as written by Tiko and Ronin
The hospital database was well beyond access, given the level of destruction the warhead had unleashed. Nothing electronic in the building seemed to be remotely functioning anymore. The officers on the other hand wasted little time in moving on Paragon with leveled guns. Even before he spoke they were ordering him down in the local Volarian tongue, and when he spoke none of them seemed to understand him.
The officers didn't particularly want to shoot him in the event it was a misunderstanding, but with four warheads already unleashed on their city they weren't inclined towards taking chances if he didn't comply so that they could search him and verify his validity with being here with a ship illegally parked over a quarantined area in the midst of a terrorist attack. His attire wasn't remotely helping his situation.
One officer was speaking into a radio.
"I don't know where it came from," he was saying. "It just appeared over the hospital. Get someone out here."
In the distance, the Royal Guard was already reacting to the appearance of the unregistered ship over their city. A small company of avorians was winging their way towards the scene. At their head was Kamil Iyengar, Captain of the Royal Guard.
____
Paragon grumbled to himself as the officers approached him with guns drawn. He was in Volaria. Best to speak Volarian.
"I'm here to help," he repeated again, this time in the native tongue. There was no translator involved - the stranger spoke the language fluently. "My ship will try to put out the fires. I'm here to ensure the virus is contained." As he spoke, the ship above made a short hover to the wreckage. Thermal and bio scanners quickly ran over the whole of the building, calculating where fire support was most needed to ensure the integrity of the building. A moment later, nontoxic protein foam dispensed from a funnel on its bow, the solvent far more effective at quelling flames than water.
Back on the ground, Paragon was thinking. He could blink past the officers in an instant, but that would escalate suspicion and could run counter to his objectives. Flat-out disarming the men could prove just as problematic. He would need to stay where he was and deal with the situation from afar. Mental commands went out from his suit to his ship. A plan was enacted.
As the ship continued to spray, a close observer might have noticed the spray from his ship change color briefly - the white protein synthesis converting to a tinged metallic grey. The particles coated the wreckage liberally before seeming to dissolved into the rubble.
____
The ship meanwhile would have its own problems to contend with as it moved to spray its solvent upon the building. The fighter ship was being engaged as a hostile. With the Royal Guard closing on the location, a precise pair of twin energy beams lanced through the air aiming to punch a hole through the engine of the ship. The Volarian solar weapons required too much energy to make effective long-range weapons, but close range altercations such as this one left them quite potent.
The rocket angels were well designed as anti-tank and anti-aircraft, and capable of bringing down reinforced and shielded structures with their focused damage. Against Paragon's ship much of that was being put into a single pinpoint location that the separate beams struck in unison.
As long as Paragon's ship was sitting still, taking it down would have limited collateral damage.
The police on the other hand weren't hearing a word out of Paragon. Though one could not blame them given the situation at hand. It was equally as likely that Paragon was after the virus, rather than his claim of containing it. That he had shown up here and now, immediately after the attack on the hospital and seemed to know exactly what was going on only made them all the more suspicious as to who he was.
The fact that the fighter ship was highly illegal in itself, and would have been akin to driving a tank through the streets didn't help his position.
"Down! Now!" they shouted.
They closed on him, their weapons leveled.
Overhead, Kamil and five of the royal guard split off to descended towards the ground while leaving the remaining two to contend with the ship.
It was Ambar who opted to act though as he fired his Vishtafa at Paragon's exposed back. Rather than an energy beam though, he aimed to disable the suspect. The spiked tip on the back end of this Vishtafa disengaged and unfolded into a series of small needled spikes that would unleash a debilitating electrical shock should they become embedded in Paragon's flesh.
____
Unless the rocket angels had schematics of Paragon's custom starfighter, they would have no idea where the engine was. Their lances of light found purchase in the aircraft's lightly shielded hide, penetrating the hull and damaging its stealth system. The ship wobbled with the impact but did not go down. With the stealth system neutralized, the Kevlin suppressors went offline. The rocket angels, if they had thermal sights, would notice a significant amount of heat radiating from a point near the back of the ship.
At the same time, Paragon was assaulted on the ground. He felt the vibrations in the air from the guards' wings and turned just as Ambar fired his Vishtafa. The blades failed to pierce his ceramite and his nanofoam protected him from the voltage, but the electrical discharge scrambled his suit's mainframe and severed his connection to his aircraft.
"Imbeciles," he growled, voice rising. He reached forward and swiped away the spikes with a wave. "That ship is equipped with a custom fusion core and slipspace hyperdrive. If it goes down, everyone in a fifty-meter radius dies." He looked up at Kamil, quickly recognizing the Captain from media outlets. "Should that happen, I will hold you responsible for the deaths of these people, captain."
____
Overhead the rocket angels were already under orders to take the ship down, and Paragon's words would have no chance of reaching them - nor Kamil - in time to act upon them. The beams had already pierced the hull, and Paragon hadn't time enough to utter more than a single word before the beams arced across the bow - severing through where the funnel was located - and outwards along the outer edges of the ship to sever along the slanted indentations on either side that resembled wings. Typically speaking small single pilot ships don't detonate and level half a football field when they get taken down unless they were of a particularly useless design that would render them a massive liability to their own allies or neutral friendlies every single time they entered combat, so the rocket angels had no cause to think this one would either - but still they were trying to avoid doing anymore unnecessary structural damage to the hospital itself by leaving the ship to fall towards the ground in pieces rather than blow it up with rockets.
If anyone at hand was an imbecile it was likely whomever opted to design such a ship and then pilot it into a heavily populated city straight into a situation that was highly likely to result in it be fired upon.
Back down on the ground the officers as well had no intention to stand around leaving Paragon to monologue, and they reacted immediately to his growl of imbecile and his physical action of moving. As his hand came up paired with a show of aggression, one of the officers squeezed off a round from his gauss pistol in anticipation of some sort of attack.
One gunshot was met by others as several more squeezed off their triggers in unison, and whatever Paragon intended to say to Kamil was lost beneath the abrupt explosion of gunfire in the street - unless Paragon opted to stand there and keep talking while weathering the hits.
Meanwhile Ambar sailed past overhead to join the other avorians upon the street.
"Fan out, aid the police!" Kamil growled.
The avorians utilized the officers' vehicles for cover as they joined the gunfight with blasts from their Vishtafas.
Paragon's intended aid had brought about a very opposite result as all efforts to combat the flames or to aid the wounded had ceased in response to his arrival in such a manner.
____
The first shot rippled against Paragon's shields just below his shoulder, his reserves spiking to accommodate the impact of the hypersonic bullet. No sooner did the projectile make contact then did a smoke grenade hit the floor at his feet, a swathe of thick fog exploding in every direction and obscuring vision. Should the remaining officers still choose to fire, they would have the just the briefest glimpse of their target before he disappeared into the haze.
The smoke disappeared quickly. Paragon was nowhere to be seen.
His ship, meanwhile, was gutted. Without the left and right thruster for support, the stealth craft hovered in a shaky descent before clanging to the ground. With its interior thoroughly compromised, the main chunk of it went into lockdown - metal sheets slamming down over the exposed areas and sealing the cockpit in a protective cocoon of trinium.
____
With the ship down, the rocket angels overhead descended towards the street just as the smoke was clearing, scanning the area for any sign of the masked man. Amar scowled behind his visor, turning back towards the fallen ship before speaking into his communicator.
"The ship is down, but the cockpit has sealed itself. Orders?"
____
Kamil cursed under his breath.
"Start clearing the area, we need to get these people out of here," he told Amar. "Move them towards Shivaji street. The rest of you, spread out and find him."
It was a feat easier said than done though, given the congestion in the streets of Volaria. Trying to move the emergency vehicles with patients would be near impossible save for at a crawl.
While Amar was seeing to the civilians, Kamil was calling in a bomb squad. With the cockpit being presumed a potential threat, the building itself was largely just being left to burn at this point. No one seemed inclined to venturing close enough to the cockpit to combat the flames.
The arrival of fire choppers overhead were a welcome sight as they lay into the flames with front-mounted foam cannons, but the time spent contending with Paragon and clearing the area had cost them valuable time. The hospital was a raging inferno by this point and it seemed unlikely that anyone inside of it still lived yet.
____
From the shadows between two nearby buildings, Paragon watched the scene from afar. He had two objectives - remove his ship from the scene and locate the infected patients to eliminate the possibly of an epidemic.
He perked as his suit's system rebooted after the electric shock suffered from the vishtafa and his command-link to his ship re-opened. He formed a plan. With the wings gutted, prolonged flight was inevitable - the central thruster could do little more then boost the ship a few dozen feet off the ground before it spiraled back down to earth. The slipstream reactor, however, seemed to be intact. A dozen feet was, technically, all Paragon needed to ensure his ship's escape. He briefly surveyed the area surrounding his ship, scanning for biosignatures. The fires were keeping most people away. Good. Pressing a few commands into his gauntlet, Paragon's ship would suddenly hum to life, energy cackling off of the hull, the underside of the transport releasing a small jet of liquid metal into the ground which quickly melted into the rubble. The air above the cockpit seemed to twitch, like a digital monitor suffering from a glitch. If unhindered, the ship would make a single powerful blast upwards, rocketing ten feet in the air before disappearing into the slipstream channel and leaving Volaria in a flash of light. The whole ordeal would take five seconds.
Sending a ship into slipstream whilst inside an atmosphere posed a number of hazards. Chief among them was the empty space left in the wake of the object's disappearance - a literal vacuum of nothingness that the surrounding air particles rushed inwards to fill. Among larger ships and frigates, the sheer number of particles colliding into one another usually resulted in an enormous implosion of energy strong enough to flatten buildings. For a ship of Paragon's size, thankfully, the ensuing 'boom' would be strong enough only to knock anyone in a twenty-five foot radius off their feet. Even someone standing directly next to the ship would only be thrown a few feet off the ground - unless they were directly touching the ship, in which case they would be swept up into the channel along with the ship (Paragon would have aborted the jump if something like that had occurred). Opening a slipsteam channel also released a fair bit of radiation, although the small size of the portal required for Paragon's ship was hardly enough to kill anyone - and was absolutely paltry compared to the leftover radiation from the nuclear blast already swimming around the hospital.
His ship hopefully secure, Paragon turned his attention to the congested street ways. He uploaded a media link to his suit featuring the names, faces and measurements of the three patients in the hospital that had contracted the virus. Running the data through a recognition software built into his visor, he took a hidden vantage point over the clotted roads and peered over the throngs below. Hundreds of negative matches lit up his screen, more and more filtering through as people changed positions and moved around. Many were discarded immediately due to discrepancies in height, weight or hair color.
Paragon made several blinks to other vantage points, focusing his search efforts in the perimeter around the hospital and in the areas that were most congested with medical patients/staff or featured the presence of ambulances. Getting everyone would be impossible, but getting enough data to make a logical conclusion on his target's whereabouts should be easy enough. He spent a few minutes at each point, taking different positions, scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of negative matches, rapidly deducing that the patients in question had not escaped the hospital.
