Air Superiority
Posted on Wed Jan 6th, 2016 @ 12:13am by 2nd Lieutenant Robert Lancaster & Staff Warrant Officer Meroka Setan [R. Lancaster]
Edited on on Wed Jan 6th, 2016 @ 12:14am
Mission:
First Strike
Location: Torros III
Timeline: After Birds of a Feather
Last Time...
"Sir, you got two on your six!" Bobby interrupted, catching the enemy by sight while sensors tried to realign themselves after the interference from the detonation. He and Red Two banked hard, trying to come to his aid, but both were set upon by the Cardassians. Red Two was the first to break off, taking his fighter into a steep spiral. Bobby kept on.
"Uh, sir," Meroka said as their fighter bucked and shuddered under the assault on them. "Shields down to 50%...40%..."
"Almost got it," Bobby said through gritted teeth, watching the range counter ticking down. Ahead of him, O'Connor's fighter was pulling tight and sudden turns, but the Cardassians stayed with him. Bobby called for Meroka to open fire before they were close enough to hit, hoping to scare them off, but both O'Connor and his own fightered were taking a beating.
"20% sir!" Meroka called out, nervous. They had lost the breathing pattern between them as often happened when Bobby was trying something far too risky. Bobby waited two more seconds before he realised he wasn't going to make it before he was shot out of the sky himself. With a loud curse, he pulled back hard on his stick, sending himself up and over his pursuing Cardassian in a loop.
Ahead, O'Connor's fighter exploded into a fireball.
And Now the Continuation...
There had been no time to mourn Lieutenant Commander O'Conner. The Cardassian fighters had driven Bobby and the rest of his flight away from the drop zone. They'd sought cover in the dangerous cliffs and mountains nearby the installation as the Starfleet pilots had learned the hard way that they were outgunned. That hadn't been expected. Years ago in the Federation-Cardassian War, decades of hot and cold skirmishes, the Federation had always held the technological advantage. Even more recently, in joint operations to hunt down Maquis threats, the Cardassian ships had always seemed years behind their Starfleet counterparts. Now though...
"Hang on!" Bobby called out and pulled hard on his controls, sending his fighter on a turn so sharp that their pressure suits had to fight to keep the blood from draining from their brains. Behind them a Cardassian phaser beam blasted a rock face into oblivion and singed their badly damaged shields. The fighter weaved through the canyon standing on it's wing for a while before there was room enough to level them out. "How we looking?"
"Shields are back down to 39%, Lieutenant," Meroka reported, tapping at his controls to pull up the latest results of their sensor sweeps. It was hard trying to maintain a lock in the mountains. "Aaaand...he's still with us. Sorry."
Bobby grumbled and checked his own sensor readings. The rest of the flight had each gone one separate manoeuvres, trying to lose some of the Cardassians, and the plan had worked to a point. What the Starfleet vessels lacked for in defence and attack power compared to these enhanced enemy fighters they made up for with agility and experience. Almost all of the pilots out there had been flying in the Peregrines for a long, long time. Not Bobby though.
"Bringing us around for another pass at him," Bobby said as he did just that, and the fighter nearly flipped over in the air. Fighting the planet's gravity, it didn't happen half as smoothly as he'd hoped, and as he struggled to get them back on the course he wanted Meroka's shots went wide. The Cardassian's return fire pierced through their shields, hit one of their wings, and wiped out the starboard sensors. "Dammit!"
The fighters arched and banked in a deadly dance through the skies, each one attempting to find an advantage of their own or a weakness to exploit. Bobby's Bajoran TacOps managed a few good strikes of their own, even a direct hit, but the enemy's shields weren't giving up easily. With the tight confines of the valleys and canyons they flew through, torpedoes were out of the question, even if they might have punched through shields momentarily weakened by phaser fire. Bobby knew he was the better pilot, but that wasn't enough of an advantage to keep them alive, not this time.
"We're going to need some help," he admitted, taking another sharp turn up and around the peak of a mountain as they shot out of the canyon. "Setting a course to rendezvous with the others. See if you can jam our tail's sensors, even if for a little bit. If they don't see what's coming..."
"Right, on it, sir!" Meroka bent to the task, using the small ship's communications array to try to block the Cardassian's sensors. It didn't help them avoid manually targeted shots however. Bobby couldn't shake him and their shields took more of a pounding. "Almost got it..."
"Sooner would be nice," Bobby said only half-jokingly and tried a spinning dive towards a rocky mountainside. The Cardassian stayed with them as he pulled out of the manoeuvre at the last second and continued on.
The pair of fighters roared through the sky, the Starfleet one leaving a trail of smoke behind it from a damaged system, the Cardassian sleek and deadly. Phaser fire echoed across the mountains, caused stones to shift. Bobby laid on the speed, pushing their engines to the limit in atmosphere and a little beyond, and the fighter trembled around them. All of a sudden he executed another turn, wide and lazy given their speed. The Cardassian started to follow and missed the sign of another Starfleet fighter coming in from their ventral quarter.
A steady barrage at the Cardassian fighter reduced it to an expanding fireball in just a few seconds as the enemy pilot had unwisely focused most of his shield power forward, leaving little for the other sections. Bobby and Meroka cheered, brought their fighter around, and fell into formation with their rescuer. As they did so the remaining fighters from the Manoora joined them as well. They'd lost nearly half their number now, but as people reported in it became clear that the battle in the skies had finally been won.
"Let's get back to the drop-zone," said the pilot who had assumed command upon O'Conner's death. "I think we have some friends in need of an escort."
Now they just had to hope that the ships in orbit had survived, or things were about to get a whole lot more interesting.
[OFF]
2nd Lieutenant Robert Lancaster
Fighter Pilot
USS Manoora
&
PO1 Meroka Setan
Tactical Systems Operator
USS Manoora
PNPC by Lancaster
