If there was one thing that made me wish-fervently, to any deity that I believed would listen-that I'd never decided to accept outsourced work from the Cornerian Defense Force, it was patrol duty.

I'm a mercenary, for pete's sake, not a corps flyboy. Let Bill and his Huskies patrol all they want to, it's their job. Not mine. Unless there was an actual conflict going on, the chances of anything interesting happening on patrol were something on the order of nil. Most boring job ever, I thought.

Except for the small issue of hey, we needed the credits. And, well, the CDF was kind enough to provide us with our personal rides. The huge one about five klicks out to my port side, though, was mine. The Great Fox. Smallest carrier that the Phoenix Shipyards on Corneria produced, but she packed one hell of a kick. Recent conflict had given her a few battle scars, but she was still a beauty to look at. She only carried two heavy laser cannons and five fighter bays-but hey, that's what my squadron was for.

Star Fox is-and you'll have to pardon the lack of modesty, but we have proven it-the best of the best. There's me..Fox McCloud. There's my second-in-command, Falco Lombardi, then the squadron (and Great Fox, by extension) engineer, Slippy Toad, and finally, the helmsman (and oldest member), Peppy Hare.

The fifth spot? That one was reserved, as far as I was concerned, for as long as it took the person I offered the position to accept it.

Officially she didn't belong to Star Fox. She was the heiress apparent to the entirety of Phoenix Enterprises, the daughter of Hiram Phoenix, Fara. We met in a rather quirky way...Venomian lizardmen had hijacked the freighter that she and her father were traveling on, Star Fox was just passing through, and we saved the day.

She could have had anything she wanted. For pete's sake, she was born with a silver spoon in her muzzle.

Fara, though, was different. She gave up all that to become the CDF's guinea pig for their aerospace wing. What that meant is that every damn model of Arwing we'd flown, she put her life on the line to test first. In fact, she had to test one the day after we saved her...and there was a malfunction. Lucky for her I was there to bail her out-not that I knew at that particular moment who it was I was saving-and thus found out the direction she'd decided to take with her life.

It made me cringe when she told me that there was a new model about to be tested, even though we usually got first crack at the new ones. There was only one prototype unit, after all, and guess who had to test it. That incident still sat in the back of my mind, after all...and she might not be so lucky the next time.

She also wasn't your typical "damsel in distress" kind of girl. I learned that the day I met her, too. When the conflict with Andross and the armies of the Venom Empire escalated, she fought right there by our side, every step.

It was then I learned something else-I liked her. A lot. Ahh, but what the hell chance did I have? I was just a merc crack pilot who happened to lead a motley bunch of crack pilots. She-even though she chose to eschew the trappings of the life-was a member of high society.

Then something happened during that final battle. I was already enraged at Andross, not only in general for the crimes he'd committed against the peaceful people of the Lylat system, but specifically because he was responsible for the disappearance of my father in a black hole.

What I heard next drove me into blind rage. Stupid monkey should have known to leave his comm channels closed.

When I was but a kit, my mother had gone downstairs. The last memory I have of her is kissing me and telling me she had to go to the store for a few things.

A few seconds later, there was a thunderous explosion outside. I ran outside to see what had happened-and there was a fireball where her car once stood. I wanted to run to it, to see if my mother was okay, but someone else held me back.

The police had told my father that a car bomb had detonated when she started the car. She had been vaporized instantly. However, they couldn't trace the origin of the bomb, or why anyone would go to such lengths to kill someone in such a manner who had no real connections to anything.

Years later, Andross had been scanning the battlefield looking for me-and his cameras settled squarely on Fara...and he paused. Cold.

It seemed that she had an uncanny resemblance to my mother. But that wasn't the kicker-he then revealed the whole reason for the bomb that day.

He was the one that set it. But she wasn't its intended target. My father was. He was so in love with my mother that he wanted my father out of the way that desperately.

My mother, therefore, had been an unintended and tragic victim of another person's jealous rage.

I growled. He had now taken both my parents from me, out of blind damned jealousy. Because he couldn't have her, he killed them both-albeit, one unintentionally, that still didn't save his ass in my book.

Oh, hell no. He was going to pay and pay dearly. So came the final showdown.

I got my payback, all right...but then there was the little problem of getting out of there. Psychotic madman that he was, he decided that if he couldn't have Lylat he'd take me with him.

Time to haul ass.

Place was blowing up all around me...and I was frantic. It was already a rat's warren getting into the place, and many of the passages out had already blown up.

I didn't believe much in deities. I was one of those who believed they made their own luck and their own fate. At that point, my luck had just about run dry. But right then, I said about the closest thing I ever have to a prayer. "Help me..."

I didn't believe it. Right there, beside me, was another Arwing...but man, was it old. I'd have said by the look of it the first model, in fact.

But the voice I heard over the comm made my blood run cold. "Follow me, son..."

"Father?" I asked, stunned. I didn't have time to ponder whether or not what I heard and saw was the real thing. Either I believed that what I saw was my father, helping me from beyond the grave, or wherever fate had taken him and hit the gas now-or it a scant few seconds, it wouldn't matter because I would be going to meet him anyway.

I could barely make out the craft in all the fireworks surrounding me. But I followed wherever I thought it was going for all I could coax from the afterburners.

I shot out with a second or two to spare before the tunnel I came out of collapsed on itself. I looked around...and I was again alone.

"Fox...are you okay?"

"Yeah..."

"Who were you talking to on the comm?"

"It was..." I started to say. "Did you see anyone else exit this tunnel?"

"We didn't see anyone else come out..." Peppy replied.

I sighed and closed my eyes. Thank you, Dad...wherever you are, I whispered, to no one in particular, making sure my mic was muted. "I'm coming in. Everybody...let's go home."

That was something about six months ago. We hadn't heard a peep from the forces of Venom since then, but...Andross had a lot of unknown tech that the Cornerian scientists were still poring over, and we didn't know the full extent of his alliances, so we still did our best to keep the area safe and things out of the wrong hands.

So, here we were, in low orbit around Venom, just the Great Fox and a Liberation -class heavy cruiser-being the first of the line, that was also the name of the ship we were escorting-to deter any enemy capital ships that may approach from trying anything stupid. Newest ship in the Cornerian fleet, yadda yadda. Hey, my ship was good, but not good enough to take on, say, a destroyer.

I let out a sigh. Every other squadron leader in the force wore shades. I didn't. It reminded me way too much of my father. Man, he loved being a squad leader. Star Fox wasn't my idea-he lead the first squadron to be so named. Him, Pigma, Peppy, and one other who kind of got lost in the stream of history.

Pigma, that damned traitor. I actually half-relished his squeals as his fighter plowed into the surface of Venom and became a fireball.

Being a pilot wasn't really my first choice of career, actually. But, I digress.

"Anything new up there, guys?" I radioed to the Great Fox, hoping they were having better luck than I had, or at the very least, less boredom.

"Fox, we're out here with you!" Falco had to cut in, being snide as usual. Lucky for us both his rapier wit and razor commentary were equally matched by his skill as a pilot-and both were damned near peerless. He'd saved my fur more times than I could count, so, I let the jibe pass like I always did. "Or have you had that little sleep this week?"

"Sorry..." I answered. Yeah, I guess I did have the other guys join me out here in their Arwings for patrol. But who was minding the store...oh yeah..."

"ROB reports all situations normal..." came an extremely automated voice. I wasn't a great big fan of autopilots-especially not on the single largest investment I've made to date.

I sighed and stared out the canopy of my Arwing. I noticed a flicker across the planet's surface...but hell, there was still plasma activity from the surface of the planet due to all the architechture and machinery that Andross had stored below Venom. He had more secret weaponry than a porcupine had quills, and-sadly to say-we didn't yet know the half of what he still had down there.

Oh yeah, I might want to mention one other little tidbit about our team. Peppy had one other trait that few knew about: He was a low-level psionic...which was about to become extremely relevant.

"Fox..." he said-and I could tell from the tone of his voice that his ears were bolt upright. That wasn't a good sight to see, knowing him-because it was a sign of panic-but when it could be conveyed so clearly over an audio channel, sight unseen...that was even worse.

"Peppy..." I replied, but he was already ahead of me for some reason and had opened a channel to the Liberator "Liberator, initiate evasive maneuvers now. Hard to-"

Too late. A blinding flash of energy lanced up from the surface of Venom and smashed into the prow of the heavy cruiser. If the ship had been able to move to either side, if we'd had just a few more seconds' warning...

The Liberator was the largest and strongest ship in the Cornerian fleet...and yet this beam of energy enveloped and then crushed it like an empty beer can. So powerful was the force surrounding the ship, in fact, that its fusion drives imploded, leaving nothing of a half-kilometer long heavy cruiser-and its thousand and more crew-but a compact debris field...and only then did the beam of energy dissipate.

From the moment I first saw the flash of the beam from the planet to the complete and utter destruction of the ship we were escorting was less than thirty seconds. Not even the heaviest weapons we knew that the Venom Empire had could accomplish that level of destruction on a ship of that class, that quickly. Even a Copperhead missile wasn't that powerful.

"What was that?" Falco asked.

"I...don't...know..." Peppy replied, and that was enough to tell everyone he was more than visibly shaken, that he had to fight to get those words out-something had to have affected him to his core.

I didn't wait for an explanation. Whatever that weapon was, either we got out of here or we were going to be its next targets, and I didn't want to be the one to test its rate of fire capability.

"Everyone, back to the Great Fox, emergency landing protocol. ROB, prepare for immediate departure at maximum speed. We leave as soon as we're all aboard."