Got it. Kira toggled the fighter left and scrolled the weapons list to missiles with her pinky finger on the HOTAS. "Fox three! Fox three!" she shouted, loosening two mecha-to-mecha missiles careening and spiraling wildly through the hangar. The two missiles tracked a purple ion trail across the room and vanished with an orange and white fireball on the hangar blast doors. The percussion wave tossed equipment, vehicles, and Seppies in all different directions, resulting in a reduction of incoming railgun fire.
More!
"Guns, guns, guns! Fox three!" She poured more energy into the same spot. "Railgun auto, fire!" The big forty-millimeter railgun cannon on the belly of the mecha began chunking armored rounds at large fractions of the speed of light into the bulkhead SIF marked in the DTM with a big red X. Cannon rounds, directed energy bolts, and missiles exploded against the force field with ripples of blue evanescence across the surface and with the orange and white flames of vaporizing bulkhead.
Full throttle, now!
The shuttle zoomed out from underneath the Stinger at max thrust and slammed into the already weakened blast wall. The craft's velocity generated whirlwinds in the growing fireball as it slammed through. The impact of the armored troop carrier against the molten metal flung red-hot composite and alloy materials in a violent, deadly splash backward, washing the hangar and setting most of the room ablaze. Large chunks of armor plating ejected like magma from an exploding volcano, pinging against the mecha.
Kira was right behind the shuttle and could see, and feel, the shrapnel and secondary blasts pounding against the forward armor plating of the fighter mecha, leaving smoldering flames on the nose and wingtips. She rolled and pitched the mecha wildly to avoid the larger pieces of flying debris as best she could manage. The last bit of the shuttle poked through the structural integrity field and vaporized into a violent fiery finale. The SIF separated in a cascade of rippling circles radially across the hull of the ship, putting undesirable torques and squeezes in the alloy surface of the battle cruiser. Armor plates buckled, and weld joints popped free from the stresses and strains of the extremely high electromagnetic fields generated by the oscillating SIF. Smaller explosions erupted, and smoke and gases poured from damage across the exterior hull of the Separatist ship. The SIFs were designed to protect the ship from exterior threats, not interior ones. Fortunate for Kira and Allison, the ship's force field designers had never considered an attack from within.
The breach in the SIF continued to ripple like waves on a pond, expanding outward from a pebble that had been dropped into it, phosphorescing at each crest and valley. Kira held the HOTAS full forward and plowed through at maximum velocity. If the field collapsed back together, she wanted it to be over with as quickly as possible. The fireball consumed the fighter for a brief instant, and Kira ground her teeth and prayed that the SIF didn't regain strength at the wrong microsecond. She was lucky. Allison was good.
The mecha burst through the other side of the fireball in a tornado of shear forces, and the battle cruiser's exterior-mounted automated- defense systems started firing anti-aircraft weapons at her immediately.
Out of the frying pan!
Indeed.
Kira yanked and banked the HOTAS with her right hand and continued to push full-throttle forward on the stick. The g-forces pressed her body into the seat with the weight of a small hovercar on her chest, nearly knocking her unconscious since she was not wearing a g-suit. Kira realized all too quickly that she couldn't take the forces of combat without the proper gear and would have to get out of this vehicle as soon as possible.
Bursting out of the side of a battle cruiser in dock was hard enough, but Kira quickly realized that she was flying directly inland toward the spaceport city's skyline, where further high-g maneuvers might be required. On the other hand, flying toward the city actually worked to her advantage. She altered her vector slightly away from the beachfront and more inland, directly at the city skyline.
In order to avoid unwanted civilian casualties, the battle cruiser's automated defense system ceased fire. The AI controller would no longer continue to fire when civilian casualties became part of the firing solution. Unfortunately for Kira, the battle cruiser hadn't stopped firing until after it had managed to pepper the engine section of the fighter pretty well with the anti-aircraft guns. Smoke and flames consumed the rear of the fighter.
"Warning, power module rupture in starboard engine. Warning, engine failure eminent." The Bitchin' Betty of the mecha repeated her message of doom several times before Kira yelled at Allison to shut it off.
"Well, we couldn't fly this thing out of here anyway, and the gees are killing me," Kira commented. Already soaked from head to toe with sweat, her body ached from the extreme g-force pressuring against her. She just couldn't take much more maneuvering. Kira pulled the visor of the helmet down and banked the fighter onto a collision course with one of the fast-approaching skyscrapers. The visor sealed against the chinbar with a sticking sound, but the hiss was vacant as there was no g-suit sealed to the helmet.
"God, I hate doing this. Eject, eject, eject," she shouted out of trained habit and jerked down on the red-and-white-striped, do-not-ever-fucking-touch-this-under-any-circumstances-unless- all-has-gone-to-hell handle.
The cockpit blasted away, and then the pilot's seat launched with more than four gravities upward. Kira struggled to maintain consciousness and not to throw up. The fighter mecha continued forward with black smoke pouring from its tail. The ejection seat thrusters shut off, leaving Kira tumbling head over heels in the night sky. The spinning weightlessness was almost a welcome change from the harsh g-forces.
For a brief moment, her mind could only focus on the wondrous spectacle of the large purple, red, and violet Jovian planet spinning overhead, coming into view and going out of view, then the beach, then the Jovian, there were some stars, then the city skyline and a flaming mecha, then the Jovian, and so on. Then her spinning was abruptly disrupted with a mind-jarring snap.
A primary gliderchute had popped free from the rear of the seat's harness, stopping the roll with a good solid yank, throwing Kira hard against the restraints. As the motion slowed to within the design limits of the safety system—a second later—the larger secondary chute popped open too.
Finally in an upright position, Kira shook her head to clear it just in time to see the flaming mecha explode against a high-rise building just ahead of her about a kilometer or so from the beach. Kira could barely make out the breakers crashing from the violet lighting reflected across the night from the gas giant. The early-morning winds were very cold and blowing between the skyline buildings and out to sea. Chillbumps raced down Kira's arms and back from the sudden temperature change.
The spaces between the buildings acted like rocket nozzles funneling and accelerating the night winds, and they formed wild, eddy currents in the airflow that whipped her gliderchute around violently. Kira fought against the shrouds of the chute, struggling to keep the glider wings in a stable flight mode. She knew that if she drifted too close to the wrong building, there could be even worse turbulence and probably even severe downdrafts, which would mean serious problems. Serious problems.
So, Kira tried to guide the chute to the surface as fast as she possibly could by pulling the guide handles to bleed off her altitude. A ripstop section of the chute opened up, flapping against the wind and reducing the drag. Doing so doubled her drop speed, but it couldn't be helped. Besides that, she was a sitting duck in the air. There was no doubt in her mind that she was currently lighting up multiple radars, lidars, and QM sensors at the spaceport. Her presence was being tracked. Sooner or later, somebody might start shooting at her or at the least chase her down and apprehend her.