The blare of the alarm klaxons interrupting a moment with Shali was a familiar experience. Kennedy had long ago lost count of the number of times that a surprise attack by their longtime enemies had forced her to depart the catgirl's embrace and rush out for a dogfight. There was a bit of irony, the human thought, in how creatures who were so obsessively sexual ended up being such complete and utter clamjammers so often - though she supposed half the reason she was such a furious and effective pilot was the rage inspired when she was driving her girlfriend to the cusp of orgasm only to be forced to fly out and shoot at a bunch of latex alien freaks.
She had to get down to her fighter, they both knew that. But this attack, right now, was a little reminder of just how urgently they needed to take action. So with a steely gaze, she looked Shali right in those beautiful, mixed-color eyes and offered up her decision. "Whatever you've gotta do, I'm in." These monsters had pushed whole speices to the verge of extinction, they'd denied her own race the chance to take their rightful place among the stars. Whatever she had to do in order to exact justice for all those lives lost, Kennedy was ready and willing.
Her lover silently nodded. "Good. I need your arm." The pilot nodded as Shani rushed to grab a small syringe filled with some grey metallic-looking liquid, flicking the needle a few times before she promptly jammed it into Kennedy's arm. The suddenness caught the pilot off guard, as did the cold sensation that flooded her veins as the liquid spread. "Adrenaline should accelerate the process, so... you'll probably be fully converted by the time the fight's over." She let out a small sigh. "This should be done while you're locked up in a containment cell where I can keep an eye on you, but... you'd break out anyway, wouldn't you?"
A expression that was crossed between a smile and a wince spread over the pilot's face. "Guilty as charged."
The catgirl rolled her eyes before leaning in for a kiss - a low, languid one, giving her tongue plenty of time to explore the contours of Kennedy's lips and mouth. The truth that she was grabbing one last kiss before her lover was irrevocably altered, or maybe even worse, was left unspoken as she pulled back, staring into Kennedy's eyes. "Please... just make it back to me."
"Always," the pilot promised as she rubbed the other woman's back. "Wouldn't do any good, abandoning the girl I love."
"Goddess, you're such a sappy little primate."
"Don't pretend you don't love it, fuzzface."
"Hmmm." She sighed and gave the pilot a slap on her shapely ass. "Now go shove their rubber cocks in."
"Yes ma'am." She gave Shani a mock salute before taking off for the hangar bay, sprinting and wincing as she felt the nanites spreading up her arm and into the rest of her body. Her nerves were tingling all over, a continuous wave of the entire network being eaten away and replaced by something new. Strands of silicon firing in the place of organic nerves, the process being... not painful, but bizarre. She could see why they were supposed to be doing this in a lab, where everything could be carefully monitored, but the futas hardly cared about the fleet's ideal procedures.
It was a flurry of activity in the hangar deck when she arrived, pilots rushing to hop into their ships, techs making sure fighter systems were operational, munitions handlers hurriedly attaching missiles and torpedos to the undersides of various craft. "Tailstrike!" she heard her callsign being yelled out by her wingman, a rugged-looking woman with a scaly face and slitted golden eyes. "I was worried you'd too busy eating hairballs to join us!"
"In your dreams, Raora!" she shot back, earning a scoff from the Valkarian. She rushed to throw on the rest of her flight suit, pausing as she was about to pull her gloves on - there was a mottled gray color to her veins, just barely visible when you looked closely. No time to worry about that now, however. She threw on the rest of her suit and hopped up into her fighter, a dagger-shaped little craft whose hull was etched with a sea of scratch marks, each one denoting a confirmed kill. Despite having been built decades ago and optimized for Gemini, with their relatively slender frames, she'd proven to be an absolute wizard with the craft, coming as close to striking fear into the futas as any human could.
Hers was the first fighter of the squadron to rocket out past the particle field and into the void, the loud noise of the hangar being replaced by nothing but the hum of engines and the crackle of the comms out in the vacuum. A half-dozen more ships like Kennedy's own followed her, engines letting off a blue glow as they weaved through the crowded space around the fleet's flagship towards the small pack of futa vessels closing in. Massive latex ovals, made of the same material that was bonded with the bodies of the freaks, firing out globules of their corrupting rubber alongside shield-disabling energy weapons. It was brutually effective, having already encased one of the vagrant ships, those inside hopelessly lost.
Time to make them pay for that. The fighters swerved in, pulse cannons blazing, alongside a trio of sleek Valkarian cruisers coming to bear with their own rail cannons unleashing a torrent of tristeel shells. A series of small ovals, the futa equivalent of gunships, swarmed towards the capital ships, only to be knocked off course and reduced to floating, lifeless masses of robber by the intervention of Kennedy's squadron. She was quick, flicking her craft around in tight turns and high-speed passes to blow one oval after another out of the void - quicker than usual, in fact.
Raora seemed to take notice. "Damn, Martinez, leave some for the rest of us!" Kennedy just chuckled back as she realized her suddenly godlike reflexes were probably part of the nanites' work. Her mind and body was working fast, faster than ever before, information flying back and forth through a nervous system that was now mostly artificial. The tingling, in fact, had stopped affecting her nerves - now it was in her skin. Despite not being able to see it in her airtight flight suit, she could feel the alterations that were spreading, as the surface of her skin changed from a rough, tan, organic material, to something... smoother. Metallic. Gunmetal gray and shiny, she was betting.
If that was the cost of being at the top of her game, Kennedy wouldn't complain. "Crusiers are clear!" she shouted as the last of the gunships was knocked out, ensuring none of their valuable warships could be easily invaded and taken over from within. "Wyver, see about those ion cannons - rest of you, let's knock out their FTL drives, keep them from running away!" The rest of the squadron copied, rushing off to their assigned tasks. A few of them dove in close, unleashing pulse cannon fire and missiles at the spots along the ovals where ion lances shot out from, as Kennedy and the rest swung around the back of the lead ship, hoping to land a lucky shot on their propulsion.
It was an attack run she'd done dozens of times before, and now did while at the top of her game... but even the best were subject to luck's cruelty. A simple roll of the dice - through sheer misfortune, the increasingly cybernetic pilot found her craft getting blasted right through with a few stray rubber projectiles. They ripped into her engines and comms, sending out showers of sparks, and leaving the fighter helpless to do little but careen towards the latex hull. It was stopped at the last minute by tendrils of the shiny material reaching out to take hold of her craft, capturing it and dragging it in to assimilate the pilot. Operational procedures made it clear what she was supposed to do in such an event... but her self-destruct was refusing to respond as a tendril smashed open the cockpit canopy.
Kennedy's last thoughts were of Shani before a whack across the head knocked her out.