STARFOX: SUNRISE OVER LYLAT
By Eric "Erico" Lawson
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: BACKLASH
Lylus and Solar- The Lylat System is recognized as a binary star system, with two neighboring celestial furnaces shedding their light upon it: Solar, classified as a Class M, or red dwarf star, and Lylus, which is a Class G blue giant. Strangely, Cornerian astrophysicists have been able to identify similar celestial bodies elsewhere in the observable universe, and have been startled to discover that the lifespans of Lylus and Solar do not match up with other stars of similar size, elemental composition, and radiance. Their combined energy output has created a unique and very large 'habitable zone' allowing for the support of life on Corneria, Katina, Fortuna, Aquas, Macbeth, Venom, Cerinia, and several other worlds including the best-left forgotten Dinosaur Planet. The theories as to why Lylus has not burned out or exploded in the billions of years of existence in the accepted geological record is a source of constant debate, research, and exploration by scientists, archaeologists, and theologians.
From the Doctoral Thesis of Reverend Saul Thistle, 10 years after the Lylat Wars
"…I am certain that if we were to encounter sentient life forms elsewhere in the universe, none of them would have quite the same level of faith and belief that we Lylatians possess. Even though the goddess Lylus has fallen out of style in favor of an asexual "Creator" that we pray to, there is no denying that our legends and ancient mythology have left their indelible marks on our society. If we are to advance to a higher frame of existence and social awareness, we must learn to cast off the shackles of our past instead of being bound to them. It is time we put childish fantasies away and marched into the stars. Lylat has been a cradle of life for our kind, but there is no telling how much longer that cradle will endure. I do not put stock into everything that scientists tell us, but I do believe…our Lylat System is an abnormality in the universe."
Katina Orbit
4 Minutes to Contact
A ship like no other, the Wild Fox was a symbol of Cornerian resistance against the Primal onslaught. Though old, its one-of-a-kind Impulse Vacuum Drive granted it an endless supply of energy from the void of space and reality. Two forward-mounted JT-300 Turbolasers, the largest and most devastating standard artillery pieces ever mounted to a ship, gave it teeth, and its six missile launchers gave it claws as well. Its shields were rated for twice the punishment that a Harbinger class carrier could take, but it had the maneuverability of a Valkyrie class cruiser. Tack on its MIDS Array, which gave it an unparalleled awareness of its surroundings regardless of interference, the Godsight pod network it could create, and its jamming beam, and the thing quite literally dominated a battlefield.
The Godsight pods had all been launched from the ship and spread out over an enormous area, providing full coverage of what would be the engagement zone. With the optical communications network up and running, the Wild Fox went through the motions of launching one Arwing fighter after another. The crew of the ship had never launched so many Arwings at once, but they came through with flying colors, seamlessly taxiing one silvery white and blue spacefighter after another from the hangar bays to the lift platforms that lowered them to the launch bay…And then down the long tunnel that allowed them to reach combat speed before they emerged, ready to engage.
"Typhoon 3 and 4, you're cleared for launch." Came the command from the bridge. Mooring clamps held the two Model K Arwings in place at the start of the launch bay while their thrusters steadily built up to standard power, and then beyond. The bright blue glow of hydrogen exhaust grew larger, nearly enveloping the back end of the ship.
Mike Chase, the red furred vulpine who went by Typhoon 4, grunted in approval. "You set, Typhoon 3?"
"All except for my callsign." Came the voice of Rex Shafer, the koala who had formerly been Typhoon 5.
"Punch it!" Typhoon 4 ordered. The mooring clamps released the two Arwings, and they shot down the tunnel, Typhoon 3 lagging behind 4. The brightly lit tunnel with its rows of yellow and green striplights guided them out of the ship's belly and towards open space. Once they had cleared the Wild Fox, they banked left and moved to join the rest of their squadron.
The reformed Typhoon Squadron linked up, and the field promoted Captain West spoke up. "Optical communications check. Typhoons, check in."
"Typhoon 2. All systems green. Props to Toad and his boys!"
"Typhoon 3…Good as I'll ever be, 'phoon 1."
"Typhoon 4. Optical interlink has good signal."
Flying in close formation, the rest of the team could see the golden retriever who led them after the demise of their former badger captain, Mulholland, give a slow nod of his head. "Wild Fox, this is Typhoon 1. The 5th Squadron is good to go."
"Roger that, Typhoon 1. All Squadrons, report in. Be sure you're on optical interlink only."
"Raptor 1 here. My boys are ready for some hunting."
"Growler 1. We've got your six, Wild Fox."
"O'Donnell here. Starfox is ready as we'll ever be."
Rex glanced around the airspace of the Wild Fox nervously. It wasn't the first time that he'd flown with Starfox, but it was the first time that he'd had the time to let it sink in. Fourteen glimmering Arwings appeared on his sensors around the Wild Fox. Fourteen fighters…the last hope of the Cornerian resistance.
Compared to the Super-Saucerer, they all seemed so small.
"All Squadrons, hold the channels open and prepare for a message from General Grey." Wild Fox's radio operator called out. It was a female voice, steady in spite of the odds they were about to face. Rex wondered who it belonged to. If they survived this, he'd have to remember to ask.
If they survived this.
Wild Fox
Cafeteria
Mrs. McCloud was fast becoming a fixture aboard the Wild Fox since the loss of her daughter, but as she had no defined role aboard the ship, no hand in the former Project Seraphim, and only fleeting connections to those who were familiar with her son, she was a fixture without a purpose. Everyone else had a place on the ship when the shit hit the fan, but Julia McCloud, a civilian, only had her room and whatever areas of the ship were considered non-critical. Not about to stay cooped up in her room, she had meandered to the ship's galley, not wanting to be alone.
An enormous brown and white-spotted canine with droopy jowls and a grease-spattered apron was all alone in the connected kitchen, calmly running rack after rack of dirty dishes through the high pressure washer. This was Pugsley "Pugs" Femmick, whom many of the former Ursa Station and Project Seraphim crew considered to be the heart and soul of their operation. Pugs had always made meals full of warmth and care, and back aboard Ursa, he'd kept the station cantina, Shaker's, well stocked. He managed well enough aboard the Wild Fox, but it was different, and he had to run both a kitchen and a bar out of the same space. For all the housing that the ship provided, it skimped on other areas.
Pugs paused as he was about to slide another rack of dishes into the dishwasher, hearing the creak of the kitchen's hinged door. He glanced over his shoulder and easily spotted the pale-furred vulpine hovering just inside of it.
"Ma'am." Pugs gave her a respectful nod.
She blinked at him. "You know me?"
"Course I do. You've eaten here, after all, and I make it a habit to get to know everyone who comes through my galley." He gave her an easygoing smile, slid the rack into the washer, and dropped the doors down. Once they were in place, the machine started automatically.
"I have to ask…why are you washing dishes at a time like this?"
"It's what I do." Pugs answered, stepping away from the washer and moving to a sink. He cleaned his hands off and wiped them on his apron. "I'm the head cook, after all. Not much else I can do, aside from moral support and meals. Well, advice, sometimes."
"But you know that they're in…that we're…"
Pugs stared at the older vixen for several seconds, then blinked. "Word gets around. I know there's some big ass ship coming our way, and it baked Darussia."
"And you don't think it's kind of stupid to worry about washing dishes?" She questioned him again.
Pugs shook his head. "Not in the slightest. I also need to get dinner started, Mrs. McCloud. Long as you're here, would you care to give me a hand?" She hesitated at his request, and Pugs sighed. "Come on. Be a sport. What else do you have to do right now?"
"The better question is, what else can I do right now?" She replied sadly. "I feel so useless right now. My son's in a world of his own right now. They all are. I almost went home this morning, but I was told I couldn't. It wasn't until Carl explained what had happened to Darussia that I understood why…I may not have a home to go back to after this. And the frustrating part is, they won't let me call any of my friends on the surface to warn them to escape."
Pugs pulled a kettle of simmering water off of one of his stoves and pulled two ceramic mugs from a mag-locked cabinet. "Want some tea?"
"Do you have white tea?"
"Do I have white tea, she asks me…" Pugs rolled his eyes, unable to hide his mirth at what was, for him, a ridiculous question. He plopped down tins of two different varieties of the aforementioned tea variety. "Pick one." A surprised Julia pointed to the first, more familiar to her. Pugs set the second one back in the pantry cupboard it had come from and set the tea to steeping. "To be honest, ma'am, I understand why they're keeping quiet about this. All that they'd do would be to start a panic. There wasn't enough time to evacuate. They're doing all they can to save this planet. To save all our planets. Say, are you hungry? There should be some cookie fingers in that jar over there on the counter still. Grab us a couple."
Still not quite sure what to make of Pugs after spending nearly a week aboard ship, Mrs. McCloud went over to the pointed out jar and retrieved four elongated dessert treats, two for each of them.
"So, you're not from Katina then?" She asked him conversationally.
"Me? Naw. Grew up on a space colony out by Macbeth, Ellsworth Station. My father was an engineer on the station and my mother was second officer on the crew. Got a sister and a brother who still live and work out there, keeping an eye on them." The answer surprised Julia a little. Though it wasn't unheard of for some Cornerians to be 'Spacers' who had grown up entirely in artificial environments, it was unusual. Most animals preferred to have a terrestrial existence before they ventured out into space. "Things weren't always perfect, though. Especially with space pirate raids some of the time. People deal with stress in different ways, and me, I learned to eat mine." He slapped his slightly bulging midsection to emphasize the point, which earned a smile from her. "Ha! Got you to break that frown of yours!" He gloated. Deciding that the tea was steeped enough, he poured them both a drink and slid one over to her. "Drink up, now."
"So you got into cooking?"
"Well, for me, cooking was a hobby at first. I started out trying to be a mechanic like my old man, but…well, anything more complicated than this dishwasher, and I just couldn't wrap my head around it." He took a small sip of his tea, letting the warmth slide down his throat and heat up his center. "It was after I failed out of tech school that I got into cooking as a fallback. I ended up loving it, and eventually, got a job working for one of Arspace's branch outfits on Macbeth. That's how I got involved on Project Seraphim…Intercompany hire. They wanted a decent galley chef, and they didn't exactly have a lot of people with experience on older space stations, or the desire to work on one. For me, it was a perfect fit."
"And now you're here. On this ship. Which might be blown apart." Mrs. McCloud nibbled on her first cookie finger.
"Maybe." Pugs shrugged. "Maybe not. Either way, I can't really dwell on it. It's not healthy. Either we win here, or we're all goners."
"So you don't worry about it since you can't do anything about it?"
"Simple, but it works." The jowl-faced canine huffed happily. "I can't fight. I can't even shoot a gun. But what I can do is cook. So no matter what kind of shit these kids have to fly through, I make sure that when they make it back safely, there's always a warm meal and some peace and quiet waiting for them. That's what I can do."
She smiled at that thought. "And they really do appreciate it. Dana's been singing your praises for days now."
"Aww, that's sweet of her." Pugs took another drink of his tea. "But I wouldn't sell yourself short either, honey. You may not think you have a place on this ship…but I'm pretty sure you do. We all worry about our families. Having you here, having you able to encourage your son, his friends…it keeps the memories of our own families alive."
Mrs. McCloud started to nod at that, but then froze. She looked up from her mug of tea to Pugs, and saw him still smiling…but with a hint of sadness.
"Your family…you said Ellsworth Station. By Macbeth."
"Yes. I did."
"…The Primals control that region of space now."
"Yeah." Pugs picked up one of his cookie fingers and bit off a large chunk of it, chewing noisily.
She bit her lip. "Are they…Dead?"
Pugs chewed for several more seconds, then swallowed the bolus down. "I don't know." He said honestly. "They might just be prisoners. The Primals might have killed them. I don't know. I can't change it either way. All I can do is keep these pilots going…so that if there's even a shred of a chance they all might still be alive, Starfox can save them."
Julia wanted to say she was worry, to comfort him somehow, but the words stuck in her throat. Any condolences she might share would seem…empty right now. The crisis they faced dwarfed everything.
Pugs tired of the awkward silence quickly, drinking the rest of his tea in one solid gulp. He set the mug down on the kitchen counter and breathed out warm air. "Well, enough of the pity party. I need to get started on dinner." He made to stood up, and Julia McCloud looked up at him.
"Would you…do you want some help?"
He smiled again, this time in gratitude. "I'd love some. We're making ghambla soup for dinner. You ever make it before?"
Julia met his smile with one of her own. "Carl hasn't told you? It's one of my favorite recipes."
"Then let's make ourselves one hell of a batch." Pugs laughed, heading for the cupboards again. "Boy, won't this be a surprise for them all when the mission's over with?"
It would have been all too easy for Julia McCloud to slip into despair, to say that the effort was wasted, and the Primals would destroy them all. But being there in the kitchen with Pugs Femmick, a dog who might very well have lost everything, and still found enough strength in his tired heart to put on a brave face and keep everyone around him moving, she decided that there was a different way to look at the problem.
Mrs. McCloud dared to hope. For the sake of her son, for the sake of Katina, she began to hope.
Bridge
"All planes are now launched and in formation." ROB reported to the fully staffed bridge. "The Super-Saucerer is two minutes out."
General Grey didn't look, but he knew that XO Dander and Carl McCloud were both looking in his direction. "Right. Give me a Godsight broadcast, Sasha. I want to talk to them all."
The soft-nosed bat who worked communications along with Woze nodded, speaking for a moment to get the attention of the Arwings. She looked over to him. "Whenever you're ready."
The old hound didn't waste time. It was too precious a thing.
"Folks, I just wanted to let you know that fifteen minutes ago, we received word from General Kagan at the CSC that the same towers Commander McCloud identified as primary targets were also a concern in their assessment. Basically, the analysts didn't tell us anything we didn't already know ourselves. You all know the plan, you know your assignments. You know what's at risk here, and you don't need me reminding you about it. Whatever happens, I know you'll all do your best. So will we."
He chewed on his corncob pipe. "Whatever you were before this, you're something more now. You're flying under the banner of Starfox. I want you all to remember that, because Starfox never gives up. They never quit. And they don't lose. Ever. I'm turning you all over to Commander McCloud, and he'll be the one coordinating the battle after this. Me and everyone else will run the Wild Fox, but you be listening in. If he tells you to do something, you do it. We've got surprise on our side, but we'll need more than that to come out of this alive. We'll need teamwork. Good luck, Starfox. Godspeed."
He got up out of his chair and looked over to Carl McCloud, who looked at him strangely.
"General?"
Grey gestured to the command chair. "This is your seat now." The look in his eyes silenced Carl's followup question. Yes, the general was sure. No, he wasn't going to change his mind. And yes, Carl needed to sit in it right now.
Carl hobbled over and sat back in the chair, slipping on his communications headset. "All right, everyone. You know the plan. The Primals are going to get here in forty seconds. Wait for the missile launch, and then get in there. If they manage to raise shields…wait for my signal."
He looked over to ROB. "You set, buddy?"
The robot slowly nodded his head. "All missile launchers are loaded, warheads set to maximum yield. The MIDS is dialed in. As soon as they start to emerge, I shall engage."
"Don't suppose you have any supply rings or supply stars hanging around to fire off also?" Carl asked, trying to crack the mood with a joke.
"As only two of our four squadrons are still Draw Effect capable, that would be a waste of resources, and space aboard the ship." ROB answered, providing a straight answer.
"Twenty seconds." Hogsmeade announced, watching the radar display with hawkish intensity. "Nineteen. Eighteen."
The Worldbreaker
Bridge
"Seventeen. Sixteen. Fifteen." The ship's pilot counted down. Praetor Goulfax smiled. The Splinter drones were sitting prepped and ready. The launch hatches would open as soon as they cleared subspace. Shields, while currently down due to the energy demands of subspace travel, would be raised right after they emerged. Eclipse and Sunder Squadron were also ready for what would come next.
The Arwings had thought they could escape him by fleeing to another world. How wrong they were. Instead, they had just sealed the doom of another planet a little faster.
"Ten. Nine. Eight." The pilot continued.
Time to die, Cornerian scum.
Wild Fox
Bridge
ROB had himself uplinked with the MIDS, the forward weapons bay, and the missile launchers. He didn't need the others to tell him when to fire. It was why Carl had put him in charge of the opening attack. Though he did have his limits on how much control over the ship he could exert at once, this was easy.
He saw the depression in spacetime manifest itself six seconds before the Super-Saucerer was due to exit subspace. There. His target. He locked the ship's targeting sensors on that point in space, only 75 kilometers away from the Wild Fox, and fired. The Primals had thought to jump in close to the planet and surprise Katina. They'd only sealed their doom a little faster.
Six Lylus cruise missiles rocketed out and away from the ship.
"Reloading." ROB intoned, surprising everyone aboard. The cruise missiles screamed, closing the gap at first one, then two, and finally ten kilometers a second. Without an atmosphere to interfere, the missiles' engines burned red-hot and accelerated well into hypersonic speeds.
"Creator's wrath!" Corporal Updraft gasped. "Already?!"
"All planes, engage!" Carl ordered quickly. The missile launch was the signal, and they all had the coordinates now. ROB had transmitted them only two hundredths of a second after firing.
One by one, the missile tubes were reloaded as the ship's automated feeder system chunked more cruise missiles into the launch tubes.
"Firing second salvo." ROB said, five seconds after the first salvo had been blasted off.
The Lylus cruise missiles had been based off of old ballistic missile designs, and only barely lacked the speed necessary to meet Corneria's escape velocity. Out in the void of space, they screamed.
"ZERO!" Hogsmeade shouted out.
A brilliant flash of light manifested as a rift between normal space and subspace appeared, and the Super-Saucerer emerged.
The first missile struck it exactly 1.2 seconds after the first hard radar return, impacting on the ship's surface and sending pieces of metal flying out from the impact zone in a shower of shrapnel.
The other five hit within two tenths of a second later. The Super-Saucerer seemed to shiver under the assault, and the lights on its surface flickered.
"Impact confirmed." ROB declared.
"No time to cheer yet!" Carl called out to the Arwings. "We just got their attention!"
Worldbreaker
Bridge
Minute Zero
The last thing that any of the Primals had been expecting when they broke free of subspace was to emerge headlong into a firefight, but no sooner had they popped back into realspace than the proximity alarms blared. They didn't have time to blare more than twice in a row before the missiles hit. The Worldbreaker shuddered under the attack, and Praetor Goulfax was thrown from his seat.
"WHAT the hell just happened?!" He demanded, trying to pick himself up quickly.
"Enemy missiles, Praetor! They hit us right after we broke out of subspace!"
"Impossible!" The Praetor sputtered. Nobody could attack a vessel so soon after emerging from subspace, there was no way to predict it. He was a tactician, and new, harmful information like this flew in the face of everything he knew about the Cornerians.
"Damage reports coming in, sir!"
"More missiles! Brace for impact!"
"Enemy ships detected in orbit!"
There was so much going on, his bridge crew was shouting over one another. Amidst the noise, alarms, and shock, Praetor Goulfax froze.
Then the second wave of missiles hit, and he was thrown on the floor again.
"Raise shields! RAISE THEM!" The Praetor thundered. His shock was wearing off, and absolute outrage had taken its place.
"Sir, we have critical damage to Shield Pylons four through seven!" One of his officers shouted out. Sure enough, when the Worldbreaker's powerful shields came online, a section of the glowing, hexagonal energy shielding was missing. The part of the Worldbreaker that it would have covered was molten slag and torn up debris.
"Give me a damage report!"
"Four compartments were vented to space under their assault, Praetor. We cannot generate shielding over the damaged areas, casualties unknown!"
"Seal those compartments. And get our ass turned around, I don't want us exposing that scar to their guns!" He ordered. "Now who in the hell fired on us? We destroyed their FLEET!"
His radar officer, tasked with identifying enemy vessels and assigning priority targets, was as white as a sheet even under the glowing red emergency lights. He brought his display up on the main viewscreen, putting it side by side with the visual.
The Praetor's mouth ran dry. The Wild Fox hung in orbit, the source of those damnable missiles.
In front of it were fourteen Arwings. Not the eight he had been expecting…fourteen.
"Lord help us." He uttered, realizing the depth of his hubris at last. The Arwings of the Cornerian Fleet had fled their destruction, sure enough, but it had been a tactical retreat. They had wanted him to follow.
Right into the waiting jaws of Starfox. Three of the fourteen hung back. The other eleven were screaming towards his ship, hungry wolves to the slaughter.
"Launch fighters! Do it now!" The Praetor thundered.
Wild Fox
Bridge
"Hot damn!" Hogsmeade cheered, tired but exuberant that his hard work had paid off.
"I see it." Carl acknowledged the porcine radar operator, nodding slowly. "They're starting to turn themselves around to cover the damaged section of the ship's surface."
"Heads up, the GSPs are picking up movement from their launch bays!" Hogsmeade called over.
Carl folded his hands together, not bothering to look behind him to General Grey. He knew that the military liaison to the Starfox Team was watching silently, chewing on the end of his corncob pipe. The general had kept it unlit, though he was probably aching for the acrid sting of tobacco smoke in his lungs now. The general had made it clear that this was his show. Even though Carl hated the role…he was involved now. They were all involved, and he had to give it all his focus for them to make it through.
"ROB, is everything charged?" He asked. The robot over at the weapons console nodded his head ever so slightly.
"Shall I activate it?"
"Not yet." Carl furrowed his eyebrows. He had a feeling whoever was sitting at the wheel of that Super-Saucerer was a strategist. Carl had led off with surprise and opening destruction, forcing the Primal in charge to react instead of acting. Now, the Primals scrambled to regain control of the situation, putting the undamaged edge of the saucer into the firing line, and they were launching their fighters. It was all about timing and maximum effect…both strategic and psychological. Carl didn't want to beat the Primals. After what they did to Darussia and the 4th Fleet, he wanted to crush them. So he waited.
"Not yet." He repeated, his eyes watching the Godsight pod feeds up on the main monitor. The hatches opened, and the first wave of fighters emerged. All unmanned fighters, the ones the Primals labeled Splinter drones. The SDF had the more derogatory name of "Twig" for them. No sign of the manned fighters yet.
Carl waited.
Forward Arwing Force
"Heads up, we've got company." Captain West called out solemnly. There was movement behind the glowing translucent shield matrix protecting the Super-Saucerer.
"We see 'em." Captain Korman hissed with a trace of sibilance. "Twigs. Lots of 'em."
"Don't break off to chase them yet." Lieutenant O'Donnell warned the vengeful leaders of Typhoon and Raptor Squadron. "Lock on and fire once they clear the shields, but don't slow down!"
"Hell of a gamble we're taking here." Raptor 2 complained.
"Carl?" Rourke said over the radio, trying not to sound nervous. What they were about to attempt went against every bit of common sense, and had only one thing standing in its favor…the Primals wouldn't have time to react.
Of course, neither would they.
"Eight seconds." Carl McCloud's voice came back, tightly controlled.
"Merge!" Rourke ordered. The three Arwings of the Starfox Team reacted quickly, with Dana and Milo each slipping into Merge Mode as they relaxed and let their synch ratios take hold. The sight of the Seraph Arwings unfolding was impressive as always, and the secondary wings detaching out once more gave them the appearance of dancing butterflies or dangerous multi-winged angels.
The first wave of Splinter drones, thirty planes strong, emerged out of a momentary hole in the barrier and came at them. Eight glowing green spheres of charged laserlight locked on to them and flew forward, homing with eerie accuracy. The Primal ships went into an evasive pattern, but only three of the laserbursts were successfully outmaneuvered. The other five incinerated their marks and exploded, engulfing others in the blast.
"Portal opening NOW!" Carl shouted.
"Here goes everything…" Captain Korman said through a clenched jaw.
While the enemy recoiled from that first brief skirmish of their fighters, the Wild Fox reached into its bag of tricks one more time. Raptor, Typhoon, and Starfox all braced themselves as a portal, just large enough to accommodate them, opened up right in front of their flight path. It was why they couldn't break off to engage individual fighters. It was why they had waited until the Super-Saucerer had raised its shields.
All of it...for this one, sudden, jump. FTL wouldn't work around an object of such enormous mass. But a Portal, which of all the ships left on the Cornerian side, only the Wild Fox was capable of generating on its own, was subject to no such restriction.
The eight Model K Arwings and three Seraph Arwings flew through the open rift in spacetime and emerged out on the other side.
Just underneath the glowing orange shielding of the Super-Saucerer.
Inside the so-called impenetrable defense.
The reaction times of all the pilots were put to their limits, because each had to fire their retros and jerk back on the stick as soon as they came out the other end of the Portal or risk smashing into the hull of the enormous mothership. The Model Ks flailed wildly until they recovered, screaming above the sleek black surface of the saucer, but the Seraphs in their Merged configuration floated like angels above the fray, moving with such grace that they hardly tilted at all…they only drifted into position, sliding in behind the others.
"God…damn…" Typhoon 3 got out shakily.
"Engage at will." Came the system-augmented voice of Rourke.
They all had their assignments. The Arwings broke apart and got to work.
The clock ticked down.
Worldbreaker
Bridge
"Spacetime rift!" A crewmember shouted out, reporting the sudden appearance of the anomaly that had dropped in front of the Arwings. They were all swallowed up in an instant, leaving Praetor Goulfax blinking in shock, wondering where…
A proximity alert screamed to life, shattering his thoughts again.
"The Arwings, Praetor…they're…inside our shields!"
The ship shuddered. Goulfax let out a scream of unbridled rage. How were they doing it?! How had these damnable ships…how had they gotten past his defenses? Since when had the Cornerians been able to manage a trick like this?
"They're going after the shield pylons!"
"Have Eclipse and Sunder Squadron launched yet?" Goulfax demanded.
"They're next in the queue."
"I want those Arwings dead, before they strip us of all our defenses!" The Primal commander gestured wildly. "Back them up with Splinters, and send seven flights after that ship of theirs. I don't want that thing getting off another shot at us!"
"But there are Arwings protecting it!"
"Then send EIGHT!" Goulfax had lost all control over the battle, and the crack in his resolve was laid bare for everyone else to see.
Typhoon Squadron
Typhoon Squadron, who had been given the assignment of knocking down all the shield pylons that generated the Super-Saucerer's defenses, found themselves skittering around the surface of the ship, taking down one tower after another. They were durable, but not impenetrable. Flying in pairs, they soon found that two charged laserbursts were enough to blast it to shreds and vent a hole in the ship. But there were lots of pylons to take down…and there was no time to waste. The ship was creeping closer to Katina all the time.
Captain West and Typhoon 2 banked hard left to escape an enormous explosion of fire and debris. "That's three!" Typhoon 2 announced over the radios for everyone to hear.
"Don't get cocky, Hank." West growled. "We've got at least another sixty to go before the Wild Fox can really cut loose."
Their conversation was interrupted by a hail of strafing laserfire from above, and the two pilots spun their ships into wild aileron rolls to deflect away the storm. "Damn! Raptor Squadron, where the hell are you? We're getting pounded here!"
"We see it. What's your shield strength?" Raptor 3 voiced back.
"Good, for now!"
"Then cover your eyes!"
"Wh…what? What are you…" At the last second, Typhoon 1 managed to squint his eyelids shut. It didn't completely block out the blinding red light as the explosion from a smart bomb engulfed him and Typhoon 2. Thanks to their shielding, the bombs didn't touch them at all, but they did succeed in roasting the Splinter drones that had been pestering them. "Shit, warn us next time!"
"I did warn you. Your six is clear, Typhoon 1. For now."
"Cocky little freaks." Captain West sighed. He opened up his mike again. "Pick your targets, Typhoons. The Raptors have the skies…or what little of it there is with that damn shielding hovering above our heads." In truth, they had very little space to maneuver around in. It made the work all the more frantic and dangerous.
But what the hell, the golden retriever thought to himself as he lined up on another shield tower. You didn't join the Arwing corps for the dental coverage anyways.
21st Growler Squadron
The airspace around the Wild Fox may not have been as narrow as that of the Super-Saucerer, but there was plenty to do. Forty Splinter drones came screaming for the Wild Fox, and they had gone into a wide dispersal pattern as they neared, preventing both the ship and its Arwing protectors from targeting large groups. Apparently, the unmanned fighters had enough sense in them to learn from that mistake.
"Orders, captain?" Damer asked.
"Wallaby, stick close to the Wild Fox and do that trick of yours. Me and Damer are going to fly out and whittle 'em down. Shoot down anything that gets close."
"You've got it, captain." The marsupial was nervous, but no more than anyone else. He'd survived one fight after another in this war, and settled down a good deal.
The two Model K Arwings of the 21st Squadron shot ahead with a burst from their boosters, coming into range of a net of fighters.
"They're going to try and swarm us." Damer observed. "And they can shake us up pretty good."
"Only if we let 'em." Hound snorted. "They've got numbers, but they're just machines. And there ain't no way a machine's outflying me."
Four of the Splinter drones broke off from their formation and dove down at Hound and Damer, firing wildly. Their aim was dead on, but the two pilots quickly spun their fighters, erecting the temporary deflective barrier that the G-Diffuser was capable of producing. The shots ricocheted away harmlessly, and the Arwings veered up, turning their single nose-mounted hyper lasers on the attacking ships. They got off a few shots before a warning beep sounded in their ears.
"They've locked on!" Damer exclaimed.
"Break off!" Hound ordered, a reflexive command that his wingman didn't really need to hear. The squirrel was already doing so. Two NIFT-29 Corona missiles shot past, barely missing them as their high-G maneuver caused the projectiles to lose their track. "Shit, they've got missiles now?"
"Leave it to the Primals to be full of surprises." Damer grunted, trying to reorient himself on the attacking Splinters. "They still break easy." He said, lancing a few well placed laserbolts into one of the drones and shattering it apart.
"Watch your six, Ostwind!" Hound shouted. The squirrel winced and threw himself into a tight loop, catching a pursuing second Splinter completely off guard. The thing's laserfire streaked by harmlessly and it plowed ahead, starting to nose up to follow. Damer finished his maneuver and swept in behind the thing, ending it with another salvo of attacks. A third came out of nowhere as he was getting his bearings again and slashed at his shields with a few lucky shots. The attack fell silent as his wingman came shooting past his right shoulder and annihilated the thing head-on.
"Thanks, captain." Damer exhaled, turning to join up with Growler 1.
"You keep this up, son, you'll give me a heart attack." Hound muttered. He checked his radar and shuddered to see the rest of the Splinters that had come their way still making for the Wild Fox. "Wallaby, you hang on! We're peeling back to you!"
"Take your time." Came the off-balance voice of their youngest wingmate. "…on second thought, hurry it up." Even Merged, a hint of panic blended with his voice. The cause became obvious when Hound saw a swarm of missile tracks on his radar headed right for the Wild Fox and its lone defender.
"I hope to the Creator the others are doing better than we are." Hound breathed, punching in his boosters.
The Worldbreaker
1 Minute, 30 Seconds since Engagement
"What do you mean we can't contact the Armada?" The Praetor demanded angrily. His radio officer was panicking.
"We're being jammed somehow, sir. It's affecting all our communications equipment."
Goulfax snarled again and pounded his armrest. "Starfox." He looked to the diagnostics readout of the Worldbreaker, wincing at what he saw. The Arwings were blasting apart the shield emitters one by one, leaving gaping holes in their defenses that their precious mothership wasted no time in shooting at. They couldn't communicate with the Armada, and their hyperdrive needed time to recover before it could activate again. It was old technology, after all. They were committed.
"Time until we can fire the Shatterbeam?" He demanded.
"Five more minutes!" The weapons officer shouted back.
"Then order our gunnery crews to get off their asses and start blasting those ships out of our skies. And launch the next wave! I want those two manned Squadrons flying now!"
Wild Fox
Bridge
Carl had paid very careful attention to the data collected on the Super-Saucerer. He'd used it to construct their attack strategy, to figure out the thing's weak spots…
To anticipate their counterattack. Just like the Saucerer 75 years ago, the Super-Saucerer used a series of four hatches placed around the ship's edge on the ventral side to launch its fighters. They'd unleashed one wave of Splinter drones, then a second…
And they were opening a third time. His face twitched with what might have been a smile in a less tense moment.
"Rourke, it's time."
"We're on it." Came the immediate reply. Partially hidden underneath the slowly dying shielding, the three Seraph Arwings of Starfox flight began to move.
"Keep those turbolasers firing, ROB." Carl advised the robot calmly. "Let's not give the Primals space to breathe."
"I am firing when the opportunity arises." ROB replied. The Wild Fox shuddered as several impacts rocked their shields. "Multiple impacts. Shields have decreased by 8 percent."
"Sasha, remind my former CO that they all need a ship to fly back to if we survive this." Carl grimaced. The soft-nosed bat nodded and made her next communication.
Super-Saucerer Airspace
Just as with the Saucerer that Andross had sent to attack Katina's frontline base during the Lylat Wars, the Super-Saucerer launched its fighters from several hatches spread out in a ring around its outside ventral edge. Starfox had been picking their gun emplacements to shreds with Raptor Squadron flying top cover, cutting down on the amount of firepower that the ship could bring to bear on the Wild Fox and the Arwings themselves. The rapidly depleting shielding, one cell after another dying from the efficient work of Typhoon Squadron, had to have made the Primals extremely nervous.
Inside his cockpit, Rourke tempered cold fury with satisfaction as the hatches began to open. Just as Carl called it. His Seraph, still Merged, allowed ODAI to share in the remark. He, Dana, and Milo all split apart, each of them flying in a different direction.
Three planes and four hatches.
One benefit of engaging in close proximity to the Wild Fox…we don't have to worry about packing our own Godsight Pods.
Which, as Carl had said in the briefing…left room in their Modular Weapons Bays for the modified Cornite munitions that the Seraphs had been designed with.
The first of the fighters began to stream out from the hatches and the launch bays that sat behind them. Uplinked to every tiny camera satellite, Rourke and his two wingmates had a perfect view from every angle. Gun emplacements tried to gain a bead on them, but they were flying so low to the surface of the enormous ship that the guns couldn't zero in the ranges. Their shots flew harmlessly overhead, fully ten meters from even grazing them.
The hatches came into range. Taking a page from Terrany's playbook, Rourke screamed over the lower edge and then flipped himself about effortlessly, staring down the open hatch and its sea of fighters like it was a gunbarrel.
Rourke had never managed to precisely fire a shot well enough to have his bullet impact the interior of another person's weapon before. This was close, though. He squeezed the bomb release, felt the slight shiver as the G-Negator infused device screamed through the swarm and exploded on his command.
A brilliant light baked the closest fighters into oblivion, and then the G-Bomb went into its grisly second stage. The light of the explosion froze and was drawn into itself, coalescing into a pinprick of absolute darkness. A microsingularity.
Against its extreme pull, only the Seraph Arwing was immune. Everything else around it was sucked in. Splinter drones, still launching, were crushed like tin cans as they continued ahead and were drawn into it, spaghettifying. Splinter drones that had launched froze in the vacuum of space and began to rattle, until their engines burned out and they too drifted back towards that inexhaustible vortex. Most frightening of all to the Primals would have been what the detonation did to the Super-Saucerer itself. The hull plating around the hatches and their launch tunnels quaked and buckled, crushing in and rendering the hatch completely useless, unable to even close up again. The scraps of debris and destroyed fighters formed a tight nugget of metal and crystalline slag at the center of the sparking heap, and at last, the microsingularity collapsed.
"Hatch one…destroyed." Rourke announced.
"Milo. 2 is down."
"Dana. 3's space junk." Rourke quickly accessed the GSP feeds and found himself well pleased. Carl's plan continued to work well. Only one hatch was untouched, and it was doubtful that the Primals could shunt all their surviving fighters to that one part of the ship in any workable amount of time.
His body blinked when the cameras showed six spacefighters flying out of Hatch 4. Not Splinters.
Manned fighters. Blackwings, as the SDF called them…Helions were the Primal designation.
"Heads up, everyone. The Primals got out their pilots." Rourke announced.
"You keep on the Super-Saucerer, O'Donnell. Raptors, close in and engage!"
Worldbreaker
Bridge
2 Minutes Since Engagement
The ship had been taking one punishing blow after another between the Wild Fox punishing the open gaps in their shielding, the remaining pylons exploding and going offline, and their own vast array of guns fast being slagged. None of those impacts were anything like what they felt when the three transformed Arwings split apart, weaved through the ship defenses effortlessly, and made for three of the four open hatches.
The entire ship shuddered, the superstructure creaked and groaned like a godly pair of hands were twisting it apart. The ship's power flickered wildly from whatever it was that they had done.
"Flaming hells, what now?!" The Praetor demanded.
"Sir, the…the hatches…The fighters…" His ship systems analyst swallowed, afraid to look away from the screen that showed even more red on their slowly foundering vessel. "They're gone. We've lost another 60 Splinter drones. Only one hatch is still operational."
Praetor Goulfax bit so hard on his tongue that he tasted blood. "Did Sunder and Eclipse Squadron make it out?"
"Yes, Praetor. By some miracle, they were launching from the one that those Arwings didn't target."
Not good odds, even with that stroke of luck. And Eclipse Squadron had lost two of its pilots in the attack on Darussia, thanks to a particularly brutal strike by the retreating Arwings that had seen them sacrifice one of their own to land a blow.
They anticipated us somehow. They've negated our defense, they've picked apart our fighter superiority, and they've made our guns useless.
"Time to Supraorbital position?" He swallowed.
"Four minutes, twenty eight seconds."
And we may not make it. But…at least, there's a way to keep the Shatterbeam protected. I hope.
"Tilt our Z-Axis. Point our dorsal dome at the Wild Fox and keep for Katina." He ordered. "Our armor is thickest there. Disengage the primary shielding matrix and divert all shield power to the secondary emitter!"
"We've…we've never used it before, Praetor! We've never even tested that system the Ancients made!"
The Primal shook his head. "We've never had to use it before. Activate it, and commence our maneuver." His voice was hoarse from screaming. He settled for seething rage instead, gripping at the armrests of his seat.
Wild Fox
Cafeteria
The ship shuddered slightly, and both Pugs and Mrs. McCloud looked up at the ceiling with different degrees of concern. The chef chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then got back to work. Julia seemed ready to faint.
"We've taken worse." The ship's cook tried to reassure her, giving her a wan smile. "When we set down on Katina before, we'd had an entire wing blown off. It took 'em forever to fix that. Wyatt and his crew were always around, bitching about one technical problem or another. But this is a tough old ship. We'll pull through. Just watch those onions. Once they burn, we'll have to saute an entirely new batch."
"Hey, you just worry about those leeks."
"Leeks are easy, woman."
"That explains why you gave me the onions to fix up." She countered. He laughed sharply at that, and she gave her head a shake. "I'm just glad that the stove here's magnetic."
"No kidding, right? The last thing anyone wants if the artificial gravity goes offline is a pot of boiling water slapping you in the face. Well…not like it'd stop the water itself from floating out of the pot, but…" Pugs cut himself off and sighed. "I'd best shut up while I'm behind."
"You do seem to be good at digging holes to step into." Julia teased him. Another rattle spread through the ship, and she winced. "How can you stay so calm when all this is going on?"
"Wish I knew. I mean, supposedly I can get bent out of shape about little things, but working on this ship? Maybe I am crazy. Of course, I think we're all a little crazy here. Temporary insanity was a common trait among the people that got brought on to work at Ursa Station."
"Ursa Station?"
"Ah…right. That was where they ran Project Seraphim out of. Carl getting knocked out of commission was the prelude to this mess, but the war really kicked off when the Primals sent a cruiser to destroy our home station. It was pretty touch and go there, but your daughter and the rest of the team held the Primals back long enough for us all to evacuate before the station was blown apart. It was a hell of a thing. To own up to the truth, it was an even bigger surprise when this ship came flying out of nowhere and rescued Corneria."
"It must have been crazy." Julia flicked the pan, turning the onions about with a midair flip. "I still have trouble believing that they can all do the things they do. Maybe you all being crazy is what makes this mess work."
"Alcohol helps." Pugs joked. "There was this little bar I used to run on Ursa back before it blew up. Shaker's. We don't exactly have the space set aside for it here…probably can't afford to give up any more of it…but I do miss that place. Everyone loved to go there for a mug of beer once they got off of work. Maybe I ought to see about setting aside some space here in the cafeteria or galley for a bar counter."
The ship rattled again, and Julia clenched her teeth together. "You really are crazy."
"Almost as crazy as a fox." The jowl-faced canine winked at her.
Super-Saucerer Engagement Zone
The amber glow of the remaining hexagonal energy shield panels above their canopies provided constant illumination in the darkness of space for Raptor, Typhoon, and the Starfox squadrons. Even with all the chaos happening around them, it was a source of comfort. Seeing them drop one by one gave them all heart and the will to push on, even as the Super-Saucerer desperately rotated to use its remaining shield panels to block the attacks of the closing Wild Fox.
Then, suddenly, all the remaining amber light over their heads disappeared, and the pilots couldn't help but flinch.
"What the heck? Did somebody just make a lucky shot and take down the rest of their shield network?" Typhoon 4 called out.
"Typhoon 2. Wasn't me or lead." Came Hank Hunter's wary voice.
"Wasn't any of us." Came the tense voice of Viper, Raptor 1.
"Wild Fox, what are you seeing?" Rourke demanded, sending a transmission through the outspread Godsight pod network to their home base, and to Carl, who was still coordinating the entire operation.
"The Super-Saucerer just dropped all its shields…standby."
Rourke did so, but in the comforts of Merge Mode, he also had the same access to the various camera feeds that Carl did, and he could shuffle through them at nearly the speed of thought. He noticed the danger before anyone else did. So did Dana and Milo.
"Evasive maneuvers! Break off the attack!" Rourke snapped out the order quickly, though it felt like molasses tumbling from his mouth. He and his wingmates were already moving, but the Model K Arwings, and their pilots, would take longer to respond.
"What? Evasive?" Raptor 3 asked quizzically.
"All pilots, move NOW!" Came Carl's suddenly panicking voice. Rourke winced internally. So their fearless leader had finally noticed the shift in the Super-Saucerer.
They all had to scatter and veer up and away from the surface of the Super-Saucerer. It was moving in a way nobody had predicted…tilting on its side, aiming its entire upper half towards Katina and the Wild Fox as it closed the gap. Had they tried to stay put or maintain position, the rotating vessel would have smashed them like waves on the rocks, breaking them apart.
Of all the Arwings, though, the Seraphs had the maneuverability and united processing power of pilot and machine to track the enormous ship's move and match it. Suspended in their gravity-free bubble, able to move with complete freedom, they swiveled around the moving Super-Saucerer like tops. The others, thankfully, broke off completely and tore for open space, which was a good thing, as more than one Splinter drone, cut off from communications with its peers and its ship thanks to the jamming beam of the Wild Fox, cratered into the surface as it came around and slapped them head-on.
"Dirty motherfuckers!" Raptor 3 screamed, barely clearing enough space before the leading edge of the enormous disc passed no more than five meters behind him. "What the hell are they doing now?!"
"Everyone, watch yourself. I'm picking up an enormous energy spike from that crystal dome pointed at the planet." The steady and clipped voice of Milo Granger silenced the otherwise unceasing snarls and complaints of the shaken pilots.
"We can confirm that." Carl said from his perch aboard the Wild Fox. "It doesn't appear to be a weapons signature, though…Be advised, the remaining Splinters are breaking off and coming for us. Raptors, can you assist? Growler Flight's got their hands full."
A small stream of the Splinters who'd launched prior to Starfox annihilating three of the four launch bays were, just as the eldest McCloud had said, making for the struggling Wild Fox and its beleaguered defenders.
"Raptor lead copies. We're on our way. Keep the pressure on this ship in the meantime, Commander. Raptors, on me!" The four Model K Arwings of Raptor Squadron broke off from the shifted Super-Saucerer and flew in hot pursuit after the inbound attackers, leaving the four Typhoon K Arwings and the three Seraphs of Starfox in the engagement zone.
"Typhoons, I think it's done changing position. Get back in there, we'll cover you." Rourke ordered. The Seraphs, who had never really left the close airspace of the Super-Saucerer, were already on the lookout for inbounds. The six manned "Blackwing" fighers had also been taken by surprise, but they had flown in a wide arc to begin with after launching due to the destruction of the other hatches to get their bearings. Now they screamed along the underbelly of the Super-Saucerer, dancing around the central weapons spire as they made for the Cornerian fighters.
Typhoon Squadron may have wanted to get back in the fight, but they had no such chance. The mysterious energy spike that Milo and the Wild Fox had detected revealed itself at last…With a flash, a softer, yellow field of energy erupted out of the dome like a solar prominence, then fell backwards, cocooning the ship in a heavy layer of energy. The Typhoons had to break off to avoid smashing into it. By the ship, the three Seraphs and the six 'Blackwing' fighters were encased within.
"Milo, what the hell…" Dana started.
"It's an energy field. Probably a backup shield array. They must have housed it in the dorsal dome. Looks like you were right after all, Carl. They did have a surprise." The former sniper seemed almost weary as he congratulated their reinstated teammate on his foresight.
"Shit! Starfox, our weapons aren't breaking through it!" Typhoon 1 called out worriedly.
"Rourke…this secondary shield isn't as strong as their first ones were, but it's still pretty durable." Carl said. Blast after blast from the Wild Fox's JT-300 Turbolasers crashed into the front of the approaching ship, but only succeeded in producing minor discolorations. "You're…you're on your own."
Rourke's claws popped out as he gripped the control stick tighter. "Business as usual. It never ends."
That motto of weary resignation was never far from his lips.
Wild Fox
Bridge
"Crap." Carl said lowly, biting his lip. The tension on the bridge was palpable, and all eyes were on him, the coordinator of the operation. Everyone was looking to him for answers, for instructions. For hope.
He hated it all. The weight of responsibility, the pressure. Even his name. He was the last McCloud, the heir apparent to the legacy set down when his grandfather had smashed Andross 75 years ago. McClouds made miracles happen, or they died trying.
Like his sister had.
Your team, your friends…Dana…they're out there on their own in that mess, and you can't do a Creator-damned thing to help them. You're worthless. And Terrany…why? Why did you do it, sis? I wasn't worth it.
He could remember the last time he saw her. He'd been the one to bail her out of jail after she got kicked out of the Academy, the one to bring her home to cold bowls of Ghambla soup and their worried mother. Carl remembered what she had said in the car.
I hate being a McCloud.
He had thought her crazy at the time, or perhaps just overly bitter. Sure, everyone always had such high expectations for them. He'd excelled in the Academy, earned his wings flying under Captain Hound, and been part of the final strike which crushed the last bit of resistance from the space pirates and Star Wolf. It was where he'd met Rourke for the first time.
He'd excelled, but he'd felt the weight of it. He'd been all too glad when he was approached to work on Project Seraphim, a chance to do something different, to put war behind him. When he met Dana and they hit it off, he dared to dream of a life beyond what fate and public perception always claimed he was destined for.
And all of that is blown to dust now with my sister…and everyone's looking at me.
It would have been so easy to fold up, to collapse. Others had done it. This war had been going on for less than two months since his fateful skirmish, and in that time, the Primals had been brutally effective. Darussia and the execution of "The Pale Demon" were only the two most recent strikes.
But he couldn't. Carl bore down and swallowed the pain of it. He resisted the pressure as he always had, with steely resolve and a stern face. He was the last McCloud. The battle to save Katina was ongoing. He was deathly afraid for Dana, Rourke, and Milo, but he couldn't help them.
He needed to be strong. For the others, he needed to be strong. His heart was cracking from the weight of all the chains, but Carl held strong.
"ROB, keep firing. If there's a chance we can knock those secondary shields out, we'll have to take it." His command to the robot perched at the weapons console was firm and deliberate, with no hint of a quaver. Ordinarily, the ancient AI would be at the SWACS console. But not for this.
"Understood. Be advised, the Wild Fox is enduring several hits from the enemy barrage." ROB cautioned him. "The shields may not be able to withstand a continued assault."
"Typhoon 1. We can't get through these shields, Commander. We're falling back to support you!"
"Growler, Raptor, Typhoon…I hope you're all planning to get these Twigs off of us soon." Carl hit the radio again.
"Working on it, Skip." Came the gruff voice of his old CO, Captain Hound.
The ship shuddered again from another handful of small missiles.
Carl had played his hand. He'd made all the moves he could. Now all that was left was to sit back and wait.
Wait for the showdown to finish.
Super-Saucerer Engagement Zone
Starfox Team
3 Minutes, 30 Seconds Since Engagement
They could have spoken to one another in their voices, but they didn't. They could have felt fear at being trapped, yet they didn't. The three members of Starfox Team, Merged and with their timers nearly expired, reacted in a way that none of their friends aboard the Wild Fox or in the other Arwing squadrons could have anticipated.
They spoke at the speed of thought, transmissions bouncing between them through the optical interlink that the secondary shields of the Super-Saucerer couldn't prevent. They had nine main targets. The six fighters…the secondary shield emitter on the dorsal apex, the fourth hatch, and the rapidly building power fluctuation on the ventral apex. Each had an assignment. Each knew what their fighters, what they themselves were capable of. Rourke commanded, and his wingmates agreed to the plan. Rourke and Dana broke off and flew at the fighters at narrowly converging angles.
Milo's Seraph hung back.
Pulse Laser online.
In the depths of his mindscape, Sergeant Milo Granger felt the world slip away, and the narrow tranquility of his gunsight took hold. His ODAI, as ever, stayed silent. There was little he could offer in way of support. The ship systems told Milo everything he needed to know, and in space, there was no windage, no atmospheric phase compensation required. The Pulse Laser was not the heavy fifty caliber cannon that was as much a part of him as his arm. It wasn't like the narrow-beam Gatiss Type IV that fired an invisible beam of charged particles that left only a brief, quarter second infrared signature to the most observant.
The Pulse Laser was, at its heart, a fire and forget weapon. Fire. Forget the thing you aimed at ever existed. Most of the time. In spite of all the work that Wyatt and his crew had put in on reinforcing the nose laser's central capacitor, the overload required limited his number of shots. Six was the round number Milo tried to keep himself at, mostly because he could fire six shots in less than three seconds, and afterwards the G-Negator weapons capacitors were redlined. His orders were simple. Clear a path for Dana to make it to the secondary shield emitter. Take down one or two of the fighters. Leave the rest for Rourke.
He aimed and fired. Unnecessary as it was, he still pictured himself braced behind his old Maldober APR with its scope zeroed in out at 1200 yards. With nothing to disperse it, the shot blazed hot, fast, and concentrated, burning a trail through the void faster than any normal laser round had a right to go. There was simply no time for anyone to react.
Two shots crashed into the leading Primal fighter that was closing in on Dana. The first flared its shields. The second collapsed them entirely. Irritated, Milo fired the third shot an agonizing half second later. He anticipated the jink of the damaged Helion, and the third blast cleaved it into two ragged halves that exploded in a wide fireball. The other ships started to react to the sudden threat, attempting to separate.
But Merge Mode made their desperate attempts at self-preservation look as graceful and quick as a pad of butter sizzling in a circle across a hot grill.
Shots 4, 5, and 6, Milo spread wider, moving his nose in an arc. He crushed the shields of a second fighter and badly damaged a third's primary defense. Dana reacted to his actions and finished off the second shield-less Helion with a burst of her own Nova lasers, and the third veered off away from her. The tigress now had a clear path, and she took it, hovering away from the dogfight with impunity. The surviving four Helions had other concerns, what with Rourke barreling into them like a possessed madman. If anyone had a reason for such a state, it was Rourke.
Pulse Laser capacitor at redline. Safety interlock engaged.
Milo pulled back away from the rifle of his mindscape and breathed, soaking in the battle ahead of him with clear eyes once again. The capacitor would recover much faster if he de-Merged…
And so he did.
"Good luck, you two." Milo told the other two members of Starfox. Taking a moment to recover his bearings, and amazed that he suffered almost no pain from the transition back to real-time presence and the drop into his true body, he checked his radar. ODAI had marked the direction he needed to go on his HUD. Down, towards the fast-building weapons energy signature.
The weapon that had shattered Darussia.
The ring-tailed raccoon flipped his Arwing about, struggling to maintain altitude and bearing as he found himself flying inside the narrow confines of the airspace of a moving ship with a hard, shielded ceiling. He managed well enough, thankfully. He was Starfox.
They always managed.
Wild Fox Engagement Zone
4 Minutes Since Engagement
One Seraph and ten Model K Arwings were all that stood between the last, desperate strike force of drone spacecraft launched by the Primal mothership and their own vessel. Once the Splinter drones had gotten in close enough to the Wild Fox to escape the focused jamming beam aimed at the Super-Saucerer, they'd regained their ability to communicate with one another. The result was a much more coordinated attack on their ship, and it was an absolute mess. The Arwing defenders had whittled down their numbers by ten, but the reinforcements still outmatched them five to one. Fifty Splinter drones buzzed around the Wild Fox, targeting the ship, and the fighters with equal ferocity and firepower.
Well, 49. Raptor 1 flew through the spherical fireball created with his underside pass, Raptor 2 stuck hard on his wing in support.
"Scratch one more bogey." Raptor 2 reported, and then the screech of a radar lock shut him up. "Damn!"
"Bank right!" Raptor 1 ordered, and the two Arwings made a hard turn, trying to defeat the tracking. The missile attempted to follow and exploded, firing a rod of hardened metal after them. The edge of it missed fuselage, but grazed Raptor 2's shielding, causing it to flare brightly.
"Shit, that was close!" Raptor 2 hissed. Glancing behind him, he saw the "Twig" responsible for the missile shot tracking in after them. "We've got a tail, Viper!"
"Raptor 1, in trouble. Anyone got a bead on our bandit?!" The Venomian lizard shouted over the broad channel, so every Arwing pilot could hear him.
"I've got him lined up." Came the oddly mechanical voice of Growler Flight's youngest member. A pair of white-hot laserbolts lanced through the enormous dogfight, narrowly missing three more engagements, and incinerated their pursuer. Raptor 2 had to fight the urge to backtrack the incredible shot to its source, because it would cause him to lose situational awareness. That was something none of them could afford, as he'd just been painfully reminded of.
"Thanks for the save, kid." Raptor 1 called back. A sweep of their surroundings revealed plenty more targets to worry about, but something more worrisome besides. Five of the Splinter drones weren't aiming for the Wild Fox proper, but seemed to be heading down with a more specific target in mind…they were headed for its belly, which contained its main weapons systems and the launch bay tunnel. "All planes, I've got a group of drones going after the weapons, or worse. Can anyone engage?!"
"Typhoon 1…no go. Got our hands full."
"Growler 1. The kid's barely keeping us above water, Viper."
"Raptor 3, boss. We're tangled with a cluster going for the engines."
Raptor 2 moved up a bit, drawing even with his commanding officer. "Just us, then?" He asked worriedly.
Raptor 1 managed a hiss and engaged his boosters. "Keep close, this is gonna get rough. They take out those guns, our life is going to get interesting quick."
Wild Fox
Bridge
"Missiles away. All missiles expended." ROB reported.
"The turbolasers?" Carl asked.
"Under attack. Raptor 1 and 2 are moving to defend them."
"Anything we can do to make our defenders' jobs easier?"
"Only breaking off our attack, which is not advised. We cannot target them with the jamming beam at their current range."
"Agreed. Maintain it on the Super-Saucerer." Carl glanced back to General Grey. The military liaison gave the barest nod of his head to that, holding firm to his commitment to let Carl run the battle as he saw fit.
He released another ragged breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and expanded one of the Godsight pod feeds focused in on the Super-Saucerer.
One Seraph was moving towards the dorsal side of the ship, and what was likely the secondary shield emitter. Dana. Another was flying in the opposite direction, for the ventral side, and what ROB and Hogsmeade had both reported was a rising power signature that could only be the ship's main planet-busting weapon winding itself up. That Seraph was de-Merged. Milo. Guess he'd fired off his Pulse Laser to redline and was recharging.
And there, swarmed by the four manned fighters…there had been six…
Carl's throat went dry.
"Rourke."
Rourke was fighting the Primal's ace pilots. Alone.
Sasha looked over from the communications station. "Should I…"
"No." Carl said raggedly, cutting her off. "Don't call him. Don't do anything to distract him." All that would do would be to put him at greater risk than he was already.
But then Rourke did the unthinkable.
"Carl." Even Merged, his voice was thick with rage. In spite of being in the fight of his life, the bastard was calling them. "Kill the jamming beam."
"Rourke, if we do that, the Super-Saucerer can communicate with its fighters. Those fighters would be able to talk to one ano…"
"I WANT them talking. Divert it then. Just hit the ship. Leave the fighters alone."
"If this is some kind of macho bullshit thing, lieutenant…" General Grey growled loudly, finally breaking his silence.
"Carl." Rourke repeated, ignoring the general completely.
At the SWACS console, ROB turned his head slightly over, watching Carl McCloud with that intelligent, unreadable gaze from his glowing red optical visor.
Carl swallowed his lump. For her. You're doing this for her.
"ROB…narrow the jamming beam. Target the Super-Saucerer's communications only."
ROB nodded and carried out the order without ceremony. Carl could feel the rage brimming off of Grey behind him, but he found he didn't care.
"I hope to the Creator you didn't just get your friend killed." The brigadier general said lowly.
Carl shut his eyes, only responding inside his mind. You've never seen him fight when he gets like this.
Rourke
You've lost it. His ODAI was, as always, a source of constant acerbic wit. Too much like Rourke for his own good, sometimes. But everything in the AI's personality had been learned, adapted, adopted, through its interactions with Rourke, and one Merging after another.
Shut up. Rourke knew that the program was expressing worry and concern. He didn't care.
You want to know how I know you've lost it? I can hear the memory of your grandfather snapping one cruel thing after another at you, and you can't even hear him. All you can hear is the rage.
Shut UP. Rourke could feel his teeth grinding against one another, one unusual sensation in a sea of stimuli that could drown lesser minds. Just as he had wished, the jamming beam narrowed, and his Seraph chirped up, reporting that normal radio frequencies were once again enabled. He kept his systems switched to optical interlink, but allowed his scanner to pick up the Primal bands. He could hear the four remaining pilots at last.
"What? Hey, our radios are working!"
"Everyone, stay on your toes! We've practiced for this!"
"But the last two from Sunder…"
"Died by the Marksman's treachery! Eclipse Squadron WILL avenge them!"
"The Marksman. So that's what you call my wingmate." Rourke cut into their frequency with a cold voice. Even as they swarmed in on him from all sides, locking on with missiles and filling the void with laserfire, his focus was so absolute that he dared to speak to them. "You're not getting to him. You have to deal with me." Another of their projectile-firing missiles came at him, and he effortlessly weaved his Seraph out of its flight path ever so slightly. When the charge fired and the hardened metallic rod at its core screamed out to smash through his shields and shatter his Arwing, it hit nothing but empty space. Their attacks, while numerous, were slow as molasses. Predictable. Laserfire pierced the air around him, at him, and he lazily spun his Seraph around, deflecting their shots harmlessly.
"You will die, Starfox. Just as your Pale Demon did."
The usual white of the Merged mental landscape he shared with his ODAI had been a hazy pink since the fight started. Now, it flared blood red.
"She had a name." Rourke said, firing a pair of Nova laser shots at one of the surviving 'Eclipse' Primals, punishing it for coming in too close. The pilot reacted quickly, launching another missile before breaking off, hoping to force Rourke on the defensive long enough to escape for another pass. Rourke evaded that NIFT-29 Corona as easily as the last. "But I suppose it was easier for you miserable sons of bitches to just call her a Demon." Another lashing of his Nova lasers smashed into a second Helion fighter, forcing it back. Rourke kept them all at arms' length. "Less personal that way."
"Flaming hell, what kind of monster ARE you? How is your ship even…"
Rourke let out an angry snarl, and his Seraph jumped towards the retreating fighter, locking on. Along the forward edge of his wing, five white-hot balls of plasma energy coalesced. The ship chimed with a positive laserlock, and he fired. Each sphere tracked in on the fighter, and its pilot screamed, trying to jink away. The close confines of the Super-Saucerer and its energy shield prevented any meaningful evasion. One sphere hit the shields as the Primal swerved away from a quick and ignoble demise by collision. The second went off astern, flaring the ship's shielding. The third and fourth went off along the Helion's wings simultaneously, and the fifth struck dead center, atomizing ship and pilot alike.
"I don't want a nickname, or need one. You won't have the time to come up with one anyhow." The balancing act between precision and rage was something Rourke had fought with for years under his grandfather's harsh schooling. He had only ever lost himself to rage once before.
And now, as his Nova lasers approached redline after the brutal attack and struggled to cool to acceptable levels, he had done so twice. But for her…for her, it made sense. He didn't care about anything except making them pay. Making someone pay. So they would pay for what had happened to the one bright spot in his pathetic shambles of a life. An alert sounded. One minute until de-Merge, a separation that would reduce his ability to fight on even terms against the heavily stacked odds. He couldn't have that, and so Rourke gave a rare order to his companion in the Merge mindscape.
Shut off the Merge safety.
Boss…Please. Don't do this. You're putting your life on the line!
She could do this.
You're not Terrany. You're Rourke O'Donnell. You're a survivor. An opportunist. You don't go racing in on the sacrifice play!
Fresh pain tore at his chest, and Rourke could almost hear his grandfather's rasping, bitter laugh mocking him. He almost could, but it was gone. The red rage was too overwhelming, because it was powered by a feeling that Rourke had never been able to cope with.
Grief. ODAI numbly realized he'd lost the argument, and Rourke could feel the Seraph's supposedly hardwired safety feature get burned away in an instant of agreement between pilot and AI.
Until her.
Dana
There were still gun emplacements along the outer surface of the Super-Saucerer. During the initial phase of the attack, she and Rourke and Milo had been tagging them down, but there were so many more. The ship was bristling with armaments, and along the ship's upper surface, pointed towards the Wild Fox and Katina just beyond it, every surviving gun was fixated on her. But this wasn't the same Dana who had fallen apart after Carl went MIA, and struggled to cope with thoughts of suicide. A fierce protective urge had risen up inside of her, and her ODAI, clever little thing that it was, matched it. Its voice had changed also, becoming more feminine as the war had dragged on. It was like flying with a cousin, almost, if Dana had any.
No way in hell that any stinking gun turrets are tagging us, Tiger.
Not a frigging chance. What went unsaid by the both of them was felt all the same. The Super-Saucerer had to fall. It was aimed for their mothership. For the planet they were protecting.
And Carl was aboard that ship, crippled, grounded.
She was NOT losing him again.
It must have been frustrating to the gunners aboard the Super-Saucerer. The skies were filled with anti-aircraft laser artillery, drilling holes through the void with compressed firepower, but they all failed to connect. Her Seraph bobbed and weaved through the storm with the grace of a dancer. Rourke was an all out scrapper. Milo was the tactician. Terrany had been the instinctive pilot. But Dana…
Dana had been the Arspace Dynamics test pilot assigned to Project Seraphim from the start. She'd had only a bare bones, basic-level combat experience before the Primal War, but like nobody else on her team, she could make her plane sing.
It was almost amusing to watch those hundreds of laserbolts that missed her keep on going, rise up, and splash against the energy shielding. The impacts caused minor ripples of discoloration. In their haste to rid themselves of Dana, the Primals were only hastening their own defeat. Of course, their own shots were nowhere near as powerful as the enormous blasts that slammed from the JT-300 Turbolasers aboard the Wild Fox, but every piece contributed.
An array of heavier guns was coming up. Dana held down the trigger inside her mindscape and charged up the five homing laserbursts that the Nova lasers were capable of producing. Four guns, five shots. She locked on and fired, and stationary targets stood no chance. Pillars of fire and venting atmosphere rose up from the annihilated artillery, and Dana flew on, a wild dervish in a thunderstorm.
I see the shield emitter. Her ODAI had let Dana focus on the fight, lining up targets and keeping them on their flight path. To anyone, it would have seemed just decoration, or a piece of the design. Only when they had disrupted enough of the shield pylon network and forced the Primals' hand had the crystalline dome atop the Super-Saucerer been revealed for what it was.
Nova Lasers are still cooling down from the homing bursts. Time for a G-Bomb. Set it for normal. I want that secondary explosion.
Oh, they have got to be hating those things by now…Her ODAI cackled and made the final adjustment to the G-Bomb's circuitry.
Dana allowed herself a small smile of triumph. A wide ring of defensive turrets was situated around the elevated dome, and they all turned and fired.
Absolutely useless. Dana locked on dead center to the dome and pulled her bomb trigger. The brightly glowing projectile shot off, rocketing towards its destination.
Terrible light flared when it hit, and then came the moment of implosion…the wash of sudden, unrestricted suction as the microsingularity began its grisly work. The crystalline cover cracked like a spiderweb under the assault of gravity's relentless pull. Armor plating around the dome was ripped up like shingles in a tornado, the guns stuttered, fell silent, and were bent to uselessness as they succumbed to that intense tug. Debris was sucked into the microsingularity, making it more powerful, more angry. Dana watched in fascination as the darkly glowing secondary shields of the Super-Saucerer began to flicker. The critical systems were being affected as well.
And then the inevitable secondary explosion, so much larger than the first. Empowered by the matter it had drawn in and spaghettified into subatomic particles and energy, the blast radius engulfed what was left of the dome and cratered the top of the Super-Saucerer.
The secondary energy shield, that last desperate means of protection, winked out in whimpering silence.
And then the turbolasers began to strike home on the ship's surface, pounding it with thick, messy, furious impacts of laserfire.
Dana pulled her Seraph away from the ruined target and breathed. She checked her Merge limiter, winced, and let the mindscape fade away…
Dropped into her own body, Dana shuddered and blinked furiously. She looked over her right shoulder and watched the secondary wings lower back down to the primary wings. The quartered blue G-Negator pod situated at the start of the secondary wing's mounts closed up, reverting to its normal diamond shape. She would need Merge Mode one last time to take down her secondary target, the last hatch.
"Shields are down. Kick this thing's ass, babe." She said over the radio, not caring if she used a pet name for her beloved.
An honest and relieved chuckle came from that beautiful brown fox in reply, warming her heart. "Creator, I love you, woman."
The guns of the Super-Saucerer opened up again, angrily trying to punish her for her deed. Without Merge Mode, it was much harder to fly through it all, and several shots baked her shields. She swore and veered up into open airspace, giving herself some much needed space.
"We're not through yet." She told him, trying to focus herself as much as she could focus him.
She hoped that Milo and Rourke were managing.
Worldbreaker
Bridge
5 Minutes Since Engagement
The entire ship shuddered again, and the Praetor needed nobody to tell him the cause. The rattling, the shaking, it was those damn super-Arwings that Starfox used. They had crushed three of the four hatches like tin cans earlier, and now…
"Praetor, our…our shields…"
The ship began to shake with different impacts. Incoming enemy fire.
No way out. No retreat.
"Time until we're in Shatterbeam range?"
"Two minutes. Charging procedures are timed to match."
"Our squadrons?"
"The Splinter drones are heavily engaged with their mothership. It's taking quite a beating. Sunder Squadron's two remaining pilots were destroyed. Eclipse Squadron is down to three planes, and fighting with one of the Arwing pilots."
The Praetor looked around the bridge. There was no escaping the inevitable conclusion now. This battle, tipped horribly out of their favor from the start, would likely kill them all.
He saw fear, but also resolve. This was their one chance. They would have time for one shot, and Katina was no longer the prime target.
"Turn the ship around, and activate the Shatterbeam emitter." He ordered. "Target their mothership."
A weapon that could destabilize planetary cores and burn a world to magma and cinders…he could only imagine what that enormous beam of energy would do to a single ship. If their situation wasn't so desperate, he might have smiled.
As it was, the fire returned to the eyes of his men, and faces that had been defeated and downcast revived. Everyone moved with newfound sharpness.
Die they might…But now, they would take those foolish Cornerians, that foolish Starfox, down with them.
Typhoon Squadron
"He's on you, Two!" Typhoon 3 shouted out in warning. He and Typhoon 4 flew in to intercept as one particularly diligent Splinter drone tracked in on Typhoon 2, who'd been cut off from his wingmate as they dodged another drone's missile shot.
Typhoon 2 did his best, bobbing and aileron-rolling with everything he had to try and avoid the storm of laserfire. "Geez, this bastard's persistent!" He ducked under one of the enormous thrusters at the stern they were protecting, narrowly avoiding a collision. "Any time now would be good!"
Still swarming around the Wild Fox like flies and freed of the jamming beam because of their proximity, the limited AI of the drones managed to be more of a nuisance with their coordinated efforts. The middle cluster going after the ship's bridge was being held off by some fancy flying and the Merged Seraph of Growler Flight, but Typhoon was on its own in defending the ship's thrusters.
"We've got a threesome closing in on us, Three." Typhoon 4 told his wingmate warily. They'd landed in the middle of a dogfight sandwich.
"Just…a little closer…" Typhoon 3 grunted. A glowing orb of green laserlight gleamed from his nose, and they finally closed enough of the gap that his systems chimed the happy sound to indicate lock-on. "Firing!"
The homing laserburst tracked in on the Splinter pursuing Typhoon 2, and the craft moved to evade. Three had expected the maneuver and aimed upwards…a stream of hyper laserfire from his nose cannon stuttered along its wingtip and sent the ship spiraling out of control, veering up and backwards in an uncontrolled arc. "Got 'im!" The glee in his voice faded as he tracked the dying ship's angle, and realized something. "Aw, shit! Wild Fox, brace for impact!"
Their shields already weakened from the unending barrage, the Wild Fox's primary defense flared as the crippled Splinter drone moved like a boomerang for the port engine. The force of the physical impact proved too much, and the thing broke through, impacting hard against the protective plating of the engine before going up in a brilliant flare of light.
Sensing the weakness created by the attack, the trio of Splinters moving on the tail of Typhoon 3 and 4 broke off and made for the damaged engine, locking on with their missiles. Three armor-piercing missiles screamed for the glowing weak spot and hit hard before anyone on Typhoon Squadron could react, and the engine sputtered and died, disengaging power to the thruster before it could go critical and take a part of the ship with it. Moving with only one thruster, the Wild Fox began to drift, banking in a lazy turn.
"You sons of bitches!" Typhoon 1 screamed, launching a smart bomb up at the trio of drones. They tried to flee, but his shot made contact with the fighter on the right side of the element and baked all three to oblivion. "Wild Fox, they got past us and took out an engine after a suicide crash. Are you doing all right?"
"Negative." The radio operator's voice was clipped, terse. "Keep them from taking out the starboard thruster, or we're dead!"
The reason for their sudden panic became clear when Typhoon regrouped and caught sight of the Super-Saucerer…distant, but closing rapidly. It was nearly turned about, pointing its ass straight for the mothership. The brilliantly glowing spike at the bottom, its main cannon, seemed to be winding up for a shot capable of melting planets.
"You heard the lady!" Typhoon 1 snapped. "Protect this ship!"
"Roger!"
"Roger!"
"I'm on your wing!"
Holding fast in their 'finger' formation, the four Arwing squadron closed in on the re-energized Splinters around the stern.
Milo
5 Minutes, 30 seconds since Engagement
There was an old saying in the Cornerian Army that Sergeant Granger was reminded of as he veered off and pushed the Seraph's thrusters, engaging the boosters; You see a tank coming for you, you get out of the way. The same could be said for the enormous Super-Saucerer as it turned completely around. Instead of trying to keep pace with its shift, as Rourke somehow managed to, Milo turned and burned for open space. Checking his radar, he could see that Dana had also flown clear of the Super-Saucerer, but she was closing in while it was shifting position. Let the test pilot and the space pirate fly fancy. That wasn't his gig.
When he'd first been enlisted to Project Seraphim, Milo had thought it a joke. Sure, he had the right mental capacity and chemistry to handle Merge Mode, but he wasn't a pilot. Until Carl had roped him in, the only planes he'd ever stepped foot in were troop transports and cargo haulers. He still didn't consider himself much of a pilot compared to his teammates, but he had been getting better. At the end of the day, though, his experience guided him, not any piloting instincts. He was their rational thinker, their voice of calm in a storm of hormones.
And unlike the others, his Seraph was geared up with a much more effective sensor package. That system now blared a warning that the main cannon was charging up…and based on its angle, aiming for the Wild Fox. Their mothership was almost foundering, turned sideways and based on the venting from the starboard engine. That also had made its main weapons useless.
"Oh, no you don't." Milo muttered. Grunting as he brought his Seraph into a sharp turn that strained the G-Diffusion effect and squashed him back against his seat, he kept the boosters burning and aimed himself for the airspace between the two enormous ships.
"Odai, do you have a read on the power output of that main cannon of theirs?"
"I am receiving telemetry, but as we lack direct line of sight, the ship's sensor array cannot provide an accurate assessment of energy buildup."
"Don't you worry about that." Milo fought back against the G forces and pulled himself up. Now that momentum was normalized again, he was able to breathe…at least until he braked and turned himself around. "We have the readings from that cannon's shot at Darussia on file?"
"One moment…confirmed. Power output at the time of firing during the battle of Darussia is on file. I have saved it to the Seraph hard drive."
"Give me a cross reference when we've got our nose pointed at the thing." Milo ordered his ship's AI. "And put up an estimated countdown for me."
"Understood."
They cleared the edge of the Super-Saucerer, and Milo gave himself another kilometer of clearance before hitting the retros and banking the Arwing into a sharp turn that caused the edges of his vision to blue for a moment.
"Receiving accurate telemetry. Processing power buildup."
"Put it up." Milo croaked, clenching and unclenching his legs to get the blood flowing again.
A timer appeared on his HUD.
60 seconds. 59. 58.
"Aw, shit." Milo exhaled sharply. He triggered Merge Mode…
Back in his mindscape, Milo took position behind the trigger and checked the capacitors of his Pulse Laser. They'd cooled off some, but not enough for the full salvo. He had three shots.
Make them count.
He pulled the trigger. The first compressed beam screamed out at the delicate spire, bristling with energy. The powerful ray warped as it drew near…and missed.
Damn…make the adjustment. It's like windage.
He did so, bringing his sights slightly to the left and up one measure. He fired again. This time, the beam crashed dead center…and was reflected off in a ricochet.
What in…
The Super-Saucerer's main beam cannon appears to employ a similar G-Diffusive effect as an Arwing during an Aileron roll. The spire is supercharged during the energy buildup. Readings indicate not even the Wild Fox's turbolasers could pierce that resistive field.
You're full of good news. Milo pulled back from the scope and expanded his focus. He couldn't hit the spire with lasers, it was too well protected. It frustrated him to no end. He'd never really gotten behind laser sniper rifles, either, preferring the tried and true lead-slingers. Most shielding systems used in Lylat were like that, built to defend against energy attacks, but with enough power to handle the occasional odd asteroidal impact or hull graze without compromising ship integrity. But any ship stupid enough to smack into an asteroid, or as the Primals had made clear with their armor-piercing space missiles, get hit by a fast moving physical projectile suffered a lot wor…
Milo blinked a few times, then smacked himself in the forehead. Creator, you're an idiot.
No defense was perfect. He knew what he had to do to make that point abundantly clear to the Primals now. His ODAI sent a warning to the Wild Fox about the incoming attack, and then he shot off. It was time to get to work.
Dana
6 Minutes, 10 Seconds Since Engagement
Closing in on the last of the hatches from her high angle, Dana saw it beginning to open. They must have been getting ready to launch more fighters.
"Like hell you are." She growled. Activating Merge Mode again, the time started…
Her ODAI was waiting for her in their mindscape. She didn't know what the others' mindscapes looked like while they were Merged. She didn't know that Terrany's had been that of an enormous wall of screens and panels, all beckoning to the commands issued by herself and the last remnant of Falco Lombardi. She didn't know that in Milo's mindscape, everything was dialed in to the scope of a sniper rifle. She didn't know that Rourke's mindscape was that of a darkened ship's bridge, with none of the brightness that the others possessed. And she certainly didn't know what Wallaby Preen's looked like.
Hers took on the form of an Aeronautical museum, an open space full of every plane, experimental fighter, and spacecraft she'd ever encountered, flown, or taken an interest in. From the R67 to the Model 1 SFX, there was even hanging models of the Seraph and that black stealth Primal superfighter.
Her ODAI didn't have corporeal form. It was a voice in her head, a ghost on a datapad linked to her headset.
The G-Bomb is charged and ready, but I'd get closer.
I'm a test pilot, Odai. Getting closer and pushing the limits? Hell, it's what I live for.
Her ship danced in, and sure enough, as she placed herself in front of the opening hatch, she could see one last array of Splinter drones coming down the launch corridor.
Like fish in a barrel. She hit the bomb trigger, and on the overhead, multisided stadium monitor that hung from the ceiling in the midst of all the plane mockups, she watched the glowing projectile track in.
The fourth and last hatch was crushed by gravimetric shear, the fighters swallowed by the singularity before the resulting gamma burst blast wave ripped the ship's hull apart.
"Last hatch disabled." Dana reported to her teammates. "Rourke, you need any help?"
A dismissive growl was her only reply, and she shivered in spite of herself.
She hadn't felt that much rage from him in forever.
Wild Fox
Bridge
6 Minutes, 30 Seconds Since Engagement
A howl of pain punctuated the report from ROB that Wallaby Preen, the only Seraph-capable pilot outside of the Starfox Team, had slipped out of Merge Mode.
"Ice cream headache! Ice cream…shitshit shitty mcshit!" The young marsupial hissed over the channel. The ship shuddered, but the shields were holding for now. All of that would mean diddly in thirty seconds, though. Milo, the closest to the central weapon that the Super-Saucerer was built around, had sent them a report, and they'd gotten the countdown information from his sensor suite directly. ROB confirmed it as accurate in a heartbeat.
The Wild Fox was turned sideways, beleaguered on all sides, and its defenders were slowly and steadily whittling down the Splinter drones. Rourke was doing more than engaging the enemy, he was brutalizing them, and somehow, he was staying in Merge Mode while going past the five minute limiter. If Dr. Bushtail had been on the bridge, Carl was sure the simian would be giving them all a wonderful apoplectic show because of that.
Even if their ship was pointed in the right direction, they would have been unable to manage a critical blow on the energy-firing central spire. As Milo's efforts had made abundantly clear, the thing was generating some kind of ray shielding during its buildup that prevented laserfire from penetrating the device. It made its own miniature shield, the third that this fragging ship had produced.
He'd put together the best strategy he could, and still, they had come up short. All around him, the crew of the Wild Fox, the people who had been on Project Seraphim, were tired and beleaguered. Could they sense as he did that this was all for naught? Unwilling to meet their faces and confirm any fears they might hold, Carl kept his eyes on the main monitor and flipped through the camera feeds of the various Godsight pods around the engagement zone.
He blinked and then cringed as one camera pod began to suddenly spin wildly. He switched feeds, and was stunned to find that one spinning as well.
"ROB, what am I looking at?"
"Pilot Granger is using the draw effect to keep the Godsight Pods spinning around his Seraph at increasing velocity." The ship's AI reported.
Confused, Carl hit his communicator, opening up a direct line from the bridge to the raccoon's ship. "Milo, what the heck are you doing?"
"Troubleshooting." Came the distorted reply.
Rourke
6 Minutes, 40 seconds since Engagement
There had been six fighters. Then Milo had dropped two, taking their number to four. In a flurry of the Seraph's homing Nova laserbursts, Rourke had diminished them to three without taking a single hit. The second, already weakened, had been demolished as well, but its pilot had ejected. Rourke let the escape pod go, not out of mercy, but out of practicality. One wasted shot on that pathetic pilot was one less against the still active planes. And the last two survivors had definitely been training. Had he not been Merged, they would have definitely given him a run for his money. As it stood, though, it was all too little.
His last G-Bomb went off in their thruster wake, and the two ships found themselves being strained against the powerful microsingularity. Spinning in place, Rourke lined up his targeting reticule and blasted their engines to dust.
"You…You MONSTER! AAAH!" That was the last transmission from Eclipse Squadron before the G-Bomb's microsingularity collapsed, and the blast wave vaporized their weakened ships.
Then, and only then, did Rourke break clear of the Super-Saucerer and set an escape course. As soon as it was plotted in, he and his ODAI released the connection they had. Merge Mode faded, the wings folded back in, the G-Negator pods closed up.
Rourke sank into his seat, teeth clenched, whimpering in pain as a monstrous headache like no other he'd ever felt in his life finally hit. He had overstressed his mind beyond the five minute limiter's safeguard, and he was paying for it. But in spite of the darkness that closed in on him, he kept his eyes on the glimmering stars of the galaxy, weakly reaching up with a hand towards them.
"I did it too." He rasped, too exhausted to notice if he was speaking on an open microphone or not. "Were you watching me…Terrany? Just like…you…"
His ODAI took control of the ship's autopilot and corrected the Seraph's course, bringing it around in a wide arc that would have it approaching the Wild Fox, if it was still intact.
Rourke slipped into unconsciousness, having given his all.
For her.
Wild Fox
Raptor Squadron
The Splinters were fast, and lacking pilots, capable of some tricky maneuvering, but they lacked the sheer durability and ferocity that Arwings brought to bear. Flying with the deadly grace and precision that the 17th Squadron was famous for, "Viper" Korman and his three wingmates had demolished the threat to the guns and launch tunnel of the Wild Fox in a blistering series of maneuvers that made the lizard feel reborn, and proud of. He and his men excelled in hit and runs, and against weak targets like Twigs, that tack worked perfectly.
The last pair of fighters threatening their zone of engagement were blown apart into shards of metal when Raptor 3 and 4 spooked them into a jink that the two drones had no business making…right into the waiting gunsights of himself and Raptor 2, the polar bear that was the literal polar opposite of himself when it came to personality.
"Your nose is clear, Wild Fox!" Raptor 1 reported with a shout.
"Typhoon here. Stern is deloused!"
"Growler Squadron. Last of the drones are mopped up here!" Every Splinter drone had finally, mercifully, been destroyed, leaving the Wild Fox with clear airspace.
"All fighters, disengage! I repeat, disengage!" The harried voice of the Wild Fox's female radio operator shattered his good mood, and Korman did the smart thing by reacting and not questioning. His men, thankfully, followed his example, and they turned and burned away from the Wild Fox. Only then did he look back, and out of the corner of his eye, he caught the fast-closing Super-Saucerer…and the glowing nimbus of light around its main weapon. It wasn't pointed at Katina, but Starfox's mothership.
"Oh no." Victor Korman whispered. "Not again."
Milo
6 Minutes, 50 seconds since Engagement
10 seconds countdown remaining
Spinning. Everything was spinning. His ship was spinning. The four Godsight pod satellites he'd scooped up were spinning even faster still, and picking up speed. The draw effect…never was Milo more glad to have that unusual, often unattached feature in his Arwing.
Explain "Troubleshooting", Pilot Granger. His ODAI was inquisitive for a change, and Milo blinked inside his Mindscape at that. Maybe his ODAI was changing too…but that meant that HE was changing also. He didn't know which was more surprising.
Troubleshooting. As in, there's trouble, and we're shooting it.
To be accurate, you are not 'shooting' as much as you are attempting to 'throw' the GSPs at a high velocity and rate of speed.
Smartass. Yes, that clinched it. Somehow, ODAI had a sense of humor now. Frigging AI. Milo brought his Seraph level, stopping the wild rotations that, were he not Merged, would have rendered him dizzy beyond belief. The scope reappeared, his intense focus and ability to hit small targets at large distances took center stage. He remembered the angles, the trajectories that his lasers had taken. The same was probably true, even with hardened projectiles. That narrowed his target window to about…well, a meter, according to the energy readings. And it had to be perfect.
But then, that was what Milo did. What he'd always done.
He steadied his breathing, felt the gunsight steady, waited for the moment between the beats of his heart when his eyes steadied and perfect vision was his…
Finger on the trigger. A metaphorical trigger now, as what he was actually doing was releasing the satellites right at their moment of arc when the resulting vector would go forward along to the spot in his zeroed out scope.
Not again. You don't get to fire that thing again.
Lub-dup. The quaver of a heartbeat. His, or the ship's? It didn't matter. His finger tightened. Only the smallest pull was needed now.
Silence. Clarity.
Perfection.
BANG.
Worldbreaker
Bridge
"Eclipse Squadron is DOWN!" The radar operator screamed. Praetor Goulfax ground his teeth. Apparently, not even their best, most well-trained fighter pilots were a match for Starfox…And only ONE of those accursed Arwings had thrown themselves into the melee with those four surviving fighters.
"Twelve seconds to firing! Ten! Nine!" The weapons officer counted it down aloud, and the Praetor stared at his monitor, towards the ever-nearing Wild Fox. The ship would be turned to dust from the high energy discharge.
All his thoughts of victory were put on pause when a faint glimmer of light caught his eye. Something moved in the kilometers between the two enormous ships. Something small. Something silver.
Taking command of the main viewscreen, Praetor Goulfax zoomed in their surviving cameras. Something was standing in their path.
An Arwing. And by the way its wings were unfolded…A Seraph?!
"Five! Four! THREE!"
Objects spun around it so rapidly they seemed a blur. And then, one by one, the spinning wheel around the Arwing flashed and revealed themselves to be some kind of…missile? Projectile? All of them screaming towards the Worldbreaker.
Towards the Shatterbeam.
Impact. The first Godsight pod satellite's aim was dead-on, and the other three followed it in. Able to deflect energy fire, but unable to prevent hardened targets moving at extreme velocity, the energy barrier around the Shatterbeam could do nothing except flare uselessly.
The first impact turned the Godsight pod to dust, but left a splintering spiderweb pattern of cracks on its surface. A quarter second later, the second one hit. Another quarter second. The third. And the fourth. Each successive blow did more damage to the Shatterbeam, a weapon so devastating, it could ruin planets…but was conversely fragile in spite of all its power.
The fourth shot cracked clean through the spire, rupturing it into two halves. The buildup of energy suddenly found itself shunted, its preferred route cut off. Having nowhere else to go, the power meant to destroy the Wild Fox instead found itself lashing backwards at the only target left. Energy was never lost, after all.
Every circuit on the Worldbreaker, every power conduit, every relay and junction throughout the ancient vessel suddenly exploded with the backlash. Angry red lines glowed through the vessel. Those aboard her died instantly, just from the heatflash caused by that sudden release.
The chain reaction ended with its one obvious result. The Shatterbeam's energy found its way back to the nuclear-powered fusion generators deep within the ship, containment and stability were lost.
A fireball engulfed the Worldbreaker, and the ship died. Not with a whimper…with a bang.
Wild Fox
Bridge
7 Minutes since Engagement
The blast of light was so intense that every set of eyes in the room squinted shut automatically, even those who hadn't been staring at their doom. In an instant, the threat was ended.
General Grey couldn't help it. His jaw dropped, and his pipe, unlit, hit the floor and rolled away from him. Carl stared agog, realizing that the threat was ended…and who had done it.
ROB, naturally, stated the obvious. "Super-Saucerer has been destroyed."
"What the…What happened?!" Typhoon 1's confused voice came over the intercom.
"Milo." Carl found his voice again. He could see the sharpshooter's Arwing de-Merging, his position in the space between the enormous fireball and the Wild Fox making it blatantly obvious who was responsible for their salvation. He swallowed, and slowly began to breathe again. "All aircraft, report!"
"Typhoon Squadron. All fighters accounted for."
"Raptor Squadron. We're good here."
"Growler Squadron. Me and my boys are just fine, Skip. Well, Wallaby's got a bit of a headache."
"Captain?" The shaky voice of Wallaby came over the radio. "Can I say it now?"
A sigh. "Fine, kid. Fine."
There was silence for a moment, and then the marsupial screamed. "UP YOURS, PRIMALS!"
The cascading laughter shattered the last bits of tension the strung out fighter pilots and bridge crew felt. Carl allowed himself a shaky chuckle, then went on.
"Rourke, Dana, Milo?"
"I'm fine, hun."
"Huh. Can't believe that actually worked." Milo drawled.
But no response came from Rourke. Carl swallowed. He could see Rourke's fighter coming in towards the Wild Fox, but the pilot wasn't answering. "Rourke? Respond."
ROB looked up. "Pilot O'Donnell is currently incapacitated. EEG readings indicate he is unconscious."
"Can his ODAI fly in the plane by itself?"
"Affirmative."
"Good." Carl rubbed at his forehead, then accessed the shipwide speakers along with the channel used by the Arwing pilots. "Everyone, this is Carl McCloud. The Super Saucerer is destroyed. Katina's safe. Absolutely outstanding work. Pilots, you're cleared to RTB."
Shutting off the channel, Carl found himself swamped in a sea of cheers and exultant shouts of joy. Carl just felt tired. Happy. Alive. But tired. He wanted to fall asleep in the command chair right there, untouched by the noise.
A hand touched his shoulder, and he stirred. Looking up, he saw Brigadier General Grey looking down on him with pride, his recovered pipe sticking out of the side of his mouth.
"Now that…was some damn fine leadership." He told Carl, the noise of the celebration on the bridge keeping anyone else from overhearing their conversation.
Carl shook his head softly. "I didn't tell Milo to do that trick. I couldn't stop Rourke from making that suicide blitz. My strategy…it fell apart the moment the Primals started changing the game on us."
"Doesn't matter." Grey told the veteran Arwing pilot sternly. "No plan survives contact with the enemy. A good leader adapts, keeps his head on his shoulders, and above all, maintains control of himself and his men when everything is falling apart around them. And you did that today." The old dog checked his watch and blinked. "Son of a…Do you know how long that fight took, from beginning to end?"
Numb all over, Carl shook his head. "No."
"Seven minutes." Grey answered. "Because of your plan, because of who these pilots were…and who Starfox is…you took down the ship responsible for Darussia's annihilation. In seven. Minutes."
Carl nodded weakly, swallowing the lump in his throat.
He didn't have the energy to do anything else.
Corneria City, Corneria
Cornerian Space Command
General Winthrop Kagan was pacing. He'd known that the Super-Saucerer was mobile again, and the last transmission from the Wild Fox had indicated its next target was Katina, likely chasing after the eight escaped Arwings from the Sector Y massacre. He'd known their estimated time of arrival was fifteen minutes ago, and since then…
"Latest Spysat feeds, sir." One of the techs in the monitoring room said. Kagan jerked his whiskered nose up.
"Let's see it."
To his utter relief, the image it showed…was unchanged. Katina was still there. But there was no sign of the Super-Saucerer. Cold dread filled his heart. Had the Primals merely been running late?
"Incoming signal, sir! Omega Black frequency!" This time, Kagan grinned in open relief. Only a few entities used Omega Black encryption, and by far, the most abundant user of the SDF's most advanced, quantum keyed system was…
"This is General Grey. You awake there, Kagan?"
Kagan let out a sharp laugh. "Arnie." He didn't release the tension in his body yet, though. "Please tell me you have good news."
"Ohhh, you could say that." The smug voice of his former superior replied. "Nothing left of the Super-Saucerer but trace elements. These fighter jocks annihilated it. And it was Carl McCloud's plan that did it."
Kagan sunk into his chair, feeling the pressure fall off of him and leave him weaker than before. "Thank the Creator. That was their big secret weapon. How did…how did they do it?"
"I'll send you the after-action report in the next planet to planet broadcast. Suffice it to say, we caught them with their pants down, and we didn't let up for anything. Listen, I got to keep this short, so there's only two more things I'll pass along."
"Go for it, general. You name it, I'll make it happen." Kagan vowed. He wasn't about to tell anyone aboard the ship responsible for saving the war from a horrible, fiery end no to much of anything.
"First, I think it's time somebody got a promotion. I'll pass along the paperwork."
"You, Arnie? Want to be a two-star?"
"Fuck no. It's not for me." The old hound said gruffly. "There's been one high-ranked Grey in the Cornerian military, and I ain't my poppa. Okay. Second thing…we're getting geared up for a party here, but before we do, we're sending a system-wide broadcast to get the Primals' attention. They're not the only ones who can use propaganda, and it's high time we paid them back for what they did. Is it all right if we use the civilian Intersystem Subspace Network?"
"You'd probably hijack it even without my permission. Granted. I don't think anyone in the Senate is going to give two shits once they hear about your victory."
"Good. In that case, keep your ears up. We'll go live sometime in the next two hours. Later, Kagan."
"So long, Arnie. And tell them thanks."
The call shut off with a click, and Kagan looked around the CSC's command center. Smiles of relief met him from every side. Kagan could only smile and nod.
"And that's why we have Starfox."
Wild Fox
Bridge
2 Hours Later
Carl still couldn't stand without his cane, and that unnerved him as ROB dialed in the camera pointed at the bridge. His only saving grace, he reminded himself, was that ROB had fixed it so the camera could only focus on his upper body. Dressed in a newly made flight uniform emblazoned with the famous logo of Starfox on its breast pocket, the last McCloud wondered why he was doing this.
Then he looked over to Dana, standing off to the side beside his mother, his heart felt a familiar, painful thump, and he remembered.
For Teri. Your baby sister, who sacrificed herself…for you.
General Grey was down in the ship's galley/cafeteria, helping to organize the party. They'd destroyed the Super-Saucerer. They'd saved Katina. They had dealt a crushing, debilitating blow to the Primals, and they were about to add the psychological component to it as well.
"Ten seconds to air." ROB announced. "Are you sure you do not wish me to activate the holographic emitter to give you a teleprompter?"
"Everything I need to say, ROB…I know already."
A flicker of red passed over ROB's visor, and the robot gestured to him. He was live to all of Lylat, Cornerians and Primals alike. His face hardened.
For Teri.
"Greetings from Katina. My name is Carl McCloud. I was the lead pilot on Project Seraphim…and now, the commander of the Starfox Team. Earlier today, the Primals launched their superweapon, an enormous ship that was responsible for the destruction of Darussia, against this world. They deployed to follow the handful of brave Arwing pilots who managed to escape destruction after we lost that world. What the Primals didn't know was that we were here, and waiting for them."
Carl let off a snarl that he didn't bother to restrain. "The Primals threw their newest toy at us. They thought it invincible, that it would be too overwhelming. It wasn't. We destroyed that ship in seven minutes flat. And yes, I know you Primals can hear me. This broadcast is system-wide. Everyone is watching this, just like you insisted on broadcasting my sister's execution. Consider this payback, you miserable bastards. You hurt us. Hurt me. But we can hurt you so much worse. Apparently, there were two of your best Squadrons on board the ship. Sunder and Eclipse, according to our logs? They're dead, too."
Raising a trembling hand up, Carl pointed at the camera. To his credit, he made the shaking look like barely controlled rage. "When you started this war, one thing was abundantly clear; you hated Arwings. Well, you were right to. Just a handful of us, a handful, were powerful enough to destroy your marvelous ship you've been excavating for weeks now out of the Venomian rock. And you probably won't believe me. Well…don't take my word for it. Try to talk to them. Try to reach them. You won't be able to. You've had the advantage up until now. The advantage in numbers, ferocity, in brutality. That all changes today. From this day on, you're not hunting anyone. We are hunting you. So go. Go and hide in your caves, cower on Venom. Shore up your defenses. It won't help. For every life you have taken, for every Cornerian soul you have extinguished, we will pay you back. Sleep, if you dare. But I don't imagine you will, because Starfox is still here. I'm still here. And we're coming for you."
Carl gave a small nod of his head towards ROB, and the camera's red light flickered off. "Transmission ended." The robot said. Carl was still trembling, and he nodded ever so slightly before tilting backwards. Dana was there in a flash, bracing him up with her slender, strong body.
"It's all right." She whispered to him. Carl was glad that the bridge was empty of everyone else, because it meant his tears could flow freely. Around her, he could feel ashamed. And ROB…ROB was family. Or so Wyatt had told him, repeating something that Terrany had supposedly said once. "She'd be proud of you."
"I'm her older brother. She wasn't supposed to…to die before me." Carl got out with a faint hiccup. Dana held him closer, pressing her body into his back and resting her chin on his shoulder.
"She didn't die for nothing. We're all hurting, Carl." Dana looked over to his mother, who had tears in her eyes. "All of us are. But those of us that are left, we don't have to carry that weight by ourselves. You can lean on me. You can lean on your mother. We can all help each other. You put the fear of the Creator into them with that message. We can worry about the war tomorrow. Tonight…you have a different assignment."
"I don't feel much like a party."
"Well, that's too bad, Carl." His mother said, walking over with her arms crossed. "If Pugs and I were kind enough to whip up some of my homemade Ghambla soup in the middle of a battle, the least you can do is get a bowl and eat some."
Carl let out a pale laugh and rubbed at his eyes. "Yeah. I suppose. You two girls go ahead, I'll catch up. I have a stop to make at the Medical Bay first."
"…Is he awake yet?" Dana inquired. She was as worried about Rourke as he was. Carl shook his head.
"Dr. Bushtail said he'd call if anything changed. Apparently, Terrany pulled a stunt like this also, and she'd be unconscious for hours. I'm hoping it's the same with him."
The two most important women in Carl McCloud's life nodded and embraced him, his mother with a chaste kiss on the cheek and a tight hug, and Dana with one on his snout.
"You know…he wasn't who I pictured Terrany falling for." Julia McCloud said, sad smile on her face. "But he's a good man."
"The best." Carl agreed quietly, waving them off. The women linked arms and made for the turbolift, dropping away from the bridge and towards the waiting party.
Carl looked over to ROB, who appeared as unassuming as ever. "You sure you'll be all right by yourself up here, ROB?"
"Someone should monitor the ship's condition and keep a watchful eye on the MIDS array for any possible enemy contacts. Do not fear, Commander McCloud. I am fully capable of running basic operations aboard this vessel. Your place is elsewhere."
Carl nodded. "Yeah." A sudden thought came to his mind, and he looked at the robot. "You knew my father?"
"And your grandfather, and your great-grandfather also, for a short time." The ancient AI nodded once. "Why?"
"Does this ever get any easier?" Carl asked the robot. "The pain?"
ROB shrugged his shoulders. "I cannot process emotion as you do, thus I would be a poor candidate to ask. However, I carry memories of your grandfather holding a similar burden in his heart after his father was tortured and killed by Andross. He said once that the pain of his loss never really went away…he simply got better at harnessing it as a weapon. I would advise you to do the same."
"Yeah." Carl breathed out slowly, then adjusted his cane. As he passed by ROB, he patted the robot on the shoulder. "Good talk. We'll see you tomorrow, then." The last McCloud kept on walking, stepping onto the turbolift and selecting his deck. The doors closed behind him with a hiss, and the lift went away in a whir of motion.
Alone once more, ROB resumed his station at the SWACS console and stood immobile, a vigilant defender of the McCloud legacy. Of Starfox. He did something strange, then. Bringing up the bridge's main monitor, he tapped into a live feed from the cafeteria and started to watch the party quickly moving into full swing.
"I am never alone." ROB said, to nobody's ears but his own.
Primal Homeworld (Venom)
Hall of Antiquity
Tribunal Chambers
The Tribunes, the most high authority of the Armada save for the Lord of Flames himself, sat in the darkness of their room. All were shaken and disturbed.
For a third time, they watched the open transmission that had been bounced across the entire star system. They watched as the self-proclaimed Carl McCloud spoke.
"…Sleep, if you dare. But I don't imagine you will, because Starfox is still here. I'm still here. And we're coming for you."
Unable to stomach a fourth run-through of that devastating message, Tribune Hillers shut it off with a wave of his hand. The sensors running the holographic projector picked up the movement and responded immediately, dropping the hall into silence.
Out of a council of nine, fully six of the Tribunes were Elite Primals, mostly hairless and with pale skin unlike their peers. Hillers, the most senior of them, was an ordinary Primal. There had been constant bickering and bristling by the Elites over their role in the Armada, as they considered themselves to be the Lord's "Chosen", but nobody had ever dared move against Hillers before. Looking around the room, Hillers could see disbelief. Outrage. Such emotions might—might—lead to a shift in power that would almost certainly carry blood with it.
"Is this report true?" Tribune Westphal, the youngest and most power-hungry of the Elites on the Tribunal Council, asked lowly. "News of it has spread to every corner of the Homeworld by now, and amongst the scattered Armada on the conquered worlds."
"Kind of hard to stop, considering that they employed the same broad-access transmission we did for the execution of their Pale Demon." Tribune Holtzford said placatingly. "These Cornerians are a devious enemy. This could just be propaganda, meant to disrupt the fighting spirit of our men. This could all be a lie."
"It could be, but it likely isn't." Tribune Hillers said, stopping the grumbling. His calm, level gaze searched out the eyes of his peers, searching for dissent. Unsurprisingly, Westphal was the most aggravated. "We have heard nothing from the Worldbreaker since it departed from Darussia, and it was scheduled to arrive over Katina two hours ago. If it has not sent us word by now…"
"Then the Cornerians are telling the truth, and we lost not only the great weaponized ship of our ancestors, but also Praetor Goulfax, his entire command, and Captains Fuchs and Gral and their squadrons." Westphal cut in brusquely. "Our greatest superweapon, two elite fighter squadrons, countless Splinter drones…and nothing to show for it."
"I feel the need to remind you, Westphal, that this strategy was one proposed by Praetor Goulfax, endorsed by the Armada leadership, and voted on in the affirmative by this council." Tribune Holtzford said, tiring of the young Primal's posturing. "We all carry the burden of this loss on our shoulders. We should not have sent the Worldbreaker alone."
"We could not have predicted that Starfox would be there." Another Tribune spoke up quickly. "Those accursed Arwings ruin everything!"
"And they will continue to do so." Another Tribune rumbled. "We were warned by the Lord of Flames not to underestimate those fighters. To date, we have killed…two? Three, if you include the Pale Demon. We have shot down others, but their pilots survived."
"Hardly stellar results. Not even our training program for our best squadrons seems to have met with results."
"And who should we blame for that, exactly?" Westphal snapped.
"Our best and brightest were put together for that grouping. Grandflight Gatlus himself trained them." Tribune Hillers reminded all in attendance. "He is our most loyal, most decorated, most respected pilot in the Armada. Blame cannot, must not, fall on him."
"So then, are you saying that these Arwings and their pilots are simply too good for us to cope with?!" Westphal countered angrily.
"No, that is NOT what I'm saying." Hillers kept his voice level, though he desperately wanted to snap and bite the little twit's head off. Any such admission about the Cornerians' special "Starfox" unit being too much for them, much less the regular Arwings, was liable to open treason. No enemy was too powerful for the Primals to overcome. It was Doctrine, drilled into them since birth. "But we cannot punish Gatlus. As much as we would want to minimize the damage from this debacle, some people are untouchable."
A set of suddenly loud footsteps came into the chamber, and the Tribunes turned to see a Primal in a Geasbreaker's outfit take the floor.
"And some are not." Geasbreaker Rolfe said coolly, not intimidated by his surroundings in the least.
Tribune Hillers frowned. "Geasbreaker, this is a closed session of the Tribunal Council. Not even you are allowed here."
"Ordinarily, such is the rule, and I would abide by it." Rolfe said, although he likely didn't mean it. Geasbreakers considered themselves above such petty rules, and though they were ostensibly in the service of the Tribunes, many believed they answered to no authority but the Lord of Flames…and their own ambitions, in recent years. "But it occurs to me that if blame is to be assigned for the disastrous loss of the Worldbreaker, and the failure of two elite squadrons to counteract the threat of Starfox, you could do much better than Grandflight Gatlus."
Nobody said anything for a few moments, and then finally, Holtzford spoke, leaning forward a bit in his elevated seat.
"Explain, then."
Rolfe smiled.
Corneria City, Corneria
CSC
The Admiralty Department
The news was outstanding, and General Kagan had wasted no time in sending out the memo to the Joint Forces Chiefs. As a result, Supreme Admiral Weyland knew about the triumph of Starfox and their unified Arwing force over the Super-Saucerer long before the system-wide broadcast made by Commander McCloud.
The commander of all Fleet assets, which were basically nonexistent at this point, drummed his fingers at his desk. The 4th Fleet had basically contained every battle-ready ship at their disposal capable of front-line combat, and their most senior Commander. The loss of Admiral Markinson was a devastating blow. Now, Weyland could count the number of ships of the line left in reserve on one hand. There was only one carrier left, the Falcon's Fury, one battleship, the Mole's Bastion, and a handful of Gryphon class frigates to defend them. In short, he no longer had a force capable of running offensives. The Falcon's Fury had been grounded for repairs on Corneria when the war began, and with the 4th Fleet off on assignment, it had been put on planetary defense after the nuclear missile attack on Lunar Base.
At best, he could only run a defensive action, and even that would be limited to a local proximity to Corneria. It would be a pitiful showing, even then. No, he needed his Arwings. There were two eggs left in the basket: Corneria and Katina. Starfox likely wouldn't be around Katina forever.
He brought up his computer, put in his password, and accessed his mail.
"Time for the SDF forces to come home." He said to himself. Doubtless, Kagan would be irritated beyond belief, but Weyland had reviewed the so-called "Starfox Protocol" thoroughly. Short of an immediate threat, his Arwings remained his Arwings. He couldn't control those blasted mercenaries, but SDF personnel and assets were another matter. Naval assets, especially. At its core, the CSC and Kagan's post was that of an intelligence agency, a monitoring position.
Screw Kagan. He loved to play his little games, something he'd doubtless picked up working under that legacy General Grey. Let them play their games.
Weyland had two planets to protect.
Katina Orbit
Wild Fox
Medical Bay
Dr. Sherman Bushtail glanced up from his datapad and a recent medical journal when the hydraulic doors to his domain hissed open. He harrumphed when he saw that it was Carl McCloud wandering in.
"Is your leg sore?"
"A little." Carl admitted.
The simian slapped his datapad down and scowled. "Well, considering you're using your cane incorrectly, I'm not surprised. It needs to be opposite of your weak side. How many times do I have to hammer that in your head?"
"At least once more." The brown vulpine sighed, switching his cane over to his other hand. "I wanted to check in on Rourke. How's he doing?"
"Considering what he did to himself overriding the Merge Mode limiter, about as well as can be expected." The physician grumbled. He got up and went over, pouring himself a cup of decaf tea. "I thought that Wyatt and his boys had hardwired those bastardly ships of yours to prevent that. But Terrany broke it, and now Rourke."
"Apparently, they can override the five minute limiter while they're Merged."
"So what kind of good does it do them at all?!" The doctor snapped. Carl flinched at his anger, and knew it was merited. Just as the engineers had to patch up the Arwings every time they came back damaged, the doc had to patch up his patients. And the damage incurred by unsafe Merge Mode usage was much harder to diagnose and treat. Mental exhaustion? Synaptic fatigue? Neurotransmitter imbalances? It got into the realms of high medical science. Nothing reminded Carl about how dangerous the Seraph's technology was quite as starkly as hearing about all the times Terrany ended up unconscious inside the cockpit.
Carl looked over to the critical care area. Rourke was tucked in a medical bed, wireless electrodes monitoring his vitals and brain activity.
"There really isn't anything you can do for him, is there?"
"No." Bushtail said, and the anger was replaced with resignation. "Even now, we know so little about the brain. This Merge Mode technology is constantly pushing the boundaries of what is safe. This stupid, stupid war…it puts all of you at risk. Project Seraphim was supposed to be safe. A clinical trial of new technology."
"Yeah. And instead, we ended up with a trial by fire. If things were different…but they really aren't." Carl moved to the door. "I'm just going to pop in and see how he's doing. You coming to the party?"
"Nurse Ermsdale's down there already. She said she'd bring me some nibblies when she came back up. My place is here."
"You almost never leave." Carl reminded the doctor gently. "Even on Ursa, you always kept to the hospital wing."
"You have your place, McCloud. I have mine." Dr. Bushtail picked up his datapad and sat down, returning to his reading.
Inside the critical care area, Rourke lay underneath a thick blanket. When Carl got closer, he winced as he saw that there were a series of burn marks and singed fur along his scalp, perfectly in line with where the neural studs would have rested on the inside of his Seraph's flight helmet. For the bioelectric feedback to be strong enough to do that…
"You almost killed yourself." Carl said quietly. In the darkness of the dimly lit room, the faint glow from the pilot's EKG and EEG monitors glowed over his dark gray fur, giving it a bluish sheen.
O'Donnell's pulse held steady, providing a constant beep.
Then Carl heard his friend inhale softly.
"Yeah. But I didn't." Rourke replied.
Carl's face melted into an easy smile. "You ass. How long have you been lying there awake?"
"Long enough to hear you and Bushtail bitching at each other. I guess that hasn't changed." Rourke slowly cracked his eyes open, but kept them narrowed to slits. It was just as well, considering how bloodshot they were. "I feel like shit."
"You look like shit, so that hasn't changed much either." Carl tapped his way over to Rourke's bedside and looked down at his subordinate. "Hell of a stunt you pulled today. Creator's sake, Rourke. I haven't seen you fly like that…since…"
"Since I was trying to kill you."
An awkward silence fell over the two for a while at that.
"Why do you fly like that? It's like you…you become someone else entirely." Carl asked. "It was damn frightening back then, but when you did it today, I got the same chill."
"We honor the dead by earning triumphs in their name." Rourke explained coolly. "That was what my grandfather taught me."
"You really are an O'Donnell. Stubborn to a fault." Carl shook his head. "So that was your way of…saying goodbye?"
Rourke slowly turned his eyes sideways without moving his head. "Of remembering. It's how she would have fought. How she did fight."
"Yeah." Carl bowed his head, and the two mourned a vixen taken before her time…one they had both loved, in their own way. "I was reviewing your flight recorder data. In that fight, one of the pilots bailed out. But you didn't kill him."
Rourke kept his silence on that point. Carl knew exactly why, and it left a lump in his throat. If there was one thing that the McClouds and the O'Donnells had, it was history.
And most of it was god-awful.
Carl reached down and squeezed Rourke's hand. "You're not your father." He consoled the former space pirate.
Rourke shut his eyes. Carl really didn't expect him to say thank you, or anything vaguely resembling gratitude. It wasn't his way. It wasn't their way.
"You're not your father, either." Rourke countered in a ragged whisper. "But you are like your grandfather."
"No. Terrany was." Carl said bitterly.
"There were always two sides to that coin. She was one, Skip. You…you're the other. " Rourke's voice grew fainter, his breathing slower. Before Carl could get another word in, Rourke fell back asleep, still exhausted.
"Rest easy, brother." Carl McCloud told the unconscious pilot with hushed reverence. "Dream of happier times."
He turned and left, sparing one more look behind him. It was strange. For a moment in the blue light of the monitors, though he shook it off, it had almost seemed like Rourke's fur…had been...
Wild Fox
Cafeteria
The dining hall had never quite been as lively, at least to Milo's memory, which was sharp as a tack. The former sniper turned test pilot turned pseudo-mercenary sat in a corner of the victory party, watching it all unfold with a relaxed smile and a distant posture. A large boilermaker rested on the small round table beside him, half consumed, while he traced a small claw gently along its side. Rourke was stable, and would likely pull through with nothing worse than a bad headache. Especially since, unlike Terrany, he hadn't merged with another full consciousness.
Typhoon Squadron and Raptor Squadron were all plopped center stage in the mess hall. A loud roar was swimming around them as they flicked pocket change off of the long table they sat at, trying to land plinking ricochets into the glasses of their peers. Raptor Squadron had a slight lead according to the holographic scoreboard hovering underneath the ceiling projector, but that was likely due to the uncanny accuracy of Captain "Viper" Korman. Wyatt was passed out drunk on the opposite side of the room, and several of the engineers, led in the hijinks by Ulie Darkpaw, were dangling a plastic spider precariously over the amphibian's enormous, open gullet. Their snickering was almost loud enough to wake the stone drunk Toad, and Ulie put his menacing stature to work, staring down the inebriated mechanics with shrill hisses and bared teeth. He succeeded in silencing them for all of two seconds until the giggling started anew.
Most telling of all were many of the bridge officers, XO Dander included, who sat over by the food and enjoying a piping hot meal. General Grey had been in earlier, but excused himself after a message from ROB had informed him of the latest planet to planet laserburst transmission's arrival. The menu for the party consisted of ghambla soup, sweet rolls so warm and fresh that steam escaped them when they were cracked open, roasted asparagus and squash, and marinated beef skewers. Some damn decent work done by Pugs Femmick, especially considering that much of the prep had to have been done during the battle. Dana and Mrs. McCloud sat amongst the elite along with a far less shy Wallaby Preen and the ever watchful Damer Ostwind of the 21st Squadron. They didn't look like a bunch of animals thrown together for the hell of it. They looked like family.
The second chair at Milo's table was pulled out, and the analyst of the Starfox Team glanced up to see Captain Hound smiling down at him. The leader of Growler Squadron had a mug of beer of his own, but darker. A stout, probably.
"Mind if I pop a squat?"
"It's a free planet. Still." Milo shrugged, lifting his mug of mixed beer and whiskey a few centimeters in salute. His smile faded for a stony, blank look, however.
"Yeah. I still have trouble wrapping my head around that stunt you pulled. That was one hell of a shot you took…and throwing satellites at the Super-Saucerer's main beam cannon? Unbelievable."
"Well, the lasers weren't working. I had to try something." Milo said, trying to deflect the praise. He knew now that the Primals had a nickname for him; "The Marksman". That worried him, as a reputation, more than ever, was more likely to get him shot down again. "But it took all of us. If it weren't for you, Typhoon, and Raptor, we wouldn't be here right now. No one person's flying won the day."
"Spoken like a true soldier." Hound nodded. He noticed how Milo seemed to have a far-off gaze, and also took note of how he'd distanced himself from the others. Their closest partygoers were three meters away at another table; Corporal Fress, who switched shifts with the ship's pilot Corporal Updraft, and Simkins and Sal, two members of the engineering division who'd been part of Arspace's second wave of supporting crew.
"Tell me, Sergeant, why is it you're sitting here by yourself when your wingmate Dana's over there with everyone else?"
"I see better from here." Milo shrugged.
"Yeah." Hound sat down and crossed his legs. He tipped his chair back and braced himself against the wall with a sigh. "You were a sniper before."
"So it says on my service record."
"…You deployed to a lot of places. Fichina, Zoness, Macbeth during the incursions. In the end, Papetoon." Milo winced slightly, and Hound's gaze softened. "That was a real mess."
"You were there?"
"Not on the ground, no. But up in the air…yeah. Just flying over that mess made me sick. I'd just been promoted to flight lead when the Papetoonian Insurrection hit full boil. A lot of people didn't make it back. On both sides."
Milo took another drink, this one larger than his previous sips.
"You keep your distance a lot." Hound said. "And compared to your teammates, you're downright emotionless."
"That's not a crime."
"No. But I know it's not easy for me to talk about some of the things I saw…or did…in the last days of that." Hound tapped the small table twice. "And it's probably worse for you. Is it true they found you strung out in a bar on Papetoon?"
Milo's stony face cracked slightly at that. "Yeah. Who told you?"
"Carl did. I doubt the general cares to remember how his car got stolen."
Milo chuckled a bit, sipping at his beer again to regain his composure. "You know, one thing…One thing I keep asking myself is, what was it all for? Why did we have a stupid ass civil war between ourselves? To establish the predominance of Corneria and the SDF? What good did it do us? Any of us?"
"It made us stronger." Hound insisted. "When the Primals came, we were a united star system."
"I wonder about that some days." Milo mumbled, looking around the dining hall again with just a small hint of sadness. He shook the fugue off and lifted his glass. "Fuck it. You've got me digging up old bodies when we should be celebrating the living. Let's just drink and move on. To absent comrades."
Lars Hound clinked their mugs together. "Absent comrades." The two drank to end their toast, and Hound rocked forward, standing up again. "Well, think I'd better go get some food in me. You coming?"
"Eventually." Milo said. Hound gave him a sidewards glance, and Milo waved off his concern. "I promise."
"I'll hold you to it, Sergeant. We'll save you a bowl." Captain Hound wandered off, and Milo returned to merely watching it all at a distance.
It was just easier that way. Getting too close to anything…people he cared about, especially…only ended up making the heartache hurt worse.
If the party was raucous before a new arrival came marching in, it was positively frenzied afterwards. Cheers rose up from every corner of the room as Carl came in, glasses were raised, and the wash of noise smashed through any lingering sense of sadness or doubt that Carl might have been feeling. The brown-furred vulpine sheepishly rubbed at the back of his head and gave them all a wave, knowing it would fail to cancel the noisy outburst.
Thankfully, Dana interceded on his behalf. The tigress got up from her table and marched over to him, looping an arm around his and then giving him a tender peck on the cheek. She turned and stared down everyone else. "All right, all right, settle down! Give him a chance to sit down and grab some food before you all start buying him drinks!"
Halfhearted grumbling came in reply, but the gathered celebrants seemed to understand that Carl would want some time with those closest to him first. He was dragged over by Dana and plopped down between his mother and his lover. Pugs came over from the serving table and set a bowl of Ghambla soup in front of him.
"Here you are, Commander. Damn fine work today. Enjoy, with the compliments of myself and your mother."
Carl turned sideways to Mrs. McCloud and affixed her with an inquisitive glance. "Why Ghambla?"
"Pugs had already started on it." She said with a smile and a shrug. "Go ahead. Eat up, Carl. From what the others tell me, Pugs and I did a fine job."
Carl began to do so, but as soon as the first spoonful of warm, brothy flavor hit his tongue, it triggered the same memory he'd had during the battle…One of Terrany. The last time he had seen her.
Her, thrown out of the Academy and back at home after he had to bail her out because of a bar brawl. Him, shipping out the next day to return to Ursa Station and Project Seraphim. Back when it had just been Project Seraphim. She had been so angry, so defeated then, and he with his career on the rise, had struggled to understand that anger.
I hate being a McCloud.
All of that, along with the memory of two bowls of lukewarm ghambla soup.
Dana touched his shoulder, concerned. "You all right?"
He wasn't all right, but Carl fought through the mist growing in his eyes and put up a brave smile. "Yeah. It just…it reminded me of home."
If Dana suspected what he was really thinking about, she didn't let on. The tigress who he'd fallen madly in love with, who had fallen apart in his absence and shared his grief over Terrany merely nodded her head in real or pretended understanding and looked elsewhere.
The sound of a fork clinking hard against a glass brought the room's various distractions to a muted close, and all eyes turned to see Executive Officer Tom Dander standing up at Carl's table. Wearing his dress whites, the orange-furred tomcat cut a dashing figure that commanded attention regardless of rank.
"All right. The gang's all here, and the general told me to start the party without him. So. Damn fine flying, damn fine work from all of you. The Primals thought they had us on the ropes, but you all hit back hard, fast, and furious. We've put fear back into them now, I just know it. They're down one more superweapon, and it's all thanks to the four Arwing squadrons and their support personnel."
"Hear, hear!" Ulie belted out from his corner of the room, just as the rubber spider on a string made its way successfully far enough down Wyatt's throat to trigger the poor amphibian's gag reflex. The Toad came to gagging and coughing, and everyone started laughing, Carl included.
"That said…" Dander went on, trying to shush the assembly, "That said, this war's far from over. We've kept the Primals from destroying a second planet, but one freed world's a cinder, and we've got countless more to fumigate before we turn our attentions on Venom again. It won't be easy, but we have the advantage. We have Carl McCloud back in the fold."
"Well said." General Grey praised his XO loudly, walking back into the mess hall. He carried an old fashioned leather satchel slung over one shoulder, which was so out of place that it had everyone instantly curious. "Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen. Though our victory today was due to all of your combined efforts, we have Skip here to thank the most. It was his plan, his strategy, that allowed us to take on the Super-Saucerer, catch it off guard, and slip through its defenses. Though they pulled a few tricks on us, we had control of the battle's tempo from beginning to one undeniably explosive end."
"Yeah, it gave a whole new meaning to the phrase 'throw a rock at it." The recently promoted Captain West said jokingly, earning another round of soft chuckles and whistles when Milo sighed and raised his glass in acknowledgement.
"Hey, I had help." Carl protested, giving a meaningful glance towards Hogsmeade, who had worked his pink fingers to the bone to finish the MIDS software modifications in time. "I don't want anyone here thinking that I'm more important than they are. That's not why I volunteered to come up with a plan."
"At ease, son." Grey soothed the ruffled vulpine's sensibilities. "Every single soul on this ship is important. Everyone's important. But I also know that if you hadn't provided a meaningful strategy, we'd have been a lot worse off. We might not have come out of this alive. Every Arwing pilot knows it, and the rest of the crew…well, they found out about it after the fact. Like it or not, you're the hero of the day, and the SDF knows it. We're here to celebrate our victory. Your victory. And the triumphant return of Starfox." Grey looked around the room to the other pilots from the other squadrons. "You may all be proper SDF, but today, just as you did when we all were together over Darussia the last time, we flew under one banner. The banner of Starfox. It's more than the flag of a band of mercenary pilots. Starfox is a symbol, and it's one that the public has rallied behind. One we rally behind."
All he got in reply was a set of short, understanding head nods. Grey patted his satchel. "You all may be wondering why I've got this with me. Well, I've got good news and bad news. First off…Major, you're out of uniform." When he spoke, his eyes were centered entirely on Carl McCloud.
The pilot who had once affectionately carried the nickname 'Brown Fox' from his sister felt his mouth go dry.
Taking hold of the moment, Grey dug in his satchel and pulled out a small box. In it were two epaulettes, each bearing a golden oak leaf.
Major. He had been promoted not one rank, but two. He now outranked every flight lead aboard the Wild Fox.
"Battlefield promotion, on the authority of General Kagan, and with my support." The old hound went on quietly. "For your bravery, your sacrifices, and your cool sense of command in the face of insurmountable odds, you are hereby promoted to the rank of Major in the Space Defense Forces.
Carl took the decorations with a shaking paw. "Thank you." Both Dana and his mother touched him then, on the shoulder and on his arm. Fresh cheers rose up, and the loudest among them was Captain Lars Hound.
"Raise your glasses, everyone! To Major McCloud, and to Starfox!"
"To Starfox!" Came the cry.
Grey smiled again, then sobered up. "That said, some of you are going to have to cut the party short. The latest secure laserburst transmission from Corneria carried some new deployment orders." He reached into his satchel and came up with three datapads. "Captain Korman."
"Yo." The Venomian lizard sighed and slid away from the drinking games table, plucking it from Grey's paw. He glanced at it, then looked to his men. "We're being sent to Corneria."
"Captain West."
"They don't even give us time to mourn Mulholland's death properly." The golden retriever complained. He glanced over the deployment order and exhaled. "Katina. Seems they want us planetside."
"And Captain Hound." General Grey held out the last datapad, and all eyes turned to the formerly exuberant veteran. The pilot responsible for molding Carl McCloud into the ace he'd become chewed on the inside of his mouth for a few moments, then took one slow step after another. It gave him time to glance around the room full of suddenly somber faces. To Grey. To Viper. To West, a flight lead tested in the fires of battle, but still so unsteady.
To Skip.
The decision was so easy to make after that. Taking the datapad from Grey's hand, he dropped it on the floor and stomped down on it. Hard. People cringed when they heard metal bend and supposedly unbreakable electromesh crystal shatter.
"Huh." He said laconically. "No thumbprint verification of receipt. It seems that deployment order must have gotten lost in transmission." Damer and Wallaby stared at their CO with goggled eyes. Hound took in a slow breath, let it out, and smiled. His mind had never felt so clear before. "I guess you're stuck with us, General. As is the Major."
An amused General Grey shook his head. "Admiral Weyland won't be too happy about this. Very well, Captain. I can hardly fault you with disobeying orders if you never received them."
Instantly, Captain Korman smacked himself in the forehead. "I shoulda thought of that…"
"Ah, don't worry your scaly head none, Viper." Hound reassured his fellow squadron leader. "Me and my boys will keep these hotshots out of trouble. You make sure we have a planet to come home to."
"Will do." Viper hissed with renewed pleasure.
Grey looked over to Pugs and whistled. "Okay. Two hours from now, Femmick, I want the bar closed and you to start shoving people out the door. Typhoon and Raptor Squadron have departure times to make early in the morning. Everyone, enjoy the evening. You've earned it." He stuck his corncob pipe back in his mouth, gave a thoughtful smile, and then left the cafeteria.
Slowly, the party began to start back up again, and Captain Hound plopped down at Carl's table.
"It's not every pilot who risks being court martialed just to hang around with a bunch of test pilot mercenary lowlifes." Dana teased Captain Hound, leaning her head into Carl's shoulder.
"Let's face it, Tiger, you'd be lost without me and my boys. And seeing as you were all kind enough to give Wallaby one of your brand new toys, it just didn't seem right to go flying off with it."
"Sure, that was why." Carl laughed, picking up his cane and setting it on the table to get the weight of it off of his leg. "Admit it, old man. You missed me."
"That's another reason entirely." Hound remarked, his eyes twinkling.
Katina Supraorbital Airspace
Wild Fox
24th Day of the Primal War
Morning
It had been early when the 5th and 17th Squadrons departed from the Wild Fox. Most of the crew was still sleeping, or waking up with massive hangovers. Carl and Dana were lacking any clothing at all, and sleeping in a sprawled out mess of tangled sheets and mussed fur in his quarters after some much missed—and needed—physical activities. Aside from some words of wellwishing from the on-duty bridge crew, Raptor and Typhoon Squadron disappeared without ceremony or fanfare. A major victory had been won, but the war continued. XO Dander had watched with mixed feelings as Raptor's four Model K Arwings shot off into subspace with a burst of power from their FTL drives, and a great sense of irritation when Typhoon Squadron flew through the atmosphere for the planet's surface and McNabb Air Force Base. Only the truth that the Wild Fox wasn't likely to be hovering over Katina for much longer tempered his own feelings on the matter.
Two hours had passed since then, and General Grey appeared on the bridge with a cup of coffee in his hand and his corncob pipe puffing up a storm. "Morning, all." He said, which earned him a series of halfhearted muttering replies. Grey paid the worn out crew no mind and turned to Dander, giving the tom a nod. "How did things go with our re-deployed Arwings?"
"Not a problem. It just seems…quieter around here all of a sudden."
"Yeah." Grey agreed. It was quieter. He nodded towards the turbolift. "I relieve you, XO. Go get some grub and some shuteye."
"Aye-aye, sir." Grateful for the chance after the all-nighter he'd pulled following the party, Dander left the bridge in the capable hands of his superior
ROB had kept the MIDS Array on long range scan since the fight with the Super-Saucerer had concluded, partly to give them the usual early warning of large inbound threats, and partly to let the MIDS circuitry cool off after all the demands they'd forced on it. He'd said nothing earlier, but he'd been tracking an inbound from the direction of Corneria for the last hour, after he'd confirmed it was a ship and not a glitch in the system. It was far, far smaller than the Super-Saucerer's imprint, but slightly larger than an Arwing, which was another reason it had gone unnoticed for so long, with the sensitivity dialed up for targets the size of Primal capital ships.
"Sir, we have an inbound vessel from Corneria." ROB announced to the General. "Mass displacement correlates with a Rondo class transport."
"Huh." Grey took a sip of his coffee, glad for the hit of caffeine. "We expecting any traffic?"
"A resupply of Lylus class cruise missiles and repair parts for the Wild Fox is expected, but was due four hours from now."
"Maybe they're running early." Grey posited, and regretted saying it immediately after. No, if there was one thing the SDF could be counted on, it was timeliness. "So, something else then. How far out are they?"
"One minute to emergence from subspace on their current heading."
"Well, okay. May as well raise the shields until we know what we're dealing with."
That minute seemed long indeed, with activity on the bridge coming to a screeching halt as everyone waited to see what would happen next. Finally, a flash of light indicated a momentary tear in the fabric of spacetime, and sure enough, a transport vessel burst out of the disturbance 2000 kilometers away. After a moment, it righted itself on a heading for the Wild Fox. A moment later, its IF/F tag clicked on, and Hogsmeade grunted from his radar console.
"It's friendly, sir. Ship reads as November Niner Three Gulf Seven.."
General Grey nodded to Sasha, and the soft-nosed bat thumbed her radio. "Transport vessel N93G7, this is the Wild Fox. We have you on a course for our position. Identify your purpose, over."
"Wild Fox, N93G7 here. We're carrying one tank, two crewmembers, and some hungry stomachs."
Everyone frowned at that, and Sasha hit her comms switch again. "Repeat that, N93G7? Cargo is a tank?"
"Yeah. Its driver wants me to say he remembered you pulling their asses out of the fire on Corneria and Darussia, and it was about time they repaid the favor."
Grey blinked a few times, but it was ROB who made the connection first. Overriding the radio, he spoke in place of Sasha. "You are in possession of a Arspace Dynamics Landmaster tank?"
"Got it in one." Realization set in, and Grey found himself grinning at that.
"We lost eight Arwings, and we got a tank. Why do I feel like we're running a motel?"
"Oh, it's at least a hotel." Corporal Updraft said dryly. "We only get the good toilet paper here."
Grey chuckled. "Sasha, mind if I radio them back?"
"Go right ahead, sir." Sasha said, forwarding control of the radio to his command chair. General Grey punched the talk switch.
"N93G7, you're cleared to dock. Our onboard AI will send you the guidance waypoints for landing procedures. And tell Major Boskins…welcome back to the fight."
