STARFOX: SUNRISE OVER LYLAT
By Eric "Erico" Lawson
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: BLINDSPOT
The Blue Marine- A prototype combat submersible built shortly before the outbreak of the Lylat Wars, the AX-01 "Blue Marine" submarine was a pinnacle of aquatic engineering dreamed up by Slippy Toad and developed in-house at Arspace with the assistance of his father, Beltino Toad. Equipped with regenerating concussive homing torpedoes, dual T&B laser cannons (modified for underwater use), and a variant of the then-experimental G-Diffuser drive to increase its durability and crush depth, the Blue Marine was an unparalleled threat in deep sea combat. Following the Lylat Wars, the Cornerian Defense Forces quickly ruled out putting the craft into full production, favoring air and space force development instead.
(From the personal logs of Arspace President Beltino Toad)
"It was only used once on Aquas during the cleanup that followed Andross's demise, but the Blue Marine outperformed all our expectations. The decision of the CDF to not authorize even a handful of AX-01s for a rainy day just galls me. They would rather throw buckets of the wrong weapon at a problem than pay to have the right one on hand. The CDF doesn't see the need for it, and some day, I just know they're going to regret it. I only hope the rest of us don't have to suffer for the experience."
Papetoon
The Papetoonian Insurrection
11 Years Ago
The SDF campaign to retake Papetoon and put down the Insurrection had grown in importance. The bulk of the Resistance had, by now, been either wiped out or weakened to the point of helplessness. Under the command of a stiff-beaked black avian named General Huckbill Branch, the SDF had redeployed its forces around the desert world like a naval blockade of old and put the world under siege. No reinforcements in, no evacuees out, and the general order broadcast to the hidden forces on the planet's surface and beneath it a single standing order: Surrender.
They should have known it wouldn't be that easy.
Fieldtown had been so named for a large airfield built long ago during the brief reign of Andross in the Lylat Wars. After his defeat, the Papetoonians had reclaimed it and converted the military base into a full-fledged interplanetary transport hub, with goods coming in and ore and high grade silica going back out. When the SDF had begun its expansion, the Resistance had quickly converted it back into a warbase. The orbital bombardment of the facility that had been a thorn in the side of the SDF forces for so very long had been the opening move after the establishment of the blockade. With no other known airbases at the Resistance's disposal, the thinking among the SDF brass was that they would roll over and surrender in the face of superior numbers.
Colonel Greg Buster had been put in command of the ground assault at Fieldtown. Confident in their chances of success, he had utilized COMSAT visual and ELINT data alone to plan his strike. A full wave of 1,800 soldiers, the bulk of them infantry with armored division support, would roll out from the ashes of Bayfield Air Base and move into the city like a tidal wave, flowing into each city street like streams cutting through crevasses, cleaning out any resistance. Aerial support would hover above them like waiting angels, keeping their eyes open for any hardware or ambush points the Insurrectionists might have set up. On paper, it had been a solid plan; overwhelming numbers with interlaced support, air, ground, and cavalry working in unison, and moving in so quickly after the destruction of Bayfield, keeping the elements of surprise and speed on their side. It had never occurred to the brass that the Insurrectionists might have expected that exact opening gambit, and planned accordingly.
At first, everything had been going smoothly. The landing transports had brought in men, supplies, and cruisers without incident at the smoking, burning ruins of the air base and Colonel Buster's "Suppression Force 1" had lined up into position and started the march in. With aerial forces keeping watch from the skies and men and armor rolling in, supporting one another, any acts of aggression or defiance would have been stopped almost instantly.
Innocent looking chimneys, a byproduct of the long-ago replaced woodburning stove, had suddenly unleashed tiny rockets that went up 500 feet and filled the skies with reflective ribbons of aluminum foil, cluttering radar to uselessness. The tops of grain silos opened up as well, and larger missiles burst out of them, some smashing the close fighter support to pieces while others went up farther, exploding into clouds of smoke which billowed outwards, thickening instead of dissipating. Rooftops were suddenly swarmed by troops that fired RPGs and cut in on the ground forces that were now stripped of their air support.. Their subspace radios were jammed in a squeal of angry noise that overpowered the SDF comm systems completely. Entire buildings, entire blocks of buildings, were shattered by demolition charges behind the advancing SDF force, cutting them off from the quickest avenues of retreat.
The skies, already filled with chaff, were now coated over by thick, caustic smoke that obscured nearly all of Fieldtown from orbital view. Those not destroyed instantly soon found themselves in a mad dash to retreat for Bayfield and regroup.
They found an entire city full of guerilla warfare waiting and standing in their path.
Papetoon
Northern Hemisphere, Gerren Continent
Fieldtown Outskirts
11 Years Ago
There was the scent of blood, the smell of singed and charred fur and flesh and the acrid sting of ionized oxygen. There was the sound of screams and explosions, the hissing of laserfire and the whine of thrusters. There was the sight of entire buildings collapsing, each one a monument to another entire squad cut off from any hope of rescue. What had been an orderly march in was nothing but a mad dash out, and the Resistance fighters were making quick work of them. The leader of his small sniper unit glanced up at the skies, full of glittering ribbons and black smoke thicker than any thunderstorm. He couldn't see the sky through it. He couldn't see the sunlight under that patch of missile-seeded darkness that had covered Fieldtown like a blanket. His sound-dampening headset radio, turned down to its lowest possible volume setting to stave off the static, remained a constant irritant he kept on if only for the hope that some message might eventually get through.
"Sarge! Sarge!" An eager crow assigned to his team came racing up to him and his personal spotter. "Sarge, we've got units popping smoke all over! I think we're retreating!"
"Not surprising." The sergeant allowed, his whiskers flicking slightly. "We stepped in it good this time." His own squad was intact; the sniper division was on foot, and they followed at a slower pace than the armored cavalry and the infantry. While everyone else had been blocks ahead, they'd fired their grapnels and taken up position to lay down a first wave of supporting fire if it was needed. Affirming his purpose for existence, the sergeant leaned his shoulder against his tripod-propped M-62 and looked through his scope, veering in on a group of guerilla fighters 10 blocks away getting into position for another RPG shot. "Windage."
"Two MOA. Out of the southeast." His spotter quickly answered him. The sergeant steadied his breathing, lined up the shot, led the target, and waited for the space between heartbeats when his vision and his hands would be the steadiest.
The loud crack of the high velocity slug screaming through the air was instantaneous. The hole in the chest of his target, and the resulting spray of blood and shredded vital organs, followed after it. Most of the others in his unit were more comfortable with the Tiger and Brouser Model 18 Particle Rifle, more commonly known as the T&B M18. The condensed laser rifle carried plenty of punch, was more effective against shielded targets, and wasn't affected by the wind currents. The downside, the sergeant had constantly tried to drill into the heads of the impressionable rookies, was that every shot made it abundantly clear to anyone with eyes exactly where you were shooting from.
"Clean hit." His spotter said, confirming what the sergeant already knew. The rest of the RPG team on the roof around the now destroyed guerilla quickly reacted, ducking for cover behind an air conditioning unit on the rooftop. "They're under cover."
"AP round, then." The sergeant ejected the spent cartridge and slid a heavier round into the chamber. Using the same MOA adjustment from his last shot, he took aim at the AC unit, imagining the soldiers behind it, and backed away from the rifle's butt. The adaptive rifling quickly altered the M-62's barrel for the higher caliber round, and when he fired it, the gun jumped backwards.
The inexperienced had broken clavicles trying to brace against that recoil. Inexperienced was something he wasn't.
After a slight delay, the shot impacted. Behind the rooftop AC unit, a spray of metal, blood, and chunks of once living animals splattered out on the roof's gravel surface.
"Good hit, Sarge." His spotter congratulated him. The sniper closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, his face was blank again.
"Time to move." The sergeant ordered, and his unit of five sniper teams got to their feet. It was a matter of self-preservation to move and find new cover after taking a shot, especially for those who used the M18 laser rifle. Also, with so many puffs of signaling smoke in the advance areas, it was clear that falling back was the only good option left to them. That was why his next words were so startling. "We're advancing."
A badger corporal stopped dead in his tracks, having been turned around and two steps towards Bayfield already. He looked over incredulously. "Uh, Sarge? Could you repeat that?"
The sergeant's face was a mask, but it wasn't perfect just yet. There was still anger, rage, and irritation all clear to see, with only its depth left to question. "Lowery, nobody out there in this dustup is going to make it back to the Evac point, the way things are. Radios are down, air support's down, and we're not going to be seeing any orbital assistance with those clouds. We're the only hope those boys have of getting out of there alive."
"Milo…" A private on his squad started out, correcting himself after Sergeant Milo Granger gave him a death glare. "Uh, Sarge. That's suicide."
"And they aren't dying out there?" Milo questioned him sharply. "This is the job, soldier. So get your gear ready, find a good position, and get to work laying down support fire. We are not going to be the only ones to walk out of this mess, do you get me?" The feline swallowed hard, but nodded. The badger who had questioned him earlier, Corporal Lowery, only went a shade paler before setting his grapnel hook on the ledge of the roof. Sergeant Granger glanced towards his spotter and nodded once before doing the same.
Lead by example. Especially when the radio was so kludged that your CO was out of range. They had come into the sniper force with enough of a skillset to make them dangerous. Granger had sharpened them further, and knew that they would do what needed to be done. Under 90 seconds, they had all moved into new cover, placing themselves along the main through-way which led out of Fieldtown and towards Bayfield. It was the natural place for any successful retreat to happen. It was where the enemy would attack in force. It was where their killzone would be waiting.
Half a minute later, the first of the battered SDF forces started pouring into view. A cluster of infantry huddled close to a Landrunner tank which turned onto the road with its turret swiveling behind it, firing off a shot at whatever was chasing them. Angry laserfire answered back, and the infantry stayed behind the Landrunner, using it as moving cover. Sergeant Granger caught sight of the troopers in his unit, marking each one mentally. A couple were ducked in windows on the higher floors of buildings. A few more were on rooftops. Granger had put himself and his spotter in a rearward position, which made for more challenging shots, but gave him an angle to keep an eye and support his own team members if things went tits up.
No. When they did. Like right there, as the tank rolled along, it put itself dead center, staying clear of a downed close air support fighter that had cratered onto a building and burned with acrid chemical fumes along a side street.
"Not there." Sergeant Granger whispered. Only his spotter heard him utter it, and the fellow didn't get his meaning soon enough to realize the danger.
The Landrunner tank passed over an innocent seeming manhole cover, and the concrete beneath it exploded upwards and outwards in a deafening blast. The tank was gutted from below, where its already weak armor was weakest, and the troopers following behind it were battered by concrete and durasteel shrapnel, and the ones who didn't get shredded instantly were forced to scatter left and right as the ground beneath the wreckage gave way, creating a massive crater in the street. The effect was twofold, the move devastatingly effective. Shock and awe, and it denied any other vehicles use of the road.
The Sergeant felt his face twitch. His hands didn't.
"By the Creator…" His spotter wheezed.
"Eyes up." Sergeant Granger ordered him steadily, slapping in a cartridge of standard antipersonnel rounds. "Don't freeze."
Enemy guerillas started to pop out of the woodwork. From seemingly empty buildings, even from other windows of the same buildings his own men were stationed in, from other rooftops. His sniper team went to work, firing high-density laser blasts to cut them down before they could bring concentrated fire or explosive rounds to bear on the still scattered SDF troopers. Granger held his fire, sweeping the perimeter with the eye not stuck against the scope. He needed the wide angle and the attention to movement his peripherals allowed. They were hunting for the guerillas attacking their forces. He was hunting for the guerillas attacking them.
"One up. Ten o'clock, window, four floors!" His spotter called out anxiously. "One MOA!"
Sergeant Granger swung the M-62's barrel around and sighted the target. A long-rifle wielding Resistance fighter, right where his spotter said he was, taking aim at one of his own. "Engaging." A loud thundering crack echoed over the engagement zone, and his headset quickly dampened the sound to tolerable decibel levels as he watched the shooter take the hit to the sternum and get flung backwards in a spray of gore. "Neutralized." He concluded
"Three o'clock, roof! One and a half!" Another shot, another kill. Something caught in the corner of his eye. A different roof, enemy forces using rocket packs to get up and take aim at a sniper positioned there. The high visibility laserbolts were just too visible, too apparent. His snipers were all too vulnerable. Another target. A shot taken without spotter-assisted MOA adjustments, but it hit all the same. He was eyeballing it all now, using instinct and his sense of the field, relying on his spotter's position callouts alone and doing the rest himself.
He should move by now. They all should, but the engagement was so heavy, he barely had time to think before his spotter called out more targets. Five kills. Six. Eight, with one shot taking down a two man rocket team lined up all too perfectly.
Then, the first casualty as the numbers turned overwhelming. The forces on the ground, realizing the crossfire they were in, were tearing down what was left of the road in a full out dash, and one overeager rookie leaned a little too far out of his window to get an easier shot. The added exposure proved fatal when a barrage of automatic laserfire singed and cauterized him to death. Granger took aim at the nest the shots had come from and loosed a shot, but it was too late.
Then a second casualty, this time from a rocket team who'd gotten smart and come out of the debris of the fallen fighter off on the side street. The spotter died in that explosion as well, mercifully.
A third casualty, as one sniper in a building was apparently located by insurgents and killed by a shot to the back while he worked. The spotter was dragged in screaming for about two seconds before he went silent. The price was finally high enough.
"Pop red smoke." Granger ordered his spotter. The soldier did so, pulling the pin on a colored flare and pulling back his arm to throw it out into the street for the rest of his unit to see and react to. No radios. They were down to smoke signals like everyone else.
A lasershot screamed up and bored a hole clean through the spotter's head. His body collapsed onto the roof, leaving the shaken sergeant to duck for cover and scramble for the flare. With a low sidewards throw to keep his profile hidden, he chucked it off the side of the building, and looked to what was left of his spotter. The rabbit didn't have enough of a face left for him to recognize. Milo Granger reached down and put his free paw over the fellow's dog tags, allowing himself a moment of weakness.
"I'm sorry." He apologized to the body. In a clean jerk, he snapped the tags off and took off at a hunched over run with his rifle slung over his shoulder. Finally, he moved. But only for two buildings, just enough to set up a new shooting post a little further along. What was left of his own unit was scrambling to get out as well, along with the soldiers they had tried so desperately to save.
Granger slammed his sniper rifle's stabilizer legs out and took aim again. No spotter now. It was all on his own, but he didn't allow himself the time to think about it. There was no time to think about it. Just a horde of enemies, and his the only weapon left that could touch them and give the few remaining survivors of this massacre a chance to escape.
One shot after another, almost every one so terrifyingly accurate that it boggled comprehension. He ran out of normal rounds and switched to the few magazines of high caliber AP ammo he possessed. The M-62 got only louder, bucked all the harder, the barrel burned all the hotter. His headset, overwhelmed by the constant barrage of 175 plus decibel rounds, locked into its full noise cancelling mode.
His world became the sighting scope, the targets seen through it, the trigger under his finger, and the count of his shots remaining. His world became the gun, and everything else fell away.
Milo Granger felt a hand on his shoulder. He ignored it. It pulled at him, throwing off the aim of his next shot, and he barely kept from firing into friendlies. It was Corporal Lowery. The badger was bleeding from a shallow head wound, but otherwise intact. He was yelling something at Milo. The raccoon couldn't hear him. He couldn't hear anything except the thumping of his heart and the thumping of his shots.
He read the badger's lips. Time to go.
Milo shook his head and got back into position. There were still more targets, and he still had rounds left. It was all he could do now. Just keep shooting.
Just.
Keep.
Killing.
Wild Fox
Ship's Mess/Cafeteria
47th Day of the Primal War (Present Day)
Morning
"Milo? Hey, Milo, you there?"
The ring-tailed raccoon blinked three times at the sound of his name being called out. He flexed the hand he'd been staring at, making a fist and then releasing it as he looked up to Dana, standing in front of him holding her breakfast. "Oh. Hey, Dana."
The tigress rolled her eyes. "Hey yourself." Not waiting for an invitation, she dropped the tray down on the table and sat across from him. "You doing okay? You're not the type to space out."
"Heh." Milo managed a grin and reached for his coffee, grimacing as he drank it. Lukewarm. He'd been sitting for too long. "You have to give an old man certain allowances from time to time."
"Shit, you aren't that old." Dana snorted, biting into a piece of toast. "Then again, your fur's always been that color, so it's hard to say."
Milo shot back a dirty look that she ignored, and he settled for his usual half-amused, half-indifferent base expression. "Just me so far this morning out of our crew. Growler Squadron's come and gone. Typhoon and Raptor Squadron are huddled up close and nattering away." He gestured over his shoulder, to the other pilots a few tables away. "It's still a little weird, having five squadrons aboard. Anyhow. How's Carl doing?"
"He's going to go the entire day without the cane. See how it goes." Dana told him, taking a long drink of her orange juice. "He's been putting time in on the treadmill and dialing the nullgrav back, so today's going to be an endurance test."
"Heh." Milo smirked. "We'll get him back in the cockpit soon enough."
"We'd better. We need every Seraph pilot we can spare." She chewed into her beefsteak with gusto before spearing her fork into the hashbrowns, another of Pug's delights. "And Terrany, too. They both need new Seraphs."
"You really think Doc Bushtail is going to clear her for flight duty this soon?" Milo raised an eyebrow. "I think he's still sifting through all the data from the simulation against Telemos. She's going to have to wait until the curmudgeon is satisfied…and Wyatt and his team get a few more rebuilt."
"Makes me wonder if we're going to get a mission today. Now that we're back on active duty and all." Dana went on. Milo stared at her tray of rapidly dwindling food, then slid over the small container of mixed fruit from his own. "Hey, thanks." She lifted it up and slid the contents back into her mouth in one gulp. Two chews, a swallow, and she went for her juice. "Pretty hungry this morning."
"You're not eating for two, are you?" Milo joked. That barb made the tigress pause long enough to affix a glower at him.
"If I was, the doc would've told me."
"Doing it bareback, then." Milo picked up the rest of his tepid coffee and drained it in one swallow while Dana choked indignantly. "Process of elimination."
"Screw you, Granger."
"And make Skip jealous?" Milo smirked. His wingmate groaned and threw her hands up in the air. "Okay, okay. I'm done. There's a chance we might be doing something today."
"Yeah?" Their spat forgotten, Dana leaned forward eagerly. "You hear something?"
"Nah. No scuttlebutt. Just a feeling." The raccoon let his left arm drop so the hand was hidden behind the table, and felt it clench up again. "Give it ten years and your hunches will be just as good as mine are."
"If we live that long." She added, going for a bit of morbid humor.
"You will." Milo said, enough determination in that vow that Dana went still and searched his placid face for an absent clue.
Hangar Bay
10 Minutes to Morning Briefing
"Gramps? Gramps Damnit, Gramps, why are you messing with my people?!" Torn away and denied breakfast by an urgent communication from Ulie, Wyatt Toad was brewing up a full head of steam as he stomped down the gantry stairway and onto the main floor of the hangar bay. The mechanics and engineers on the floor who saw him coming quickly became fully engrossed in what they were doing or skittered out of his way while looking back over their shoulders.
He weaved around hoversleds full of equipment, cargo boxes and parked transports, and the precious handful of Arwings still operational. Past them all, past the workshops tucked away in corners and in smaller offices behind wire fencing and steel bulkhead walls, he moved directly towards the newest installed facility in his domain; The SMSM Foundry and assembly line, directly wired to a power shunt off of the main engine feeds from the Impulse Vacuum Drive, contained within the still bleeding-edge technology of his Subspace Azonal Containment System; The SACS Foundry.
He found his grandfather plopped down on a comfortable chair, examining the handiwork of a trio of technicians on a datapad as they fiddled around inside the guts of what looked to be three heavily modified Godsight Pods at a nearby workbench. Behind them, the SMSM cranked out part after part, which was scooped up by grappler arms suspended on a heavily reinforced ceiling gantry and transferred to various work areas. It was a masterpiece of engineering, just finished late last night. Wyatt had fairly dragged himself up to the elevator and to his room, leaving behind slurred orders for the foundry to get to work cranking out Arwing parts for assembly.
"Hm. That's not bad, Garfield. Be careful with the capacitor leads. The positive and the ground can look very similar when you're not paying attention, and I'd hate to see you blasted across the room for inattention."
"Yes sir, Mr. Toad." The feline nodded, quickly moving to double check his work.
Slippy sighed with a satisfaction that his tremendous age allowed for, and then turned his head towards Wyatt and smiled. Actually smiled, as if nothing was amiss. "Ah, Wyatt. Good morning. Have you had breakfast yet?"
"Haven't had the chance. Not with you starting fires down here."
"A fire? Here?" Slippy looked around in mock horror. He tapped his datapad's microphone input. "ROB, is there a fire down in the hangar bay and workshops anywhere?"
"Environmental sensors show no fire, Slippy. There are traces of ozone from ongoing projects, however."
"Ah. No worries then. Thanks, ROB."
"You are welcome." The connection cut off and Slippy winked at Wyatt. "No fire here. Now, I can tell you're about to blow a gasket, which you shouldn't do at your age. So take a breath, and…"
"Gramps, I don't have time for…"
"Take. A. Breath." Slippy repeated, enunciating every word with severe emphasis. Decades of learning at the feet and beside his grandfather, and the ingrained loyalty bought with it, paid off. Wyatt snapped his mouth shut and inhaled loudly through his nostrils. Exactly four seconds later, he exhaled in the same way and cracked his eyes open.
The small move paid off, and the younger Toad felt old lessons guiding him. Open your eyes, make a sweep of your surroundings. Spare everyone the stupid questions. Use your brain, it's the most important thing you have. Your webbed hands are a distant second to the creativity and ingenuity stuck between your ears.
Wyatt stared at the workbench with the trio of would-be Godsight Pods. But they weren't. They were thicker, more reinforced, and the camera housing had been torn out and fitted with…Wait. Was that a focusing lens? His eyes danced around over to Garfield, who was working on a capacitor. A secondary one, by its placement, and it was meant to carry a far greater charge than the GSP's main systems. It looked like one of the capacitors for a Model K hyper laser assem…
Oh.
Wyatt slowly dragged his eyes back over to his grandfather, who watched him with slowly increasing approval. The old wart nodded. He'd seen that Wyatt had recognized the project for what it was.
"Weaponized Godsight Pods." Wyatt said, swallowing to moisturize his suddenly dry mouth. "I'd shelved that project. Couldn't lick it."
"Consider it unshelved." Slippy said, turning his datapad around so Wyatt could see the blueprint and notes from his first go. "You were on the right track, and the idea behind it is…well. 'Genius' wouldn't be too far of a stretch. Given the situation, an easily deployable secondary gun for the Arwings is a fine addition to the team's options. But you were aiming for an all-or-nothing proposition on your rough builds, weren't you?"
Wyatt winced. This was going to turn into another one of those slightly painful 'I've forgotten more about engineering than you'll ever know' lessons his grandfather had occasionally sprung on him in his youth. "Okay, fine. What did I do wrong?"
"Power demands." Slippy coughed. "Based on the figures here, you were trying to shove an entire hyper laser assembly inside a tiny space, and there was no way in hell you'd be able to manage the fit and maintain the necessary power output at the same time. You were trying to miniaturize the capacitor, give yourself enough space to house a larger Cornite power cell. You kept hitting the wall. No way to do it, am I right?"
"Solution?" Wyatt demanded, sulking as the other engineers in the room glanced over at grandfather and grandson and smirked at the show being given to them. It would do wonders for their morale, at least. His own was taking a hit.
"Shield bleed." Slippy explained with a chuckle. "There isn't enough Cornite left on board this ship to make the size of power cells you'd need to make them independent. So, we fall back on the Draw Effect. If we can have the GSPs orbit an Arwing for collection—or in the case of the destruction of the Super Saucerer, kinetic buildup and release, still not sure how Sergeant Granger thought up that tactic—then it stands to reason that we could make these orbit a ship in the same manner. And draw power from it while it's riding the shields."
"One of your miracle projects pulled out of the satellite?"
"A department head on Corneria had been looking into it, yes. He was getting close. I took it home." Slippy confirmed grimly. "Like you could have, if you weren't busy running yourself ragged all the time."
Wyatt rolled his large eyes. "You see anyone else here who can keep this madhouse going?"
"Ulie's a fine lad, but you're not running Project Seraphim anymore. What's left of Arspace is on a wartime footing." Slippy chastised him. "You're running yourself ragged, and the more time you spend on tasks better left delegated to team leaders, the less you're handling research and development. ROB's been keeping tabs on you, and from what he tells me, you've not been taking very good care of yourself. That's a recipe for disaster."
"You have ROB spying on me?"
"He was my friend before he was yours, grandson. That counts for a lot in his metal heart." Slippy frowned.
"Huh. Well, whatever. What's left of Arspace's best and brightest is already on this ship or shuffling around the base to help with this ship." Wyatt pointed out wearily. "We. Lost. Everyone else. It was sheer dumb luck that you survived, gramps."
"First time I've been glad for military obstructionism." The older Toad chortled. "But, I wouldn't count us out just yet. As I recall, there's two good schools here on Katina; DIT and UNA. Some of the faculty used to work for Arspace, and I imagine they'd leap at the chance to help out."
"Internships?"
"Graduates." Slippy punched up his mail program and forwarded a list. "I've sent you their contact information. When you get the chance, give them a call. Tell them you only want the best. That's what they'll give you."
"It may be a while." Wyatt sighed. "Orders came down first thing this morning. Now that the SACS Foundry is up and running, we're getting the Wild Fox airborne. Time to get back to work. Which is why I was hoping to have a pile of Arwing components waiting for my crews today."
Slippy's lips pressed together in a thin line. "We'll stop the production run at 20 units. Should be another hour. After that, we can build these things anywhere. We'll get the Foundry running on those Arwing components right after."
"Thanks."
"You want me to make those calls to DIT and UNA?"
"You know them better than me, Gramps. You'll get a better response." Wyatt's eyes flickered down to Slippy's datapad, and he winced at the time display. "Shit. Well, so much for breakfast. I'll be late for the morning briefing if I stop for a bite."
"Then don't." Slippy dug in a small toolbag sitting beside him and pulled out a fruit and fly energy bar. "First rule of Engineering; Never go hungry when you're working."
A grinning Wyatt scooped it up and peeled back the end of the foil wrapper to smell the contents. "You're the best, Grandpa Slip."
"At least I'm good for something." The older Toad joked, waving him off. "Now get moving."
Wyatt adjusted his battered cap and threw his grandfather a two-fingered salute, then tore off for the elevator in a powerwalk. He bit off half of the energy bar in a single bite and was chewing on it noisily as the lift doors closed behind him.
Wild Fox
Conference Room
At the start of the Primal War, the Conference Room had been able to house the whole of the Starfox Team, General Grey, his XO, and any other necessary personnel. In spite of the disastrous losses they had taken, the number of available pilots on hand had ballooned by a factor of five, and by consensus, it had been decided that future general briefings would be the purview of the flight leads and department heads alone, with any squadron briefings to be held after as needed. The conference room was still crowded, but they weren't packed wall to wall and overloading the temperature controls.
At their usual places in the back of the room around the end of the table were General Grey, XO Dander, Commodore Leadfeather, and Major Carl "Skip" McCloud. Along one side of the oval table were Captains Hound of Growler Squadron, "Viper" Korman of the Raptors, and Captain West of the Typhoons. Arranged opposite them were Captain Lockjaw of Renegade Squadron, Captain Siddell of the Graves, and Lieutenant Rourke O'Donnell of the Starfox Team. At the far end, Dr. Bushtail fiddled with his datapad, compiling medical reports while he stared at the empty chairs still arranged nearby.
"I know we're still waiting for Wyatt, and the elder Toad has a permanent invitation, but why the other two empty chairs?" Captain Hound asked gruffly.
"Sometimes we get someone from the transitional government who asks to sit in." XO Dander clarified.
"Right, because two Toads in this madhouse wasn't enough." Captain West joked, getting a small round of chuckles.
"We're waiting on someone I asked to be here." Rourke explained, ending the laughter as the newer flight leaders looked over at him curiously. Grey stared at him the longest, and Rourke rolled his eyes. "Just trust me."
"O'Donnell, there are days I'm still not sure exactly how Carl convinced me to pull you off death row."
"Worked out, didn't it old man?" Rourke said, folding his arms.
"Hmph. Sure the hell has." Grey begrudgingly admitted.
The doors slid open, and an uncomfortable Telemos Fendhausen, dressed in his Primal uniform for lack of a better alternative, walked inside. He received some hard stares and matched them with his own, and Rourke gestured for him to sit down at the empty chair beside him. The flight leads from Grave and Renegade Squadron offered more easygoing nods and grins, but Telemos still sat rigidly. He seemed relieved when Wyatt came storming in ten seconds later, harried and apologetic.
"Sorry, sorry! I had a small grandpa emergency to deal with, and…" The youngest of the Toad line froze when everyone in the room stared at him. "…Aaaand you're all here." His face fell as he slinked into his waiting chair. "Wonderful."
"Let's get started." General Grey rumbled, and there was enough of a growl in his voice that everyone straightened up a little bit more. "First off. Fleet Status. Commodore?"
The wizened hawk adjusted his cap once out of habit before speaking. "The Reconstructed 2nd Fleet is in orbit and on station for trouble. We are currently in the process of recruiting new Arbiter pilots, and we're planning on a slightly more accelerated timetable for their graduation. The earliest ones will still be a month out before they clear basic, though, and if they're going to last through their first engagement, we'll need time for additional training. It's my recommendation that, until we shore up our numbers and replace our pilots and crew complements, that the 2nd Fleet be kept in reserve for defensive actions." The news was sobering, but expected, and Grey could do little aside from nod stiffly and move on.
"Ship reports. Wyatt, how are we looking?"
"Yeah." The chief engineer pulled out his datapad and tapped into the conference room's holographic projector. As the room lights dimmed down, a schematic of the Wild Fox appeared from the ceiling's emitter, slowly rotating with sections flashing. "We completed work on the SACS Foundry late last night. Thanks to having a working Primal model to reverse engineer, this ship is now equipped with its own custom Stable Matter Synthesis Module and workshop inside a pocket bubble of expanded subspace. It's hooked up directly to the main power trunk, which gives it more than enough power to do what it has to. We still need matter stores to process new parts efficiently, but we now have the capability to manufacture Arwing components at enough of a pace to keep up with the rate that we're wearing them out, and the space to do it without sacrificing hangar bay storage. Building new ships will still take lots of work, but we'll have the pieces at least."
"Excellent. Have you already started a production run?" General Grey asked.
Wyatt flinched. "Uh, no. That's the grandpa emergency. After I went to bed last night, Gramps went down and hijacked it for his own side project. Or, more like one of mine that I'd shelved for later because I couldn't get it to work."
"And he has?" An amused Captain Korman inquired, his tongue slipping out to taste the air.
Wyatt grumbled a bit more and nodded. "I don't have a mockup to show you, but yes. Anyhow, he told me he'd finish up and start the SACS Foundry on Arwing parts production by lunch. So if you were asking when we'll have more Arwings made, I can only ballpark it. A week to get all the components, a couple more for assembly. Arwings are notoriously complex aircraft to make, and Seraphs more so. The calibrations on weapons systems aside, G-Diffuser technology is an absolute bear. Always has been. Misalignments in G-Diffuser systems can weaken overall shield performance, and worse, could tear the ship apart."
"You'll do your best. Keep us updated on the Arwing situation. For now, though, when will the ship be ready to launch again?"
"The Wild Fox? Final systems checks will be done by early afternoon. Thanks for keeping it grounded as long as you have. Major refits aren't something you do when it's in use."
"Good." General Grey looked down and marked the next item on his agenda. "Medical. How's the crew doing?"
Dr. Bushtail cleared his throat. "I'm keeping Terrany under observation for the moment, but she seems to be on her way to making a full recovery. Until she has a Seraph of her own again, I'll be putting her through fitness stress tests and anything else I can think of to determine how exactly someone who spent weeks Merged with their AI was affected by it in the long term. My main complaints, unsurprisingly, are with the engineering and mechanic teams. They could all use some more rest, or shorter shifts. Which is an impossibility, I know. Needs of war and all that. But tired people make mistakes. In my medical opinion, we either need more staff or better shifts."
"The people we're working on." Wyatt cut in. "Grandpa Slip's going to make some calls to the local technical institutes here on Katina. See if we can't drum up some new recruits."
"And it's not just the engineering staff we're short on." Bushtail went on, waving a hand at Wyatt to acknowledge the offered fix. "I estimate that, bridge crew aside, we could also stand to have more folks working in the galley as well as Medical. We've been trying to run this ship with the same staffing levels we had on Ursa Station, and it's just not cutting it anymore. Any help you can drum up would be very much appreciated."
"We'll see who we can get for you, and for Pugs." General Grey promised, making a note of it. "Though in Pugs' case, I may ask him for ideas. The last thing we need is food quality taking a hit, and he gets very particular on how things get done."
"Talk to my mother." Carl offered. "She told me she's been helping him here and there. Not saying she'd be keen on a full time job slinging hashbrowns, but she's got a keen eye for detail. And people."
"Hm." Grey pulled out his pipe and gnawed on the stem. "XO Dander. How's our supply situation?"
The tomcat cleared his throat, going from respectful silence to professional brogue in two heartbeats. "We're critically low on processed Cornite stores and Lylus cruise missiles. As things stand, if we don't find a new source soon, our Arwings aren't going to have enough Smart Bombs to put a dent into hardened targets. Our basic food and other materiel needs are being met for the moment, but with the refugee situation on Katina straining planetary infrastructure, we may hit a decrease in our rations soon. The local government has a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of folks to house and clothe. I did have an idea to address that, however." When General Grey gestured for him to continue, the feline looked over to Wyatt. "Zoom in on the ship's arboretum for a moment, would you Wyatt?"
After a small pause, Wyatt did so, and the image of the enclosed garden expanded. "The Krystal McCloud Memorial Garden, as we've taken to calling it, is unique among ship facilities. Hydroponics started to fall out of use after the discovery of subspace and the FTL Drive, but the concept never went away. The development of artificial gravity was another windfall, in that it allows us to grow crops and eat foods that wouldn't be allowed in zero-grav. I'm reasonably certain that Farhaven uses hydroponics to survive on its own. On this ship, however, we're growing trees. Which means that there's enough contained soil, moisture, artificially generated sunlight, and nutrient filtration to sustain much more complicated crops than soybeans in plastic cups. During the first refit following the Battle at Sector Y, Slippy Toad even supervised the installation of transparent heavy duty paneling so that the crew could have a skylight, and so we could get natural starlight and sunlight as well. With a little work, we could start growing more than flowers and trees, but our own crops as well. Of course, it would help if we had someone who was an experienced farmer. I don't think any of the crew has much experience in growing things, since we mostly make them blow up."
A short susurrus of chuckles followed, and XO Dander shrugged. "It's an idea. The more self-sufficient we can make this ship, the better off we'll be in the long run. What few planets are left under SD…Excuse me, the Starfox Coalition's control, are struggling to make ends meet as it is."
"We may find a solution very soon. Today's mission profiles could lend itself to solving both our Cornite shortage as well as our need for skilled farmers and botanists." General Grey said, skillfully guiding the conversation away from shipboard concerns to what the Arwing pilots were present for. Everyone leaned forward in their seat and resumed their stiff postures as the holographic image of the Wild Fox shifted and was changed for a more ominous view of the Lylat System. The two beating hearts of the binary star system, the Blue Giant Lylus and the Red Dwarf star Solar, spun around each other in a whirling dance. The other planets of their home star system pulsed as tiny dots of light against the to-scale representation, and then in a dash, the holographic image shifted as it zoomed in on a particular section, to a very familiar world.
Fortuna.
"Chief Engineer Toad and his grandfather both thought that the surviving Arspace engineering corps had plenty to do without anything else being thrown on their plates, and given just how behind the curve we are, I agreed with them. The successful production and launch of Sentinel-1 in orbit around Katina went off without a hitch, proving that the…Uh…"
"MIDS technology." Slippy supplied when the old wardog started to trail off, grasping for the term. "Mass Imprint Displacement Scanner."
"Yes, that." Grey huffed. "The MIDS technology has successfully been miniaturized enough for use on the Sentinel Tactical Satellites. To wit, as soon as Sentinel-1 became operational, production on future Sentinel satellites was moved off-site of the Wild Fox to facilities here on Katina. I am happy to report that Sentinel-2 has just been completed as of yesterday, and should be arriving here on base for transfer to a waiting Albatross transport, which will take it to Fortuna and deploy it into high orbit. Our services have been requested for fighter and ship escort in what is being called Operation Dragline. Once the Albatross, code-named Trawler has finished its mission, it will land at Strongwing Army Base to deliver additional supplies for our forces stationed there, as well as relief supplies for the Fortuna refugees. The Wild Fox will be taking on additional supplies which we will deliver to the planet's surface for the use in their construction projects. Fortuna is to be a lifeboat for at least some of the Cornerian refugees, and this is the first act in making that possible. Sentinel-2 will ensure that should the enemy make a move on the planet again, they will have ample warning and time to reach out to us."
"An escort mission." Captain Korman mused. "Been a while since I've done one of those."
"What, afraid you've lost your touch after too many sorties going on pirate hunts?" Captain Lockjaw goaded his fellow reptile. The lizard stuck his long tongue out at the crocodile, who merely snapped his jaws and chuckled.
"Typhoon Squadron will take point on this one." Major McCloud cut in sternly, silencing the chatter. Rourke glanced over and watched his former flight lead with a scrutinizing, quiet stare, while the Wing Commander in charge of all Arwing squadrons elaborated. "Under Captain Mulholland, Typhoon Squadron racked up plenty of time on escort missions. Captain West, are your pilots able to handle this?"
The golden retriever quickly nodded. "Yes, sir, Major."
"Good." Carl looked over to Captains Korman and Lockjaw. "Renegade Squadron is going to be the backup flight on this, on standby in the hangar during the operation, which means the Raptors are benched along with Grave Squadron."
"Ah, you're kidding." Victor 'Viper' Korman groaned, while Captain Lockjaw only smirked all the more. "Don't crash my Arwings, Cold Blooded."
"And deny you the pleasure of doing it yourself? Never. Understood, Major. I'll tell my flight to be ready.
"Good." The brown-furred fox's face softened. "I understand you have a Merge-capable pilot on your squad. Wildpaw, wasn't it?"
"Yes, sir. Renegade 2, Lieutenant Wildpaw."
"Tell that jackrabbit Wyatt will get him a Seraph soon enough. For now, he'll have to stick to a Model K."
"Works for us. Fly what you know, right?" The crocodile shrugged.
"I notice you left out us and the Growlers, Skip." Rourke coughed. "Got something else in mind for us?"
"We do, yes." General Grey nodded, bringing up the holographic projector's remote and punching the button to transition it. "In reviewing what datafiles we were able to get from Corneria before the CSC was destroyed, we learned that there were a few mining operations elsewhere in the Lylat System which were going after off-world Cornite deposits. Unfortunately for us, all of them are in enemy-held territory at this time. Of the targets available, one planet was the most viable." The image of Fortuna shrank and faded out as the camera pulled back and moved to a different world across the system map, a ball of sickly bluish-green water that was clearly not Aquas. "Zoness. It seems there were several deep sea mining platforms dotted around the planet, and there was one in particular which the SDF had listed deep in its high level security files. It was a mine that hit Cornite about fourteen years back. After that, the SDF quietly bought out the mining platform through a couple of shell corporations and then militarized it, building a complete underwater base stationed over the mine. Thanks to the energy reserves it was hollowing out from underneath the seabed, it was completely self-sufficient. The mining platform itself was declared closed off, and the underwater mine beneath it tapped out. The entire time, however, Platform 43 was producing high grade Cornite ore, which was sent up the pipeline's elevator shaft and loaded onto unregistered transports which then flew the Cornite to ore processing centers on Corneria and here again on Katina."
The image of Zoness was expanded, and the camera zoomed in on a mining platform standing alone in the hazy oceans. "This is a recent snapshot of Platform 43 taken by one of our Spysats in the region. It's a little grainy, but you can see what our problem is." As everyone strained to look, they could make out what seemed to be hastily installed additions not part of the original construction.
Weapon emplacements. An enormous satellite dish. Some kind of runway.
"The Primals," General Grey said with his fair share of bitterness, "Seem to have moved in." He looked down the table towards Rourke, but his stare went past the wolf to the lone Primal in the room. "Telemos. You know anything about this?"
Telemos Fendhausen frowned, measuring the question and its intent for a few moments as he examined the grainy image. "I know this facility." He said. "It is known as 'Deep Ear', and it is a roughly thrown together outpost in that sector of the system. The facility's primary function is to serve as an early warning system, in the event that any subspace traffic goes past it and moves for the production world your people call Macbeth." The Primal rubbed at his chin, pausing for effect. "It is not a very desirable posting within the Armada." He concluded.
"What kind of staffing do they have there?" Major McCloud pressed him.
"Minimal." Telemos answered after another pause. "Perhaps two squadrons of ground troopers. Armada technicians. Although, that runway…they will likely have a squadron of fighters stationed there."
Rourke tensed up for a moment. "Another one of those named squadrons you trained to fight us?" He growled out. Telemos wasn't intimidated in the slightest by the verbal cue.
"Hardly." Telemos snorted in return. "I was not privy to their posting assignments, and they have likely changed since my…departure…but the Armada's leadership is not one to waste valuable Helion fighter groups on low-value installations like Deep Ear. It is more likely that there is a flight of Splinter drones stationed there. Perhaps a squadron of Burnout fighters, but that is less likely."
"Wait, wait. This doesn't add up." Captain Hound interrupted. "You're telling me this is a low-value target in the eyes of your old bosses, right? Just how efficient are the scanners on that mining platform, anyhow?"
"By itself, not very." Telemos conceded. He looked over to General Grey. "Can you manipulate this image? Pull back a distance so we can see an approximate radius of 50 kilometers around Deep Ear Outpost?"
General Grey chewed his pipe's stem a little more before nodding, and slowly the grainy image pulled back to show that while Platform 43 was alone for several kilometers in the open ocean, there were other platforms dotted around it, approximately ten kilometers between each of them. Though faint, it seemed that the others had similar features as 43 did…mainly, roughly constructed sensor arrays.
"Deep Ear, your Platform 43, is the only facility which is manned by Primal forces." Telemos went on. "They took advantage of the pre-existing structures to erect other scanning dishes as well, which all tie together. Individually, you could fly through and be overlooked if you knew the pattern. Together, they are able to detect subspace radio communications and even the subspace distortions which arise from large task groups. Emerge back into realspace, and those sensors will be able to detect you 60,000 kilometers away from the surface."
"Geez. Sure doesn't seem like a low value target to me." Captain Siddell of Grave Squadron muttered. Telemos past Rourke's shoulders to stare at the eagle and narrowed his eyes.
"You again misunderstand." The Primal pilot informed the Cornerian, who clicked his beak. "It is an undesirable posting because all they can look forward to there is tedium, or a few moments of excitement before they are destroyed. In either case, their ability to defend themselves is not very high. Their ability to see an attack coming, and send out a warning, is what truly matters. Once that message has been delivered, they are expendable. And they know it." He stared at Siddell a moment longer to make sure the Cornerian understood, then looked over to Major McCloud. "Brother of the Pale Demon. Am I correct in assuming that you plan to launch a strike against Deep Ear Outpost?"
"That was the plan, but apparently that's shot to hell now." Carl shook his head. "Damn. Is there any way to sneak by? Just where are the sensors concentrated?"
"Pull the image back. Sector view." Telemos ordered, waving a hand in General Grey's direction. Nobody in the room said anything while the old dog grew red in the face, and Telemos remained blissfully unaware of the danger he was in until Rourke elbowed him in the ribs.
"Say it like we practiced." O'Donnell hissed lowly.
"Ah." Telemos blinked twice, rubbing at his chest. "Yes. Please."
"Better." Grey rumbled, finally doing as he'd been asked, instead of ordered. Zoness faded back out as the empty space between worlds took its place. Telemos scrutinized the map, then stood up and gestured along a path. "Here. The sensors are arranged to detect any traffic between the usual subspace corridors into and away from Macbeth. But there is a blind spot on the far side of the planet. If you come out of subspace…along this axis out of the ecliptic…you should remain unnoticed for a time. The moment you approach Deep Ear, however, the sensor array will pick you up and they will sound an alarm. Once it becomes clear that the target is Deep Ear and not Macbeth, they will eventually ferry reinforcements out to engage you. Assuming they follow standard protocol."
"But if our target was Macbeth, they'd let us destroy Deep Ear unopposed?" Captain Hound tilted his head to the side a little.
"Certainly." Telemos nodded. "It is a matter of prioritization. However, if you were contemplating a strike mission on Deep Ear, that would make it difficult to reach your underwater mining facility. Correct?"
"Yeah." Rourke exhaled, looking over to Major McCloud. "Skip, he's right. If we fly in there guns blazing, we'll just as likely sink the damn platform as knock off its guns. We can't reach it from orbit, or even flying in from the other side of the planet without getting their attention. Telemos, just how low would we need to fly to escape their radar detection?"
The Primal rubbed at his chin again. "I believe Deep Ear isn't equipped with the most accurate sensors for perimeter defense, but they have a significant number of them around the exterior platforms. Their effective detection range is 1,000 kilometers in a circle around them, but is much larger at higher altitudes, up to orbital range. If you stayed below six meters above sea level, you would be able to clear it unnoticed until it was too late."
"Shit, I don't like those odds." Captain Hound complained. "You're skimming the wavecrests pulling a stunt like that. One rogue swell and the Arwing would be swamped. And even if you got in close, you're what, trying to smoke their Battlenet relays and their gun emplacements without filling the rest of the station so full of holes that we don't destroy our way of reaching the underwater mine safely?"
"Agreed." Rourke muttered. "It's risky. I know that we're famous for pulling miracles out of thin air, but there are too many X factors in this."
"It is unfortunate that you lack a means of coming by sea." Telemos leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. "That would be perhaps the easiest way of getting past their perimeter security. By air, there is simply no good means so long as you're in an Arwing."
Wyatt jerked a little as Telemos made his off-handed observation, leaning forward in his chair. His eyes took on a clouded appearance while his mouth opened and closed, never quite uttering a sound. At length, while General Grey and Major McCloud were ruminating on their limited options, he found his voice.
"Oh, I am going to kill Grandpa."
"Chief Engineer Toad, is there something you'd care to share with the class?" XO Dander inquired.
Wyatt slowly shook his head and laughed a little. "Wow. I thought he was nuts. Rule Six, he said. Come prepared." He looked over to General Grey. "Can you bring up the schematic of Platform 43 for us again? And if you can, include the mining facility and the underwater base as well. Including its depth."
A little confused as to his purpose, General Grey did so. The holographic image suspended in midair showed the mining platform in exacting detail, then zoomed out to show the waters, and its support pillars. The four exterior pillars descended down into the waters a full hundred meters, acting as rigid-walled buoyancy collars and stabilizers, keeping it level regardless of the waves. The central pillar, highlighted in red, extended down even further still, all the way down to the seabed 3,121 meters below where the sunlight didn't reach. It passed into an enormous reinforced domed structure and finally came to a stop.
Wyatt adjusted his cap and warbled low in his throat. "Yeah. This wasn't an Arspace design. I can tell just by looking at it." He gestured to the underwater base. "No moon pool? No way of accessing the base aside from the main cargo shaft? Still, could be worse. I'm seeing some sonar pickups on the exterior. Is the base equipped with hydrophones?"
"Uh." General Grey frowned and checked some more in-depth information on his datapad. "I believe it is."
"Good. Then we can talk to them at least. What kind of a crew is supposed to be down there?"
"That, I can answer." XO Dander said, bringing up headshots of a full dozen and a half individuals, some in military uniforms and others in worksuits. "The mining project is overseen by a Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Griggs. There are a couple of security officers, but the bulk of the personnel down there either keep the underwater base going or are on the mining crews. It's heavily automated, or else there would be about 80 animals to worry about. The base is designed to be self-sufficient and independent, with the crew living and working without coming up to the surface on a regular basis. At that depth, they have to; going through decompression treatment takes several hours, although don't ask me to quote you an exact number. So there's no risk of them having starved or lost power while they're down there. While the base is capable of detaching from the surface mining platform in the event of major storms, it's unlikely that they would have; It would have aroused too much suspicion when the Primals moved in. It's more likely that they just sealed off the shaft and made it look like just another support beam, since my notes on the base indicate that there was such a procedure in place in the event that pirates or system rebels moved on Zoness."
"Hang on, Wyatt." Rourke held up a hand. "You're driving at something, but I'm not seeing it."
"Then you obviously haven't been paying attention to all my little pet projects. Or my grandfather's." Wyatt grinned. "There's a way I can get you onto Platform 43 without the Primals ever noticing your approach. We can't go by air. There's no land out there to speak of. So, you're left with the ocean."
Carl McCloud stared at the smug Toad for a bit before a long forgotten lightbulb clicked on. "Oh. Oh, no. Please tell me you're not thinking what I think you're thinking."
Wyatt activated his datapad again, taking over the holographic projector to show a strange beast of a machine, clearly not meant for anything but use in the water.
"Animals of all breeds, meet Arspace Dynamics' unrecognized contribution to the Starfox Team during the Lylat Wars. The Aquatic Experimental Model 01, or AX-01: The Blue Marine."
"It's a submarine." Captain Korman said. "Wait, the Lylat Wars? How old is this thing?"
"My grandfather was a teenager back when he and my great-grandfather laid down its keel, if that clues you in." Wyatt chuckled. "You can relax. We've been refitting it here and there when we had time, so it's back up to spec and even better than it was 75 years ago. I'll send you a cheat sheet with the data, but it's got the capabilities to get to the platform from beyond their sensor range. It's going to require an Albatross to launch, though. I think gramps actually had the original Great Fox land on the ocean surface and flooded the launch bay to get it deployed. We don't have that option since the Wild Fox is going to be off station."
"That…could work." Carl conceded. "The Albatross is capable of limited VTOL launch with mounted exterior thruster pods."
"Well. Guess Starfox is going swimming then. And what's Growler Squadron going to be doing, Skip?"
"Hang on." Carl rolled his eyes. "Changing the plan as we go here. Why don't we keep them on station with the Albatross, since losing that means the Blue Marine is stuck on the planet without an escape?"
"We'll be ready."
"Good. Captain Hound, Lieutenant O'Donnell, I'll leave it up to you two to iron out the details. I'll make sure we have an Albatross here on the base. Wyatt?"
"Yeah, I know." The younger Toad scratched at his ball cap. "We've got to get the Blue Marine prepped and off of the Wild Fox before we launch. I'll get a team on it."
"There's never enough time or resources to do everything we need to. We make do with what we have." General Grey stood up, and everyone else aside from Telemos did so as well out of reflex. "Inform your teams. Dismissed."
Enroute to the Rec Room
"I see that I have become a source of intelligence for you." Telemos started out, as he and Rourke were in the elevator going down from the top deck of the ship to the middle section.
"And you're surprised by that?" Rourke countered. "That's why I wanted you there. You know things we don't. There's a database we have on your ships and some of your weapons, but it doesn't tell us about your mentality, your leadership's reasoning for deployments, what unexpected things to look out for. You've got a berth on this ship, and you're not a prisoner. You're an ally."
"I am still getting used to that distinction." The Primal harrumphed. "Speaking of. This mission you are taking to Zoness. I am going with you."
Rourke raised an eyebrow and looked sidewards to him. "Ohhhkay. I don't think that they'll let you fly your fighter."
"No." Telemos narrowed his gaze, and Rourke was forced to turn and face him properly. "I will be with you on that submarine. There is space enough in it; Room for 4. And since the Pale Demon is still under medical leave, I will be your fourth."
"…Why?"
"Deep Ear presents a unique opportunity. It is equipped with a Battlenet Relay, and I intend to make use of it." Telemos held up a flat hand to silence Rourke's immediate argument. "Not as soon as we land. The security detail must be neutralized before we can even consider bringing up those Cornite stores you spoke of. But afterwards, when your people and your mineral are recovered? I will use it to send out a message to the Primal forces. It is high time that they were told the truth about who we are. Who our ancestors were."
"In other words, everything Andross told you."
"The God in the Machine is vengeful, but he does not lie." Telemos pointed out. "You are fighting this war to save your people. I am here, now, to do the same."
The elevator came to a stop at their floor and the doors opened with a small hiss. Rourke and Telemos stepped off, continuing as they walked on. "You mean now that you've got that whole One last duel with Terrany thing out of your system." Rourke said smugly. When the Primal glared at him, Rourke sighed and nodded. "All right, fine. You're coming with us. But we're only doing your thing after we've done what we're going there for to begin with. Hell, for that matter, why don't we just pack up the Battlenet Relay and take it back home with us?"
"That is…" Telemos paused, both his voice and his feet, and Rourke slowed to give him a chance to finish his thought. The Primal blinked several times, flinched a little, and then sighed. "That is a good idea."
Rourke coughed once as he smiled. "You're pissed off you didn't think of it yourself, aren't you?"
"Immeasurably." The Primal growled, and kept trudging.
Inside of the Wild Fox's Rec Room, they found the other members of the Starfox Team hard at work getting their exercise in along with some of the other crew. While some engineers were huffing away by the free weights, Milo pedaled away on a stationary bicycle, while Dana and Terrany were working through a sparring session with padded helmets and gloves on a wrestling mat. The former test pilot had the upper hand on Terrany, who was breathing hard as she tried to regain her fighting edge.
"Come on, Teri, you can hit harder than that! What's the matter, Rourke wear you out last night?" The tigress goaded the vixen.
"Oh, yeah? Don't think I didn't notice that little limp when you first walked in. What's the matter, stripes, is my big brother too much for you?" Terrany shot back, throwing a high chop that Dana parried. The tigress tried to sweep her legs, but Terrany leapt back a step and came in with a roundhouse kick while Dana was recovering.
It was a split second that kept Dana's head from being kicked sideways when she reared back. She took advantage of Terrany's fatigue and her overextended attack to land a snap palm thrust into the vixen's side and toppled her to the ground, pinning her down with a fist raised up and held steady.
Terrany groaned and slapped the mat. "Thought I had you that time."
"Nearly." Dana cheered her up.
"Getting back into our morning routine, I see." Rourke interrupted, coughing to get their attention. "Do you two seriously talk about your sex lives in the middle of a fight?" Terrany and Dana turned to look at him, and Rourke fidgeted a little under their blank stares. "I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that idea." Milo cracked up laughing at his awkwardness, and Rourke glared at the former sniper. "And you didn't say anything to stop them?"
"Hey, Rourke. All I said was you had to be friends with Terrany. I never said anything about you sleeping with her." Milo countered, bringing his exercise bike to a stop and climbing off of it. "That's all on you."
Rourke drew a hand over his eyes and dragged it down the length of his snout, using the time to compose himself. "All right, all right. You all had a laugh, great. We've got work to do."
"There's a mission?" Dana immediately put her game face on, as Terrany's smirk turned into a scowl. Milo was still smiling, although it was more narrow, and his stance had shifted slightly.
"Impressive." Telemos remarked, more to himself, but loud enough for everyone in the Rec Room to hear him. He ignored the stares of the pilots and still exercising engineers, explaining himself. "In two heartbeats, you move from frivolity to readiness. You continue to surprise me, Starfox."
Rourke looked over to the engineers. "Sorry, fellas. Is it okay if we borrow the room for a briefing?"
The engineers looked at each other for a bit, shrugged, and dropped their weights back onto the racks. With a wave, they walked out, leaving Starfox alone with Telemos.
"Terrany. Doc Bushtail says you're still not combat ready yet." Rourke began.
"I'm working on it, Rourke." She growled out.
"I know you are." He soothed her nerves. "But you're still down an Arwing. Keep after your training. Once the doc signs off on you, we'll start rotating our formation to get you back in the air. Good?"
"…As good as it gets. For now." Terrany surrendered. "So where are you headed today?"
"The Wild Fox and some of the Arwings are headed for Fortuna to deploy another Sentinel early warning satellite. Starfox and Growler Squadron are headed for Zoness." Rourke began. "There's an old mining platform that the Primals took over. They've covered it and other platforms with enough sensors to watch the subspace corridor between our region of space and Macbeth. Seems that beneath it is an underwater mining colony full up with Cornite we need to make our best explosives, and a crew that's been stuck there since the war started. So far as we know, the Primals have no idea that they're down there."
"I sense a but coming." Milo said, and elbowed Dana before she could throw a witty barb at him for the remark.
"The but is that Deep Ear Listening Outpost, as Primal Command calls it, has enough radar coverage to detect any direct approach by air or by orbit." Telemos answered, crossing his arms. "Thus, an alternative solution was proposed. It seems we will be getting our feet wet."
At the blank stares, Rourke chuckled a little. "Yeah. Seems that Wyatt and his grandfather dug up an old Lylat Wars relic from storage. A submarine."
"Wait." Terrany made a face. "You're talking about…"
"Yes." Telemos said.
"But that thing is…"
"Yes." Rourke nodded. Terrany's face squinted up in disapproval.
"I know Arspace builds things to last, but my grandfather only ever used it once if the family stories are true, and it never got used again. What in blazes made them think it was wartime ready?"
"Desperation, most likely." Rourke admitted freely. "But Wyatt promised that they've been upgrading and reinforcing it for a while now. I've never known him to put us in a machine that he and his staff didn't have full confidence in, regardless of the need."
"Hang on, hang on." Dana pointed at Rourke, then swung her finger around to Telemos. "He said we. What does he mean, we?"
Rourke shrugged. "He's coming with us."
"Now, hang on a flapping minute!" Dana sputtered. "This is going to be a full-on mission! We're going to be stuck in a submarine!"
"Until we get aboard the mining platform, then it'll be close combat." Rourke tacked on. Telemos narrowed his eyes as Dana looked between Rourke, Telemos, and then Milo.
"Milo, say something!" Dana begged the raccoon.
With Rourke and Telemos waiting, Milo brought a stubby claw up to the side of his face and scratched at it. The entire time, his face was an emotionless mask as he considered the unusual situation.
"So. Coming with us, huh?" He finally drawled.
"Yes." Telemos said defiantly.
Milo stared at him for a few seconds longer, then finally dropped his arm down and shrugged. "Okay." When Dana grunted in disbelief, the raccoon side-eyed her. "Hey. I trust him. If Rourke says he's coming along with us, then it's for a good reason, considering he still won't fly with us."
"It is." Rourke nodded. "Telemos wants to get the word out to his people that the leadership has been lying to them about the underlying cause of this war. About their own status. Since Deep Ear has a Battlenet Relay, one of our objectives will be to get in there and capture it so he can get the word out. After we've handled all our other objectives."
Terrany looked between the other members of her squadron and the Primal that had gone from trying to kill her to something close to a competitive comrade. Her lips curled slightly around her snout. "This is the kind of thing they should really throw a special forces unit at."
"The ones left to us are on Fortuna. And we're not going there." Rourke said. "You're worried about us, Terrany."
"Damn straight I'm worried. In an Arwing, you've got shields and armor between you and the enemy. This kind of mission…" She fell silent when Rourke slipped a hand under her chin and pulled her in for a soft kiss and a tight hug.
"I'm coming back."
"You'd better." She murmured into his chest, holding him fast until she'd had her fill of his comforting scent. After she pushed Rourke away, she went over to Telemos and stared up at him. The Primal pilot looked down at her, waiting in silence.
"You." She poked his chest. "You bring my friends back alive."
Telemos bobbed his head once. "I will do so." He prepared to leave the room when Terrany suddenly shivered, and her eyes glassed over. "Are you all right, McCloud?"
"Yeah. I just…" She trailed off, pulling herself back together. "Sorry. It just seemed like you were distracted there. Worried, maybe. Or…guilty?"
The Primal blinked. "How could you tell?"
"I felt it?"
Uncaring of the looks garnered from the others in the odd exchange, Telemos watched her for a bit longer before nodding. "You are a daughter of Lylus after all, it seems." He turned around and headed out. "If I die on this mission, Pale Demon, the care of my plant will fall on you. I shall try to save you from that burden."
Once he was gone, Rourke nodded to his team. "Milo, Telemos, get your gear together; anything you think we might need for a ground op. Dana, you're our resident Arspace test pilot, so that means we'll leave the sub driving to you. I'd recommend you study up on it."
"Oh, goody." The tigress grumbled. She reached for a towel and threw it at Terrany before grabbing one for herself. "Nice to know we have a plan. I could have sworn we were winging it again."
"We're Starfox." Terrany said, smiling grimly. "Winging it is our plan."
Deckmore AFB
Outer Tarmac
47th Day of the Primal War
Midday
An Albatross transport ship was a beast unlike any other in the SDF forces; so enormous that it dwarfed the more standard, parallelogram shaped Rondo, it was slow and bulky and entirely defenseless, lacking even the maneuverability that a Rondo possessed. What the Albatross lacked in every other category was space; space enough to house a crippled Arwing or countless pallets of supplies, space enough for the largest ship components that could be thrown at them.
Seeing a submarine being loaded onto one, however, was something that Transport Captain Grant Harvester had never seen before. The ocelot, a rarer breed of feline, tucked his flight helmet under one arm and rubbed at his eyes as the antigrav sleds pushed it up into the belly of his ship. There had been no mistaking that they had some impressive cargo, as it had been rolling over from the Wild Fox parked a kilometer distant for half an hour. And that had been after the base technicians came by and started attaching bulky, thrust-vector equipped rocket pods along the sides of the mammoth transport.
"Captain? External VTOL thruster pods have been installed and read green, and we've got our IF/F codes established." His navigations officer said, handing him over a datapad. Captain Harvester stared at the screen for a bit, grunted, and handed it back.
"Our callsign is Wet Duck. Funny." He put his helmet back on, taking note of an approaching jeep loaded down with pilots and supplies. Once they got close enough and he could recognize them, he rolled his eyes. "Of course it'd be them."
The jeep came to a stop and the Starfox Team, minus Terrany McCloud and plus one unusual looking simian, piled out of it, dragging piles of gear and weapons with them. The scruffy wolf who led the team came up to him and nodded.
"You Captain Harvester?"
"And you'd be Lieutenant O'Donnell. Starfox." Captain Harvester answered. "Mission profile says I'm supposed to fly your team and this submarine to Zoness. Also that we're going to have an Arwing escort, and that we need to be careful."
"The Primals have a lot of sensors in that region of space, watching the subspace lane approaches to Macbeth." Rourke confirmed. He glanced to his teammates. "Milo, Dana, Telemos, get loaded up. Soon as this thing is loaded, we're airborne."
"On it, lieutenant." Milo answered, hefting along his M-62 sniper rifle and a bag full of jingling ammunition. He tugged on Telemos' arm, dragging the surly warrior behind him. Dana looked equally unenthusiastic, and walked at a slower pace behind the other two.
Captain Harvester watched the odd assembly go by, and spoke after they were past. "Only one person on your team is wearing Cornerian green."
"Oh, the pants?" Rourke mused. "Yeah. Milo's the only one in the squad who was regular military."
"Takes all kinds, huh?"
"Especially these days." The wolf's ears perked up when Milo whistled out from the back of the Albatross, and the two turned to look at the ring-tailed raccoon.
Milo had an uneasy smile on. "Hey boss, anytime you're ready. I made off with some medical supplies, and I'd prefer to be gone before Doc Bushtail notices they're missing."
"And that's our cue." Rourke sighed, clapping the ocelot on the shoulder and walking after his team. "Once we're in transit, I'll fill you in on the rest of it. Rest assured, you're going to be a long ways out from where the fighting will be."
"Considering how crazy Starfox operations can get, from what I hear, that isn't much of a reassurance. And those external engine pods aren't doing much to soothe my jangled nerves either."
"You've trained for water landings before, right?"
"On a lake. In a calm day!" Captain Harvester sputtered, trailing after him.
"Right. We're in good hands then." Rourke said cheerfully.
Wild Fox
Medical Bay
Right on time for a double booked physical, the McCloud siblings walked through the doors of the Medical Bay. At the sound of muffled snickers from the pair, Dr. Bushtail settled for a sigh over a groan and stepped out of his office.
"If it isn't my two most reliable patients." He deadpanned. The vulpines looked at one another, and he gestured for his unoccupied exam tables. "Now sit down so I can see if you're as good as you feel."
"Doc, I'm telling you I feel fine." Carl protested, plopping down on the edge.
"He's not using a cane or anything." Terrany added.
"Uh-huh." Dr. Bushtail picked up his medical datapad and detached its wireless probe, calmly running it just above Carl's green fatigue pants from his hips to his ankles. He stared at the results from both limbs for a moment before kneeling down and forcing his leg back by pressing on the shin. "Try and resist me." Carl did so, although he grimaced near the end and his leg still gave way to the determined force. "I thought so. Grade 4 plus. Not perfect, not yet. We took you off the anti-grav belt and off the cane, but you're not there yet."
"Hey, your machine doesn't know everything."
"Yes, that's why I use my hands and manual muscle testing." The simian snapped back. He hit a few more notations on his checklist. "My machine tells me you're still short ten percent of your pre-comatose muscle mass, and eight pounds underweight. What my years of experience tells me is that you've got another week of rehab before we try again. Now, why don't we try some of my favorite basic questions."
"You're supposed to ask those first, doc."
"With an ordinary patient, I would. In your case…both of your cases, don't give me that look, Terrany…I'm forced to take shortcuts to keep you on track." The surgeon gave Terrany a sidewards warning glance to keep her from voicing another argument. He slid the probe back into its charger and started tapping on the screen. "Been sleeping regularly?"
"Six to eight hours when we were at home. Last night, four."
"Hm. Any headaches or fatigue? Nausea?"
"No."
"Have you been sexually active in the last week?"
"Doc, do you have to ask me that in front of my sister?" Carl scratched at his ear in embarrassment.
"I'd say that's a yes." Terrany smirked, folding her arms. "Probably why you only got four hour's sleep last night, Brown Fox."
"…Moving on." Dr. Bushtail quenched his grumpiness through a supreme force of will, and pulled out an intricate latticework helmet from a cabinet close by. "Put that on, lie back, and relax for me. While that's taking your EEG readings, I'm going to have a chat with Terrany."
"Shoot, doc." Terrany said, swinging her feet back and forth as she sat on the edge of her own table. "What's got you worried about me?"
"For starters, we could begin with your latent Cerinian awareness." The simian pulled out a second EEG wiremesh skullcap and handed it to her, and she slipped it on with a small grumble of protest. Dr. Bushtail waited until his medical datapad beeped at him to confirm the device's activation before going on. "Thanks to your particular genetic inheritance from your grandmother's DNA and your mother's recessive genetic framework, you had a certain level of…mental awareness that had me raising my eyebrows even back before you were captured. Your ability to somehow read KIT's mind while you were Merged, or close to Merging. And then there was the mission on Darussia and its aftermath, when you were somehow able to 'speak' into Rourke's mind. The best I could wager a guess with at the time was that you had picked up some of Krystal McCloud's rumored talents, which was all guesswork. Even ROB could only provide so much detail. Most of the secrets the Cerinians had, they took with them to the grave. It wouldn't be amiss to say that we learned more about them in the short twenty minutes we were in the company of Andross than in the 75 years after their death." The surgeon paused and looked up at the ceiling, recalling something. "I think he might have written a paper about them once…Unusual, for his field of study…"
"Yeah, okay. Sometimes, I get feelings." Terrany admitted.
"Recently?" Dr. Bushtail's eyes came down on hers again with terrifying speed. "How much do you remember about the week you spent recuperating back at your home?"
She fidgeted a little, looking over to her brother for support. Carl was lying on his side a meter and a half away, and he gave her a slow nod. "Didn't we talk about this already?"
"You prefer the direct tack instead of circling into it? I can do that." Dr. Bushtail gestured to a nearby monitor by the beds and brought up some graphs. "This is the EEG I took of you back when you first joined up with Project Seraphim." The image of a vulpine brain flickering with color-coded electrical impulses appeared, then was shunted to the side after a second brain scan appeared, this one a touch more active with more yellows than blues. "This one, we took after your mission to Darussia. More active overall, but still within the accepted range. Now this third one, we took after your team and that Primal risked their necks to pull you out of that prison camp." This one showed a brain in a constant state of total activation, lit up with streamers of color that ran almost fully orange with several zones of red. "When KIT was Merged with you completely, your brain was going in full overload. If it hadn't have been for Andross, we would have never separated you two. The scope of just how intertwined you were was leaps and bounds beyond anything I had ever expected to see."
"Still getting used to the idea that nutcase is alive."
"Alive may be something of a flexible term." Dr. Bushtail mused. "You could say that he is as alive as Falco Lombardi still is. Now, after that particular bit of business was done, how do you suppose your brain is doing? With everything you've told me about how you felt and thought during your captivity, witness observations, and this sense of being able to sense the thoughts of others?" He waited while Terrany fidgeted, scowling. "No, go ahead. Take a wild guess. Because that's all we're doing right now, my dear. Guessing. There is no test sample or control group for comparative analysis. There are no other pilots who have your depth of Merge exposure, your genetic markers, your particular profile."
"Then why are you arguing about this?" She demanded. "What's your deal?"
Dr. Bushtail seethed at her fire, but tamped down his first response and settled on something calmer. "What is my purpose here, McCloud?"
"You're…our doctor?"
"Yes. Which means, my primary job is keeping you alive. Right?"
"Yes."
Sherman Bushtail leaned in close to her, his coat blocking the light behind him. "You all place me, on a routine basis, in situations that make that difficult." He ground the words out between clenched teeth. "So when you come tearing in here demanding to have your flight status reinstated, like what you faced was anything as simple as a broken bone or deconditioned muscles, you need to understand just how insensitive that really is."
He tossed the datapad on her lap. "This is your brain now. Tell me what you see."
Unnerved, Terrany looked down at the display, taking her time to consider the image of fluctuating colors.
"It's…active."
"Active in places which we have never mapped primary sensory, control, or processing nodes to." He grunted. "Overall, very active. Your mind is, by my estimates, running at about twice the baseline of where you were during training in the opening days of Project Seraphim. At rest. This is something I haven't seen in any other Merge-capable pilot, and I can't guarantee that putting you back in the cockpit won't kill you. Especially after this." He reached down and punched a button, bringing up a new graph with several jagged lines. "Your EEG data. The blue one is right now. The red one is from when you were Merged with KIT during the rescue mission for Skip over there. And the green one is from your little training session Telemos put you through to snap you out of your funk. Look where it spikes."
"It's…at the same level as the red line."
"Your brain was working just as hard in a simulator, flying solo, as it was weeks ago during that rescue op. The reason we put a limiter on Merge Mode was to decrease strain. Headaches, migraines, those are the least of our concerns. There is only so much a Lylatian brain, regardless of species, can handle. At least that's the standard thinking. I hope that somehow, Cerinians are capable of more, and that there is a certain plasticity which kept you from collapsing during the long period of your Merged co-existence. But you're not a full-blooded Cerinian, nobody ever considered the side effects of a prolonged Merged state, and I'm grasping at straws." Dr. Bushtail set a hand on her shoulder. "I am a hardass. I get it. You all feel like I'm holding you back. If I have to be a bastard, I will be, since that is apparently the only thing keeping you from killing yourself."
They locked eyes, with Terrany finally showing traces of fear as she swallowed.
"So what do we do?" She said, surrendering to his logic.
"Tests." Dr. Bushtail answered immediately. His hand pulled back and his face softened. "Bloodwork. Full body scans. Everything. We're writing the rulebook as we go with you, Terrany. Let me make sure you're still good to fly, so your wings don't burn off when you fly towards the sun."
Albatross Transport Wet Duck
Subspace, Enroute to Zoness
3 Minutes Out
With the submarine inside of the Albatross's expansive cargo compartment, the floor space was rather limited. Available seating space was even worse on the lower deck, which forced the Starfox Team and their Primal cohort to perch on the foldout chairs on the upper deck which connected to the cockpit. Telemos sat impassively, his arms folded and his eyes fixed on Milo as the oldest of their number slowly checked his M-62 sniper rifle over for a fifth time. It was Rourke who fidgeted in his seat the most, his mind awash as he fought through the mission to come.
Telemos finally sighed at the minute antics of the wolf and shook his head despairingly. "Must you squirm about so?"
"There's a difference between sitting in the cockpit of a fighter jet going through subspace and sitting in a cargo bay." Rourke said back. "I've just got a lot on my mind. How come you're so calm?"
"I am no stranger to endless sailing through the stars." The Primal replied, pointedly looking towards Milo after. "Besides. The Marksman makes for an entertaining distraction."
"Just being prepared." Milo muttered, keeping after his task.
"By my count, you have several dozen rounds of both normal projectile slugs and nonlethal anesthetic auto-injector rounds on your person, and whatever mechanical defects might have been present in your weapon have now been fully resolved twice over. I believe what you do is no more than a coping mechanism."
"Hm." Milo made a rude gesture and kept on working, and Telemos rolled his eyes. They were spared further troubles when the intercom spiked on.
"Hey, Starfox. Just a heads up that we're a few minutes from dropping out of subspace along the corridor your Primal indicated was safe from enemy sensors. You all ready to go back there?"
Rourke stood up and punched the squawk on the wall speaker. "Hang on, I'm checking." He glanced to Telemos, who didn't bother even patting the laser rifle slung over his shoulder before nodding. Milo, still not looking up from his work, grumbled a halfhearted 'ready as I'll ever be' before reattaching the trigger guard.
Rourke made his way to the gantry steps and descended down to the Blue Marine. Another quick climb up the rope ladder fixed to its side brought him to the escape hatch, and he stuck his head down inside of the large submersible fighting vehicle.
"Hey!"
There was the sound of something clanking within the tin can followed by a loud bit of female swearing. "What?!" Dana's voice snapped back up the hatch, and she stomped over to glare up at him, trying to mask a grimace of pain with anger.
"How goes the sub training, Dana?"
"So long as nothing breaks down on this thing, I'll manage." She said, rubbing her forehead. "We may be able to fit four of us in here, but with our gear it's going to get crowded."
"So I see." Rourke said, smiling. "You'll do fine, Dana. It's Arspace tech. They make it to last."
"A good thing. I don't plan on dying by drowning."
"Well, you know the old saying. He who buys drowned cat…"
"Finish that sentence, O'Donnell, and I will castrate you." The tigress snarled up, loud enough to be overheard by Milo and Telemos. The retired sniper laughed at the exchange, finally setting his reassembled weapon across his lap as he looked down at the sub.
"Look at you, Rourke. Joking right before a mission. You really have loosened up."
"Well, we've got Telemos with us now. We can't have more than one stick in the mud." Rourke reasoned. He looked back to Milo and Telemos. "Get the sub loaded up. I'll be up front for a while."
The wolf left his comrades and the submarine alone, and made his way up the gantryway of the compartment to the cockpit's hatch. A quick double knock was followed by a short pause before the door hissed open to grant him entry, and after he stepped inside, it sealed shut behind him.
Captain Harvester's ears twitched once before the feline looked back over his shoulder. "Good timing, Lieutenant. We're just about ready to drop out of subspace. We don't often make jumps outside of the ecliptic; this one was a bit interesting."
"They can be." Rourke said. "Do you have contact with Growler Squadron? And have you switched over to LOSIR yet?"
"We established optical interlink the moment we left Katina's orbit." Captain Harvester picked up a wireless radio and handed it back to him. "This one's tied into the ship's transceiver. They'll be able to hear you."
"Thanks." Rourke double-clicked the radio before speaking. "Lone Wolf to Old Dog. You there?"
"Don't call me that, lieutenant." Captain Hound growled back angrily. "What do you need?"
"Just making sure you were still with us. The Albatross cockpit doesn't exactly have a full field of vision like an Arwing's does."
"We're here. We've already talked it over with the Wet Duck; we'll fly in protective escort formation around you on the descent to the surface. Navigation is up to them, though. Standard satellites have been shot out of the sky, so we've got nothing to go off of."
"Trade secrets, Growler 1." Captain Harvester smirked, using his own wired mike to respond. He hung it back up and cleared his throat. "It's actually Ensign Savich's plan." The ocelot jerked a thumb towards an unusually slim panda who was manning the navigations console. "Seems he was something of an old hat flying SDF crews in and out of Zoness back before he got assigned to my crew."
"I'll tell you once we start in. I need to concentrate first." The panda grunted, waving a hand in lieu of actually looking at Rourke. "Captain, we'll be exiting subspace in five…four…"
The rest of the countdown was silent, and Rourke braced himself for the shudder that came with the dimensional shift. The luminescent tunnel of purple and blue faded in a flash, and was replaced with a familiar sea of glimmering stars and a hazy greenish-blue world dead ahead of them.
"All right. Scanning for ELF radio frequencies." Ensign Savich said, muttering to himself. His console shone with line after line of unintelligible code that ran by, one after the other, before the panda cackled. "Gotcha. Okay. Now...Captain, bring us in closer. We need to be at below 40,000 kilometers in altitude for me to link up."
While not aware of what Savich was fully doing, Rourke knew well enough to keep quiet and let them work. Growler Squadron closed in around them, with one Arwing taking point slightly above and ahead of the Albatross. As the planet grew larger and larger in the transport's canopy, Ensign Savich finally let out another triumphant cackle. "39,950 kilometers. Signal established. Downloading grid coordinates." His fingers flew over his console's control pad, and in under a minute, the panda nodded in satisfaction. "Map established, captain. Uploading course correction for safe vector to you now. Our approach angle was almost right on the money."
Captain Harvester flipped down his helmet's visor to look at the HUD readout, and smiled. "Confirmed, Ensign. Good work. Starting our course in."
Rourke looked to Ensign Savich, who fluffed up a bit under the praise and turned to give Rourke his best smug stare.
"You see, the SDF sometimes commissioned 'black' flights through Zoness airspace, and that meant keeping them off of sensor logs. Masking radar returns was doable with countersignal jamming, but the GPS transponder would have given away any plane's exact coordinates and name regardless. So on those flights, what we started doing was using a completely separate satellite network, the ZOSS. Zoness Oceanic Survey Satellites. They link up to automated buoys down on the surface with directional ELF radio frequencies. Those buoys get used to determine wave crest height, salinity, surface temperature and conditions, pollutants, that sort of thing. But in a pinch, since they all run off a strict grid system, so long as you can pick up the ELF buoy transmissions and have a map of how they're laid out, you can plot your position to within a quarter kilometer. I was hoping that the Primals would have overlooked the ZOSS network as unimportant and left it alone, since it doesn't transmit anything they'd consider useful in a military sense. They took out all the GPS relays in orbit along with the civilian and military subspace transceivers, but they ignored the ZOSS. And right now, our ship is masquerading as a ZOSS satellite in the signal traffic. If they're even paying attention to it after dismissing it for so long, there's nothing amiss."
"That's one hell of a back door." Rourke conceded. "You've probably been where we're headed."
"Platform 43, yes sir, lieutenant." The Ensign confirmed. "We'll put down right outside the edge of their radar umbrella, just where we need to be."
"Once we're feet wet, though, we'll have to launch you quick." Captain Harvester reminded him. "An Albatross wasn't meant to take on a belly full of seawater, even with those VTOL thruster pods helping out. One bad wave before we can dump you and the ballast and regain our buoyancy, and none of us are flying home after this."
"We'll be ready, captain." Rourke reassured him. "I'd best load up with everyone else now."
Leaving the cockpit behind as it sealed shut once more, Rourke clambered down to the Blue Marine and made his way to the top hatch. Going down the hatch ladder after sealing it closed, he found himself in the cramped confines of the submarine's interior.
The Blue Marine was meant to be crewed by a team of four originally, and it still had the same belted chairs and consoles as it had when it was first constructed. The bulk of the ship's functions, however, had been routed to the pilot's console, and the HUD had been updated significantly alongside its weapons systems, pressure plating, and shields.
"How are we looking, Dana?" Rourke asked, sitting down in the last open chair and strapping himself in.
"Fusion generator is at idle and all systems are green and on standby." The tigress answered.
"Good. Milo, how's navigations?"
"We're getting the feed from Wet Duck's systems right now. Once we launch, we'll be able to stay uplinked through the ZOSS network and make our way to Platform 43 without difficulty." The raccoon paused before chuckling. "Hell of an idea."
"You Cornerians can be very devious when forced into it." Telemos grumbled, adjusting his uniform black combat suit. He had foregone his usual Primal uniform in favor of something which was better suited for infiltration, but it was clear that it wasn't broken in to a level of comfort yet. He kicked the small pile of supplies that they had brought with them, minus Milo's sniper rifle, which was bungee'd to the wall beside the raccoon with loving care. "We are ready for whatever comes at us, but I have the Marksman's assurance that we will use nonlethal systems until forced."
"Killing everyone isn't our goal on this mission, Telemos." Rourke reminded him. "We neutralize the base, get the Cornite, and if we can, steal their Battlenet Relay. Or as much of it as we can pack up with us."
Telemos grunted and went back to staring at his screen, which was right when the Blue Marine started to vibrate and shake violently. Rourke glanced over to Dana, taking note of her relative calm.
"Not me, boss. Re-entry."
"Right." Rourke settled into his chair and waited the minute and a half it took for the buffeting of the planet's atmosphere against the shields and hull of the Wet Duck to subside, which placed them in atmosphere.
Another two minutes later, their radio, set to local wireless only, spritzed to life. "Wet Duck to Blue Marine. We're ready to splash down and flood the cargo bay. Are you all buttoned up back there?"
Dana brought up a new menu at her console, reviewing the submarine's status. The onboard computer responded to her in an emotionless monotone. "Ship seals at full integrity. Ready to dive." The tigress grunted and punched the squawk. "We're ready here. Once we launch, it'll take us about four hours to get to Platform 43. Hope you all brought some puzzle games along."
"Standby."
There was more shaking, and then the strange sound of a muted roar from outside their pressurized interior. Flooding, they all realized. Dana shivered a bit and punched in another button, and the panoramic screen at her forward facing seat lit up into an HUD unlike anything they'd ever seen before, with what seemed like a blurry interior of the Albatross's cargo compartment.
"A sonar-based visual display." The tigress explained, taking note of the puzzled glances from the others. "There's a short range visual scanner, but this is the default. This thing's designed to go deep. Apparently, you get below a certain depth and sunlight can't get through. This sub's designed to take incoming sound waves and interpret them into a visual layout for the crew. Right now, it's on passive sonar only, so we're 'seeing' the image made by water flooding the compartment and crashing against the walls."
"And the submarine with us in it." Telemos added soberly.
Dana ignored him, bringing up more data to the HUD, which quickly filled with shield and hull integrity status bars, weapons status, a thruster gauge, and a sonar systems marker. The last to appear was the targeting system, dead center in the display.
"Think I prefer an actual canopy to this." Dana scoffed.
"Compartment flooding complete." The radio operator of Wet Duck called in. "VTOL thrusters are firing and holding us steady. Disengaging magnetic docking clamps. Blue Marine, you are go for launch!" As he spoke, there was a definite ka-chunk, followed by the Blue Marine shifting slightly as it went from tethered to floating in open water.
"Acknowledged. Heading out." Dana reached for the throttle, and the single propeller, or screw, of the Blue Marine began to turn and generate power.
The menacing weapon of underwater warfare knifed out of the Wet Duck's belly and into open water. Dana spun the submarine around to get a picture of the transport, which even above water, was generating enough noise for the sub to make a complete, if grainy picture. It rose back up into the air on its external thruster pods, tilted slightly to pour out all the water it had been flooded with, then closed its massive doors and settled back onto the water again, this time with enough buoyancy to float unaided. Around them, the three Arwings of Growler Squadron were locked in a lazy circle at low cruising speed and at low altitude, keeping vigil.
"Wet Duck is stable and on standby. Good hunting, Starfox." The radio went off one last time, with the comm line indicating an optical linkup at last.
Dana didn't waste time answering. "Setting course. ETA…four hours. Hang on to something."
Everyone braced as the submarine pulled away from the transport and dove deep. The whir of the propeller was steady as the depth gauge passed 50 meters, then 100, and then settled at 150 as she leveled out.
Rourke let go of a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding as the attitude of submarine pulled steady again. "I thought you said to hang on to something."
Dana harrumphed and allowed herself a small smirk as she started flipping switches around the crowded pilot's chair. "You didn't read the manual like I did, lieutenant."
"Water displacement systems activated. Structural reinforcement at maximum. Sonar now in Active Mode."
"That sounds ominous." Telemos said. "What devilish trick are you Cornerians using now?"
"Supercavitation." Dana explained, which was met with blank stares from the men inside the submarine's cramped compartment. The tigress sighed and rolled her eyes. "Making air bubbles on purpose. The Blue Marine's shields expand out, vaporize the water around us, give us an air bubble to 'fly' in. Water's dense. If you want to go really fast, you have to push it out of the way. Your people do sonar sweeps, Telemos?"
"We look for trouble from the skies. Not the oceans." Telemos said, the skin under his fur going pale as he realized what exactly 'supercavitation' entailed. "We'll be crushed the moment we slow down."
"Maybe." Dana grinned, and pushed the throttle to flank, then pushed in the small red button on the side of the stick. The loud roar of the Blue Marine's rechargeable rocket impellers kicking on drowned out the steady thrum of the screw, and jerked everyone against their harnesses. Ensconced inside a constantly refreshing bubble of air beat on by the pressures of the deep and hurtling ahead at the breakneck speed of over 250 kilometers an hour, the submarine passed through the water and split it like a spear. At its full, upgraded speed, the Blue Marine screamed towards its goal a little more than 1000 kilometers away.
Deep Ear Listening Outpost
Crew Quarters
Lashal Orrek considered himself an honorable soldier of the Primal Armada first, a good father and husband second, and a creature of routine a close third. Due to an irregularity in its rotational axis, Zoness only had a limited span of three hours of darkness after the larger blue giant star fell past the horizon before the smaller red dwarf star rose. During Solar's much more prolonged daytime cycle due to its proximity, Zoness's atmosphere took on the duller, hazier tones of olive and sepia that the abysmal world was famous for.
His mate, Marena, was up and making a cup of the bitter stimulant drink that the Cornerians favored as he came out of their quarters dressed in casual fatigues. She looked over and smiled at him, the wrinkles in the light brown fur around her eyes crinkling a little as she did so. In the dim light of the living room's kitchenette, the golden collar around her neck gleamed.
She handed him a cup as he came up to her and gave her a gentle kiss. She hummed pleasantly as he pulled away and took a drink. "Morning, husband."
"Marena." Lashal smiled. He was not sure how other Primals acted with their mates in private, but he had chosen her out of love, and gave her as much in the way of freedom and personal choice as their circumstances and society allowed. He took another drink and nodded. "You added sugar."
"You like it, though." She pointed out. Lashal humphed and nodded in agreement. The Cornerians had far more of it than the Primals had, and their love of a sweet tooth had slowly been spreading among the reclaiming forces. "What are you doing today?"
"Patrol, later on." Lashal said, setting the cup aside and pulling his wife closer to him. "How is Selim adjusting?"
"He is still young enough to not fully understand what is happening." Marena said. "But the lack of consistency is…making him irritable."
"He isn't giving you any trouble?"
"He is two. What do you think he acts like?" She countered wryly.
Lashal nodded. "I will speak with him then, before I go. Would you want to go on a run with me this morning?"
"And leave Selim alone, unsupervised?" Marena rolled her eyes. "A recipe for disaster. Do not worry, love. We shall go and play later today after breakfast. There are spots in this…floating prison where we can still enjoy ourselves with games."
"If any of the guards give you trouble, you tell me about it." Lashal said, giving her forearm a firm squeeze.
Marena looked down at the floor. "And what would you tell them? They would be in their rights to send us…me…back to our quarters here."
"I think that I would disagree strongly on that." Lashal growled. "I serve with honor, and I am no prisoner. What, save for the control room, hangar, and armory, should be off-limits to you in this place? You deserve better, Marena."
She quelled his rising irritation with a kiss, and then pulled him down to rest his forehead upon her own. "I am with you, and you have always been faithful. You give me enough."
"I love you." Lashal whispered to her, letting the harsh qualities of rigid Primal discipline fall away in the tender moment. A look of longing and respect passed between them, and she released her grasp on his head with a smirk.
"Now go. Talk to your son." She shooed him away.
"Yes, dear." He chortled, picking up his coffee mug and drinking it as he strolled towards Selim's door and opened it slowly.
His two year old son was inside and sleeping like the dead. He was a heavy sleeper, a quality that military training would likely grind out of him later in life. It stung Lashal at times to think that his son's bright and eager disposition would one day either be masked by cynical sarcasm like in Lashal and Vodari, or be wiped away completely, as had happened in the case of Telemos.
Telemos. The memory of his superior made him pause in the doorway, and not for the first time, Lashal asked himself if he had made the right choice letting Telemos escape from prison. It had been wrong what the Tribunes and that Geasbreaker had accused and arrested him for, but there was some truth that the total discipline and control he had always respected his friend and superior for had eroded rapidly after his encounter with the Pale Demon. He had made a judgment call in the moment in that corridor of the Temple of Antiquity with the alarms wailing.
He shook his head. Right or wrong, the decision had been made. It was a decision that had led to Telemos going completely rogue, killing his own people to save Terrany. All for the hope of one final duel.
With any luck, Telemos had died at her hands the second time, or at the least, had been shot by the Cornerians after the fact. One could not trust a traitor, after all.
Telemos had nothing to do with his life now.
With the light shining in through the doorway and on his face, Selim stirred and grunted in irritation. Lashal went to the side of the boy's cot and knelt down beside it, calmly making small noises to get his son's attention.
"Mwuh?" Selim muzzily got out. "Daddy?"
"Yes, Selim." Lashal said, softly. "I have to get to work soon. But I wanted to see you first."
"Sleepy, daddy." Selim groaned, rubbing at his eyes as he shifted.
"I know." Lashal paused. "Your mother tells me that you have been acting out."
"…don't like here." The child grumbled.
"Can I tell you a secret?" Lashal whispered in conspiratorial fashion. That got Selim to finish blinking the sleep out of his eyes long enough to focus on him. "I don't much like it here myself either. But, sometimes adults need to do things they don't like. Or go places that they don't want to be. We do it so we can protect the ones we love." He nudged a finger into his son's chest, earning a slight giggle. "So I can protect you. Do you understand, son?"
"Yes?" Selim yawned, which was his way of saying, minus a few words, that he didn't like it but he knew better than to argue.
"So. I need you to be brave for me. I need you to be good for your mother. Can you do that, Selim? Can you be my brave little soldier?"
"Yes, daddy."
"Good." Lashal rubbed the top of his head affectionately. "Be good, son. I'll see you later."
He passed by his wife on the way out, and after only a moment's deliberation, kissed her again before exiting their quarters. Outside in the corridor, Lashal closed his eyes and took several breaths to reorient himself.
The caring father disappeared when he opened his eyes.
The Primal pilot and warrior started his morning jog.
Wild Fox
Bridge
The on-duty communications officer for the shift was Sasha, a soft-nosed bat who was now very familiar with the Wild Fox's unique setup and systems. She nodded slightly as another communication came in over her headset, and keyed up a quick reply before turning her attention to the command chair in the center of the bridge.
"General Grey, another communication from the Trawler. They're powering up the Sentinel-2 for deployment."
"Good." The grizzled hound dog removed his hat to scratch at an itch under his head. "ETA to Fortuna?"
"We'll be dropping out of FTL in about five minutes, general." Updraft chirped from the pilot's seat.
"Four minutes and fifty seconds, to be exact." ROB clarified from his own perch at weapons. The cardinal stuck his tongue out of his beak at the robot, who naturally, said nothing in reply.
Carl McCloud had been quiet so far at his own station on the bridge, occasionally responding to something on his headset. "Typhoon Squadron is still holding position. Exterior ship cameras show them in escort formation around the Trawler, right where they're supposed to be."
"Good." General Grey let his gaze do a slow sweep of the bridge. It was something that he'd picked up with experience; watching everyone without giving the impression he was watching anyone. Done right, it kept the animals under his command at ease while still letting him see the chaos of operations unfold.
Hogsmeade was over at SWACS with a new crewmember he was training up. The porcine radar operator had been running himself ragged keeping the Wild Fox's airspace monitored during operations, and the presence of Airman Deke Lepper, a skinny and nervous looking gray-furred rabbit, was a balm that things would change. The rookie just had to put up with another few weeks of Hogsmeade 'mentoring' him, and then they would have someone who could run the system and give ROB a break from manning it when Hogsmeade was off-duty.
"Seriously kid, you're going to give me a coronary at this rate." Hogsmeade groaned. "This is day one stuff here! Don't just count on the computer giving you a readout of every return you get, when we stumble into a furball you won't have the time to zoom in on every contact and hope that the computer recognizes it. You identified that contact as a battlecruiser, but it was actually two squadron's worth of Splinter drones flying in tight formation. Looking a little closer would have let you see the small bits of space between them, but you eyeballed the blur."
"Sorry sir, I'm doing my best."
"Creator help us." Hogsmeade groaned, punching in some more buttons. "All right, let's start up another quick sim. You're getting better with your bearings and ranges at least. This'll be the last one, though. Once we drop out of subspace, I'll have to take over for the mission."
"You know kid, he gets riding you too hard, you could always ask him about the solar panel incident back on Ursa Station." XO Dander suggested. The tom stepped away from the ship status monitors and folded his arms while smiling. The veterans of Ursa Station around the bridge instantly started chuckling, while Hogsmeade himself went from pink-cheeked to red in short order.
"XO, we don't have time to reminisce, I was in the middle of educating this rookie about the intricacies of wartime radar operations…"
"No, you were riding his ass about it." Dander yawned.
"What about the solar panel incident?" Airman Lepper asked eagerly.
Hogsmeade drew a hand over his face. "Fine. I misidentified an object back on Ursa Station when we were still a black budget project."
"Hey, you want to tell the story, tell it right." Dander ribbed him again. "Hogsmeade here was used to serving on warships, but Ursa Station was an old junkheap of a space platform before we converted it for Project Seraphim. Most of the radar systems didn't really have the finesse he was used to, and he decides to tinker around with it one day for better resolution. While he was doing that, he accidentally jostled the monitor resolution up a few factors and didn't notice it. When he reboots the system and it comes online, the bits of debris hanging around Ursa looked like station-killing asteroids, and he sounded the alarm. We sent out spotter ships to get visual confirmation, and they ended up coming back aboard with…" He paused, giving Lepper a chance to laugh in realization before finishing, "…An old solar panel."
After the laughter had died down, Hogsmeade cleared his throat loudly, trying to restore his lost air of command. "Yes, well. That's why it's so important for you to get it right, sport. It wouldn't do to go making the same mistakes I did."
"Yes, sir." Lepper answered, still grinning. Hogsmeade glowered at Dander, who innocently shrugged and turned back to his own console. There was peaceful silence until Updraft called out the thirty second warning, and everyone straightened up as they prepared to exit subspace.
The drop from the wavy deep purples to a field of stars was attention grabbing as ever, and the lush, green world of Fortuna below them even more so.
"Strongwing has established contact, General." Sasha announced. "They're welcoming us back to their airspace."
"Any radar contacts, Hogsmeade?" General Grey asked.
"No enemy radar contacts in range, General, but I haven't finished rebooting the MIDS array yet. That'll take me about another four minutes."
"Very well." Grey gestured to Carl. "Major, signal Typhoon Squadron to continue escort for the Trawler. Commence Operation Dragline."
Everybody on the bridge started moving, with Skip radioing the 5th Arwing Squadron while Sasha made contact with the Albatross hauling the enormous MIDS-equipped satellite. XO Dander found himself busy keeping in touch with the various stations aboard the ship, most significantly the hangar bay, where Rondo transports already loaded with supplies for Fortuna's sole standing army base were preparing to be lowered down into the launch bay beneath it.
All the while, Hogsmeade and his trainee were busily powering up the Wild Fox's MIDS array from its standby status.
"Man, if the MIDS is so useful, why put it offline when we jump to FTL?"
"Wyatt could give you a more scientific answer than I could, he actually cares about the principle behind it." Hogsmeade told him, both eyes centered on the status bars as the sensitive signal collectors sluggishly woke back up again. "The short version is, the MIDS picks up the disturbances in spacetime caused by objects in realspace and subspace. It's sensitive enough that whatever uses it can't be going anywhere near relativistic speeds, or it'd fry the sensor array entirely. So whenever we make an FTL jump, we have to power it down into safe mode and then bring it back up after we get to wherever we were going."
"Seems like the kind of thing they'd want to fix." Lepper said. Hogsmeade snorted in reply.
"Great. You can tell him to focus on that instead of the forty-three other things stacked on his plate. Relax, kid, we're almost done."
One by one, the system startup and diagnostics cleared green, and finally, the MIDS powered on and gave Hogsmeade back the sharper set of eyes he'd now grown fully accustomed to.
Two seconds after his sensor display globe came online, Hogsmeade swore and punched the alarm at his station, setting the klaxons blaring.
"What the hell?!" Carl McCloud sputtered, jerking his head over. Hogsmeade's face was hard, and he didn't look away from his station.
"Incoming traveler from subspace, ETA one minute. Bearing puts it on a course solidly from Primal-held territory. Looks like a capital ship, by the size of it."
"Were we expecting any other arrivals to Fortuna?" Grey looked over to Sasha. "Radio Strongwing, get a confirmation. XO, halt the transport launches. Major, recall Typhoon Squadron and the Trawler, get them back under close cover."
Repeats of his orders came back one after the other, and the Wild Fox slowly began to shift from escort to wartime status. It wasn't happening soon enough for anyone's liking.
"Sir, Strongwing just radioed back. They weren't expecting any subspace traffic along that vector." Sasha called out, nervous but still professional. Grey nodded stiffly, and left a mental reminder to give her some words of praise after this mess was concluded. Sasha wasn't regular military, but she'd seen enough action that she put on a brave face in a crisis and pushed through it. They all did now.
"The Trawler and Typhoon Squadron is reversing their course, but the Albatross doesn't hustle. They won't make it here before our visitor pops in." Carl announced.
"Gnh. Dander, transport status?"
"We're pulling the Rondos up out of the launch bay as quick as we can, but our launch crew estimates it'll be 90 seconds after the bogey's arrival before we'll be able to launch Renegade Squadron in full." XO Dander responded. Grey chewed the stem of his corncob pipe all the harder and squinted his eyes.
"Do we have an estimated dropout point for our visitors at least?"
"Affirmative." ROB's mechanical head lowered and raised itself exactly once. Grey turned to the robot and nodded.
"Ship armament status?"
"Turbolasers online. Three Lylus cruise missiles ready for launch in tubes one, three, and four. Shields at maximum and fully deployed."
Grey hesitated, and ROB prompted him. "Shall I arm the missiles and fire them to impact on target immediately following its drop from subspace?"
"Like we did with the Super Saucerer?" Grey muttered. "It's the safe play, but if it's a friendly, we'll have taken out an asset we can't afford to lose. No. Hold your fire until we can confirm the target's IF/F. The moment you can positively identify it as a Primal ship, don't wait for the order, ROB. Light it up. But keep one missile in reserve…firing all of them off is cowboy tactics. Helm, line us up so we'll be pointed right off of them."
"Affirmative. De-selecting Tube four."
"Twenty seconds to inbound subspace drop." Hogsmeade called out nervously.
General Grey pulled his pipe out of his mouth and twirled it by the stem. "Ready the jamming beam. If they're unfriendly, I don't want them calling home."
Save for that one last confirmation of his order, the bridge fell quiet, unable to do anything but wait and count down the seconds.
"Subspace rupture!" Hogsmeade shouted out, as the timer passed two seconds.
What blasted out of the rift into normal space was anything but a Cornerian vessel. As prompted, ROB didn't bother answering anyone, simply putting the ship's weapons to good use, opening up with a blistering salvo of turbo-laserfire and popping off both of the approved cruise missiles.
"Jamming beam active!" XO Dander announced, doing so only because ROB couldn't be bothered to announce it himself while he was focused on the guns.
With the ship now firmly in radar detection range, Hogsmeade quickly compared the cross-section with their growing database of Primal ships. "It's Primal, all right. I'd say it was a Blackout drone carrier, but this one's…different. It's smaller than an Eclipse manned carrier, though."
"We've got visual. Putting it up now!" Sasha shouted. The bridge's main monitor blazed to life, displaying an ominous dual-nosed gray ship, sleeker than other carriers of its kind and bristling with defensive armaments. The first shots fired by the Wild Fox struck it and were absorbed by the ship's shields, which flared wildly before dissipating the energy of the attack.
Shortly after, the doors on the front of its two forward sections opened, revealing a long corridor that ran the length of the ship. The hangar bays.
A swarm of drone fighters came pouring out of the ship, more than could be counted by the naked eye, and the ship turned towards the Wild Fox, putting on speed to close the distance between them. The two Lylus missiles, flying at breakneck speeds, were lit up by a tremendous array of point defense lasers that slid out from more than three dozen newly opened ports along its dorsal and ventral surfaces, blowing both of them apart long before they could pose a threat to it.
Grey heard himself swallow down the lump building in his throat.
"Get Renegade Squadron in the air. Now."
Zoness
Deep Ear Outpost (Beneath the Platform, Sea Surface)
In the end, it hadn't taken them a full four hours to reach their destination; only three and a half, as Dana had finally gotten comfortable enough with the Blue Marine's supercavitation drive to push it those last two dozen knots further. The shorter trip was small consolation for the other three who'd stayed fairly clenched up for the entire dive. Aside from the noise of the constant water displacement and its reformation in their wake, it had actually been peaceful, Dana thought. Milo had the easiest time of any of them, because he'd slipped in his shooter's earplugs and set them to maximum sound dampening. The stop had been the most jarring part, not because they hit the brakes suddenly, but the act of slowing down finally allowed the water to close in on them from all sides with a heavy slap against the shields and reinforced hull. Using a less powerful version of the sub's active radar had guided them in the final five kilometers to the Primal sensor outpost, and more importantly, to the central pillar which led from the floating rig to the seafloor thousands of meters below. Pulling alongside of it, Dana had slowly guided the Blue Marine up towards the surface. When they finally breached it and popped the hatch, the cool recycled air of the cabin was suddenly filled with the musty and slightly stinging scent of the polluted Zonessan seas.
Milo was the first out, leveling his sniper rifle after clambering out of the hatch and making a slow turn of the platform's underside. Constantly going between his scope and his own eyes, he nodded and gestured for the others to follow. Telemos was the next one up, a laser rifle slung over his shoulder and a heavy bag of supplies being dragged behind him, and Rourke was the last one out with an equally bulky supply kit.
Dana stood at the bottom of the ladder and looked up with squinted eyes. Even out of direct sunlight, morning had come to Zoness and it was still fairly blinding after hours in the soft lighting of a darkened sub.
"No cameras underneath, Milo says." Rourke called down to her, keeping his voice just loud enough to be heard over the lapping of the waves against the Blue Marine's hull. "You've got the easy job after this."
"Easy, he says. Going down deep enough that the smallest crack in this thing's plating would cause it to implode and kill me in a millisecond." Dana gave him a look. "And then hoping that we can establish contact with the folks in the undersea mining operation. Yeah, easy."
"You want my job?"
"No thanks. I'll leave the sneaking and the subterfuge up to you, the old man, and that Primal." She stuck her tongue out at him. "Now seal the hatch and get going. I'm diving in exactly one minute. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight…"
Rourke flipped her off before slamming the hatch shut and spinning the wheel. Dana went up the ladder a bit and wiggled the handle, double checking the lock. Satisfied, especially after the interior hissed with repressurized air, Dana made her way back to the pilot's chair and checked the ship status.
"All green still. Astonishing." She muttered. "Arspace really does build things to last." A look through the overhead exterior cameras showed Milo grappling his way to the side of the platform, presumably to clamber up for a bird's eye view of the exterior and any patrols about, while Rourke and Telemos made their way for the singular access door on the platform's lower half, off to one side of it.
The dive down wasn't too terribly difficult; a retaking of ballast in the dive tanks, and the Blue Marine achieved negative buoyancy, slipping beneath the waves. With the screw churning away, the tigress refrained from the blistering speed of supercavitation and settled on a still (For underwater) blazing pace of forty knots. Two and a half minutes passed by in relative silence, the faint noise of the submarine complemented by the steady pinging of her sonar off of the lift shaft's outer surface while she corkscrewed down around it.
At 3,100 meters down, she was forced to pull away from the shaft as the surface of a high-strength, reinforced geodesic dome appeared on her monitors. "Well. That should do it." Dana said to herself, powering on the submarine's secondary communications systems. The sound-powered telephone started to come online, and she took several breaths as the Blue Marine settled to a midwater drift well clear of the dome.
"Now, what's the best way to phrase this?" She asked herself. "Hi there, I hope you're all still alive? Hey, you may not believe it, but I'm with Starfox and we're here to rescue you?"
Dana was interrupted by the noise of the Blue Marine's threat alarms going off in a loud wail. The tigress froze up, because an attack was the last thing she'd been expecting this deep down. But there it was on her active sonar; nearly half a dozen fast-moving objects were tracking up from the seabed around the dome and homing in on her. She swore and kicked the throttle back up, even hitting the booster for an additional splash of speed as she tore away from the dome. The nearest of the objects, which her sonar imager seemed to indicate was some kind of underwater drone, got near enough to her before she reached speed to trigger some sort of proximity switch; that was her assumption, because an enormous Cornite-fueled fireball exploded underwater, bouncing her wildly in her harness and even rattling her shield and hull status gauges.
"Warning. Modified underwater explosive device detected. Reinforced hull integrity now at 92 percent. Please take evasive maneuvers."
"No shit!" Dana snarled, pouring on the speed as the other five came after her. Worse, her sonar showed another half-dozen modified drone torpedoes taking off from the seabed towards her. "Not so helpless down here after all, were they?" She slammed her hydrophone's activation toggle. "Attention, Cornerian personnel! This is Dana Tiger of the Starfox Team, you've currently got me in your sights! Cease fire, I repeat, cease fire!"
Deep Ear Listening Outpost
Interior
For a dilapidated and abandoned mining platform, the Cornerians had given the structure some impressively large storage areas and corridors. Save for the interior spaces where the living quarters, control centers, and other places were, the rest of the platform's hallways were twice as wide across and just as high. A full circuit of Deep Ear's outer pavilions and corridors had taken him a full forty minutes to jog yesterday. That included the stretch along the platform's runway, naturally, which circumstances this morning hadn't allowed for.
The exercise was soothing, and gave the Primal time to let his mind drift. There were few Primal sentries out this early in the day, and the ones who were on duty were clearly not all that concerned about intruders. They had merely nodded and waved Lashal on through one checkpoint to the next, eager to minimize their interactions. He tried not to think of them, or why they were so loathe to converse with him and the other two members of his Squadron.
It gave him time to think on other matters. Like, why were the corridors here in the outer reaches of the old platform so large? Had they been designed to allow large machines and heavy equipment through, back when it was in operation? It would explain the sizable storage areas, at least. One thing that had forever impressed him was just how stable the platform actually was. The Cornerians clearly had a mastery of non-warfare related engineering far beyond their own. Five pillar descended down beneath the ocean surface, both holding the station aloft and without suffering the rocking motion of the seas. He turned the corner away from the direction of the hangar bays and runway and started down the hall, passing by several double-door storage rooms, all of them kept wide open.
Except one just before the next bend in the hallway. Lashal slowed as he neared it, confused. This was only his second day running this course for exercise, but he'd noticed the day before that the Primal security preferred to keep every non-critical door open. Why would this one suddenly be closed?
He would have dismissed it as just idle curiosity had he not sniffed the unmistakable scent of burned air and ozone from the closed entrance. That was enough to make him scowl and reach for the handle. Had the security troopers assigned to the base gotten so bored that they had erected an illegal shooting range in the outer reaches of Deep Ear?
Twisting the knob and pulling the door open, he stepped inside, ready to give his fellow Primals an earful regardless of what they thought of him. He was five feet in and had just passed a rack of empty shelves when the smell hit him. Not just ozone. Burned electronics. Sniffing the air, he turned and looked up and into the corner.
One of the base security cameras had been shot out by a laser weapon, if the scouring on the wall was any indication. He felt his heart stutter. Not even a Primal soldier would do that.
The barrel of a weapon suddenly dug into the side of his gut at a low angle, making him freeze.
"Move, or make a sound, and I kill you where you stand." A low voice said, in the Cornerian tongue. Biting his lip, Lashal bent his eyes down and to his left as far as he could, until he could just make out the form of a gray-furred wolf in combat gear kneeling on the floor behind an empty crate, one arm extended up at him with a fierce looking laser pistol in his grip. The look in his eyes promised exactly what he'd spoken if not obeyed.
Lashal Orrek heard the metal door he'd wandered through close behind him; the faintness of the noise only perceptible from the total silence of the standoff. That was when he heard a voice he had thought dead to him forever.
"Rourke. Stand down. I know him."
"You're not the lead on this mission." The wolf named Rourke growled, and Lashal felt his memory tickle further. He knew this wolf. The Cornerian belonged to Starfox.
"Just do it." The other room's occupant hissed, and Rourke complied with a growl, standing up and pulling his weapon back. He didn't point it at Lashal, but he didn't put it away either, keeping it in low ready just in case. "Lashal Orrek."
Lashal shut his eyes to hide the sting of betrayal he felt from that voice speaking his name. He slowly turned around, praying that somehow he was wrong, that the Cornerians were merely mimicking that voice. He opened his eyes.
And there he was. Phoenix 1. Telemos Fendhausen, formerly of the Sixth Noble House of Radiance. His former commanding officer…his oldest friend.
His enemy.
"Lashal…" Telemos said, an uneasy and pained look spreading on his face as he stood by the now closed door. "…What are you doing here?"
