STARFOX: SUNRISE OVER LYLAT
By Eric "Erico" Lawson
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: IRON FALCON
Projectile Vs. Energy Weaponry- In the few years prior to the development of the FTL Drive, energy based 'laser' weaponry was only just becoming viable. Eventually, further miniaturization and specialization allowed for energy weapons to almost fully replace gunpowder-based projectile weapons, and an environmental push sealed its fate. Following the Lylat Wars, energy weapons became the norm, although there were some holdouts, especially in the sniper corps and missile development programs, who insisted on the value of 'slug' projectile weaponry as a fallback.
(From "Weapons Systems Review for the Cornerian Army", published for the Joint Chiefs 18 years after the Lylat Wars)
"…While it is true that advances in laser technology allow for greater use in space-based combat environments than standard munitions, it is the recommendation of this panel that projectile based weaponry should not be discontinued at this time. It is unlikely that shielding technology will ever reach a point to be fully effective against full kinetic impacts such as missile strikes, which cause enough kinetic impact to strain shields designed for energy dispersal and microkinetic impacts, to the breaking point."
Planet Titania
Detention Area Zero (The Blackwolf Ruins)
None of the other Primals on duty paid any attention to the APC rolling into the compound. It served no purpose; having entered the compound, it had clearly passed the security checks. And Primals, for all of their warlike nature, were steadfastly loyal to their fellow soldiers. None had ever considered that anyone might infiltrate any installation under false pretenses, that any enemy could ever strike so subtly.
For all that the Primals professed to be masters in the art of warfare, subterfuge was not among their talents. It was, however, a talent of their enemies, and once more, that difference would be made painfully clear.
The APC rolled into the motor pool, pulling into place alongside the other Primal ground vehicles, the lighter patrol and the heavier combat models all lumped together.
The engine wound down, and the occupants, a disguised Telemos and Rourke, looked to one another through their face-shrouding helmets.
"Wait thirty seconds after I leave, then get to work. And remember that phrase I taught you. Say anything else and they'll know you aren't one of us." Telemos instructed his cohort quietly.
"You Primals really just left all of your hardware right in one spot like this?" Rourke whispered back. "It's just begging to be destroyed. I won't even have to tag every one with a charge, they're stacked up like firewood in this lot."
"Then you should be able to work even more quickly." Telemos started to open up his door, but Rourke's hand shot out and touched his elbow, stopping him.
"Hey. I just wanted…You know, while you're heading in there…" The mercenary made a few false starts before shaking his helmeted head. "Good luck."
Telemos nodded his head once, and left.
A minute later, trudging towards Detention Area Zero's main compound, which was nestled suspiciously next to the visible aboveground ruins, Telemos slowly turned his helmet in a sweep of the compound, just like a tired officer taking one look around before moving in to file his report might do.
He briefly caught sight of a shadow slipping between the vehicles, dragging a heavily laden backpack behind him.
Phase 4. Rourke destroys the Battlenet relay, and as much hardware as he possibly can. And somewhere out there, beyond the fence, up on that ridge, The Marksman likely already has us in his gunsights. He will not fire until the signal is given or the alarm is raised and we need covering fire. To there.
On his sweep, Telemos caught sight of the very small, and hastily erected airfield on the northern side of the makeshift prison compound. There were only two ships there, smaller transports. Telemos could only hope that they were being kept in a state of readiness for immediate launch.
For the first time, Telemos felt the skin beneath his fur beginning to crawl with a prickling sensation he was not accustomed to.
It wasn't rage, or fury, or anticipation. It was not indignation, or grief, or depression. He had felt all of those. It wasn't pride or a sense of rightness.
Walking through Detention Area Zero, Telemos felt his first inkling of fear.
Right when it was too late to do anything about it.
Certainly, the Starfox pilots feel like this all the time. And yet they endure. Once Telemos had resolved that thought, he pressed through it with the same grim determination that had gotten him this far. His steps took on a steadier, increased cadence.
He was a proud, honorable, Primal warrior. Trained since he could walk to fight, to shed what was unnecessary, to endure. If such presumed 'weaker' species could carry out this daring task…
Telemos would be damned to do any less.
Telemos had been right in his assessment of The Marksman's position and inclinations. At the moment that Rourke and Telemos disembarked from the APC, Sergeant Milo Granger was tucked in the shadow of the ridgeline, a kilometer and a half from the fence and twenty meters higher than the camp at the ridge's lowest point.
He was currently along the southeastern edge of the ridge, which gave him space to retreat north, or further south and west when it came time to break for new cover.
There was no sign of him, no traces to give away his position thanks to a refracting sniper's cloak. The chromorphic crystals embedded in the durable cloth's electromesh weave had done their work of producing a suitable color scheme to match the reddish brown dust and stone. Because of the noise his weapon made, Milo had one additional piece of gear the others hadn't thought to bring along; noise cancelling earplugs. They also linked to his headset, protecting his hearing while still allowing him to hear incoming signals.
Milo could still think back on his earliest training, when even with the sniper's cloaks, they'd been forced to undergo brutal combat training on Fortuna. There they'd learned the skills of camouflage and fieldcraft. Of painting their faces and fur so thick with mud that the stink didn't wash out for days, of stitching leaves and twigs into ghillie suits to break their form and let them vanish into their surroundings. There was a reason he'd survived on Papetoon, thrived, when so many others in the Army had perished. Technology could break down. Skills did not.
The cloak did more than offer camouflage. Even though it was uncomfortable, Milo's body heat was kept trapped within the confines of the covering draped over him and his rifle, refracted inwards. Only minimal traces of heat leaked out, and if anyone had been looking through infrared, he would be as the rest of the ground around him. It was the dead of the Titania night, chilly enough to make one shiver if caught in a breeze, and he was still baking beneath that covering.
Still, better to sweat than to bleed.
And yet all of this, his cloak, his fieldcraft, existed for one purpose: To place him in a position to aim and fire his Felid Industries Model M-62 Multipurpose Sniper Rifle. He carried ammunition ranging from antipersonnel to antitank, and regardless of the caliber of the round he loaded into it, the Adaptive Rifling, one last brilliant innovation of gunsmithing in the twilight years of projectile weaponry, would always sense the distinction and 'dial in' the necessary changes. It did so by adjusting the diameter of the entire barrel and loading chamber, like a camera lens switching focal lengths.
The scope on top allowed him to view targets in normal visibility, but also included infrared, night vision, and if it was absolutely called for, a version of LADAR which allowed him to sight targets through dense smoke or fog at the cost of telegraphing his position to enemy sensors. At the moment, the night vision alone sufficed. The one thing that the scope couldn't account for was windage, however. For that, Milo had to rely on naught but bare senses and experience. Any of the portable wind vanes he might have brought along and remotely linked to his scope would have required broadcasting a signal, and the Primals had proven themselves all too proficient at detecting and decrypting even the hardiest of communiques. Only the quantum encrypted Omega Black radio transceivers and line-of-sight optical communications were immune to the Battlenet's ungodly abilities, and Milo possessed the use of neither. He would have to decide his Minute of Angle, or MOA, and adjust himself. Which he had, for the moment, accounting for a steady 6 to 7 kilometer crosswind.
Milo followed Telemos for a long minute, tracking the Primal's progress across the compound before he disappeared into a temporary quickbuilt structure of collapsible rigging and corrugated steel. Placed in front of one lurching, crumbling monolith of stone which was the center of the Blackwolf Ruins. Strangely, it seemed as though the facility connected to the ruins. There had been hints of it in the satellite imagery available to them, but on the ground, inspecting it from two kilometers away, it was much more evident in design.
If the Blackwolf Ruins were, as that archaeologist had theorized, hollow, then it was very likely that the Primals were using whatever chambers were below as a recessed and protected area. Sheltered from the elements. Heavily guarded, most likely. Difficult to access.
"Boy's got his work cut out for him." Milo uttered to himself. He eased back away from his rifle's scope and reached for his hip flask, taking a quick drink of sugar and electrolyte infused water while he could. The last thing he needed were tremors from an absence of sodium and potassium throwing off his aim. Swallowing it down quietly, he slipped the flask back into its holster and resumed his firing position.
Guiding the scope north, he sighted the small airfield they'd expected. Their escape had hinged on transport being available for a fast getaway. To Milo's relief, there were two such transports available, parked off of the runway. He saw no movement in the cockpit, but there could be personnel in the rear of those ships. Still, they were there at least.
One less problem.
With that seen to, Milo scanned the perimeter, double checking the patrols and guard towers, seeing just how many enemies he had to contend with.
Fully two dozen Primal troopers, scattered in six guard towers around the perimeter looking outwards, and 3 wandering patrols, each with a pair of guards. Terrible odds, really, and Milo had to swallow the bitter truth that once he started firing, there would be plenty of troopers still standing who could sound the alarm. Still…the towers themselves.
First shot's hollowpoint. You've got an AP round chambered as your followup before you need to reload.
Ordinarily, he'd consider the use of a depleted Duranium slug on a so-called 'soft' target a waste, but if he could line up the shot right, he could conceivably shatter two legs of a guard tower at once and send it toppling to the ground…neutralizing the position and the soldiers inside of it all at the same time.
The raccoon mentally marked them all and proceeded to scan for Rourke. If he was keeping to the plan, Lieutenant O'Donnell would either be setting charges around the motor pool for use as a later distraction, or making his way towards the obvious satellite tower on the compound's western quarter. The Battlenet relay, which would need to be destroyed to cut off the prison camp from the Primal's orbiting assets.
There you are. He caught a flicker of movement, which was revealed to be a figure in a Primal uniform, ducking in and around the vehicles of the motor pool. It had to be Rourke, for this one was carrying a backpack, and no other Primal would have had any reason at all to kneel down and reach underneath the chassis of every second APC or tank. Tinwheels, Milo thought to himself.
But then he tensed up. Another Primal trooper that had been out of his sight during the first scope sweep stepped out from behind a transport, head buried in a datapad. The soldier looked up just in time to see Rourke's figure move between two more vehicles.
"No, no, no…" Milo whispered. "Not now." He tracked his aim in, making a rough windage adjustment. This first shot would be messy, but if he needed to take it, he would.
Do something, Rourke. Don't make me handle it for you.
"Aushalten!" The Primal's voice was loud by dint of the silence in the compound, and Telemos tensed up and froze, trying to gauge whether any other Primals had heard that one voice. He looked back, and saw a single Primal trooper walking towards him. He looked around. No, nobody else seemed the least bit aware. Even the sentries in the guard towers weren't paying the motor pool any mind.
Rourke readied himself, preparing the one sentence in Primal that Telemos had taught him.
The trooper, who didn't even have a weapon drawn, came up towards him. The Primal didn't even have a helmet on. He affixed the helmeted Rourke with a raised eyebrow. "War bist dein?"
Rourke made no nod or shake of the head, and affected a disinterested pose. "Lo's mit eisen auftrag, hacch'kesht dal Prator bekkana." I am busy running an errand for the Praetor.
The Primal paused at that, and cocked his head to the side. Telemos was glad that he could at least read the trooper's facial expression. He seemed confused, and a little dissuaded. But not completely. He said something else, rattling on a little faster and smiling at the end.
"Lo's mit eisen auftrag, hacch'kesht dal Prator bekkana." Rourke repeated, a little more firmly.
The trooper seemed to get a little miffed, and stepped in closer, saying something else and sounding offended. Rourke stared at him for a few more moments, then let his head swivel slowly in a wide arc to see if anyone was paying attention to them yet.
Nobody was, even now. The trooper smacked the side of his helmet and snapped at him. Behind the visor, Rourke narrowed his eyes.
His gloved paw shot out almost faster than the eye could track, and a well-placed stab with his extended fingers right at the Primal's exposed throat successfully crushed in the enemy soldier's windpipe. Gagging and gasping for air, the Primal went to one knee. Rourke swiftly stepped to his side, grabbed hold of the flailing trooper's head in both hands, and before the trooper could react, snapped his neck in one quick, clean jerk. When the body hit the ground, Rourke could almost hear the cruel chuckle of his grandfather's voice again.
Now, who taught you that move again, boy?
"Shut up." Rourke mumbled, both for the ghost in his memories and for the Primal who now lay dead. He checked the environment one more time, then grabbed the trooper's body and dragged it underneath the next vehicle in the line. He placed one last explosive charge to the undercarriage right above the body, and then headed out away from the motor pool.
As he left, Rourke couldn't help wondering if Milo had been about to pull the trigger himself.
Helmet still on, Telemos approached the complex at the front of the ruins. He offered a brief nod towards the soldiers on station, and taking note of the rank insignia on his stolen outfit, they offered a sharp salute and let him pass without complaint.
Inside, he quickly made his way towards an information kiosk. It was standard procedure for Primals to file after-action reports, no matter how mundane the mission, and it would be expected for the commander of a ground team to make one. For one as simple as a failed SAR operation, the Praetor on site would not require a face to face, nor would he be expecting one.
Sitting down in a room set aside for Battlenet file access, Telemos activated the monitor, which was in locked mode. He paused for a moment, realizing that he did not know the user name of the officer whose rank he had taken.
He knew his own, though. Here, he hesitated. Should he dare to use it? Would it still be valid? The Primal leadership had already written him off as an enemy. It was standard procedure to invalidate the access codes of deceased or shamed Primals. His own access had been, for a time, downgraded during the period when he had been stripped of his last name.
He had no choice. He needed answers, and if there was even a shred of a chance it might still work…
Telemos input his Battlenet username and password. He waited.
Access Granted.
Inside of his helmet, Telemos breathed a soft sigh of relief. Whoever was in charge of such things hadn't gotten around to removing him from the Battlenet just yet. Or perhaps they'd never expected an exiled Primal to even try. He made the most of his time, bringing up a schematic of Detention Area Zero and then saving it to a memory chip for later use. To his surprise, the bulk of Detention Area Zero wasn't visible. It was belowground. The estimates of Primal troop numbers which the Cornerian's intelligence had provided to Rourke turned out to be grossly incorrect. They'd thought there would be 250 souls on the ground. There were only 194 on the roster. Still more than Telemos would care to tussle with, but it did improve the odds. Slightly.
There were two elevator shafts, according to the schematics. Telemos memorized the path to them, then logged himself out. He turned and headed for the lifts, climbing on board. A pair of Primal troopers joined him, giving a respectful nod as they stepped aboard as well. Telemos reached past them to punch the switch to take them down, and when the doors closed, they began their descent.
It was a new elevator lift, but the shaft itself…Telemos could smell the age on it, even through his overtaxed helmet filters.
One of the other troopers decided to strike up some small talk. Given how they were descending 150 meters, they had the time.
"Heh. Funny, us being here." The first soldier laughed a little. "I could hardly believe it when the Praetor told us what this planet used to be."
"Well, it's not like they were ever going to use this place again. Not after our ancestors got through with them." The two laughed heartily at their joke for a moment, before the humor sputtered out. They'd taken notice of Telemos, and how the still helmeted Primal, a superior officer no less, hadn't reacted at all.
Inside of his helmet, Telemos was too busy processing that tiny bit of new information. Who they were, and what Titania used to be were things he was particularly interested in. Still, he wasn't about to make the faux pas of asking what they meant. If he had truly been an officer on the base, he would have known.
"Er, everything all right, sir?" The second Primal asked him cautiously.
Telemos fell back on a practiced stance of disdain and minor condemnation, turning his helmet first left, then right to let each feel the weight of his unseen glare. "If you have time to laugh about the accomplishments of our ancestors, you could better spend it deciding how better to honor their memories with your own service."
The other Primals shuffled about uncomfortably, wording quiet apologies before going silent. The lift finally came to a stop and the doors opened, and they all stepped off into ancient corridors that were somehow still intact. Dusty, more a tomb than an underground base, but still intact. There was evidence of fresh bracings being put in as well to keep the structures in one piece.
The two troopers went one direction, properly chastened, and Telemos went the other.
His path took him towards the detention cells.
Titania High Orbit
52,000 Kilometers above the surface
Primal transport ships weren't given full names, and apparently this was something that the Cornerians had in common with them for the most part. Thus, while the Flashpoint and Creosote were the names assigned to the small escort ships, the larger transport vessel carried only the designation T-G849.
Aboard the bridge of the transport vessel, Captain Golitz Mausleff felt the sting of that insult very keenly. He had once commanded a ship of the line, but had been demoted because of a fight between himself and another Primal officer shortly before the Armada had arrived here to their home system. The other officer, who had offered the grievous insult though not the first punch, had escaped punishment due to his uncle being a Tribune. That had been only the first in a long line of insults which Captain Mausleff had had to put up with ever since then. Being ordered around by wet-nosed pitiful excuses for command officers with barely any command experience under their belts was the latest. Mausleff had three times their leadership experience, combined, yet they were considered the senior officers for the resupply.
While the stocky Primal with slowly graying fur stomped around the bridge, the soldiers under his command shared uneasy glances. Mausleff had once carried a great deal of credibility, and a loyalty from former subordinates that had labeled him as a magnificent teacher. Since his court martial, he had been surly and short-tempered. Surviving under Mausleff aboard T-G849 was easy: You kept your head down, you did your job, and you didn't say anything out of turn.
The radar officer had been watching his display for several minutes, frowning and deliberating between reporting a larger than normal inbound and letting it slide. Unfortunately, the choice was taken out of his hands when the Captain appeared behind him. As grouchy as he might be now, Mausleff hadn't lost his prescient sense of knowing when something was happening aboard his ship.
"Looking at anything interesting?" Mausleff inquired softly. He didn't have to shout it, his voice carried enough weight regardless. The radar officer hid his flinch and nodded.
"Possibly, sir. We've got a rather significant object coming in towards our airspace on an in-system course."
"What's your read on its trajectory?"
"The pattern presents as ballistic, but…"
"You're not convinced." Captain Mausleff finished. The radar officer nodded once. A ballistic trajectory would be indicative of a foreign body or space debris, floating on a straight course that was influenced solely by gravity or other external factors. A non-ballistic pattern would indicate a spacecraft with a means of propulsion.
Mausleff considered it, then glanced over to his XO. "See if you can get a visual on this radar contact."
The XO did so, then shook his head. "Negative. It's too far for our cameras, even at full zoom."
Mausleff growled at that. Lord forbid that Command put as much money into their non-military research as they did on weapons, shields, and armor plating. "How many Splinter drones do we still have aboard?"
"Four, sir. But they're not flight-ready at the moment." The XO answered. "Shall I give the order to have them fueled and readied for launch?"
"As soon as Primally possible. I want them outbound and closing into visual and firing range of that object. I don't like surprises."
The wait was interminable, and the object continued to close in in the meantime. Finally, the transport's cargo bay was cleared of personnel and the blast seals opened up.
One second after the craft launched, the Splinter drones stopped reporting a signal to the transport vessel. "Sir, we've lost communications with the drones!" The communications officer reported.
"What?!"
"T-G849, this is Escort Creosote. We've superseded your command authority and taken control of the Splinter drones. Would you care to explain why you launched military assets?"
"Captain Pollaus, you are interfering…"
"As you are aware, Captain Mausleff, control of military operations lies in the hands of myself and Captain Bolshauser. Now. What were you going to do with them?"
With his crew watching nervously, Captain Mausleff grinded his teeth. "My radar officer has been tracking an inbound object on a course for Titania. As it is currently out of visual range, I was sending the Splinters to obtain confirmation on it."
"…If you are referring to the inbound on heading 283, Z-Axis Negative 31, we have already dismissed it as a ballistic contact moving at asteroidal velocity."
"Captain Pollaus, I am not convinced…"
"Golitz, your job is to fly that transport and deliver supplies. Not to second guess your superior officers. However, if you're so adamant about it, we will move to investigate."
Mausleff's back went ramrod straight. "Captain, send the Splinter drones. They are an expendable asset. If there is trouble, don't expose yourself to it unnecessarily."
"Negative. The Splinter drones in your hold were placed there for the express purpose of supplementing Creosote and Flashpoint in the event of an enemy attack. As you have launched them and wasted valuable resources on what is likely a false alarm, I am putting them into an orbital holding pattern to conserve fuel. Escort Flashpoint, come in."
"Flashpoint here. We have been listening in on your conversation. We will protect the transport while you move to visually confirm the bogey."
Captain Mausleff shut off his connection and swore loudly, causing everyone on the transport's bridge to jump a little in their seats.
"Damned fools." He muttered angrily after composing himself.
Inside of the dead transport, Dana sat in the cockpit of her Seraph. Tucked snugly inside of the cargo bay, still locked into the retractable gantry, there was little to do but wait as the clock ticked by. She'd shut off everything on the Rondo aside from a single forward camera to stave off boredom and give her a small heads up. No emissions of any kind, save for that small transmission on a dead, drifting ship that would easily be written off as just a fluke. Her own Seraph didn't even have its radar or sensors powered up. She kept the radio on, just to pick up transmissions. And all she was getting were Battlenet encrypted databursts, which she couldn't translate with her ship's systems mostly on power-down.
But she could note their rising frequency of chatter.
Finally, as Titania loomed heavily in the camera, it picked up movement. A ship, heading in her direction. Dana tensed up and brought up the Seraph's files, quickly identifying it as a smaller military escort. Easier to crack than a capital ship, but more maneuverable. It was probably scanning, looking for signs of life. If it found any, it would attack, and Dana wasn't entirely confident that her Arwing could survive having a ship blown apart around it.
Was she close enough? She didn't have her radar on, only dead reckoning based on her speed and inertia after exiting subspace and estimated distance to the planet.
Not even her ODAI was online, so the former test pilot had to run the numbers in her head.
Close enough, she decided with a shake when she started to develop a headache. She began powering up her Seraph.
As soon as the fusion generators came online, so did ODAI. Her AI companion seemed to let out a false yawn as the Arwing's databanks and processors came back online. "What did I miss?
"Time to wake up. We're on."
"Ah, gotcha. Powering up, prepping the Seraph for launch. Putting plasma thrusters to idle. Seraph atmospheric seals…green. Depressurizing the Rondo cargo compartment."
A hundred plus steps that all needed to happen in sequence were carried out effortlessly by ODAI. The Seraph was prepped for launch, the free-flying Rondo's cargo bay was readied and then opened.
The unique launch gantry that could support two Arwings inside of the smaller transport, and only just, began to slide out of the opened back hatch. As it did so, the Seraph finished powering up its systems. Shields first. Then radar. Then weapons.
Everything working in perfect order. For how long, Dana knew, depended on her skill in not getting smashed to pieces. She wasn't who she used to be. Like everyone else on the team, she was stronger now than she had been.
She was more than who she had been.
The ship sent to investigate her drifting Rondo seemed to finally realize the danger it was in. Her Arwing blared an alert of radar lock-on.
"Too late. Game over, pal." Dana grinned. "Launch!"
Her thrusters roared to full power, the locks on the gantry mechanism disengaged, and her Arwing separated from the cradle of the Rondo. Too late to do any good, the escort vessel fired. The missiles failed to engage the Arwing, and instead locked on to the Rondo, which blew apart in a shower of sparks and shrapnel. Dana winced and looked over her shoulder at what could have been her grave. "Shit, I liked that ship."
"They're laying in a pursuit course."
Dana closed her eyes and drifted into the familiar feeling of Merge Mode. Her Seraph unfolded into its ultimate, six-winged form, and spun around freely to face the approaching ship.
A single G-Bomb flared out from the launcher in her belly, and impacted on the outer shielding of the Primal ship. The shields flared brightly in the splash of the initial explosion, then buckled. What was left of the ship was drawn into the micro-singularity, unraveled like a wool mitten as the intense gravity crushed it to its component atoms. There was no escape, and at its size, no surviving wreckage.
The Seraph flipped around and charged for the distant blips that appeared on its radar. There were still more Primal ships in orbit to destroy. The ones that were left looked none too happy at her sudden appearance.
"Phase 4. Let's finish this." Dana said to herself. Or to ODAI.
In Merge, personal pronouns…got blurry.
Primal Transport T-G849
In a flash of energy and a burst of power that defied explanation, the Primal escort ship Creosote vanished. It looked as though a black hole had swallowed it, and Captain Mausleff wondered how the crew of that doomed ship had felt. He remembered only scant and rudimentary details from his applied astrophysics course, something about how time slowed in closer proximity to the event horizon of a black hole. That detonation had held all the benchmarks of one, albeit on a much smaller scale. For the witnesses who had only been able to watch it happen at extreme visual distance, it was over in a few seconds. For the crew of the Creosote, their destruction might have lasted an eternity. An eternity of hell and a slow drop into oblivion.
The other Primal escort ship, the Flashpoint, quickly reacted. "Flashpoint is moving to engage the enemy Arwing! Transport T-G849, hold station and inform Command!"
"Like I needed you to state the obvious." Captain Mausleff grunted. He checked to make sure he hadn't been broadcasting, then nodded to the rest of his bridge crew. Already, the Splinter drones that he'd launched and had removed from his control were soaring after the Flashpoint to deal with the inbound. Mausleff considered the situation and shook his head.
He was on board a transport vessel and stripped of his only means of defense. To be fair, he did also have the singular missile launcher in the nose, but it had one shot. Useless, in this situation. Like hell he was following those orders.
"Communications." Mausleff snapped. The officer jumped to attention and looked back at him. "Radio Armada Command and inform them of enemy presence in this sector. Navigation, helm, plot a course to Macbeth and shift to subspace velocity when ready. Don't wait for my order."
His second in command stuttered a bit. "But sir, we were ordered…"
"Screw our orders." Mausleff muttered. "I advised those fool captains about playing it safe and they ignored me. The consequences fall on their heads, and I'm not about to let this ship be vaped just to satisfy your basic need for blind obedience. A meaningless death is without honor." He stared hard at his second in command, waiting until the man swallowed and nodded before looking away. "Better to serve in life than in death."
Ignoring the foolish orders of the last surviving, but doomed escort ship, Transport T-G849 broke Titania orbit. Having sent a Battlenet transmission to Command informing them of the presence of a superior enemy force, they spun up their engines and headed out.
They vanished from the sphere of Titania in a blink of light as they entered subspace, leaving the madness of oblivion behind them.
Detention Area Zero (Aboveground)
The Battlenet relay was impressive in its size, but not in its complexity. It contained its own power source, but it hung on the outside of the device, mounted within a cage to give it protection while allowing the heat sinks a chance to circulate. Given the environment, it was possible that the Primals had done a fast and dirty engineering fix to accommodate the Titania climate. It meant he could have disabled the transceiver with a much smaller charge, but Rourke wasn't taking any chances. He had explosives to spare, and he wanted to make a statement.
Plus, taking down the transmitter was the signal to commence operations, and the louder it was, the better.
Sparing another look around to make sure he was clear of any patrols, Rourke placed his second to last charge, mounting it on the inside of the relay's framework so no cursory inspection would reveal it. He checked to make sure the receiver on the detonation package was powered on and ready, then sunk low and made his way to the camp's singular anti-aircraft gun emplacement stationed along the path to the runway.
Five meters from the AA gun, the calm night was shattered by the blaring of every alarm that the facility conceivably had. Rourke risked a glance around, expecting searchlights to zero in and a hail of laserfire to riddle his body. When it didn't happen, he sprinted the last few leaps to the gun and dove into the trench it was stationed in.
A Primal voice rang out in the night, and Rourke didn't understand a damned word of it aside from the pivotal one; Arwing.
"Well, why not." He grunted. Readying his detonator, he checked the screen on it to ensure that every charge, save for the final one in his pack, was primed and online. When he'd determined that they were, he undid the safety catch and punched in the trigger.
The Titania night exploded in a multitude of fireballs, destroying the entire motor pool in a garden of red and orange explosions and black smoke. Several of the vehicles were thrown three meters in the air and flipped over completely. None of that was as impressive as the sight of the battlenet relay, which groaned and creaked ominously with half of its support legs blasted to scrap. The tower lurched heavily towards its damaged side, sparking madly all the while, and fell inwards towards the camp. As more Primal shouts filled the now fiery night air, Rourke smiled to see an unlucky patrol look up in time to see his approaching doom. The tower crushed him a half second later, and came to rest on the ground with a heavy thud.
With the Battlenet relay destroyed, Rourke reached for his radio and thumbed it to life.
"Lone Wolf to Renegades. Battlenet's offline, but I think they spotted Tiger Eye in orbit."
Detention Area Zero Perimeter
Milo had been merely biding his time after Rourke was back in the clear. Keeping careful tally of the guard positions, and still making rough windage calculations the entire time, he had marked his first shot a long time ago; a Primal who had the look of a commanding officer in a window of the prefabricated structure adjacent to the Blackwolf ruins.
He didn't even wait for the explosions when he heard the alarms going off. Pausing only long enough to make sure Rourke was still moving and, for the moment, undetected, he lined up his shot and fired before the Primal officer inside of the building could do more than swivel his head around.
Milo didn't risk it. He aimed for center mass. The shot sent a thundering krack-OWWW through the air as the slug screamed towards its target. The window shattered, and so did the Primal. Milo only waited for the spray of blood before he pulled his eye back away from the scope and quickly switched off of night vision. That decision saved his sight.
Rourke's sabotage charges went off, igniting the night in noise and brilliance. Milo flinched for a moment, but then used the ambient burning luminescence to aim at the first guard tower. His second round, the AP slug, tore clean through two support struts just as he'd hoped. The unbalanced tower started to collapse, although there was too much other noise for Milo to hear if the metal groaned as it gave way.
His radio, on but silent, finally went off.
"Lone Wolf to Renegades. Battlenet's offline, but I think they spotted Tiger Eye in orbit."
Milo didn't bother with a verbal response. He simply clicked his mike toggle twice, loaded in his next round, and kept on shooting. There was confusion in the camp and he wasn't about to waste the opportunity.
Detention Area Zero
Underground Complex
Rourke spoke, Milo clicked his microphone, but Telemos had a benefit that both of his partners in this little mishap lacked; fluency in Primalacha. Thus, when the alarms started going off, he understood the message perfectly.
"All soldiers to general quarters! An enemy Arwing is approaching this planet's orbit! All soldiers to…"
The message cut out, and the old caverns trembled a little, with even the hastily installed lights flickering wildly for a few seconds. It was less a shaking of the feet and more a sprinkling of dust from the ceiling, but he knew the cause very well. Telemos looked around warily as the base alarms kept blaring, but the other Primals here and there within the catacombs were scrambling towards their stations.
Just as well; it made for a more effective cover when he took off at a dead sprint, following the newly hung and roughly drawn signs indicating areas of interest. Everyone else on the base was running. His destination just happened to be taking him away from the elevators.
He was grateful that the base personnel here were so confused by the old ruins that they felt the need to label places and leave directions. Thus, reaching the "Detention Cellblock" was quite easy.
Stepping inside of the cellblock and closing the door, Telemos glanced around the interior. There was one heavily armed guard and two Primal service personnel in what looked to be a converted front office, with an open door behind them leading into a darkened corridor.
"Sir!" One of the troopers stood up from the desk nervously and offered a quick salute. He'd noticed the rank insignia on Telemos' borrowed uniform. "What are our orders?"
Still hidden behind his helmet, Telemos considered the question and looked to the armed guard. The fellow had his laser rifle in hand and charged, but not in a firing position, and seemed eager to receive orders as well.
Praying for forgiveness, Telemos brought up his own rifle faster than anyone in the room could process and fired. His snapshots rippled up the guard's chest, melting armor and sending him toppling to the floor in a heap.
The other Primals flinched in horror as Telemos turned his weapon on them.
"Drop your service pistols and radios and kick them over, before I ventilate you." He growled out. Shaken, and in no mood to tempt the obviously deranged fellow, the two complied. Their smaller weapons and means of communication lingered at Telemos' feet.
"Handcuff yourself to that desk." Telemos ordered. When they had done so, Telemos went over and smashed the systems console on the desk to pieces with the stock of his rifle. Matching brutality and ferocity with speed and surprise, he then looked to the now captive Primals through his visor. "Now stay low, shut up, and you might live." They nodded like their heads were balanced on a wild seesaw.
Telemos walked past them into the detention cellblock's back room. At long last, he had arrived. Now all he needed to do was find the Pale Demon, bust her out, and get her back to the surface.
He froze two meters into the corridor as one very important, and unexpected detail, made itself known. He caught movement coming from multiple cells.
They had thought that the Primals had moved Terrany to this hidden facility to be interrogated personally.
None of them had counted on there being multiple prisoners of war, but that fact stared him in the face from three separate cells. Eight different animals in all, of varying size, species, and gender, all with one thing in common.
They wore flight jackets that, aside from their unit designations, had one other feature; An Arwing on each logo. They were all Arwing pilots.
Telemos removed his helmet and blinked.
"What the hell is wrong with you, Primal?" A male crocodile with the bearing of a superior officer snapped angrily.
Telemos finally found his tongue. "…Where is the Pale Demon?" He demanded.
"Who?" The crocodile blinked, confused.
"Terran…McCloud. Her name's McCloud." Telemos got out, correcting himself.
The name sent a ripple of surprise through the imprisoned Arwing pilots. "Who?" The crocodile asked. "I don't think I heard you right. There's only one McCloud in the SDF, and as far as I know, he's a guy."
Telemos shook his head. "Some things have changed."
"Obviously." Another animal, this one a male eagle, retorted from the other side of the small cellblock. "Just who the hell are you?"
"Your way out, it seems." Telemos raised his rifle up.
One of them, a female feline, sneered as him. "Well, well. Come to put us down at last?"
He should, no one would know. No one would ever know. His finger twitched.
But he would know.
"Stand back from the cell doors." Telemos growled. The POWs reacted quickly, and with some well aimed shots, Telemos blew the locks of the cells clean off.
The eight pilots quickly poured out into the hall, and Telemos involuntarily flinched, wondering if they would attack him, try to kill him or take his weapon. Instead, the crocodile and the eagle stood in front of the rest with grim expressions.
"All right, cowboy, now what?" The crocodile asked. "I'm assuming you didn't come alone."
"No. I came with Starfox." Telemos said. That name, which had always carried a very fearful quality for the Primals above even that of Arwing, had the opposite effect on the now freed prisoners. Their faces lit up in a mixture of surprise, disbelief, and wonder.
Telemos jerked a hand behind him. "There are two laser pistols and one rifle in the next room. Arm yourselves and prepare. We need to find McCloud. She has white fur, very easy to spot."
"We've never seen her." The female feline said back to him. "And we've been here for a while."
"…Then she is being kept somewhere else." Telemos muttered in irritation. He finally thumbed his earpiece radio. "Wild Card to Renegades. No sign of Wild Fox. Have found eight other prisoners. We're moving to locate main target."
"Say what?!" The sound of Rourke's voice was barely audible over the noise of secondary explosions, loud gunshot reports, laserfire, and screams. "I thought this place just had Terrany!"
"Apparently, they sent all surviving Arwing pilots here." Telemos countered dryly. "Hold out a while longer, if you can. We'll need a clean escape."
"No promises, Wild Card." The clinically composed voice of Milo responded. Telemos rolled his eyes and moved out.
In the next room, the Arwing POWs had armed themselves as best as they could, even scrounging up some stun sticks from storage as well. The crocodile and eagle, the most senior officers if Telemos guessed right, were waiting by the door and watching him expectantly.
"So what's your plan?"
"We go find McCloud, and then we get the hell out of here."
"She might be down in the interrogation wing." The female feline muttered, kicking one of the chained Primals hard for her own satisfaction. The Primal let out a pained groan and cringed in on himself. "They'd drag us down there one at a time, torture us for information. There was one room that they stopped using after a while. They might be keeping her there."
"Then that's where we're headed." Telemos agreed. "I'm not leaving this base without her."
"And if you're preaching truth about things, we're not leaving a member of Starfox behind." The crocodile sounded off. To a man, all of the Arwing pilots nodded, even a simian with severe lacerations and blood-matted facial fur. The simian glowered at the handcuffed Primal guards for a moment more, then spat on them.
As they opened the door and made ready to leave, one of the guards hissed out an invective in Primalacha. Telemos flinched, but did not respond. He let the prisoners who knew these corridors better than he take point, holding to the rear and covering their retreat.
The eagle Arwing pilot lagged close to him, keeping his borrowed Primal laser pistol in a two-handed, down-the-sights grip. "Did that Primal call you a traitor?" The avian asked quietly.
The exact phrase had been much worse, but Telemos didn't feel the need to correct the pilot.
"Something like that." He finally conceded.
Titania Orbit
By the time that the five minute limiter forced Dana out of Merge Mode and her Seraph's secondary wings folded in, she was surrounded by trails of spaceship debris high above the surface of Titania. The main thrusters powered back up, but dialed back to low thrust due to collision warnings. The tigress took a moment to draw in a long breath and reorient herself to her own body and her normal senses.
"All threats neutralized. Airspace is clear of active enemy contacts."
"Yeah, but things just got more interesting on the ground. And that other ship got away, which means it's probably calling in reinforcements." Dana reminded her AI. She tapped her helmet communicator. "Renegades, Tiger Eye. How's it going?"
"Mixed bag. How's the situation up there?" Rourke called back.
"Stable for now. We'll probably be getting some company real soon. The transport ship got away while the escorts tussled with me."
"I'd love to tell you to come down and give us a hand, but..."
"Yeah. I know." Dana finished the thought. She still cringed at the thought of leaving her two friends, and that Primal turncoat, alone down there with everything hitting the fan. "Radio if things get too hot."
"Roger."
The transmission from the surface ended, and Dana dialed out her radar to maximum range. "Okay, ODAI. Alert me if anything pops up out of subspace. I'm going into a holding pattern."
Her Seraph glided out of the debris field of her own making, and once she was clear, she brought the engines back up to normal thrust. She had hoped to eliminate the orbital presence before the Primals would wise up to her presence.
"Figures that this time, there'd be a Primal smart enough to cut and run." She grumbled.
Detention Area Zero
Interrogation Block
The technicians and soldiers on duty within the interrogation block had heard the alarms and responded. Some of the soldiers had raced to get aboveground to help with the defenses, especially when the Battlenet went down. For the rest, there was little to do but wonder what exactly was going on, and hope that the trouble wouldn't get down to them.
The lead Geasbreaker in charge of Interrogation paced irritably around inside of the main compound. The others under his command shared worried glances, wondering what exactly the furless Elite was thinking about.
"Sir…with the Battlenet down, should we scramble the data?" One technician asked nervously. "If the enemy is coming…"
"Enough." The Geasbreaker snapped. "We have transmitted our initial findings, but we are just now beginning to gain critical information. We are not gutting the project."
"Geasbreaker, if they've disabled the Battlenet relay, then they're already here. On the planet. Not just in orbit." One technician with a suicidal streak of courage ventured warily. "The data need not be lost. We can back it up. Hide the data chips. But we should not allow the Cornerians to dare put a hand on what we have discovered. Or to retrieve their captured brethren."
The Geasbreaker stared hard at his underling, waiting for the Primal to flinch and beg for forgiveness. It didn't happen. He finally gave his head a shake. "I will excuse your effrontery this one time due to these trying circumstances. Carry out the data backup, and prepare to scramble the systems. But only as a last resort." He pointed to the two armed troopers in the room with him. "Stand on guard at the entrance. Nobody gets in. Failing that, give us enough time to carry out the destruction of sensitive materials."
The two troopers went to the interrogation block's entrance and stood at the ready; one beside the door and one standing back away from it with a clear shot. The technicians moved to the data storage room off of the main chamber and quickly got to work with their data backups, but the work was prolonged. The data they had collected would be the work of moments to transfer via Battlenet. Data chips were prohibitively slower, and couldn't store all their files on one drive.
"Backups one and two complete. Three, four, and five are processing." One of the technicians announced. "Twenty nine percent of interrogation research secured."
The interrogation doors blasted apart under the weight of a grenade explosion, sending the first Primal trooper stumbling. The second trooper yelled out in warning and immediately opened fire on the now broken doorway, causing two armed prisoners who had been ready to rush in to duck back away for cover. The technicians gawked as everything started to go to hell, and it took the hard voice of the Geasbreaker to focus them.
"Destroy the data!" The Geasbreaker snapped. He plucked a grenade of his own off of his bandolier and hurled it out into the corridor, then took off running for the doorway to the interrogation cells as shouts and the grenades' explosion muffled his footsteps.
"Sir, where are you going?!" One of the technicians still trying to back up the files cried out.
"To destroy sensitive materials." The Geasbreaker growled, kicking the door open and racing through.
One living soul had been kept separate from the other prisoners in Detention Area Zero. Brought in under the greatest secrecy and locked in a separate room where only the Geasbreaker had been allowed access, that lone prisoner stirred as the sounds of laserfire, explosions, and anguished screams shot through the air.
The door opened. The Geasbreaker appeared in the darkened room, his face sober.
"My apologies for ignoring you for so long." The Geasbreaker growled. "That comes to an end now, though, as does your existence." He pulled out his laser pistol and took aim. At this distance, the chained prisoner stood no chance. "Farewell, pilot. They've come to rescue a corpse."
He had started to squeeze the trigger, but was denied his victory. The wall behind his prisoner exploded, knocking him off his feet from the wash of debris and dust. The prisoner, bound to the chair and facing towards him, was protected from the blast.
As the Geasbreaker groaned and struggled to pick himself back up, another Primal trooper stepped into the room, his laser rifle up in the ready position. His helmet was off, and the Geasbreaker stared at him in disbelief.
"You." The Geasbreaker said, when he could speak again.
Telemos Fendhausen of the Sixth Noble House of Radiance, the renegade traitor who had led a prison breakout on the homeworld and vanished in his superfighter, looked back at the Geasbreaker without pity or shame.
"Me." Telemos said in reply, and fired. The Geasbreaker fell dead with a smoking hole burned into his chest.
Telemos stepped into the room slowly, watching the door behind the Geasbreaker for reinforcements. When none came, he finally turned and focused his attention on the prisoner who sat locked into a chair. A prisoner with ragged clothes, matted pale blue fur that looked white under the harsh lighting, and dead eyes.
The Pale Demon slowly lifted up her head, which was and covered in a transparent helmet full of sensors and electrodes. An IV drip was embedded in her right arm, and she looked thin. Thinner, worn down. Broken. She took forever to focus in on him, and when she did, she didn't even blink.
Telemos could feel his heart thunder in his chest, not from adrenaline or fear, but rage at seeing his foe like this. Not the proud, defiant temptress who was forever haunting his soul with her burning words and supreme combat prowess. He had come expecting her to thrash in her bonds, to swear at him, to taunt him. But all she did was look at him with the same intensity that a fish might give a rock. His people had done this to her, and he seethed at the injustice of it. He had come for a warrior, not a living corpse.
"You look like hell." Telemos said, attempting to break the ice.
"…You?" She demanded. There was a strange fluctuation in her voice, starting in high pitch and ending low.
"Me." Telemos nodded. He pulled the strange helmet off of her head, and then tore the IV needle out of her arm. "Time to leave."
The manacles around her wrists and ankles he shot off with carefully aimed low intensity blasts, and for the first time in endless days, Terrany was free. She started to get up out of the chair, but her legs gave out on her, and she stumbled forward. Telemos jerked into action and caught her with his free arm, startled at both her weakness, and his sudden empathy to the pilot he wanted so badly to destroy in aerial combat.
"Are you all right?" He asked, when the awkward stare she gave him refused to die.
"You…worry about your own hide." Terrany countered.
The door that the Geasbreaker had come through slammed open, and Telemos spun around to point his laser rifle towards the door. He hesitated, then let the barrel drop slightly when one of the other freed prisoners appeared, the sour-faced crocodile.
"You find her?" The Arwing pilot demanded. Telemos nodded slightly and leaned to the side so the POW could see Terrany. The crocodile scrutinized the ashen Terrany for a moment. "So that's the other McCloud. She doesn't look too good."
"Any casualties?" Telemos demanded.
"We've got two pilots with shrapnel damage. Bandaged 'em up as good as we can. Everyone else is still good, and…" The crocodile paused to reach down and scoop up the Geasbreaker's laser pistol, "…Rearmed. We'd better go before your 'friends' get wise to our jailbreak."
"Oh, they're aware of it." Telemos grunted. He hoisted Terrany up and kept her braced under her shoulders. He spared a glance at the hole in the wall behind him and shook his head. "Better go back the way you came in. They'll run for the noise I made getting in here while you provided the distraction."
Lugging a dazed and barely responsive Terrany along, Telemos and the other Arwing pilot rejoined the others in the interrogation block's main room. The renegade Primal spared a look around the room and zeroed in on the carnage by a row of damaged computer banks in another adjoining room. There were dead technicians by the doors, and a portable memory chip was lying on the ground in front of one.
"Hm." Telemos focused in on the computers, and noted that not all of the damage was caused by laserfire. He motioned to one of the unharmed Arwing pilots, the female feline, and then pointed with his rifle to the storage device on the ground. "Grab that. They didn't want us getting our hands on what they had here." She quickly dashed over and picked it up, stowing it in a pocket of her flight suit.
The eagle Arwing pilot reloaded the power cell on his laser rifle and powered it back up with a faint whine. "Elevators are back this way. Let's move."
Telemos nodded, Terrany mumbled a little, and all the others just followed orders silently. They raced out of the interrogation block, and kept on a straight path for their way out and up.
Detention Area Zero
Perimeter
Milo, some of his closest friends would occasionally point out to him, was a master of understatement. When he'd told the other two that he made 'no promises' as to how much backup he could provide to them, he was being perfectly serious. His initial sniping work had been marvelous. He'd demolished two guard towers with his AP rounds. The Primal patrols, finally figuring out that they were being shot at not from the sky but from the ground, had started ducking behind cover and figuring out his firing line.
That was to be expected. The Primals were warriors through and through, and one useful skill you picked up or perished without was finding effective cover after determining where the shooting was coming from. Without the telltale flash of light of a laserbolt, they had figured it out the old fashioned way: By noticing which way their allies were falling, and where the bullet holes were appearing.
Creator forbid you all just send up a patrol to try and find me, though.
The howling shriek of another inbound plasma mortar was enough to make Milo pull himself up from his fourth firing position and go scurrying for cover. When the high density energy projectile came down and impacted 20 yards from where he'd been standing, the ring-tailed raccoon in his sniper suit was under cover with a large boulder between him and the blast.
The boulder protected him from the worst of it, but Milo still felt his entire body rattle from the concussive rush of displaced air. He tried not to think about the heat he felt off of it.
Grimacing, Milo keyed his mike. "Lone Wolf, I could use a hand here. This artillery's starting to singe my fur."
"Just be glad they don't have any vehicles to go chasin' after you with." Rourke countered. "I'm a little busy here too, but I'll see what I can do."
"Great. Just great." Milo muttered. Even with the earplugs, he still had to yawn to pop his eardrums and equalize the pressure after the latest bombardment. He reached inside of his suit and checked his rounds.
He had another dozen AP rounds with a gray band around the casing, another three dozen hollowpoints with no mark, and only six rounds with an ominous red band around the bottom of the casing. They were his ace in the hole, and so far he'd avoided using any of them.
Another round came down and went off, forcing him to hunker down and hope that it wasn't anywhere near him. The blast rattled him from nose to toes, but it was farther away.
"Screw this." Milo pulled out two of his precious red-marked rounds and slid them into his rifle's loading chamber. Unlike the others he used, these were not standard issue. Wyatt had presented them to him back soon after he'd modified his Nova lasers on the fly into the Pulse Laser. While it was meant as a gift, there had been a barb and a warning in them, a faint note of condemnation for the sniper's gutsy move that emphasized power and range over utility.
Six shots, that's all you get. So make them count, hotshot.
"So we aim straight." Milo forced himself out from behind the boulder and scurried to the top of the ridge, setting his rifle's bipods onto the ground. Activating the nightvision scope, he zeroed in on the compound.
There, twenty meters from the burning motor pool, were a trio of hastily erected mortars placed behind translucent blast shields. One shield carried two impact marks from two failed hollowpoint shots. His AP rounds would have gotten through the shields, but being accurate enough to strike those mortar tubes under fire would have been trying for someone with twice Milo's skill. Hence, the special ammunition.
"Let's see how you bastards like it." Milo growled. He intentionally aimed slightly to the side, to the left of the center mortar, which was in the process of reloading. And then, in what would have been stupid to anyone else, he lowered the barrel slightly until he was aiming at the ground.
Milo measured his breathing, waited one second until the lull in his heartbeat matched an exhale to steady his aim…and fired.
Wyatt Toad was a certifiable genius, and had inherited all of his grandfather's talent and more. Having never had to learn how to fly, his pursuits in engineering had allowed him to do many marvelous things, the Seraph Arwing included.
But one minor project had been designing an ear stud which doubled as a two way communicator for Terrany to use. It had been powered by a tiny piece of Cornite, the same material used in Smart Bombs and G-Bombs. It made the sniper round into something more terrible than an unstoppable slug; it turned it into a high explosive round.
The bullet impacted into the ground, and the nose cone of the round was flattened backwards, driving a tiny pin into an explosive blast cap hidden within the bullet. Once there, it ignited and created just enough energy to cause the 150 grams of weapons grade Cornite within the round to detonate.
Compared to the blast radius of a Smart Bomb going off, it was miniscule. But for what it was, the explosion was enough to knock the Primal's protective blast shields flat to the ground, and the troopers who weren't incinerated instantly in the red fireball were thrown like rag dolls, horribly burned. The mortars they had been using were now twisted and unusable.
Milo slid the bolt back, kicking out the now smoking bullet case and reloading his second HE round.
"What the hell was that?!" Rourke demanded.
Milo made a sweep of the compound through his scope and cringed. The AA gun emplaced by the runway was being angled down and pointed for the ridge. "A little present from Wyatt. Now do something about that AA gun. They're pointing it at me here."
"That, I can do something about." Rourke quickly chimed back. A second later, the AA gun went up in smoke and fire, with pieces of it flying in all directions. "Looks like my last blast charge came in handy. You're clear."
Milo breathed a sigh of relief. That was one gun which wouldn't be aimed at him, or the ship they used to get away either. He saw the Primals on the surface scrambling to ready more mortars. One was already being loaded up. This time, they were being smarter, putting more space between the portable artillery pieces. "All right, Lone Wolf. You stay on mission. I'm headed your way."
"Roger that."
Milo got up from the ground and took off running along the ridge, making his way to the west. Eventually, he'd have to break cover to dash for the runway. For now, though…
The scream of an inbound plasma mortar round aimed at his last position forced him to run even faster along the uneven terrain.
Far away from the blast when it hit, he still stumbled to his knees when the blast wave washed over him. He gnashed his teeth as he shielded his rifle, using his arm to take the impact of the fall.
"That Primal had better hurry it up."
Titania Orbit
Dana's prudence in not flying for the surface to offer air support proved to be the right call. Her radar suddenly lit up with inbound signals, large ones.
"Enemy vessels detected. Looks like that transport got off a warning about us after all."
"How many, and what kind?" Dana asked. She was already gripping the stick tighter and accelerating towards the marker on her HUD.
"Three. Looks like two cruisers and a battleship. They won't have any fighters."
"I'll take whatever good news I can get." The tigress coughed. "It's still too soon, though. We won't be able to Merge. Put up the visual."
The forward camera of her Seraph blipped up on a tiny window in the corner of the canopy HUD. One menacing looking dreadnought bristling with firepower was headed straight for her, while the two smaller craft kept pace with it. After a few seconds, one of the cruisers broke off and veered away from its companions.
"One of the cruisers just made a course change…I think it's headed for the surface."
"Figured. And the other two? What are our chances of stopping them?" Dana demanded. She made a quick check of her shield gauge, noting that it was at full strength again. She only had two G-Bombs remaining, however.
"By ourselves?"
"Don't be a smartass, just run the numbers."
"You don't want the numbers." Her ODAI snarked.
Despite the circumstances, Dana couldn't help but chuckle darkly. "You're right. I don't." She tapped her headset to life again. "Tiger's Eye to Renegades. Reinforcements just showed up, and you've got one big effing ship going to make planetfall. I've got two more up here gunning for me."
"Give them hell, Tiger's Eye." Rourke's solemn voice responded.
The battleship opened up with a blistering volley of laserfire that could batter capital ships to pieces, and Dana's radar screamed a missile lock warning coming from the cruiser.
"You think it's that easy to KILL US?!" Dana screamed, and jinked hard to port in an aileron roll. The first laserbolts screamed around her, with the closest being deflected away by the maneuver. Her shield gauge howled in protest and dipped slightly as one grazing shot managed to punch through the temporary gravimetric field. Dana righted herself and jinked in the opposite direction.
"It takes MORE THAN THAT!" The tigress bellowed.
Detention Area Zero
Underground
Telemos had thought he'd heard a report of incoming Primal reinforcements from orbit, but his worries about that were fleeting. He had more immediate problems, namely the ambush firefight that he and the POW's had walked straight into while heading for the elevators.
Fully two dozen Primal troopers with rifles and one gatling laser turret had been there and waiting for them, and even though they'd scrambled for cover, he had a head wound from a grazing laserbolt which stung like a bitch. He cursed ever taking his helmet off. And not putting it back on.
The rest of the prisoners had hunkered down behind cover, the same as he had, and the two sides had traded wild shots. They had killed ten of those 24 Primals, but there were still far more than they could ever fully overcome.
The gunfire from the embanked Primals fell silent, but Telemos didn't dare stick his head out from the side room he, Terrany, and another three of the POW's had ducked into. The crocodile who had kept close to Telemos for the duration narrowed his eyes and squinted down his long snout.
"What the hell are your buddies doing out there?" He whispered.
Telemos considered the question and paled a little at the answer. "Likely, they are deciding whether or not to use explosives to kill us all here, or to demand our surrender. And they're also trying to decide whether this situation can be salvaged, or if this little prison operation has completely failed."
"We know you are there, traitor! We know you are with them! Step out now, or we will kill you all!" The angry voice from their attackers, the blockade in front of the elevators and their way out, was spoken in Primalacha.
"What did he say?" The feline pilot hissed lowly. She looked particularly itchy with her finger on the trigger of her borrowed laser pistol.
"If I don't go out there, they destroy all of us." Telemos replied quietly.
"Oh, well in that case." The crocodile snorted.
Telemos rolled his eyes, and opted to stick his head out into the hallway briefly. The remaining Primals were crouched beside their fallen comrades, but there was one new addition. They had loaded a rocket onto the mounted laser gatling. Telemos winced and ducked back in.
"I was right. Explosives." He muttered. "They could kill all of us with one trigger pull."
"For once, I'm glad that they don't just get it over with." The crocodile breathed. "But do you have an idea of how to get out of this mess?"
Telemos shook his head.
"Well?" The crocodile demanded.
"Shut up, I'm thinking." Telemos hissed.
"You have ten seconds! TEN!"
Telemos glanced over to Terrany. The pilot he had broken out of prison twice for before today and risked everything to save remained mute, and nearly insensate. Every so often there came a flicker of her eyes, a twitch of a hand or a leg, but nothing meaningful. Even when the shooting had started, she had been too insensate to offer even a thanks or another insult. Whatever drugs they had poisoned her with to torture information out of her had clearly done their work.
"Nine! Eight!"
Telemos looked to the others he had found by accident. The other eight Arwing pilots, all of them full of fire but running on adrenaline and dying hopes for freedom and retribution. They had been lucky to only suffer minor injuries so far in this hellstorm. They could not do any more than they could, and they would not survive a rush on the elevator.
"Seven! Six!"
He sighed. It came down to him. He stuck his hand out to the female feline. "Your pistol. Now."
"What?"
"Five! Four!"
"Give him your gun, damnit." The crocodile snapped.
"THREE!"
"He's already got two!" The pilot protested. Telemos gave her a withering stare, and she finally complied with a grumble.
"TWO!"
Telemos stuck her pistol uncomfortably behind his head and neck in the collar of his uniform, taking special care and a sweep pass of his hand to ensure that it was not visible.
"ONE!"
Telemos stepped out into the hallway with a cautious sidestep, and the countdown stopped.
Behind the blast screen of the laser gatling, the Primals' de facto commander glared at Telemos. "So. It is you, after all. I had thought the reports to be inaccurate. There was no way that you could have been here. But it was your face on the security cameras from the Interrogation block. And no Primal would ever forget the face of you…the living disgrace. You would free prisoners twice over, and become twice damned. Traitor. Allying yourself with our enemies."
Telemos smiled, but didn't move. "We all have our reasons, soldier. Perhaps if you knew mine…"
"ENOUGH!" The soldier snapped angrily. "I do not wish to hear the words of such a snake as you. Drop your weapons."
"So you can kill me in cold blood?" Telemos inquired.
"Do not play games with me, traitor. Do it, or die where you stand."
Telemos considered the situation, and unslung his laser rifle, letting it clatter to the floor.
"And your pistol." Telemos made a face, but lifted the pistol on his hip with thumb and forefinger and dropped it as well.
"So now what?" Telemos asked blandly.
"You die, and your 'friends' are taken back to their cells."
"Really? How original." Telemos deadpanned. "And how is this honorable? They are warriors, not the mewling masses! They deserve to die in battle, as befits their station!"
"You…is that…" The Primal behind the gatling blinked, then snorted. "They're animals. These are not worthy opponents. The Lord of Flames has decreed as such, and you knew that."
"I know enough not to immediately believe the lies that are told by a corrupt leadership scrambling to maintain control of a dying cause." Telemos countered.
"Enough. Put your hands up." The Primal snarled. Telemos did so, reaching slowly…and moving his hands behind his head. A submission pose in any other circumstance, save for the weapon waiting there. He looked down at the gatling turret, and the rocked mounted on it.
He narrowed his eyes.
"Any last words, traitor?" The Primal in charge of the small force asked snidely.
"Just one." Telemos said, and sighed. He did not blink, though. He did not look away. And when he spoke again, it was not in his native tongue, but the language of the Cornerians.
"Goodbye."
That momentary switchover, that brief instant as the Primals ahead of him translated what he had said gave Telemos his opportunity. He drew the hidden pistol behind his head. He brought it down, and lined up his arm along the line of sight he had already established. The pistol fired, the bolt of laser energy burrowed into the rocket.
And it exploded, taking the hunkered down Primal defense line out completely.
When the smoke cleared, Telemos stepped into the blasted remains of the dead and dying. He knelt down beside the Primal commander, who was gasping for air, and missing a leg and arm. He had been spared immediate death from the blast because of the blast shield on the laser gatling.
His pained eyes looked up at Telemos, and he tried to mouth a word. Perhaps to ask why. Or to spit out a retort. Blood bubbled on his lips, denying him the opportunity for either.
Telemos shook his head. "At least you will die with honor." His opponent's eyes rolled back up into his head, and he perished.
Telemos stood back up just as the other POWs came out and joined him.
"Damn fine shot." The crocodile finally said. Telemos wordlessly handed the laser pistol back over to the feline pilot, ignoring the praise.
"They shouldn't have had to die like this." Telemos said bitterly. "None of this should have been here."
"What?" The crocodile blinked.
"This prison." Telemos elaborated. "Warriors are meant to die in battle or in their beds after a lifetime of service. Not to rot in prisons."
"You don't have prisons?" The simian Arwing pilot asked curiously.
"Not for warriors." Telemos gave his head one last shake and picked up his guns. Thankfully, while the elevator doors had taken some damage, they still opened to let them all onto the lift.
Hauling Terrany along, the 8 POWs and Telemos went aboard and started up. Telemos activated his radio with a heavy, leaden sensation hanging in his chest.
"Packages secure. We are on our way up."
Detention Area Zero
Surface
Milo had been thorough in his step by step dismantling of the Primal perimeter defenses, but even the retired sniper hadn't been able to eliminate everything. One guard tower still stood between Rourke and his final destination, and two guards were on the edge and looking out over the hills.
"Long Barrel, you'd better be moving. We're running out of time here." Rourke timed his voice between the blasts of the mortar rounds impacting and going off.
"No shit." Milo grunted on the other end, muffled by the explosions going off far too close to his microphone for comfort. "But I'm running out of hill here, and they're still lobbing burst plasma. I step out, they'll fry me in a heartbeat. Think you can do something about that?"
Rourke was hunkered down behind a crate of supplies close to the northern perimeter, with the last standing guard tower close enough for him to see the two guards on it in the flickering glow of the motor pool's burning wreckage. One was wielding a rather ominous laser rifle and firing off a shot in the distance towards Milo's presumed location every now and then. The other was struggling with a slightly heavier piece of armament, one that Rourke recognized in spite of the foreign design. A rocket launcher.
Behind him, he saw the last mortar team standing guard behind the wreck of the motor pool, relying on the vehicle's thick armor and their own transparent blast shields to prevent Milo from getting a clean bead on them. They didn't know his exact location, but they'd placed themselves well after seeing him destroy the other teams with well positioned shots.
From the main building, a large force of close to 30 Primal troopers was advancing outwards, dashing between pieces of cover and moving to reinforce their comrades. They were spreading out to minimize the chance of another one of Milo's HE rounds from taking them all out at once.
Tower, mortars, or the troopers.
Rourke gave it a half second's worth of thought, swore, and broke cover to head for the guard tower. He stuck to the shadows as much as he could, and tried not to make it too obvious that he wasn't just another Primal trooper. To his relief, nobody paid any attention to another armored and helmeted Primal trooper moving through the compound towards the guard tower. He quickly climbed up the ladder, glad for the noises of warfare all around him to mask his quick climb.
The two troopers on top of the tower had their eyes out and their backs turned to Rourke when he reached the platform.
He contemplated whether to go stealth or to go brute force for that same half second of time as before, then rushed the guards. His rifle was up and fired nearly point blank at the back of the first one picking up the rocket launcher. At that range, the shot cleanly gouged through the trooper's dorsal armor plating and ended his life. Both he and his weapon collapsed harmlessly. The second trooper with the rifle spun about in surprise, but Rourke was on top of him before the man could fully react. Rourke swung the butt of his rifle up across the guard's helmeted head to disorient him, swept the trooper's legs out to drop him flat on his back, then spun his weapon around and leveled the barrel straight at the helmet's visor.
One last shot, fired only a second and a half after his first blow, ended the last guard tower trooper's life.
Oh, I think you enjoyed that. He could just picture the voice of his grandfather cackling.
"Shut up." Rourke growled again. He swept up the rocket launcher, and finding it still loaded with two rounds, he took aim at the mortars giving Milo hell.
Two whumphs, two puffs of smoke and momentary recoil, and the last mortar team went up in sand, dirt, and fire. That ended the immediate threat to Milo's life, but quickly got the attention of the other Primals advancing through the compound.
Rourke dropped the empty launcher and reached for the long-barreled laser rifle the second Primal had been using. "Long Barrel, your six is clear. Haul ass, I'll cover you."
"Moving out." Milo replied quickly.
Rourke propped the barrel of his borrowed weapon along the edge of the tower and stared back down into the compound. The troopers who had been coming to reinforce the mortar squadron and make a rush on Milo outside of the base perimeter were now hunkered down and staring towards the tower.
He took aim and fired, missing more than he hit even with the use of the weapon's scope. He cringed, but knew it was to be expected. Milo was the dead shot, and his sniper was running north along the outer edge of the base as fast as he could go. Rourke was buying time more than he was taking the soldiers down, keeping them behind cover and keeping their attention focused on him.
"Wild Card to Renegades. We're on the surface, proceeding to runway." The voice of Telemos cut through Rourke's self-debasement, and Rourke slumped a little in relief. He couldn't see them yet, but they were above ground.
"Going there myself." Milo called back. "Phase 5?"
"Phase 5." Rourke confirmed. "Lone Wolf to Tiger Eye, are you…"
A sudden squealing in his ear caused Rourke to stumble away from the tower's railing. With his mind overloaded from the auditory pain, he ripped his Primal helmet off and tore the headset off, removing the squelch from his ear. Grimacing, he looked down at his transceiver and pieced it together.
Someone was jamming their signal.
The ship Dana had mentioned…it was close enough to blast the radio frequencies with noise.
His brain lurched at the obvious conclusion. Primal ships had their own Battlenet relays. They were also close enough to intercept their transmissions as well.
You're slipping. Getting tired, runt?
Rourke whirled around and looked north just in time to see tremendously powerful laserbolts lance down from the skies and rip into the waiting transport vessels on the runway. The Primal ships, powered down and with no shields, didn't stand a chance against the powerful guns, and were shredded instantly. The thunderous blast of their explosions was strong enough to make Rourke stumble, and he looked from the now destroyed craft to the skies, catching sight of a menacing ship descending slowly towards the compound, a silhouette of death that blocked out the stars, its shields still up and glowing red at the edges from the heat of re-entry.
"No…" Rourke said, not sure if he was yelling or whispering because of the ringing in his ear. Just like that, what looked to be a victory well earned through hasty, but rigorous planning had been torn from them.
He realized a moment later that if the Primals had been listening in on their conversation enough to know where they were headed, they'd also pinpointed their transmission sources.
Rourke jumped out of the tower and scurried for cover. He made it about halfway to a large crate of supplies when the ship in the sky opened up with its guns and turned the guard tower into exploding scrap and shrapnel. He felt a sharp impact against the back of his armor, and then a stinging pain. He gasped and collapsed behind cover, then felt for what had hurt him.
A piece of metal had torn through his armor and embedded itself into his back. With a grunt, Rourke ripped it out and stared at the small piece of debris that fit into the palm of his hand.
He could still move, which was lucky. He hoped he wasn't going to bleed out.
As he reached for his laser rifle and prepared himself for what was coming, a chilling thought took hold.
He might not live long enough to die by blood loss.
Titania Orbit
The Primal battleship and cruiser had worked out a very effective crossfire, managing to keep Dana purely on the defensive. With the G-Negators still on cooldown, she could only rely on her normal sensory input and reaction times, and those were quickly flagging as the adrenaline that had kept her going started to bottom out.
The battleship and cruiser kept her locked in a pincer, with the battleship's dozens of guns creating an impossible wall of laserfire that she had no chance of weaving through without the pinpoint controls that Merge Mode provided. Worse, whenever she tried to clear their field of fire, the cruiser would launch another missile at her, forcing a wild dodge in the opposite direction. She could fool their missiles, but each wild jink, dive, and climb through the Z-axis took more life out of her, then the battleship's guns would open up and start the whole thing over again.
She was sweating through her flight jacket, even though the cockpit was climate controlled, and quickly flagging. Her ODAI could tell.
"Your reaction speed's dropping. They're going to get us at this rate!"
"No kidding." Dana rasped, speaking through quick gulps of air. She hadn't pulled this many G's continuously in a long time, not since the early days of Project Seraphim. She would have laughed at the notion if she'd had the time and energy. To think that she'd not flown this hard for this long over the entire course of the war…
She weaved up and around another lancing trio of laserbolts from one of the battleship's guns and dove down towards the ship.
"Uh, Dana? What are you doing?!"
"Something stupid." Dana replied curtly. In truth, she was going the only thing she could think of. It was a desperation play, one that would likely leave her Seraph badly damaged, but she didn't have the strength left in her to keep playing conservatively.
Both the battleship and the cruiser noticed her sudden shift in attack style, and reacted. Despite her proximity to the other warship, the cruiser launched another pair of ship-killing missiles after her. The battleship put up another wall of laserfire, less concerned with striking a hit as they were in blocking off her path in.
This time, Dana didn't dodge. Spinning in one wild aileron roll after another and making only minute adjustments, she smashed through the brunt of the laserfire and kept on coming. Her shields flared with one hit after another, her systems screamed in warning, and the gauge on her canopy HUD steadily dropped lower and lower towards the halfway mark…and past it.
"Not this time." Dana hissed, keeping on course. Her finger on the trigger, a brilliant green glow hung just under the nose of her silvery white craft, waiting. She spun again, deflecting another volley of a dozen powerful blows, suffering an impact from a pair of shots that were improperly timed right after the momentary deflective field faded. She kept on course the entire time, finally drawing in close enough to the battleship that she was in weapons range herself.
The targeting reticule beeped and locked on, a red box right at the bridge of the battleship.
Dana released the trigger briefly, then squeezed it again. And kept on squeezing, one burst at a time.
Her homing laserburst screamed straight on, and one pair after another of blue hyper laserbolts chased it, cutting through the green energy and leading it along the path. They impacted against the battleship with rippling blows and an explosion of green, creating a spike in flaring energy as the Primal vessel's shields rose up to absorb the punishment.
Spinning all the while, screaming with a fury that would have made Terrany proud, Dana Tiger kept peppering the battleship with one trio of shots after another. The shields around the battleship went from white, to blue, and then phased into red as they took more and more brutalizing damage.
The original Model 1 SFX Arwing had been touted as a Fighter/Bomber, a fast and maneuverable atmospheric/space capable superiority craft able to take on the imposing capital ships of their day. That focus on speed, agility, and firepower was something that every generation of Arwing had kept with minor shifts to one category or another. It lived up to its name, but only when flown with a near suicidal disregard at times.
Dana was screaming straight at it. 1000 meters. 800. 500. The shields kept glowing, redder and redder, angrier and angrier. Her own shields were screaming in high warning as she dropped below 25 percent.
At only 100 meters from the ship, Dana triggered the pickle at the top of her control stick with her thumb and jerked out of the dive. The glowing red dot of the uncharged Cornite munition screamed down and impacted in a cloud of blinding red light. Too focused on flying her Seraph and not crashing, Dana missed the sight of the shields of the battleship wavering one last time before finally cracking and disappearing entirely.
"Their shields are down!" Her ODAI cheered.
The retaliatory laserfire from the battleship chased up after her and struck through, grazing the lower edge of her port thruster. Her Arwing shuddered from one end to the other and jerked as the thruster lost stabilization and shut off to prevent an explosion.
"…So are ours." Dana hissed, struggling to keep control of her wounded bird. "I think they've got us."
"…And we can't radio our friends to tell them, because these Primal bastards are jamming us."
Dana stared at her HUD, crushed at the reports. Multiple radar lock-ons. Decreased speed and maneuverability. Her shields were at 1 percent after that last blow. Any hit from that battleship now would destroy the Arwing. She could eject, but…She thought of Terrany, who'd ejected in the Battle on the Outer Rim. That gave her pause enough to pull her paw back from the toggle.
"I'm not bailing out." Dana resolved.
"…Somehow, I knew you wouldn't." Her ODAI seemed proud of that fact. "For what it's worth…it's been a blast, Dana Tiger."
"Yeah." Dana closed her eyes, blotted out the wailing alarms from the ship's systems, and waited for the end.
Instead, ODAI yelled at her again. "Woah! Incoming subspace rift, another large one!"
"…Great. More Primals."
"…No. It's one of ours!" ODAI exclaimed. Dana jerked her eyes open, glanced to her radar, and then stared through her canopy in the indicated direction of the new signal.
Her IF/F reacted, but Dana didn't need to look at the radar in the corner of her HUD to know what ship it was.
The tension and calm acceptance of death left her, and she felt life and weight flow back into her body again. "The Wild Fox."
The great ship wasted no time in responding to the situation. Powerful, burning blasts of laserfire screamed from the twin JT-300 turbolasers mounted underneath the vessel and smashed into the battleship's hull. Thanks to Dana, the enormous vessel had no shields with which to defend itself, and the shots slammed hard through the armored hull of the dreadnought, ventilating entire decks to the void of space.
The wounded Primal battleship opened fire, ignoring Dana for the larger threat, but the bristling array of guns were silenced one by one as the Wild Fox poured on the attack.
Additional signals appeared on Dana's radar as Arwings screamed out of the launch bay to join the attack. The ship launched missiles as well, which fractured apart and released their payloads of dozens of Godsight Pods, which lit their engines and spread out to cover the battlefield.
-Optical communication link re-established.- Her control panel reported.
"Dana, you all right?" It was Carl McCloud on the other end of the call, sounding worried and agitated all at once.
Dana managed a weak laugh as the wounded battleship tried to pull away, still being pounded to scrap. "Doing better now. What kept you?"
"Oh, you know. Doughnut run." Carl countered. He tried to keep it sounding light, but there was no mistaking the tension behind his voice. He was angry, but he was putting it aside. "Sit tight. Growler Squadron, get after that cruiser!"
"Roger that, Skip. Growlers, hit your boosters!" The commanding voice of Captain Hound echoed over the line of sight interlink. The Primal cruiser, sensing how severely outgunned it was, started to turn away to make a break for it. The 21st Squadron flew straight for it at maximum burn, with the Seraph piloted by Wallaby Preen outpacing his comrades.
Finally giving up after being shredded by the Wild Fox, the Primal battleship snapped in half under the strain of trying to flee with so much of its superstructure critically damaged. A moment later, the two pieces exploded in a wide fireball.
"Dana, what's the situation?" Carl asked, a little calmer than before.
"My ship is shredded, so I can land it, but don't ask me to fight until we get this thruster repaired." Dana answered. "The boys are down on the surface, they've found Terrany and were bringing her up, but I'm not sure how bad things are. These reinforcements flew in, and they've been jamming our radios ever since."
"…So she was here."
"Yeah. She was still alive, Skip." Dana retorted, perhaps with a little more bitterness than he deserved. A moment of awkward silence hung over their connection before Dana sighed. "But you're here now. That's all that matters."
"There'll be hell to pay for this stunt, but that'll keep. For now, taxi around behind and begin your landing sequence. We're hitting atmosphere, and hitting it hard."
Dana shivered a little at the anger in her fiancée's voice. It wasn't anger for her, or for the team.
He was mad at the Primals, and he had an entire damn ship of folks working to make sure they paid for this mess.
Flying on one thruster, she swung around behind the Wild Fox as it passed and hit her booster, setting a shaky course for the rear landing bay. "Dana, coming in."
"Roger, Starfox 3. We have you on tracking. Transmitting AR guidance." Her canopy's view of the back of the Wild Fox was overlaid with a virtual landing grid strip, showing her the cleanest path to land inside of the mothership's docking bay. "You are cleared for final approach."
Exhausted, but hopeful, Dana brought her Arwing in, keeping on line the entire drive. As soon as she passed through the atmospheric shielding that covered the landing bay's exterior, the internal tractor beams grabbed hold of her and brought the ship to a lurching halt. She killed the engines and set it down on the elevator platform, and finally shut her ship down.
"Dana to bridge. I'm on board."
"Hang on to something, then. This is gonna get bumpy." Carl warned.
His prediction proved to be on the mark. Hitting the atmosphere at military thrust, at their angle of descent, was not something ordinarily done. Dana wasn't afraid for the ship; the shields of the Wild Fox had been strong enough to survive a grazing blow from a particle beam twice as large as the ship itself and hold off multiple capital ships at once.
It just rattled the hell out of everything. Dana stayed in her harness as the elevator started on its diagonal descent through the ship for the hangar bay, reminding herself that they had everything fully under control. Carl was moving in a hurry, though, and leaving Growler Squadron to tangle with the last ship in orbit by themselves.
Something had him worried.
Wild Fox
Hangar Bay
"Move it, move it, move it!"
The ground crews and mechanics aboard the Wild Fox were scurrying around as the Rondo transport carrying the Landmaster Ground Fault was slowly raised back up out of the launch bay. Supervising the process, Ulie Darkpaw gnashed his teeth and scowled as the hydraulics moved at their singularly stubborn pace.
"Bring up the Rondo and offload the Landmaster, then send the tank down itself for a quick launch. Sure. Why not." The black bear muttered under his breath.
One of his technicians, the squirrel named Whipman, rushed up with a nervous chitter. "Sir, I've just run the numbers, and we've got a problem."
"Let me guess." Ulie said, pulling up his datapad and accessing a window that brought up a simulated image of the Wild Fox, the planet Titania, and their altitude and speed. "Even though we'll have no problems launching the Ground Fault at our current insane speed thanks to relative velocity, the moment that tank is airborne, it'll either become a bug on our windshield or come in so damn fast that it'll crater into the ground and explode instead of making a safe landing?"
"Uhh…yes, sir."
Ulie rolled his eyes. "According to Wyatt, they'll be fine. We're going to use the tractor beams to slow their descent once they're clear of the ship's re-entry corridor. It'll make certain death something closer to a high altitude drop…and Major Boskins' already pulled one of those."
"But sir! A tractor beam, at those speeds…" Whipman stammered. "The Landmaster G-Diffusers aren't like an Arwing's. They're going to feel that inertia, and it might be enough to…"
"Ground Fault to ground crews. Offloading now."
Before the Rondo had been fully lifted, it had already been opening the cargo bay doors. The Landmaster sped out of the ramp while it was still partways up, making a slight jump and skidding to a halt inside of the hangar bay, causing some of the other techs to scatter for cover. Not waiting for authorization, the tank quickly spun around and made for a second lift, coming to a halt dead center. "Ground Fault is ready to deploy!"
"Lower 'em!" Ulie roared out, and his engineers and techs responded instantly, with the platform descending down to the launch bay carrying its precious cargo. Ulie breathed in a long gulp of air and shook his head. "Whipman, I think Major Boskins knows better than any of us how risky this plan is, but Major McCloud was insistent. We need boots on the ground, and we need them now. Just taking out that cruiser isn't going to be enough."
"…Just how bad are things for our only ground unit to risk their lives on a stunt like this?" Whipman asked worriedly.
Ulie shook his head. "I'm not sure I wanna know." He shut his eyes. "I just hope h…they're keeping their heads down."
Detention Area Zero
Rourke could see all his wild hopes and everything that had kept him going come to a crashing halt, and he was stuck between screaming in feral outrage or laughing at the idiocy of it all. It was amazing how quickly things had turned. They'd had the element of surprise, footage of the site, and Telemos to create a convincing ruse.
All of that had been lost, not because of their efforts on the ground, but because some of the Primals in orbit had done the smart thing for once. Had fled, gotten the word out.
And Titania wasn't exactly on the allied side of the Lylat System. Of course enemy reinforcements would be close. Even if this base was secret, they would have been sure to keep some units posted close by.
The Primal capital ship still hung in the air, an ominous threat that couldn't be defeated as they were. In his Seraph, he could have torn that ship apart on his own. On foot…It was a juggernaut. It had a view of everything happening below. Rourke didn't even have that. He couldn't pick out where Milo was, or if Telemos and his rescued POW's were hunkering down with Terrany somewhere.
He was still bleeding, he was fairly certain. Moving, but getting sluggish. Getting dizzier.
The ship up in the dark sky had launched two hoverturrets down over the compound to supervise. One maneuvered to reinforce the still living troopers on the ground, while the second played cat and mouse with him. Any cover Rourke went for was targeted and blown apart, sending him scrambling for safety.
Finally, after one already burning wreck gave out completely under the laserfire and sent him faceplanting into the ground again, Rourke's struggles came to an end. A pair of Primal soldiers were on top of him before he could dazedly come back up to his feet. One jammed their gun under his chin while the second hoisted him up with his arms held behind his back.
"Enough!" The Primal with the gun hissed. Rourke hid his cringe and stared back at him in challenge. "Your foolish rescue attempt ends here. Now call out to your men and tell them to surrender." The rifle didn't pull back, but the Primal held out a communicator. "Tell them now."
"Or you kill me?"
"Or I kill you, and then get creative with your friends. Surrender, and you shall receive a warrior's mercy." The Primal snapped. Rourke could make out why he was in such a bad mood. His uniform was coated in soot and blood, his face marred with slight lacerations that soaked his fur.
Rourke played for time, slumping a little and acting like he was about to pass out. That wasn't hard to do, considering. "Might as well kill me then. We didn't come here to become prisoners ourselves."
The barrel of the Primal's rifle dug in sharply against the side of Rourke's neck, which forced his head up at an uncomfortable angle.
"I am giving you to the count of three." The Primal shouted in his ear.
Rourke blinked, suddenly finding his attention redirected elsewhere. At the angle the Primal had put his head, he could make out something coming in hard, fast, and fiery. The sky around it burned, but it had escaped the notice of the ground troopers, whose attention was on him, or elsewhere as they searched for his comrades.
"ONE!" The Primal declared. Rourke blinked again, suddenly able to see that the inbound fireball had a shape. That it wasn't just a random meteorite.
"TWO!" Rourke blinked again. It had a shape, and it was…slowing down. Still moving faster than sound allowed, but slowing down. Now he could make out that it wasn't just a meteorite. It was a ship. A ship with four wings. He felt the gun on his neck dig in more, to ensure a killing shot.
"Wait!" Rourke cried out, silencing the Primal before he could hit three. "I'll tell them. I'll tell them!" At this point, he'd say anything. He had to buy time. He needed more time.
"Wise." The Primal didn't ease up, but he didn't shoot Rourke in the head either. The communicator in the Primal's other hand came up, jammed itself next to Rourke's muzzle. "Tell them to stand down. Now."
"Renegades…" Rourke rasped. He dragged out the words, realizing what was happening. As the descending vessel surrounded in burning air came closer, he could make out a smaller object separating from it, still coming in hard and fast while the main one slowed. More time…
"Renegades, this is Lone Wolf." Rourke felt another bout of dizziness overwhelm him, and stumbled a little before the trooper strong-arming him from behind propped him up again. "Please…it's over. It's all over."
Out of the corner of his eye, when Rourke chanced a look, he could see the Primal holding him hostage grinning in triumphant satisfaction. He let his eyes roll back up skyward again. Just keep fluffing yourself up there, jackass. The second smaller object was headed straight for the compound, a strange, boxy shape without any wings at all. The burning ship in the skies finally leveled out, and the burning air around it began to calm.
The night sky was pierced by a volley of laserfire from the newly arrived Wild Fox, right on target for the cruiser. It started to move. It must have detected the ship, but it was too little, too late. ROB never missed.
The loud soundburst of the ship's atmospheric re-entry, the sonic boom that had finally caught up to them all, thundered across Detention Area Zero right as its first punishing laserbolts smashed into the Primal cruiser.
And into the radio, Rourke shouted what he'd really wanted to say. "Take the shot!"
The soldier behind him collapsed a second later, with the loud crack of Milo's sniper rifle following shortly after. His arms now free, Rourke spun on his aggressor, jerking the rifle to the side. The Primal trooper fired and missed thanks to his quick reaction, and Rourke smashed the heel of his palm straight into the Primal's nose, smashing it back up into the trooper's head. The cribiform plate drove into the soldier's brain and killed him instantly. Exhausted after the rapid maneuver, Rourke found himself falling, and without the will to stand back up again.
The Landmaster that had been stationed on the Wild Fox came crashing down into the camp on a wave of enormous thruster wash from its belly. It still hit the detention camp's interior hard enough to throw dirt in every direction and blind all within it. By the time anyone could react, elliptical laserbolts fired from the dust cloud had cut through the first Strafe hoverturret that had been keeping watch over Rourke. The second quickly started firing on the cloud and the crater, but it too was silenced after the Landmaster rose up above of the cloud and fired a perfectly level charged shot that shattered it to pieces. As soon as it landed, the tank rolled on the remaining Primal ground forces, who now had so much more to worry about besides where the escaped POWs and their rescuers were hiding.
Lying there next to the two cooling corpses, Rourke could only picture the mayhem erupting in the camp. On his back and staring up at the sky, he laughed weakly as he watched the outmatched Primal cruiser try to flee away from the Wild Fox. For its troubles, it got its ass shot off, lost power, and went spiraling down towards the surface in an uncontrolled crash.
Rourke laughed a little harder then, and was still laughing when a shadow fell over him.
"Figures I'd find you lying down on the job." Milo teased him.
"Oh, fuck off." Rourke exhaled. "You see the others?"
"Soon as the Primal cruiser got hit, their jamming shut off. Telemos radioed in. He and the other prisoners hunkered down inside of the main building when our escape route was cut off. They're fine, Rourke. She's fine. They're all fine." Milo's voice was warm and reassuring. The raccoon looked up at the Wild Fox, which circled around the plummeting cruiser once before coming back towards them. "You look like hell."
"Feel like hell. Took some shrapnel to the back. Got dizzy. Think I lost some blood."
"…Shit." Milo hit his radio. "Wild Fox, this is Milo. We've got injured, so when you send down a transport, be sure we've got medical. And make sure we've got some more beds set up. Terrany wasn't the only Arwing pilot they'd been holding down here."
"Roger that. How many?" It wasn't Carl who was answering, but Sasha at communications.
"There were eight additional pilots being held prisoner." The voice of Telemos Fendhausen cut in, adding stark weight to the jubilant reunion. Rourke also found himself being pulled back from his light headed euphoria. They'd broken Telemos out of detention, hijacked two transport vessels, gotten into a firefight on Lunar Base…
"…Milo?" Rourke asked, as the oldest soldier on the Starfox Team looked down at him. "The General will probably kill me for this."
Sergeant Milo Granger leaned his sniper rifle over his shoulder and contemplated that for a time, then shook his head.
"Nah." The raccoon disagreed, a twinkle in his eye. "Nobody ever kills a hero."
Detention Area Zero
The Ground Fault was the first to enter the parked Rondo transport on the runway, leaving the exhausted Starfox Team, the POWs, and the medical and rescue crews to try and squeeze in where they could.
"Sorry, folks. I forgot how big of an ass this thing has." Major Boskins cheerfully spoke through the Landmaster's exterior speakers. "All aboard for getting off this rock!"
With the Landmaster loaded, the rescued POW's were next up. Dr. Bushtail and his nurse were both waiting at the rear hatch with their portable gear, and they each got as thorough a scan as the simian could allow.
The crocodile took point in front of the group, sizing the physician up in a casual sweep. "You don't look like a mercenary."
"It's complicated." Dr. Bushtail grumbled. He glanced from the crocodile down to his scanner. "Initial results show you've got some malnutrition, bruising and lacerations, but no serious injuries. We have an SDF representative waiting inside to get your name, rank, and serial number. Once we're docked with the Wild Fox, you and the others are due for a hot meal and a warm bed. General Grey wants to interview you all, but that can wait." The simian allowed himself a small smirk. "Medical supersedes command authority in this case."
The crocodile considered that, and nodded in visible relief. "I just…can't believe that we were rescued. I thought for sure everyone thought we were dead." He held out his hand. "Thank you. Captain Jack Lockjaw, 11th Arwing Squadron."
Dr. Bushtail shook his hand in turn. "Dr. Sherman Bushtail. Welcome back to the land of the living."
All the others filed aboard, leaving Telemos, Rourke, Terrany, and Milo to be the last of the rescued to be brought on. Rourke and Terrany were both being carted on gurneys, side by side.
"I can walk, you know." Rourke complained.
"If you were falling down any more, you could be a pratfalling comedian." Milo countered easily. He looked between Rourke and Terrany, who was still insensate to the world. "Come on. Let's get our girl home."
Dr. Bushtail came over and scanned them both while his nurse got busy with the other POW's. "Rourke, it's a miracle you're still conscious, considering how much blood you lost. I ought to stitch you up without anesthesia. With actual stitches."
"Forget about me, doc." Rourke let his head loll over so he could stare at Terrany. "Just…tell me how she's doing. I probably just signed my own prison sentence, so tell me she's all right."
Dr. Bushtail ran his portable scanner over her body, glanced at the screen, and froze. He didn't wince, or smile, or do anything obvious. He merely froze, and for someone whose baseline was a face that was forever scowling, it said a lot. "Get her aboard." He told the orderlies. They quickly moved to carry out the command.
"…Terrany?" Rourke called out, suddenly worried. He started to lurch up out of his own gurney, and Milo forced him back down with a hand to his chest. "Terrany! Doc! What's wrong with her?!"
"Easy, Rourke! Take it easy!"
"Forget you! Something's wrong with her!" Rourke shouted back, wincing as a wave of dizziness overcame him. Dr. Bushtail shook his head and walked up the ramp to the Rondo's interior, muttering curses under his breath.
"We did what we came here to do." Milo told him calmly. "Phase 5's done. The mission's complete."
"You are a warrior, not a doctor." Telemos added, stunning all present after being silent. "Let him do his job. She will live to fly and fight again. There is too much fire in her soul for that not to occur. Don't spoil this victory by dying on a bed because you were too stubborn to lie still."
Rourke and Telemos matched gazes, and Rourke eventually slumped back down, closing his eyes. "Let's get the hell off this dust ball."
The orderlies dragged him aboard, leaving Milo and Telemos to take up the rear. One of the engineers who'd been tasked with supervising the evacuation stood warily in their path, glancing from the Primal to Milo and back again.
"Um, sir?" He asked Milo. "Should I, uh…get some handcuffs? I mean, he is a prisoner."
Milo could feel Telemos stiffen beside him, waiting for the condemnation.
Telemos had risked everything. He had become a traitor to his own people…just to rescue Terrany. Now, he was prepared to walk right back into custody…because he had nowhere else to go.
Milo set his paw on the Primal pilot's shoulder, startling both him and the crewmember who'd asked the question.
"No. He doesn't need any handcuffs."
Appeased, the crewmember walked back into the cargo bay, and Milo started to follow. Telemos' feet stayed frozen to the ramp.
"Why do you trust me, Marksman? I came to you for one purpose; to rescue the Pale Demon. What makes you think that I will not attack you aboard your vessel, where you and yours are most vulnerable?"
"Simple." Milo said, pausing without looking back. "You want to fight against Terrany again, right? It'd be awful hard to do that without your fighter. From what I hear, our chief engineer's got it torn into pieces right now. So, for the time being…I guess that means you're stuck with us."
Milo kept on walking, and a few seconds later, Telemos stomped his boot against the metal plating of the Rondo's open hatch and scowled.
"Cornerians." He muttered. Faint light settled on his shoulders, and he turned his head partway around in time to see the beginnings of Titania's second sunrise.
Overhead, four Arwings with glowing plasma thruster wash swept around the Wild Fox and made their way astern to dock, and on the ground, he could hear the noise of the Rondo transport starting to power on.
Milo stuck his head out of the open cargo hatch and whistled loudly. "You going to just stand there all day, or get inside, Primal?"
Telemos did not have as fine an appreciation for beauty, or for enjoying the moment as his former enemies did. The Primal who had nothing but his own sense of honor left to him shook his head and walked the last few meters to the ship's interior as the hatch began to close behind him.
He missed the shift of his own life's river.
Macbeth Orbit
Primal Command Carrier Ironforger
Praetor Kroff was standing at the window of his personal quarters, looking down as the industrial planet spun silently below his orbiting vessel. The room was dark save for a single light set at low intensity, allowing him to perceive and let himself be encompassed by the vastness of space. A vastness in which he, his ship, and the planet below were but mere dots of energy, matter, and life.
His door hissed open. The Elite Primal knew who was entering without ever looking.
"Yes, commander?" He inquired of his second in command.
"…Sir. Shadow Group is fully fueled, and ready to depart."
"Good." The Praetor folded his arms behind his back. "The mission is a go."
"Understood, Praetor. But…might I ask, why the haste? Shadow Group arrived on station only three hours ago. Intelligence approved the battle plan for the first target, but you only added the second one hour after Shadow Group's arrival. Why risk our Armada's tactical stealth assets before confirming target two?"
The Praetor didn't turn around. He could picture the confused look on his second's face. But then, his second was just a mere Primal, not an Elite. He valued the soldier's loyalty, not his intelligence.
"You haven't heard, then." The Elite said.
"…Heard what?"
"The traitor Telemos turned up again. He was working with Cornerian agents, Starfox. They eliminated all our forces on Titania, including Armada reinforcements, and freed nine Arwing pilots from captivity." Kroff waited a heartbeat. "The Pale Demon was among them."
"…But she was executed."
"Apparently, a ruse concocted by Command." Kroff stated, with more heat in his voice than before. "And now, we face a fully renewed Starfox Team. With both McCloud siblings. Even you, commander, should be able to understand why I authorized a second target."
"…Before, you wanted to crush the Cornerian's will to fight by depriving them of the bulk of their strategic assets." The Praetor could almost taste the awe in his subordinate's voice. "You're trying to destroy all their assets."
"Before they can rally their captured prisoners…and we find ourselves facing not thirteen Arwings, but twenty." The Praetor nodded, and let his voice turn chilly. "Issue the order."
The commander's heels clicked together loudly as the Primal put up a salute the Praetor never turned to acknowledge, and he departed.
Kroff continued to stare out his window, and forced the inferno of rage in his heart to decrease to a slow burning anger.
Rage blinded a soldier to the mission, robbed him of intelligence and sanity. Even other Elites fell victim to it, and thus, to hubris.
A slow burning anger was the fuel that powered an inevitable march towards victory.
Wild Fox
Outside the Medical Bay
27th Day of the Primal War
1720 CST
It came as no surprise that the Medical Bay had turned into a zoo. Only a handful of souls had been allowed in, while the rest were forced to linger in the hallways, kept at bay by Dr. Bushtail's loud threats of intense, operable pain should any get in his hair while he was working.
Thus, it was only the Starfox Team and their immediate family-and Telemos, which many in the hall were grumbling openly about-who were present as Dr. Bushtail ran Terrany through a more thorough battery of tests. Rourke was lying in one of the medical beds along the side of the room with his wingmates and Telemos lingering close to them. Terrany's brother paced nervously in the center of the room, using his cane less and less.
Rourke had a bag of blood plasma hanging at his bedside, steadily feeding into the side of his arm. The injury he'd sustained had been easy for the nurse to patch up, although there would be a small five centimeter bald spot where she'd needed to shave his fur away from the wound. Time and rest, they had been told, was all that Rourke needed to be back in fighting shape. And truth be told, the team was exhausted after the raid. A rest sounded perfect.
The doors opened, and over beside Terrany's bed, Dr. Bushtail let out a low growl. "I don't care if you're the general, nobody else is getting in here…!" He whirled about and cut himself off in time to see Mrs. McCloud walk inside, fear and worry lining her features. He snapped his mouth shut, then spoke in a softer voice. "My apologies. Family's allowed."
"Thank you, doctor." Mrs. McCloud countered, giving him only a small shred of attention before looking to Terrany. Her eyes misted up, and she looked to Carl.
The brother Terrany had sacrificed herself to save looked miserable, and he nodded. "She was alive. She was alive, all this time…I was wrong." He glanced over to Rourke and his team and shook his head. "I shouldn't have doubted you." His gaze shifted to Telemos, who leaned awkwardly against the wall, not sure how to react to the situation. "Any of you."
Mrs. McCloud looked to Terrany again, if only to set it in her mind that she was real, then walked to Rourke's side of the room. She nodded to Milo and Dana, gave Rourke a small knowing smile, and then to the shock of all, grabbed hold of the Primal who was still ostensibly a prisoner aboard the ship…and hugged him. The others could only stare as Telemos went goggle-eyed and held his arms out to the sides, not pushing her away, not willing or able to hug her back.
"Thank you. Thank you for saving my daughter." She said, after pulling back and wiping a tear from her eye.
Telemos blinked several times in rapid succession, then finally settled on a response. "Thank you for having her." She gave him another smile, then turned around and headed over to say hello to the daughter she had thought she'd lost.
Rourke pulled himself up to a half-sit and stared at the Primal in disbelief. Telemos stared back, quickly becoming irritated.
"What?" Telemos demanded softly.
"I thought you hated females." Rourke pointed out.
Telemos shrugged. "She is the mother of a great warrior. That is to be honored."
"You know, Fendhausen, you come from a really screwed up civilization." Dana snapped.
"A fact I am keenly aware of." Telemos replied, without any heat to his words.
"Kids, play nice." Milo sighed.
Their argument was stopped by a loud scream from Terrany's bed, and the blaring of every alarm and monitor that was hooked up to her.
"Damn!" Dr. Bushtail yelled, recoiling as Terrany began flailing, writhing, spasming. Her mother stepped away in horror. "Nurse! Hold her down! HOLD HER DOWN!"
Nobody dared speak, nobody even tried. They were frozen at the horrific scene as the albino vixen they'd risked everything to save went into a seizure in front of their eyes.
"Stop it…STOP IT…STOP YELLING! STOP IT! IT HURTS!" She shrieked. Nurse Ermsdale and Dr. Bushtail tried holding her down, but she was too wild, her movements too jerky and her body too rigid for them to manage before she threw them off. "Burning…Too much! TOO MUCH!"
"All of you, get your asses over here and HOLD HER DOWN!" Dr. Bushtail yelled.
Telemos, Milo, and Dana all rushed over and did as the doctor requested. He shoved a tongue depressor between her teeth to keep her from biting her tongue off, while the three pilots and his nurse finally managed to get a good enough grip on her to hold her down. She kept screaming, her bloodshot eyes full of fear and wildness and pain, and Dr. Bushtail jammed a hypo of anesthetic in the side of her arm.
Her frenzied movements began to calm within seconds, and in half a minute, she collapsed into unconsciousness. The monitors recording her vitals dropped to a low, but steady rhythm.
"We're running out of time." Dr. Bushtail quickly attached a breathing mask to her and checked to make sure the other wireless electrodes and sensors were still attached. "All of you, get her up. We need to toss her in the tank, now."
"Doc, what the hell…" Carl called out from behind them all.
"Major, shut the hell up if you want her to live!" Bushtail brooked no argument, and the others, too stunned by it all to dare follow it up, did as he ordered.
They carried her over to a pair of specialized tanks that the Wild Fox carried. Dana had been in one of these after the first Lunar Base incident, paralyzed and unconscious in an isotopic soak for a full day after getting blasted with what should have been a fatal dose of radiation. After they put Terrany in one, attached an oxygen hose to her mask, and closed the lid, it began to fill up with a glowing translucent green liquid. It immersed her frail body completely, and then a shield rose up to cover her from view.
Only after Dr. Bushtail confirmed that her vitals were holding steady did the exhausted simian allow himself to collapse in the nearest chair. He put his head in his hands and breathed out.
"Unbelievable." He muttered.
Carl grabbed hold of his shoulder, and spun him up and around with remarkably strong force. "Doc. What. The hell. Is wrong with my sister."
Dr. Bushtail stared up at the newly promoted Major, the Flight Commander of every Arwing aboard the Wild Fox with dead eyes. That hollow expression was enough to make Carl take a step back away from him.
"For starters, she's malnourished, and there's evidence of several bruises, contusions, a concussion or three, lacerations, microfractures, traces of unknown poison and drugs in her system…They tortured her, Skip. All that is damage I can heal. The tank does it the fastest with the Hydroderm nutrient wash."
"At the cost of you having to knock her out, because of how hard it is on the body." Dana spoke up.
Dr. Bushtail ran a hand through his headfur. "Right now…that's the best thing I can do for her. It's the only thing I can do for her. She's…"
Mrs. McCloud stepped up next to the tank, shaking a bit. Carl came up and squeezed her hand to calm her down. He turned and looked at the doctor again.
"What else?" He asked softly. Fearing an answer that everyone in the room knew was going to be a bad one. "What else is wrong with her?"
"Her brain's…killing itself." Dr. Bushtail explained. He was always grumpy, always complained, but now, the simian was just quiet. Just as worn out as the rest of them. "Synaptic activity is through the roof, her neurochemicals are severely imbalanced, every region of her cortex showed evidence of…neural overstimulation. Traumatic overstimulation."
"They had her hooked up to some kind of machine." Telemos explained in a dark voice. "They were experimenting on her."
Dr. Bushtail managed a sick little laugh at that and shook his head. "No, Primal. As much as we can blame your people for…this one's on us. And us alone." He pulled his datapad out of his lab coat pocket and accessed one of the larger screens in the Medical Bay, bringing up a diagram of Terrany's previous brain activity while she'd been in a seizure.
"I had to double check my readings here in the Medical Bay to be sure. A pocket scanner's just too damned imprecise. The neurochemical imbalance, the neural overload…it's the same kind of evidence I'd expect from Merge overuse. Here's her baseline neurological activity."
A graph came up, displaying a single jagged line of electrical impulses.
"And this is what I took just now." He hit a button, and the monitor showed…two lines, intersecting, rising up sharply, as if they were not synchronous…but feeding each other.
"Oh, Lylus, no." Dana put a paw to her mouth. She had been the first test pilot for the X-1 Seraph. She knew what that meant.
It had been why they installed the 5 minute Merge Mode limiters in the first place.
Dr. Bushtail stared down at the floor. "Terrany is still Merged. I don't know how it happened, but…KIT is in her head. And has been since she got shot down."
Carl tried to swallow, but the growing lump in his throat made it impossible. "Saving me." He rasped.
"She's still Merged, and it's killing her. That's why she's in the tank, why I'm keeping her…them…unconscious." Dr. Bushtail looked up, the bags under his eyes never as sunken in as they were in that moment. "I don't know how to save her."