Mission 2 – Not a bacon tree…
He was woken out of his space pilot's doze by an alarm, but it was proximity, not time. His first thought was a false alarm caused by magnetic interference, since he was already nearing the massive nebula, and the magnetic currents were already fuzzing even his sensor systems.
However, his scanner showed a group of dots at extreme range. There were about 15, moving into a classic en-globing formation. This meant they were either a well trained team who'd practised the complex manoeuvre until it was second nature, or amateurs who thought it looked cool. He double checked the formation, noticing the rather ragged alignment. Amateurs!
"Got a bit eager, and sprang your trap early, boys?" he murmured to himself.
The nebula gave pretty good cover against normal sensors, especially deeper in. Even here, he'd be half blind without his amphibian ally's sensor upgrades. So there was an excellent chance they hadn't realised he'd spotted them, as few space-fighter sensor arrays had the range of his, especially the junk heaps they must be flying. Besides, Slippy had added some refinements to fool normal ECM gear, especially at long range, where the signal was weak. It would take several minutes for them to reach attack range.
Which begged the question, how they were homing in? His IFF beacon was set to passive authorised ping, so only military and civil defence units could use it, and a quick check showed it hadn't been interrogated since leaving Corneria orbit.
For that matter how they'd busted security in the first place… a nasty suspicion occurred, and his electronic warfare suite confirmed it. He was sending out a beacon, something external. That tiger type hadn't freaked because he'd dropped the spanner on the Arwing, he'd dropped the spanner because he'd freaked. Clearly, Fox had interrupted him in setting up… uh oh, what if there was more than a beacon?
The answer soon came, as his displays flickered and his thrust dropped. There was no shuddering or flash, so it wasn't explosives, but something had just made a major hit on his electronics. A disabler, maybe built into that beacon shell, pumping out tailored electromagnetic hash into his systems.
Fortunately the Arwing II was a top draw fighter, with a lot of redundant avionics capacity and an excellent damage control sub-system. A diagnostic holo-interface screen popped up to one side as it swiftly shunted non-essential programs to storage, re-routed control paths and freed up the remaining processing power for essential combat systems. The result was better than he'd feared, but worse than he'd hoped.
Basic lasers, and full normal thrust and G-Diffuser inertial compensation were available, and shields, manoeuvrability, sensors and inertial navigation were impaired but usable. Everything else, target management, boost, laser overcharging, comms, e-warfare, even damage control itself were now offline.
Life support was separate, though for the duration of the dogfight he could breath the cabin air if needed. So was the holo-recorder viewpoint that gave him a god's eye view from above and behind his hull, but that was because it fed directly to his black box data module as a legal recording. A flat screen direct feed required a minimal use of computer resources, and gave him a double check on things outside his cockpit view. All in all, he was likely still superior to his individual opponents, but the margin was a lot smaller than before.
He waited until they hit the edge of his impaired sensors, almost tactical range, before making his move. He pushed the drive up to the limits of the G-Diffuser system, adjusting the compensation factor with a practised paw, and headed for the nearest hole forward of him. Fluorescent gas made the enemies faded black dots on a psychedelic background.
The fighters, in visual range now, closed up to block the hole, just as he'd hoped, and spat laser bolts at him, which he could have done without. At least they couldn't use missiles, not if they wanted his cargo intact, but then, neither could he, even if he'd been packing. He barrel rolled instinctively as the streaks of heavy light flashed past his cockpit, and lined up on one of the perimeter fighters who'd been left all alone by the shift.
It was an 'ugly', an Invader II hull with what looked like pre-Venom Cornerian dog-fighter wings. But it's marque didn't matter since his lasers raked across it and quickly turned it to a cloud of debris. He flew through the expanding cloud, watching the flurry behind him as the other enemies scrambled to match vector and range on him.
He had a short head start, and now he was accelerating into the thicker part of the nebula, not a particularly safe activity. His degraded sensors indicated a cluster of asteroidal matter in his path, and he barely had time to compensate and weave through the flurry of rocks. He skimmed inverted across the surface of the largest, about the size of the Great Fox II, with the tips of his upper G-Diffusers only a ship length from the rock.
At least some of the pirates had boost, because half a dozen reappeared on his aft sensor array. Two of them didn't have sensors to match, because they vanished as they impacted the rocks he'd just passed. But the others gave chase.
"Persistent, aren't you?" He hauled back in the stick, and rose, hugging the surface of the asteroid. Then he cut engines, spun a 180 on manoeuvring systems alone, and floated, drifting up and back. He'd already made sure his vector wouldn't intercept a chunk of space junk. After all, the traditional hunter-huntee relationship said he should be running away. So they wouldn't expect him to be waiting for them.
His first blast evaporated the lead craft too quickly for him to identify it, but the next one was some sort of souped up space racer, which was duck soup for the waiting, fox flown fighter. Fox slammed his drive up to maximum, and boosted past the rock edge, forcing the following pair to veer off to avoid collision. One, a basic Invader I veered a fraction too much, and scraped an outcrop. This swung it round in a flat spin that smeared it across the asteroid surface.
Fox swept in and under the other one, a ex-Cornerian dog-fighter repainted in red with white go-faster-stripes and with additional strap on boosters. He looped up into it's belly before it's pilot even realised he was there. Realisation was permanently delayed by twin laser bolts rupturing the cockpit from below. Uncontrolled, it spiralled away to smash into a smaller rock and become a fancy firework.
Fox hadn't hung around to watch, looping up on full thrust to put the big rock between him and the remaining pursuers, who were just staring to navigate the asteroids. Hopefully, they'd figure on him trying an ambush again and approach cautiously. This would be fine by him, as he was now hauling tail away from the region as fast as his thrusters would carry him.
The asteroids dropped off his rear sensors, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Paradoxically he felt happier and more alive than he had in months. People trying to kill him and failing always had that effect. He didn't particularly want to find out what the alternative was like. A navigation beacon with the base's IFF was signalling up ahead, strong enough that it was detectable even to his impaired navigation system, and he headed towards it.
While he was fairly sure he could take the rest of the fighters, now their numbers were thinned, that wasn't his job. His first priority was to deliver the goods, and inform Professor Beltino that one of his cats was actually a rat. It was odd, he was still a few thousand skm short of the base's last known position, but he wasn't complaining. They'd have fighter cover and fixed turrets, certainly enough hardware to scare off a half-dozen…
A shape resolved itself out of a particularly dense swirl of iridescent gas, and he yelped with shock. It was a Cornerian Assault Carrier, but not the Great Fox II. A holographic flag waved at the mast head, a robot skull and mechanical claw crossbones. It had dorsal and ventral turrets, and launched a flight of four fighters, probably their entire operational reserve, as he approached.
The Arwing II barrel rolled and twisted to evade the turrets as they opened up, and weighed his options, none of them good. They'd used the charged nebula cleverly, letting him get very close before opening up on him. If he tried to bypass or make a run for it, the combination of point defence and fighters would almost certainly get him, especially since their more powerful capital ship sensors would be able to track him long after he'd lost their signal.
He had one chance. The old style of Cornerian Assault Carrier wasn't designed to go screen to screen in a battle, but hang back and attack with fighters. Toughness was sacrificed for capacity and speed, an 'eggshell with sledge hammers' Peppy had once called them.
Fox knew from trying to refit his own that there was a weak point in back of the hangar bay, a power conduit that led straight to the engine core. Hit that, even with regular lasers, and the whole thing would go up. As for getting out… well, he had some ideas. But that meant going head to head with a prepared pair of fighters with fire support, and no clever manoeuvres would stop him taking hits.
He dropped in on a leading vector on one of the pair, and almost got his tail fried by a turret beam that came too close. They swerved up to meet him, and it turned into a game of chicken, with added laser fire. He concentrated on one, peppering it with blasts, but this one had shields, and took several hits to die. He'd managed to adjust the run so during the critical part the nearest turret was screened by the other enemy fighter. However that gave the fighter, an Invader III with an extended nose, an almost clear track on his Arwing.
His shield flared once, twice, three times and dropped to below 50%, and then he was past, dipping below the turret's arc of fire and into the hangar bay. He was blasting as he did, shooting at the centre of the top edge, of the bay entrance. This was where the atmosphere screen power distribution module was. On full power, the screen turned into a force shield that protected the bay, so it needed to be removed.
The sudden explosion of gas, debris, and the bodies of a few unlucky pirate techs that blew out of the bay door indicated he'd speared it, but he didn't have time to congratulate himself. The evacuating air buffeted his ship as he entered the bay, but he decelerated, pulled in his wing-tips, and rolled sideways even as he pitched 'down' slightly facing towards a particular point on the rear end of the bay. The whole time he was raking it with laser fire, and a flash indicated he'd got the conduit. Now he had to bail…
Reverse pitching to go for the other side, he saw what he'd hoped for, dark matter storage tanks, the same as on the Great Fox II. The explosion as he destroyed them stripped most of the rest of his shields away, but also blew a big hole in the rear of the bay, big enough to fit his Arwing through with it's G-Diffusers retracted, which is just what he did. He flew out of the hole in a cloud of dispersing plasma, and pushed up his thrust to maximum again.
A satisfactory flare, which outshone even the nebula, indicated the carrier would no longer be a problem. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for the orphaned fighters still on his tail. They'd had to turn, and turn wide to avoid their exploding mother-ship. One hadn't been fast enough and was blind-sided by a chunk of hull. But as it spun off into space, the other two were dogging his tail, and peppering the sky around him with laser fire.
He triggered his IFF beacon on full active, with the distress sub-code, and since his shields were dead anyway, so he manually swapped out the shield management program for comms, dragging the icons across his holo-interface with quick fingertip movements. The holo-window cross-hashed as he tried to contact the base up ahead, and they quickly locked in on his emergency comm frequency, transmitted with the IFF.
A voice channel was the best it could do with the range and magnetic interference. "Mayday, Mayday." He kept veering and swerving randomly, even as he spoke, using the authorisation from his briefing to identify himself as friendly. "Kitty Hawk base, this is Star Fox 1, calling Kitty Hawk base. I am under attack! Authorisation code Tango Hotel X-Ray one one three eight."
"Kitty Hawk base, Star Fox 1. We are reading your distress signal. We are launching fighters to assist."
"I may not have much time, one of the techies who fitted the Gate module was a pirate stooge. He fingered me with a beacon and a disabler… I think it was a tiger striped feline, he acted suspicious. They jumped me on the edge of the nebula, 20 fighters and a command ship. I got about half of them and the cruiser, but I'm crippled and need support…"
Unknown to Fox, a laser bolt had scored the pod under his belly, opening it to space and letting the energised, if highly attenuated, nebula gases in. He dived through a particularly dense cloud mass, highly charged already, hoping it would spoof their sensors. He was already detecting the navigation beacon of the genuine base in the distance, and their far larger arrays must surely be able to detect him…
The laser bolts that scored additional lines of ions into the gases triggered a chain reaction. The unusual density of the gas cloud was due to it's self generated magnetic currents, and the energies it contained equalled a large bomb. The wake of the unshielded Arwing and the laser bolts created a flux tube, a gaseous lightning conductor that earthed the entire energy of the cloud into the unshielded pod.
Even as the base launched fighters, Fox heard a new alert, the auto eject for the Gate module, and groaned. He'd been so close… "The Gate module's ejecting! I can't…"
The ejection system worked, but not very well, damaged panels from the laser fire catching the Gate module and spinning it as the discharging plasma energies triggered it's Zephyr ring. The glowing green ring was projected from the end of the module, and encircled the Arwing. Energy exposure commenced as the hyper-dense plasma was fed into the ring, expanding the Gate lens and trapping the Arwing inside it.
With no program, the energies had nowhere to go, no vector to open in hyper-space, and they sought an alternate path. The residual magical energies of Krystal's staff provided that path, resonating with the hyper-dimensional vortex and interfacing with the only mind in range that could control it.
The shock of being caught in the Gate vortex had knocked him unconscious, but his sub-conscious was a ferment. Krystal… mistake… home… understanding… past… respect… hope… challenge… useful… needed… love… KRYSTAL!
The Gate shrank in on itself, evaporating to a single intense point of emerald that outshone the nebula as the two pursuing pirate fighters burst through the cloud. They had only seconds to wonder about it before the residual plasma, combined with the backlash from the Gate disappearance, generated an explosion that made a Nova bomb look sick, and erased them from existence.
The goanna sensor systems officer turned from his board to face the rest of the station command crew. The main screen of the command deck showed an expanding halo of white hot gas, centred on the beleaguered ship's last transmission.
"He's gone…", the monitor lizard said, in a stunned voice.
The base fighters spread out, circling, but there wasn't anything they could do.
Authors Notes: No Foxes were harmed in the making of this fanfic… no really, our favourite vulpine fighter pilot is perfectly safe. And, oh boy, is he in for a surprise, though if you read the story title and the dedication you'll have a pretty good idea of where the Arwing II will emerge. As for the title, the full quote is… 'It's not a bacon tree, it's a ham-bush!'
