Star Force: Penance (SF49) by Aer-ki Jyr Read Free Book Online Page B

universe
was just plain being unfair until she saw the ID tag on the top of her primary
screen that had bumped her from priority control. It wasn’t a higher ranking
pilot, nor even an Archon…but the Admiral himself,
bringing a confused frown to her face as her display shifted to a targeting
program for a weapons battery on a cruiser that was just now engaging a trio of
Scionate warships of equal tonnage in the upper atmosphere.
    She didn’t have time to think, dropping into her new
role on cue and controlling the single battery, as opposed to the 3 or 4 that a
gunner would usually control. Being given one meant that there were a large
number of pilots to a small number of ships with the duties being split up for
greater efficiency.
    Kaleigh sighted her mauler cannon on the position of a
targeting tag and fired, opening up the enemy shield for another mauler blast
that hit a moment later. Together she and the other unknown gunner chewed a
hole in the side of the cruiser along with a lot of others before the ship
finally lost power and began to fall towards the planet…with Kaleigh mentally
crossing her fingers and hoping that it wasn’t about to come down on her head.

 
    From the command nexus Paul took control of the
closest warship to the second city breach, dipping it into an even steeper nose
dive as he passed out targeting orders to the pilots handling the weapons. He
assumed control over the torch along with the helm, but left the secondary
weapons to the others, knowing they could do a better job with them than him
trying to mentally control them all…which he was capable of doing with ships
far larger than a corvette.
    The Scionate were taking a big gamble bringing their
warships into the atmosphere, and Paul knew that regardless of how that turned
out he had a small window to target the ground troops without immediate
reprisal. He was going to make use of that then turn his attention to the
Scionate warships that, for the most part, were not configured for atmospheric
flight.
    But that didn’t matter at this particular moment,
because the second city breach had just occurred and there was only one Queen
of Diamonds around to plug holes with, so as he brought the rectangular cube of
a warship down over the city its knife blade-shaped shields reformed into their
normal blocky configuration and he drifted the corvette down past the curve of
the bubble shield and directly over the heads of the enemy infantry and tanks
outside…with the latter turning their weapons skyward and blasting into the
underside of the warship.
    It blasted back, with Paul using the torch as its
namesake implied, targeting the tanks like a painter making long brushstrokes,
punching right through the shields and armor on impact as if they were little
more than plastic toys. With the remote pilots hitting the others with maulers
and the anti-air chewing up the surrounding Valeries, the corvette made its
dominating presence known as more and more tanks turned their weapons on it and
covered its shields with plasma.
    Paul watched the shield strength closely, knowing that with enough hits the tanks would get through, given that the
corvette wasn’t all that much bigger than them. Still, it had superior tech and
could take a beating even after it lost shields, and Paul knew he had to take
pressure off the troops inside the city fighting the enemy infantry…which was
being ravaged by one of the mauler cannons that he had assigned to that task.
    It was coating the area outside the breach with its
destructive blue energy, vaporizing the ground and creating huge plumes of
moisture and dirt littered with bits of Scionate. The pilot kept pouring more
mauler blasts on the area, effectively creating a wall of destruction that kept
additional infantry from getting past…though he couldn’t target inside the city
without lowering the bubble shield, and doing either one was fraught with
problems.
    With the corvette’s shields near to breaching on