craft. Kara killed them on the spot and threw their bodies off while the plasma fire from the infantry around her increased rapidly now that she had given them a more or less stable target to fire at.

  She ignored them and pried open the canopy, having felt the pilot inside and given her a telepathic heads up to release the latch. The top part gave them a bit of cover to hide behind, with Kara wrapping her shields around the Regular’s flex armor as she grabbed her and
flew them both up and into the sky, accelerating as hard as she could in a curve that brought them onto a trajectory towards the nearest city. It took less than a minute to get clear of the Scionate army, with a few Valeries tracking and giving her trouble, but when she got near to the city defense shield anti-air lachars took down one of the Valeries, causing the others to fall back and leaving her in the clear to drop down to the forming rows of mechs and stop just outside the shield.

  Kara dropped the pilot off without a word on the pavement surrounding the outer ring of buildings, then leapt back into the sky while searching the battlemap for any weak spots in the Scionate’s developing formations that she could exploit without getting herself mauled by their now swarming air cover.

  2

  Outnumbered more than 10 to 1, Paul kept his drones hitting the edges of the Scionate fleet in coordinated attack groups, picking on one ship at a time and killing/disabling it before moving onto another, with damaged drones pulling back to recycle and potentially lure more of the blocky Scionate ships out away from the orbital zone they were aggressively defending. Technology wise Star Force’s ships were better, but with their capitol in this system and six worlds to draw off of the Scionate had more military might to call on than they thought they needed…though Paul was about to make them recalculate those numbers.

  The Scionate’s strategy was clear…screen for their transports to get to ground, which was taking a long time considering how many of them they were bringing into low orbit. Their defensive fleet was holding position just above the atmosphere, which Paul was currently chewing on, while escort groups were meeting the transports at their jumppoint and shepherding them down with a third set of attack groups roaming the perimeter and meeting up with anything that dared to get close to their vulnerable ground troops. The Scionate had devoted so many warships to this attack that they appeared unbeatable…but looks could be deceiving, and speaking candidly the Scionate naval commanders were rookies.