Read Online Star Force: Initiation (SF61) by Aer-ki Jyr - Free Book Online

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drew a lot of attention to her, for as soon as she zipped away from the group
peppering her from above two more formations angled in on her and forced the
Star Force regular to bank up and away from the forest, allowing them to come
at her from all sides and not seeming to care about friendly fire.
    Her shields were dipping lower and lower and it was
just a matter of time before these gnats stung her to death. She wasn’t going
to let that happen and would pull up and head for orbit if need be, for there
was no way the wisps could keep pace when she entered super pursuit mode,
though that required a clear line ahead and a bit of prep. Unfortunately Krissy
couldn’t use that speed here because it was straight line and she was having to
maneuver like crazy to even get close to the ground battle ahead.
    The moment of choice was nearly on her, when she would
have to choose to head out of the mess of fighters or keep on pushing forward.
Problem was the armor on her skeet was thin in order to afford her the movement
capability that was more desperately needed. It would take some plasma hits and
keep her flying, but it wasn’t tank armor by any stretch of the imagination.
The fighter’s shields were its primary defense and they were slowly being
whittled away.
    A signal from another nearby skeet also pushing its
way through the mess of wisps prompter her to turn hard left and head for the
source of the brief comm signal. The lizard fighters
around her changed course to follow and soon she saw the tiny dot that was the
other skeet highlighted on her HUD ahead, with her dipping down slightly for
what was going to be a passby . She readied her
scattergun and waited for the skeet to wink past, taking a few more hits as she
flew a straight line towards the rendezvous.
    When the two fighters nearly rammed each other they
both opened fire on the other side, targeting the wisps directly following
their twin. The plasma scattergun fired off numerous little potent packets of
plasma in a cone rather than at a specific target, catching numerous wisps as
both pilots held in on the trigger and fanned the area ahead for a couple of
seconds before banking hard and coming back around towards the center point.
    The unshielded wisps took hits, some going down to
crash in the forest below and others moving off with damage, unable to keep
pace with the maneuvering skeets that now linked up in paired mode and
aggressively attacked the wisps swirling around them. Whenever one of the enemy
fighters would align on a skeet the other would hit or scare it off, and
between the two of them they took down some 14 fighters before returning to
their primary objective with more wisps moving in to fill the void of those
they’d just shot down.
    Krissy and the other pilot stayed together but with
enough space to allow each to maneuver in a wavy line as they dodged some of
the incoming fire. Plasma traveling through air diminished more rapidly than
through a vacuum, which meant shorter effective range and the lizard wisps
exclusively used plasma. The skeets had longer range weapons that they could
use to skillfully poach them, but right now that wasn’t the point…getting to
the ground troops was.
    That meant punching through and trying not to get hit
as much as the wisps would like. Those that were further away were firing ahead
of the skeets, hoping they’d fly into the bands of plasma rain and it was those
that the Star Force pilots were weaving around, for it was almost impossible to
dodge a single plasma shot. While they didn’t fire at lightspeed, nor close to
it, they were not slow through the air and aside from a slight twitch of the
flight controls there wasn’t much you could do against a well-aimed shot.
    The trick was in getting the wisps to make bad shots,
but to get to the mission point as quickly as possible you needed to fly a
direct line…which was predictable as hell. That was the conundrum Krissy faced,
but now