XXXVI: Compass
A/N: Hey guys, just a quick note up top. If you're looking for a recap of the fic so far (it's been a bit of a winding road), scroll to the very bottom of the page.
"He was a good man," Bauker said solemnly, standing over the desk of his office. "His efforts will be missed."
"My men also found the wreckage of the Cipher near the jumpgate," Warlord Norwood continued, his image taking up the entirety of the wall mounted com screen. "Message pods found in the wreck indicate that the ships were flying Wolf O'Donnell's colors. A light carrier and a squadron of fighters."
"O'Donnell?" Bauker questioned, shaking remorse for Major Wilkins from his mind. "I thought Admiral Gage took him out at Fortuna's moon."
"Perhaps," Norwood nodded, pursing his rotund muzzle. "Perhaps not. It is possible that this was just a surviving splinter command. The fact that the carrier made it through the warpgate is disturbing, however."
"Indeed," Bauker admitted, "Though the possibility that it could have been accidental as they were chasing Wilkins can't be discounted. What of the Broadsword?"
"Completely empty," the retriever replied. "My soldiers couldn't find a single living being, though plenty of evidence exists to suggest there was a fight."
"I see," the cougar said, averting his gaze for a moment. The loss of the Major by himself was a noteworthy setback to Bauker's intelligence gathering abilities; combined with the loss of a frigate and a mixed company of marines and scientists, it wasn't an insignificant blow. "Have we heard any word from Ypson?"
Norwood shook his head, though with a strange bit of triumph seeping into his voice. "No. We've found the remains of his flagship, but Ypson's been missing in action since his fleet's skirmish with the Cornerian Fifth. We're beginning to believe High Admiral Markiss' claim to have him and his crew in custody is true, though we're waiting on Siona's report to make sure." He cleared his throat. "In the meantime, I've taken the surviving portions of Ypson's fleet into my command."
Bauker nodded. The ships lost during Ypson's battle with the Cornerian Fifth Fleet numbered not even ten percent of the alliance's assets. Still, combined with the latest news surrounding Major Wilkins, it painted a bleak picture. This was by far the largest set back his alliance had encountered since its formation after the Lylat War; was this a sign of things to come?
The cougar silently chastised himself, regaining his thoughts. Of course not. No cause worth fighting for has ever been fought for without blood being spilled. And this was a cause truly worth fighting for. His scientists reported that they were making progress with Peppy Hare's interrogation; the lessons learned from the experiments performed aboard the Broadsword were yielding results.
"Post the names of the dead on the neural net," Bauker commanded after taking a moment to gather his words. "But leave out the Major. List him as M.I.A."
Norwood dipped his head in a half bow; probably a sarcastic gesture, Bauker reasoned, given Norwood's dislike for orders. But it was acknowledgment none the less.
"And tell Siona we'll double her fee for any information on Wolf O'Donnell's remaining forces. We may have to make our move soon, and I'd rather not have them running around behind our backs."
The halls of the Great Fox felt like home to her. Their worn, dingy surfaces had somehow found in her a certain charm. The dents in the deck plates had become familiar; her feet avoided them almost without thought. The occasionally choppy thrum of the engines had become a mother's lullaby, comforting in some ways, mere white noise in others.
Falco's music blaring from his quarters. Katt's frustrated grumblings from the engine bay. Bill and Sophie's sugar sweet conversations punctuated with far too many "dear"s and "babe"s. They were the steady breathing of the ship, letting the lynx know it was still alive inside. Even now, when the engines were shut down and the mechanical aspects of the ship were silent, the muffled mutterings of Rhena's bizarre language from the lounge at night, or the impenetrable babble between Slippy and Jason from the shuttle bay as they debated some technology or another, let her know there was still a heart beating.
The Great Fox's engines were shut down because it was back in one of the Lone Wolf's massive docking bays, undergoing largely cosmetic repairs from the battle in Sector Z a week earlier. Where the Lone Wolf was, Miyu no longer knew; she doubted Fox even knew at this point. They had rendezvoused with Wolf O'Donnell's flagship on the outskirts of Sector Y, but after that, the Star Fox team was kept in the dark as to where they were going next.
It had taken a week to navigate back to Sector Y from the wreck of the Broadsword; a direct route would have been much quicker, but given the stretch of Warlord territory the Great Fox would have had to cover, it would have been far too dangerous, even with Wolf's frigate Vitahly escorting them the whole way. Instead, Fox and the Vitahly's captain had agreed upon taking a course that led them out and around the Lylat System's outer orbits. Traveling through nearly deep space had its own risks, but the outer reaches contained no valuable resources to exploit, rendering slim the chances of running into any Warlord or Cornerian patrols.
Miyu rounded a corner and continued down another of the Great Fox's corridors.
The sailors aboard the Vitahly had kept to themselves for most of the trip. And since Leon Powalski had stayed behind on the Broadsword with the frigate's detachment of troops – Miyu shuddered when she remembered how the lizard had grinned when he mentioned something about questioning Bauker's surviving men – the crew of the Great Fox were left with little official business to attend to.
Almost immediately, they had started peppering the sole Cornerian survivor of the Broadsword, Captain Alex Hartford, with questions about the events surrounding his ship. The husky was reluctant to talk about them at first, but after a reminder of his promise to Fox, he began to explain.
Following the battle between Bauker and the Cornerian Seventh Fleet in Sector Z, almost two months ago, the CNS Broadsword had been apparently forgotten about. Hartford mentioned how he thought it odd that no Cornerian rescue attempt was made, as was standard procedure when a ship went missing. Warships were expensive constructions, after all, and their crew even more valuable. The idea that the Cornerian Navy would simply forget about a cruiser and its crew seemed unfathomable.
Then Hartford had learned about Admiral Gage's betrayal.
There had been a fighter pilot, Wing Commander Rashik, stationed aboard the Broadsword during the battle. His snubfighter had been severely damaged during the skirmish, and had just landed aboard the cruiser for repairs when the Broadsword was sent on its charge after a pair of Bauker's retreating frigates. The cruiser and its escort had successfully taken down one of the frigates, and were close to destroying the second when their prey began acting erratically. The frigate, unknown to Hartford at the time, was about to use the Sector Z warpgate. The activation blast from the gate utterly destroyed the Broadsword's escort, and severely damaged and disabled the cruiser itself, leaving it to drift in the all encompassing gas vapors of the Sector.
Hartford recalled how he, Rashik, and the score or so of crew who survived the impact of the gate's blast had gathered together in the following days, and listened to the Wing Commander's explanation.
Rashik told them everything he knew, from Gage's alliance with Warlord Bauker, to his theory that all of those who suspected the treachery had been assigned to the Broadsword on purpose, to make one convenient vehicle to sacrifice. The Cornerian High Command would get the illusion that Bauker and Gage are legitimately at war, and Admiral Gage would remove most of those who might give his deception away.
Hartford hadn't believed the pilot at first, but then almost half of the surviving crew had spoken up, agreeing with Rashik.
Miyu remembered how Hartford had paused at this point in the story, surrounded by the Star Fox team in the lounge. The husky was quiet for almost a minute, obviously intending to continue, but taking the time to gather his thoughts.
Rashik had also explained Project Afterlife.
The pilot never said how he came to know about the Project. Or how he had managed to obtain the knowledge without being killed for it, though it had appeared that part had finally caught up with him. Hartford suspected he had been part of the conspiracy for long enough to learn of the research behind the Project, but had removed himself after he had learned the truth. His public status as a Wing Commander would ensure Rashik's immunity to a quiet assassination by the Bauker sympathizers in the Seventh Fleet, providing he didn't leak the information to anyone.
Rashik explained how the Project was a continuation of one of Andross' many experiments, its records quietly removed from the mad scientist's databanks by the future Warlord Bauker just before Venom fell to Corneria's alliance at the conclusion of the Lylat War. The results of Andross' bioweapon research were made startlingly clear during the war, as the Star Fox team could attest to firsthand, but this particular Project had never made it to the front lines. For lack of time, Andross had never been in a hurry to finish it.
The goal of the Project was to ensure that the resources spent on training and supporting conventional soldiers were not entirely wasted upon their demise. Early research into the subject had been focused on how some coma patients retained operation of necessary life functions, like breathing, without being conscious. Provided sufficient nutrients, artificially supplied to the comatose patient, certain cases could continue "living" as such nearly indefinitely. Taking it a step further, research was done on patients which had been physically dead for a limited time before being revived into a comatose state by doctors.
It had been long assumed that most of these patients, save the ones that inexplicably regained their faculties at some point, had lost all semblance of intelligence or sentience. Andross' initial research, and Bauker's continued experimentation yielded the fact that this was not entirely true. With the right stimulation the body, and the brain controlling it, could be utilized as it once had, a tool of sentient intelligence. However, with independent brain activity lost upon death, another input for control was required. Something to replace the living "spirit", for lack of a better term, that once resided inside the body.
The research employed hundreds of biologists, doctors, and computer scientists working nonstop. The mapping of the brain, already well underway by civilian scientists in universities across Lylat, was completed for the sake of the Project's purposes. The deceased body became the shell, a biological machine. The inert brain became the control panel. And a computer chip became the new "intelligence."
Impulses sent from the chip were routed to the proper muscles by the brain's built-in neuro-pathways. Provided the body and brain were still relatively intact, the subject could perform any number of relatively simple tasks. Bauker's scientists had literally found a way to make recently dead walk, thanks to technology.
A quirk was uncovered as research continued. Those subjects with physical training – those who had acquired "muscle memory" in an action – still retained the aptitude in how their neuro-pathways were laid out. Their brains were streamlined for the particular activity. This was most prominent in the bodies of soldiers.
While the sheer number of mental processes required for aiming a ranged weapon were impossible to simulate, the developed computer control could still make use of their hand-to-hand martial skills. With a little more research, simple melee weapons could be utilized.
Hartford had gotten quiet again after that. He admitted that a good amount of the information he had just given had come his own observations, watching technicians care for the Afterlife squad deployed on the Broadsword, the same one the Star Fox team had been ambushed by and subsequently taken down.
The husky explained how when Bauker's salvage team first boarded the Broadsword, the Cornerians had fought back. They were overwhelmed, however, and imprisoned in their own ship's brig. Soon after, the Afterlife squad and a group of Bauker's scientists had arrived. The surviving Cornerians began to slowly disappear after that, taken from their cells one by one and never seen again. Hartford had assumed that his crew were being taken for interrogation, which may have very well been the case, but one of the scientists had let slip their true reason for being there.
"Live subjects," Hartford had said with understated weight to his words. "They wanted to test the process on live subjects."
Navigating the Great Fox, Miyu found the flight of stairs she was looking for and ducked into the well. The lynx took the steps one at a time, hearing the clang of her boots on every metal plank.
Hartford had no idea what the results of those experiments on the Broadsword were. He assumed they were failures. The husky didn't speak any more about the subject after that, and the Star Fox team gathered around him in the lounge didn't press him any further. The idea of a computer controlling a deceased body was disturbing enough, but the idea that a living, breathing person would be subjected to the same treatment was too much to think about. A foreign voice in your head, commanding your body to act against your will.
Miyu shuddered as she left the stairwell, proceeding towards the hanger door. Someone else's thoughts, intermingled with your own. Only Andross would conceive of a project like that.
The lynx listened as she neared the Great Fox's hanger door. Quiet clangs and the occasional muttered curse filtered into her pointed ears, accompanied by low volume rock music. Found him.
She entered a hanger largely emptied since their hunt for Major Wilkins came to a close. The bulky Invader I fighter they had captured had been transferred to the Lone Wolf's hanger, just outside the mercenary vessel. Rhade's Wolfen had been similarly moved following the wolf's internment in the Lone Wolf's medical ward. Finally, the remainder of Rhena's CDF fighter, essentially the ejected cockpit, had been stripped apart and kept as scrap avionics for the team's other snubfighters.
The pair of remaining CDF fighters occupied the spaces closest to the hanger ramp, leading down to the Lone Wolf's docking bay. Star Fox's three Arwings were lined up wall to wall, closer to the door Miyu had just come through. It was beneath one of these red and black fighters that the lynx caught sight of who she had been searching for.
"Little late to be up n' about," Fox said, his voice echoing slightly in the open hanger. He slid out from underneath his Arwing, careful to avoid snagging himself on the open hull panel he was working in. He paused while still on his back, bracing himself up with his elbows.
"Could say the same," Miyu retorted, approaching the grease stained vulpine and crossing her arms. His white t-shirt was nearly black with the stuff. "Doing a little late night tinkering?"
"Something like that," Fox replied, stressing the words a little as he pushed himself off the deck. He stood with a smile, a sight that Miyu was keenly aware she was getting used to. She could still remember the negativity of her first reaction to it, way back when she had been rescued by him, though she was having trouble remembering the reason for the negative emotions in the first place. Now his grin was like any other friendly expression, the good vibes rubbing off on her a little. "Slippy's little contraption overloaded a few systems back in Sector Z," he continued, patting the nose of his Arwing fondly. "Just getting around to taking care of that."
"You seem happy enough though," she stated as he reached inside the open cockpit, tabbing off the music system.
"Why wouldn't I be?" Fox replied, his smile widening to a grin. "Got a paycheck in my pocket and my crew back in one piece; plus, we made some progress against Bauker. Not a bad contract." When Miyu's expression refused to brighten past mildly amused, he let his grin drop, taking his tone down with it. "So what's up?" he asked, crossing his own arms and leaning back against his fighter. "Still getting used to Peppy's room?"
Miyu bit her lip, leaning back a little and cocking her hips. She wasn't expecting to bring it up so quickly. "Something like that," she stalled, unintentionally using Fox's own words. The lynx had practiced what she was going to say to him just minutes ago, pacing the very room they were talking about. All the while, Peppy's photo with the broken frame, the one with Fox's father, had stared at her, interrupting her thoughts every few moments. The long disappeared text on the back of it screamed at her, even as she tried to put her thoughts in order. Whatever speech she had planned, however, evaporated now quicker than a drop of water on Titania.
After the team got a message earlier that day from Warlord Siona, saying that her men had picked up Peppy's trail on Hrakness Station, Miyu had determined that now was as good a time as any to get the hare's message off her chest. The fact that the trail disappeared into Warlord territory for some reason only heightened the need.
Fox watched her reaction, his expression softening with concern. "Miyu, what's up?"
"It's about your father," she blurted out, almost immediately regretting the suddenness of it as she watched Fox's concerned face harden into a confused state of something approaching insult. Were she of a softer mind, she may have found her hand over her mouth in surprise.
"My...father?" he asked, eyes narrowing. Any malice he gave off was unintentional, but the fact that Miyu apparently sought him out to tell him about his father, whom he rarely, if ever, talked about was concerning. What could she possibly have to say about him? What could she possibly know that she would seek him out now, at this hour? "What about him?"
Miyu exhaled, her mind catching up to her mouth. It took a moment to get the two to coordinate again, but having utterly shattered the ice helped. A little.
"I...I found a note," she stammered, suddenly unable to meet his emerald eyes. They glared at her, begging for more information one moment and threatening to bore through her the next.
"Miyu," Fox said with restraint, taking a step forward. Gone were the friendly notes from before. "What note?"
"In Peppy's room, right after Shoana Freeport. I was..." Miyu replied, looking up at him. Almost immediately she had to drop her gaze again. Here it comes. "I was looking at some of his pictures one night and I...accidentally dropped one."
Fox cocked his head, the first word coming out almost as an accusation. "Why were you looking through his-"
"I-I don't know," Miyu admitted, recalling the odd sense of heaviness in Peppy's room that night. She was already in deep; too late to back out now. "I just couldn't get to sleep, so I was looking around and one of his picture frames fell on the floor. That's not important." She resisted the blood rising in her veins. Now was not the time to get mad at Fox, of all people; not while she was trying to tell him something, anyway.
Fox fumed but remained quiet.
Miyu breathed out. "On the back of the picture, Peppy wrote a message to you, talking about himself and your father. Talking about how he put something he wanted you know in ROB's memory." The young lynx closed her eyes, furrowing her brow in confusion. "The message disappeared after I read it, and I know how that must..."
She stopped, looking at Fox. The vulpine was watching her with a mix of anger and bewilderment, like a irritated psychiatrist not quite prepared for a patient's ramblings. But he kept his silence, implicitly beckoning for her to continue.
"Fox, what do you know about the Angels?"
"Slippy, we need the ship's logs."
Slippy froze mid keystroke, looking up from his console. Fox had just barged onto the bridge, followed closely by a worried looking Miyu. The toad was unaccustomed to seeing the lynx experiencing such an emotion, and it rubbed off on him a little.
"C-can it wait a sec?" Slippy asked, looking quickly back and forth between the two. "I was just about to finish up today's en-"
"Sorry buddy," Fox interrupted, moving to his command chair and sitting down. He unfolded the tiny keyboard tucked under one of the armrests. "Right now."
"Um, okay then," Slippy agreed quietly as a notice appeared on his screen, informing him that he had been booted from the ship's log by another log in.
The toad began shutting down the portion of the console he was utilizing. He could guess that whatever Fox was searching for in the logs would be sensitive, especially if Miyu was acting the way she was. Wishing to give his friend privacy, Slippy was just about to stand to leave when he heard a whisper from behind him.
"No, stay," Linka said, putting a hand on Slippy's, flat on the console. The toad glanced behind him, seeing the coyote staring up at the bridge's main viewport where Fox was navigating through the ship's logs. "Could be interesting."
Slippy hesitated, but stayed where he was, now aware of the fact that Fox and Miyu didn't seem to mind, or notice, him sticking around.
"ROB would have uploaded anything valuable in his memory to the Great Fox before he went down," Fox said, still harboring a bit of an edge in his voice. "Day minus one?"
Miyu nodded, unwilling to say any more. On the way to the bridge, Miyu had explained everything she could remember reading in Peppy's note, following Fox a step behind as the vulpine made his way through the Great Fox. During the trip up from the hanger he only spoke in terse, quick questions, listening intently to her answers but saying nothing else. While his expression was neutral, there was a certain hardness to his lines; a certain rigidness to his features.
Fox, for his part, couldn't help a bit of his anger from seeping through in his words and posture. How could Miyu have known about something like this for so long and not told him? Sure, they had been well occupied for a good while since Shoana Freeport, but the vulpine's ire remained.
As he began navigating the logs, however, the mercenary captain realized that his negative feelings towards Miyu were quickly fading into a sense of eagerness about what Peppy could have left for him. The revelation that his father and the hare were members of the infamous Angels was shocking enough; what else could there possibly be?
Fox brought up a search bar, typing in the proper date. To his surprise, the various menus and logs departed from the viewport as soon as he keyed it in, leaving the screen blank. The window was still opaque, indicating that the display was still on; it simply wasn't receiving any input. He turned to Miyu for some sort of confirmation that this was supposed to happen, but she only shrugged.
When he turned back, a flashing prompt had appeared in the bottom left corner of the viewport, followed by eighteen spaces. The prompt blinked impatiently as Fox stared at it, defying his wish for any sort of context.
"Peppy said you would know the password," Miyu offered, wishing she was wearing something heavier than her old, borrowed t-shirt. The bridge's recycled air was suddenly very cold on the lynx's exposed fur.
Fox thought for a moment, counting out the number of spaces on the screen and calculating possible answers in his head. Even more so than the featureless prompt, Peppy's clue was frustrating in its lack of any actual help.
"Was there anything else?" he asked the lynx, turning his head slightly towards her without actually looking away from the viewport.
"No," Miyu shook her head, sounding just a little unsure of herself. The moment hung in the air as Fox picked up on her doubt. "That's all I remember," she finally admitted, understanding Fox's disappointment but still disliking the way he sighed.
He looked down at the keyboard, staring past it into his lap and the deck plating below. How could Peppy just expect him to know the answer to something like that? There wasn't even anywhere to start from; no riddle or hint to speak of.
Fox tried thinking back, mentally listing off names and places familiar to himself and the hare. Old family acquaintances, locations around Fox's childhood home on Corneria, events that struck him as particular important to both of them...nothing was coming to mind which was both important enough for Peppy to assume Fox would simply know, and fit the eighteen character password requirement. He tried putting various word fragments together in combinations, mixing events with dates, or titles with names, but none would come together in a way he was satisfied with.
Fox had no way of knowing if the password had a failsafe lockout in place either, cutting short any thought he had of simply trying all of his various possible solutions. After all, if Peppy had been careful enough with this piece of information that he had managed to hide it from the rest of crew – even the ever curious Slippy – Fox doubted the hare would have left it susceptible to brute force attempts, or any sort of tampering.
But at the moment, Fox was left with little else he could think of. He had no reason to doubt Miyu's story, and he had to find out what sort of message Peppy had left for him.
Taking a deep breath, Fox carefully picked his first pieced together solution. Peppy's eternal words of wisdom floated through his head just as he began to spell out his mother and father's wedding location.
"Trust your instincts."
Fox froze, finger hovering over the final key. A tiny smirk, an island of amusement amidst his sea of trepidation, tugged at his muzzle, and he quickly deleted the letters of his original answer. Starting again, he typed in the new password, filling up the allotted spaces exactly, and tapped the execution key.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, abruptly, Peppy Hare appeared on the screen, forcing a surprised gasp from each of the three occupants of the bridge. The recording took up the entire viewport, stretching the image of the hare to the point where he looked just about life size. The camera taking the recording was at about shoulder height to the hare, who was seated on the end of his bed in his quarters. Miyu recognized the room immediately, having slept there since taking up residence on the Great Fox.
"Peppy," Fox couldn't help but whisper. The old hare had been so long removed from his life that the young mercenary could hardly remember what he looked like in motion. He was dressed in his usual overcoat and clothes, serving only to make the memories flowing through Fox's head even sharper.
"Those were your father's words, you know," Peppy began, his lips creasing into a warm smile. Fox could already feel a tightness gripping his chest as he smiled back, part of his mind wanting so badly to pretend it was a two-way transmission, and not a recording. "I guess I sort of inherited them after...well. And if you're listening to this, its probably time for you to take over for me."
Peppy chuckled, leaning forward and bracing his palms on his knees. "Speaking of which, I can't wait to tell James about the man you've become; I know he's been waiting. I know he was never a believer in that sort of thing, but your mother and I always tried anyway. Annoyed him to no end." His smile grew even more before it stopped, slowly fading into a thin line.
"I'm sorry you had to find out this way," the hare said after a deep breath. "But understand that the Angels were a secret we had to keep from everyone. Our families, our friends...everyone. You can't imagine how much it tore Jame apart inside knowing that. Having to lie to your face every time he came home; having to lie to his wife." A bit of his smile came back. "Something tells me Vixy always suspected something though. She had an intuition like none other, your mother; always knew you would follow in his footsteps, too. Told me so every time I came to visit."
There was a pause after that. Peppy's eyes clouded over a little, as if he had lost focus on the recording device in front of him. Fox couldn't help but match the hare, memories of his parents dancing before his eyes. His mother had died when he was only a boy, but he could still see her smile so clearly. The way she looked at him when he came home with a good test grade or did his chores had made him happy back then, but the image of such pride on her face was almost too much to think about now.
Peppy shook his head. When he looked back at the camera, his eyes were focused, though a little sad."Just um...just before she passed, and a few years before James and I parted ways with the Angels, we found something on a mission."
"Our target was planetside on Titania; he wasn't that hard to find, being a noted colleague of a younger, less insane Andross. I won't go into the specifics as to what he did, but you've heard all the stories about us. He needed to be taken down. Unfortunately, the assassination was botched, and he escaped to orbit. James and I chased him into Sector X, and for a little while, we lost contact with him in the cloud. When we found him again, we weren't quite sure what to make of what we discovered."
Fox listened as Peppy described a warpgate identical to the one he and his crew had used chasing down Major Wilkins. Word for word, the hare constructed the same mental image Fox had in his head, though even so, if the young mercenary didn't already know such a thing existed, Fox would've had trouble believing him. Their construction was distinctly odd, Peppy explained; not necessarily alien, though it was a far fetched possibility. Just odd. Lylatians had been a space faring people for many centuries, and weren't always peace loving. The Lylat War wasn't the first system wide conflict. It wasn't hard to imagine a secret research project being deployed and subsequently forgotten about in the aftermath of a war.
Peppy went on, explaining how their target was just in the middle of a jump when James and he stumbled across the gate, and it was only James' instinct to turn back that saved the pair from the activation blast.
"When we returned to the scene, there was no trace of the target's ship." Peppy shook his head, shrugging a bit. "We had no idea if it had been destroyed by the blast, or if it had snuck off while we were riding out the shockwave. It wasn't until the next day, when we heard that another Angel strike team operating in Sector Z had found and killed the target, just minutes after he disappeared in the blast, that we realized what we had discovered. It was a warpgate of some sort."
Peppy looked up at the ceiling for a moment, piecing together his words. "The Angels weren't – aren't, I guess I should say – a terribly large organization. We had the engineers to reverse engineer some information, but not the cadre of scientists to discover where these gates came from, or who built them. But to simplify the work of what engineers we had...in the heart of each of Lylat's Sectors, hidden by pockets of radiation, there is one of these gates. They connect to each other in a triangle, so by hoping into one, you can end up at either of the other two. In order to get to another gate though, you have to give a 'password' of sorts."
"You might want to call Slippy in at this point," the hare said, smiling. "It get's a little tricky from here on out."
Slippy had been listening intently to Peppy's words up to that point, and couldn't help but brighten a little at the compliment. Linka's approving giggle didn't hurt, either. However, when he turned around to look at Fox, the vulpine was staring at the recording as if he hadn't heard the words. As if he didn't even realize Slippy was in the room. A little crestfallen, but understanding that Fox was probably too swept up in the message to show anything, Slippy turned back to listen to Peppy.
"See, our engineers discovered that in order to activate the gates, you had to broadcast a frequency as you approached one. Using the frequency we recorded our target using in Sector X, they deduced the basic components of the broadcast, and discovered that the frequency is a two part key." He lifted his hands, palms towards the ceiling. "Source, and destination. Like I said, you might need Slippy for this."
Peppy's wry smile faded. "The first half of the transmission is the activation frequency for the gate. The second half gives the receiving gate word something's heading its way. If you're missing the first part, your gate won't open; you're missing the second part, the receiving gate won't open and you won't ever come out the other side. That's how it was explained to me, anyway."
"Thanks to the recording we had of our target in Sector X, our engineers took apart his activation transmission and found that, oddly enough, part of the source portion of it matched the natural frequency of the element Hydrogen. By reverse engineering this information, we found that the Sector Y gate, sure enough, had the activation frequency of Helium. Once we broadcast that frequency, along with what turned out to be a coded coordinate system for your destination gate of choice, we had something which, scientifically, shouldn't exist. A faster than light method of transportation."
"Strangely though, the Sector Z warpgate didn't respond to the frequency of Lithium, as we expected it would. Instead, it opened up to Beryllium, skipping over Lithium entirely. On an elemental scale, you could say we had gates one, two, and four, which was tossed on top of the pile of facts that didn't make sense about these things. Our engineers sent a couple probes through the gates, using possible coordinates for the Lithium gate as destinations, but when none of them showed up on system sweeps, we assumed they were lost and didn't pursue it much further. We had a jumpgate network that very few, if anybody else in Lylat knew about, and we knew how to use it. That was enough."
Peppy took a breath, leaning forward a little. "Now, it's been years since I flew with the Angels. But soon after your father and I left, the few operatives we kept in contact with began disappearing. It was gradual at first, and we didn't think much of it; that was what we were good at, after all. Disappearing. Happened all the time."
"A long, long time passed," he continued, running a hand through the short fur on his head. "We had forgotten all about the Angels, James with you and Vixy to care for, me with my own kin. We hadn't so much as talked to any of them for almost half a decade. Then one of them showed up at my door on Corneria in the middle of the night with a datadisk. He handed it to me without a word, and left."
Peppy paused, his mouth twitching. "I saw him the next morning on the news; his body had been found behind a military base, shot to death. There ah...there weren't any witnesses."
"On that disk were the coordinates of the Lithium gate, along with a note from the Angel who gave it to me, explaining that somebody was hunting them for the information. It never explained how they had found the coordinates, or why they were apparently worth so much, or really much else."
"Your father and I decided that we should keep the coordinates with us, under a failsafe lock inside ROB's memory banks. He's a common enough model that nobody would suspect it. And when you leave the Angels, they erase every record of your operations, so nobody but the Angels would know we belonged. As long as none of the operatives gave us up, we'd be safe. And there's no use trying to contact them, even if there are any out there waiting to be contacted. They won't pick up."
Peppy sighed, a small smile returning to his face. "Hopefully, being betrayed's not why I passed. I've had enough of that for a lifetime. Hopefully it was age, or maybe an aneurism yelling at Falco. But consider this my legacy, Fox. Attached to this recording, inside ROB is the only set of coordinates in Lylat for the Lithium gate. Do with them what your head says; you've got a good one on your shoulders, after all. Now, your past self should be arriving back from Riley around now, so I'll have to sign off."
"But know that you've made me proud, Fox; you were the son I never had. Hopefully I did right by you in James' place, though I think you've never really needed the direction. If you can suffer an old hare's last piece of advice though..." Peppy trailed off. His face warmed a bit, and for a brief moment, Fox thought he saw his eyes mist up. It was the regret of wanting to say something, but knowing you'd never get to say it in person. "When you're ready, find someone worth living for, and settle down. I know you're young, and that it doesn't sound all that appealing, but James has always told me that it was smartest thing he ever did with his life."
"Tell Falco that I've missed our tussles, as many headaches as they caused. And tell Slippy not to worry so much; he'll do fine in life. He'll know what that means."
Slippy's cheeks flushed, and he couldn't help a grin from creeping on his face as he stared up at Peppy's image. A soft, golden furred hand gripped his shoulder, squeezing it gently.
"You take care of them Fox," Peppy said, standing up from the bed. "They look to you more than they ever did to me."
"Come in."
The door swished open, granting the lynx waiting on the other side access to Fox's bedroom. She stepped in tentatively, padding into the low light thrown off by the desk lamp next to his bed.
"You know, they're gonna start talking if they catch you coming by my quarters like this," Fox smirked from the bed, sitting cross legged atop it. His shorts and t-shirt indicated he was ready for the night to pass, but the fact that he had been sitting there indicated that something was keeping him up.
Miyu laughed, coming in and sitting at the desk chair. "Oh sure; that's a story old as time. By the way, how's your ah," she started, gesturing awkwardly to her forehead. "You know."
"Good," Fox replied, rubbing his temple. "Can barely feel it anymore, actually."
Miyu smiled, and a beat of silence passed. Her own pajamas helped indicate the late hour of the night, their brevity showing how impulsive a decision it had been to visit Fox, something she was regretting a bit as she suppressed a shiver. He apparently kept his room a bit cooler than Peppy's.
"So are you okay?" she finally asked.
Fox gave the lynx a quizzical look before nodding, realizing what she was talking about. "Yeah; yeah, I'm fine."
"That was a lot to take in," Miyu added, crossing her arms to ward off the chill. "Slippy, ah...he told me he thought you might need to spill a bit."
"Yeah," Fox agreed, glancing down at his hands. "But I'm glad to have seen it. It's good to know there's a reason somebody was after Peppy." He looked at Miyu. "Means its more likely he's still alive somewhere."
"How do you know?" the lynx asked, only realizing after the fact that questioning Fox's belief that his father figure was living wasn't exactly polite.
"He's tough," Fox replied, face brightening a little. "If he's got something they want, they won't kill him until he gives it up. And he won't give it up."
Miyu nodded, agreeing with him. She hadn't seen much of the old hare, but what she had seen had impressed her. Peppy had a certain underlying sharpness about him. The fact that he turned out to be an Angel certainly didn't hurt his chances either.
"So now that we have the something they want, what are we going to do with it?"
"Nothing right now," Fox answered, bracing his chin on his palm. "Warpgates and coordinates and 'Lithium' don't really concern me. There'll be time to figure all that out once we get Peppy back, and once we stop this war from breaking out."
"C'mon," Miyu insisted. "You can't tell me you're not the least bit interested in what's going on with these gate things."
"Oh I am alright," Fox admitted. "I'm plenty interested. But I've also got priorities. And unless these gates figure into finding Peppy, or stopping Bauker, they don't factor too high up there."
"Yeah," Miyu relented, rocking her head back and forth. It was fairly obvious she wasn't entirely convinced.
"In the meantime though, this stays with us," Fox said, changing his tone. "Even inside the team, the fewer who know about this, the better." Miyu began nodding, but the vulpine leaned forward a little. "I'm serious, Miyu. If Wolf or Siona or anyone else out there learn that we have these coordinates, I don't want to have to take the chance that they won't sell us out to Bauker."
"I got it," the lynx assured Fox.
"I know they've helped us so far, but I can't get this little voice out of my head that says we can't tr-"
"I said I got it, Fox," Miyu deadpanned, her voice rising. "The secret's safe with me."
"Okay," the vulpine let up, meeting her gaze for a moment before shaking his head, running a hand through the short fur on his head. "Sorry, maybe it was a lot to take in."
"Mmhm; s'why I said it," Miyu answered, her smile stealing any harshness from her words.
Fox smirked before suppressing a yawn, blinking the weariness from his emerald eyes. He glanced at the clock on the nightstand next to his bed, noting the early hour of the morning.
"Alright, jeez Fox. I can take a hint," Miyu said, standing up with a stretch. "Better let you get your beauty sleep."
The vulpine laughed. "Much obliged. Can't meet Wolf and crew tomorrow with bags under my eyes."
For a brief moment, Miyu's smile matched his, and she suddenly found herself not wanting to leave. Something, some invisible force was pushing her ever so gently away from the door as she stepped towards it, as though she were forgetting something. As though a party was ending and she didn't want to go home yet. But what could be causing that feeling? Did she forget to say something? There seemed to be a heaviness in the air, as though someone had missed a cue somewhere.
"'Night, Miyu," Fox finally said, swinging his legs over the side of his bed and fiddling with his alarm clock.
"Ah, sure," she quickly replied. "Goodnight."
That was it.
She padded out of Fox's quarters and made her way back to Peppy's old room, seeking to escape the cold of the corridor as fast as possible. Thankfully, nobody was up and about to delay her, and she reached her destination quickly.
Miyu tapped the door controls behind her, hearing the locking mechanism activate before dimming the lights and climbing into bed. The oddness that had plagued Peppy's room before for her had vanished after the first few nights there, allowing her the luxury of focusing all of her attention on what had just happened.
It was such a simple word, one that few would give any thought to. But Miyu couldn't honestly remember the last time she had said 'goodnight' to somebody, or have anybody say it to her. The companionship it implied, and the familiarity required to utter it was something she was simply still getting used to. She wondered just how long she would have stood there thinking of what to say if Fox hadn't casually done it for her. She cringed a little to think of it.
The time Miyu had spent with the Star Fox team since tracking them down on Corneria had been so hectic that it was only now, when she had a few days of downtime to reflect on things, that she realized how out of place she couldn't help but feel. This family had taken her in, and despite all of her misgivings, and everything they had done to her, she found herself enjoying it. Being surrounded by people who didn't swap out every week as they had during her freelancing days was something she could definitely get used to. Getting a chance to actually get to know people was both distinctly odd and strangely enticing.
Miyu rolled onto her side and curled up a little, hugging the covers closer.
Whatever that feeling was – that alien, unusual sense of safety – she reasoned she could do with more of it. It seemed to seep from the walls, surrounding her spirit with warmth and comfort, doing for her mind what the bed sheets did for her weary body.
Fox's last words echoed through her head as she drifted off, allowing herself to utter one of them aloud before surrendering herself to a deep sleep.
"Goodnight."
The next morning found Fox standing around the rim of yet another briefing projector, this time in a room adjacent to the Lone Wolf's bridge.
Gathered around the circular railing was Wolf's cadre of Alphas, the surviving commanders of his surviving forces. Fox recognized the captain of the Vitahly, along with who must have been the captain of Wolf's other frigate, the Osgard. They were dressed in red and black navy uniforms, predictably trimmed with slightly more flashy material than their subordinates. Next to them was the commander of Wolf's remaining marines, dressed in similarly high minded clothes, though with a face to reflect her hard bitten climb to her current rank. The soldier was standing stoic while the frigate captains discussed some matter or another, the only noise in the room aside from the ever present hum of the massive battleship's various systems.
Captain Hartford was the only other occupant in the room, and Fox was glad of his presence. The husky had just come from a physical performed by Wolf's medical staff, despite Sophie's insistence that he was healthy, if a little malnourished. He certainly seemed healthy to the mercenary; the man was practically beaming. Being included in Wolf's planning, and the prospect of fighting back against Bauker put a smile on the man's face, though Fox thought it may have also had something to do with his current, freshly washed clothes. Hartford had insisted on wearing the same Cornerian greens he had been imprisoned with back on the Broadsword when he received word that he had been summoned to Wolf's meeting. To his credit and shared amusement with Fox, the husky had received all sorts of strange looks upon walking through the Lone Wolf on the way up from the Great Fox.
Seeing all of the official uniforms, both green and red, made Fox feel a little self conscious about the plain, usual clothes and flight vest he had on, but before he could devote too much time to the thought, the doors to the briefing room opened. The Alphas promptly saluted.
"At ease," Wolf O'Donnell acknowledged as he strode through the doorway, brandishing a datadisk and handing it to one of the frigate captains. Behind the lupine came another pair of officers, an Alpha and a Beta, judging by the insignias on their respective shoulders.
As the last attendees took their places around the projector, the captain with the datadisk fed it into the machine. An image almost instantly sprung forward as the installation hummed to life, depicting a floating, slowly rotating wolf's paw in deep crimson.
"Let's get started," Wolf said as he crossed his arms, standing a stride back from the railing. His uniform, as Fox was coming to know it as, was the same as always: black trench coat and black and gray combat fatigues. A red undershirt poked through the collar of the fatigues, allowing the lupine to show his fleet's colors without resorting to the standard uniforms.
"We've learned some information during the past week that will drastically change how we're going about this operation," he started, his voice a commanding growl, toned down for the close quarters of the room. He keyed a small remote, and the paw floating above the projector faded into an image of a series of stones, arranged in a circle. The yellow gases completely taking up the background gave away the picture's location. "During the hunt for Major Wilkins in Sector Y, Fox McCloud and his mercenaries discovered that Warlord Bauker has access to a jumpgate system."
"The system spans Lylat," Wolf continued, keying his remote again. The projector's image changed to an overview of the Lylat system. "Each of the three Sectors in the system contains a gate, which can access either of the other two at any given time."
Fox listened as Wolf explained how the gates worked in broad terms, and how they were the reason behind Bauker's forces' uncanny ability to seemingly disappear and reappear at whim around Lylat. For their part, the gathered officers showed little emotion, accepting their leader's explanations as though they were being told information for a test. Even when Wolf described the events of the mission to take down Wilkins, not one of them even turned towards Fox to acknowledge his and his team's efforts. The vulpine wasn't expecting congratulations, but some sort of recognition wouldn't have killed them.
If Fox didn't catch the underlying signals that he was looked down upon by Wolf's upper echelon officers before, it was coming through loud and clear now.
"Utilizing the information gathered from the Great Fox's sensors, we've pieced together the transmission the Major's broadcast before activating the Sector Y gate. Bauker's captain from the Broadsword cracked under interrogation, and using the information he supplied, we have a working password that will grant a one way trip to Sector Z."
"However, as we no longer have the engineering or scientific staff we had collected before Gage's assault, we must turn to outside interests to gather any further information on the subject. These gates provide too great a tactical advantage to pass up entirely. To that end, Lady Siona-"
"Lord O'Donnell," the Osgard's captain interrupted. "Forgive me, but won't Warlord Bauker know that we have access to these gates?" He turned to Fox. "The Star Fox mercenaries weren't exactly careful about covering their tracks. Bauker will have ships stationed at every one of these gates, ready to ambush anything that comes through."
Fox stared back at the Alpha, wanting more than anything at that moment to wipe that creeping smirk of superiority off the man's face. The Alpha hadn't been there. How could he judge what was feasible or not for the Star Fox team during those moments in Sector Z?
The mercenary held his composure though, reminding himself that any loss of it would only result in further loss of respect amongst Wolf's organization, which was something he could do without.
"If that is the case, it will significantly tie down his forces," Wolf replied. "I received word from Lady Siona recently that he recently bartered information on our fleet makeup and loadout from her. In order to blockade the gates effectively, knowing what we have, he'll have to make sure each of them has enough firepower to at least match our own. That means a pair of frigates and a battleship, plus escorts, minimum."
"Even bolstered by Admiral Gage's Seventh Fleet," the Vitahly's captain admitted. "Three gates worth of protection would be a significant portion of Bauker's hardware. Combined with the Cornerians' route of Warlord Ypson, it puts him in quite a bind."
"It almost seems more advantageous to let Bauker believe we could jump through a gate at any given time, whether or not we actually can," a third Alpha spoke up.
"We will pursue the access codes to the other gates regardless," Wolf uttered, his gravely voice cutting any further comments down. "Lady Siona's sources have informed us of someone who claims to have them, and has been trying to contact us. He's willing to give them to us for a price."
"What price?" Fox asked.
"Sanctuary," Wolf replied. "The contact is a captain with Admiral Gage's Seventh Fleet and wants to defect to our forces."
"Seventh Fleet," Hartford echoed quietly. "What's his name?"
Wolf glanced at the husky without turning his head. "Siona didn't say."
"His ship is currently in orbital dry dock around Aquas for resupply." The projector image transitioned to a rotating image of the water world. "Admiral Gage is still trying to keep up appearances of routine with Cornerian High Command, and is making sure his crews are spotted in plenty of public places in the Northern parts of Lylat, which he was given to patrol. This particular captain's crew is on shore leave in the island town of Barrados. We'll set up the rendezvous there."
Aquas rapidly ballooned in size as the 'camera' zoomed in through the cloud cover and focused on one of the many volcanic islands that dotted the watery surface of the planet's single, all encompassing ocean. On one end of the roughly circular landscape, the peak of the inactive volcano that long ago made the island soared skyward. It towered over the rest of the terrain, which was a jumbled mix of concrete landing pads, palm trees, and lightweight structures. It looked as though somebody had taken all of the ingredients of a starport, a jungle, and coastal city and threw them into a blender.
"Our delegation will land at Barrados disguised as civilians, make contact with the captain, and secure his exodus. They will then meet up with the Osgard on the fringes of Sector Y."
"Who will make contact?" one of the Alphas asked.
"...Captain Hartford," Wolf replied after a short pause, staring at the husky in question.
Hartford met the stare evenly, nodding as if he expected the assignment. Already in his mind he was running through a list of the captains he knew from the Seventh Fleet, trying to determine who the defector could be.
"A Cornerian will be negotiating on our behalf?" the Osgard's Alpha said, his face contorting a bit as though he had just eaten something disagreeable.
Wolf threw a glance at the Alpha who spoke. With his arms crossed and an eye patch covering one of his lavender eyes, the brief centering of the lupine's gaze was enough to visibly disarm the officer. Fox watched with an appreciative eye; it wasn't anyone who could dress down a smarmy subordinate with a glare.
"If the Captain agrees," Wolf visually panned the gathered Alphas. "I do not have to remind you all that despite our intentions, we are not perceived well by either side of this conflict. The Cornerian High Command would shoot us on sight, and Bauker's Alliance considers us traitors to Venom's vision. If we are going to have any legitimacy in the eyes of those who would aid us, we need to play every card we can."
Wolf's gaze returned to Hartford. "Captain Hartford's firsthand knowledge as a former officer of Gage's Seventh Fleet makes him far more qualified than anyone else here." Hartford was still meeting Wolf's gaze. "Captain, Fox has informed me of your intention to join us as a contractor; if that's true, consider this your first contract."
The husky let a few moments pass by, gathering his words. He already knew he was going to accept the offer; that part was a given. When Fox and Bill had discussed the idea of joining Wolf O'Donnell's forces – and the impetus behind Wolf's goals in the war – Hartford had agreed almost without hesitation. He didn't know how helpful he could be as a captain without a ship, but he knew that until he found something else, this was the best chance he had to help Corneria. He certainly couldn't go back to his home planet, not while Admiral Gage was still in command of the Seventh Fleet. He'd be declared a traitor the minute he was recognized.
Instead, he took some time to ready himself to make a request of the wolf before him. Hartford knew that Wolf O'Donnell was a physically intimidating man; he had read all of the reports on Star Wolf during the Lylat War. But the husky was unprepared for the sheer weight of Wolf's presence as the mercenary-turned-Warlord stood staring at him. Like a young wild animal possesses an instinctual fear of predators they've never seen before, so too did the Cornerian captain possess an instinctual distrust of the man before him. There was no way he would allow himself to be left alone in the care of a warlord who had killed so many of his brothers in arms.
"I'll accept," Hartford said. "On the condition that Star Fox act as my escort."
"Done," Wolf agreed without hesitation.
"A Cornerian and mercenaries?" the doubtful Alpha nearly exclaimed.
"You'll have a squad of my marines accompanying as observers," Wolf continued, casting a quick glance at the marine Alpha standing near him. The female officer nodded in understanding, accepting the implicit command to select a squad for the assignment. The way Wolf spoke made it seem as though it was the plan all along. Or that he was simply exceptionally well prepared to adapt, something Hartford was aware of being the more likely option. "But Star Fox will fly air support and lead the security detail. The Beta here has your briefing. You depart this evening. Make your preparations."
"Unbelievable," the first Alpha muttered, his continuing dismay at the situation unreflected in the other officers present.
"Moving on," Wolf began again, ignoring his subordinate's misgivings. "More ships aligned with Bauker have been sighted around Sector Y and Meteos. The sightings are sporadic, but we know that the Cornerians are unaware of these intrusions in territory they consider 'safe'. To that end, we will be employing our own hit and fade tactics..."
A/N:
The next few chapters are already planned out; all I have to do is find time to sit down and write. Easier said than done, unfortunately :/ But I got an absurd number of reviews this past chapter, so lets go ahead and get to that:
chaos Leader: I'm glad to hear what you said about the action sequences; I always have fun writing those, and I feel that they're at least as important to a Star Fox story as characterization. Star Fox is, after all, a series of action games. But on the flip side, those remarks about the characterizations are completely legitimate. I'll do my best to give the slower, more emotional scenes a bit more depth next time around. Thanks for the review, buddy.
AndrossKenobi: Glad to hear it AK; we'll see what happens with Bill's doubts :) Thanks for the feedback!
pkmnfan11: Happy to oblige! As far as sparing the Major...perhaps Bill would have had Rhena not gotten all trigger happy. Maybe? I guess we'll never know though, eh? Thanks for the review!
BananaBison: Thanks Banana! That's very kind. If you ever feel like saying more though, I won't complain. Just ask RedBay and chaos Leader :P
nothernmegas: Much obliged megas; that description nails it pretty well. By the way, love your signature saying. Good one to keep in mind.
EverCloud: First of all, hi! Thanks for sticking with the story for so long! Second, "rushing the plot" might be an unfortunate byproduct of getting the story moving. You have a legitimate point, but its a balance between a lagging narrative where not much of importance happens (like the early chapters), or moving things along at a clip that could be considered a little fast. But I'll see what I can do about letting the story ease through the plot at a more comfortable pace. And to me, Falco's always had the kind of sarcastic attitude that makes him perfect for a comic relief type character. Unfortunately, Nintendo always gives him the most awkward attempts at said sarcasm for dialogue. Anyway, glad you like that style! Thanks for the feedback EverCloud!
RedBay: Thanks for the kind words! Happy to answer questions when I can; more often then not in answering them I learn things about the characters myself, so its a win-win. And I'm glad you enjoyed the ending. I never liked the idea that "bad guys" are bad strictly for evil's sake. They're living, breathing people too; they have their own wants and dreams, just like "heroes." And virtually nobody ever does the wrong thing intentionally. Regardless of whether they're actually doing something good or evil, in their minds its always the right thing, and I've always felt the fact that, in certain lights, anybody's view can be justified is an incredibly compelling part of being a person. ...Er, sorry; coming off my soapbox now. Thanks for the review RedBay :)
LilGstryker: There is literally (literally) not a day that's gone by since you posted where I didn't read that review to brighten my day. Glad to have you back LilG! Your words are far too kind; hopefully my writing can live up to them some day :) But hey! I don't want to be responsible for missed learning. Put the phone down and pay attention! Plenty of time to read between classes :P
The Citadel: Ah yeah; "show, don't tell" was one of the first pieces of advice I got on this site, and probably one of the best. Hopefully I've done okay at doing more the former. Heheh, and I had forgotten all about the "psshwsshhsh" sound "word." My bad. But you know, I think we share a lot of the same ideas with OCs. Far too often they become heroes of their own, but still in stories revolving around the Star Fox team, which results in the OCs outshining the main cast, which is no good. Hopefully that doesn't seep into my writing too much.
It really made me smile to read that my action scenes "FEEL like a Star Fox game." That was the single most important thread I was trying to lay out with this fic from day one (5 1/2 years ago). Don't get me wrong, I love writing emotion and drama into a story, but if you're writing a Star Fox fic, you've gotta feel the dogfights and experience the barrel rolls, you know? I'm still working on it, but I'm really glad to hear I'm at least making progress. As far as the more poetic parts of the story, I didn't mean for any of them to come off as attempts at bragging or showing off. I just wanted to inject some unique things into the story, maybe try out a few things to see if they pan out. Some worked and I've kept (spoken word logs), others didn't and I've stopped (the jolted phrase thingy you mentioned). I'll be sure to keep an eye on them in the future though. Thanks for the review Citadel; I look forward to hearing more from you should you keep reviewing.
Thank you again to everyone who read and reviewed the story! Now stay tuned for a story recap.
-Redd
.
.
.
-STAR FOX: Mercenaries - (Note: this recap is designed for those who read the story a while back and don't remember some of the events, not for new readers who want to jump right in. I say this as an excuse to gloss over my poor recapping abilities)
Our story begins as the Star Fox team finds themselves in the midst of another contract, working an escort job in Meteos for indifferent smugglers. Though they saved the Lylat System during the massive war with Andross, their status as mercenaries left them largely out of the spotlight. Now strapped for cash and desperate for contracts, they take what work they can get.
During their assignment, the convoy they were assigned to protect came under attack by a rival faction. Fox and Falco, flying escort, fended off the raiders. One of the freelance attackers, a young lynx named Miyu, found her ship disabled and left for dead in the endless asteroid fields of Meteos. When her former employers came to collect their property (preferably minus the pilot), Fox and Falco stumbled across their salvage operation returning from their contract's termination point, and intervened.
Miyu, critically injured and fading fast, was sheltered aboard the Great Fox, and taken with the Star Fox team to Corneria. There, she was offloaded to the care of a hospital while the team went back to hunting contracts. They never expected to see or hear from her again.
Bill Grey, an old academy friend of Fox's, contacted the team shortly thereafter with news of a lucrative military contract. Star Fox agreed at once, and flew to meet Bill in Sector X, where they would help escort a military supply convoy to an isolated depot within the massive blue cloud.
However, soon after lifting off from Corneria's New Memories Starport, the team discovered a stowaway aboard the Great Fox. Or rather, the stowaway discovered them. Miyu, having escaped the hospital and snuck aboard their ship, was out for vengeance. Far from the thanks the team expected for saving her life, they received the full force of her rage. Miyu, the image of her ship's demise as the result of a dogfight with Fox still fresh in her mind, had come to exact revenge. She knocked out Slippy and was close to taking down Fox before she was incapacitated by Falco.
Miyu woke up in the Great Fox's medical bay to a proposition from Peppy. With Slippy out of commission, thanks to the lynx's handiwork, the Star Fox team was in need of another pilot for Bill's contract. Knowing she was a pilot, Peppy, much to the surprise of Fox, offered her the chance to fly with them for an equal cut of the contract. She grudgingly accepted.
The Star Fox team met Bill and his squadron of Cornerian pilots in Sector X, though not in the manner they were expecting. Bill's squadron had come under attack by a swarm of hostile fighters, and it was only Star Fox's timely intervention that saved the squadron from complete annihilation. Bolstered by the mercenaries, Bill and his remaining pilots completed their assigned duty, seeing the military convoy safely to Yohan Depot. Far from the end of their troubles, however, Bill and the Star Fox team found themselves in the middle of a system wide web of deception.
In the aftermath of the Lylat War, a group of Warlords rose to rally Venom's remaining forces. To the Cornerians and the rest of Lylat, they were a loosely organized bunch of pirates, and campaigns were launched to put them down. However, the Warlords were far more organized than first realized, with most of them having formed an alliance behind one man. Warlord Bauker. In addition, a traitor in the Cornerian ranks, Admiral Gage, commander of the Seventh Fleet, was putting in motion plans to defect his fleet to the Warlords. Filled with captains and crews sympathetic to the Warlords' idea of a Lylat free from Cornerian dominance, the Seventh Fleet, while remaining undetected by Cornerian High Command, was already hard at work siphoning supplies to Bauker and his alliance. One of the bases running this supply chain was Yohan.
The trap was sprung, but Fox, his crew, and most of the remaining Cornerian pilots escaped. However, in the chaos, Peppy was captured. Unable to turn back, the Star Fox team ran. Soon after, they discovered that, along with the three surviving Cornerian pilots, they had been given bounties by the Cornerian military. With no other option, Fox, Falco and Slippy, along with the Cornerian pilots Bill Grey, Rhena Haggerty, and Linka Pyrokanzia, began their life on the run. Miyu opted out, disappearing at the first freeport the team encountered.
A month later, Fox and his expanded team, still strapped for cash and living low, discover their first real lead on Peppy's whereabouts. Determined that getting back the hare meant finding out who was behind the treachery at Yohan, the team follow up on the information, after Miyu returns to them in the back alleys of a Cornerian city. First though, they make a pit stop on Shoana Freeport in Meteos to gather supplies.
While there, they ran into Katt Monroe, working at a spare parts shop, along with Bill's old friend Jason Mierse at his armory. There, Bill learns that his fiance', Sophie Arkanian, was kidnapped by bounty hunters in an effort to flush the Cornerian and the rest of the Star Fox team out. The team leave Shoana Freeport, and after being rescued from a different squad of bounty hunters by Katt and Jason, the entire group meet back on the Great Fox. There, they discover that their home had been raided. The intruders lay dead, the work of Linka's last ditch effort to protect Slippy and the ship. But the defense left the young Linka comatose, gunshot and bruised.
Bill and Rhena split off to rescue Sophie, while the rest of the team, with Katt and Jason in tow, seek out a freighter containing important information on Peppy's whereabouts. Along the way, they are ambushed by a Cornerian Seventh Fleet patrol, and seek refuge in a sensor-baffling debris field and reactor cloud. There, they are discovered by none other than Wolf O'Donnell.
Wolf became a Warlord following Andross' defeat, but split off from the other Warlords to become an independent entity. His base had just been destroyed by Admiral Gage, afraid that Wolf would work against Bauker's alliance. The remnants of Wolf's battered fleet took refuge in the reactor cloud the Great Fox now found itself in. Wolf O'Donnell, rather than harboring resentment for his rival, welcomed Fox and his team aboard his flagship, the Lone Wolf, and explained Bauker's alliance, Admiral Gage's betrayal, and the Cornerian High Command's ignorance to the coming war. Wolf asked Fox and his team to join him, working to prevent the Warlords from executing their surprise war against the Cornerians. Fox agreed.
Since then, the Star Fox team, made whole again when Bill and Rhena returned with Bill's fiance Sophie, has been working contracts for Wolf's fleet.
Slippy, on the verge of finding a true friend in Linka before she was rendered comatose, is seeing her "ghost" wherever he goes, an ethereal entity of unknown origin that seems to want to continue their friendship while Linka herself lies unconscious in Wolf O'Donnell's medical bay.
Rhena, an exotic pilot to begin with, finds herself unable to speak Lylatian after the team's unexpected encounter with Lylat's hidden warpgate system, in use by Bauker but unknown to anyone else.
Miyu, after plying Lylat's freeports as a freelancer, is unsure of what to make of the "family" she has been welcome in to. Their overtures of friendship are unheard of to the lynx, used to fending for herself in dark corners and grimy stations. One thing is for sure though; she could get used to the world Fox is showing her with his friends.
Falco and Katt are as brash and harsh to each other as always, while Bill and Sophie are enjoying every moment of each other. Jason tries his best to help where he can.
And Fox McCloud finds himself leading the way, keeping the team focused and sharp as they work with Wolf O'Donnell to halt the march of war, and ultimately find Peppy Hare. The young vulpine knows Peppy is still alive out there...somewhere.