Chapter 15.
Dirty Work
First, I'd like to apologize for how long this chapter took. I think I've kept y'all waiting long enough.
Second, this story broke 3000 views! Thanks, y'all. It feels good hitting that number, mostly because it means that this is my most-viewed story. I put the most work into this one, and I think it shows. So thanks again for taking the time to read what I have to write. I appreciate all y'all's reviews. They help me become a better writer.
Fox leaned back in his chair, staring at the photograph on his monitor. He felt his fur raise just looking at it, but he didn't feel anything like what he heard from Falco's report. Maybe keeping the sunglasses on reduced the effect, or something else entirely kept the ferret's image from affecting him, even when he stared directly into the shades.
Fox felt a prickling shiver run down his back, but he kept staring back at the well-dressed ferret, and then went back to scrolling through the attached news story.
...the ringleader of the assault on Venom was confirmed dead in the battle between the asteroid's security forces and the Venomian terrorists. Various sources, from members of the asteroid security team to members of the deeper Order itself, confirmed his identity as Blake Weathers, a high-ranking donor within the Order.
His disproportionate influence within the institution only became apparent after several sizeable donations linked to offworld accounts. His presence ended altogether in the weeks leading up to the asteroid's assault...
Fox skimmed further down to another photo, this time titled Weathers' Apartment in Fichina City, complete with a street and a date. He narrowed his eyes as his gaze settled on portraits of Andross.
Dozens of portraits. All lining a section of the wall, complete with a raised table and small statues for the largest one: an ornate framed painting of the scientist in his lab coat. He seemed to stare at the viewer with a small smile, like he heard a good joke that he already knew. He almost looked approachable.
Fox almost bit through an entire claw at that thought.
The only thing that stopped him was a knock on his door. He leaned back his head without turning, "Come in."
The voice came through the door before it finished opening, "Fox, you got a sec?"
Stepping over the black tarp, Slippy carefully avoided the already-curling tape holding it down. A jury-rigged metal plate already kept the room sealed from the outside, but the tarp kept anything from blowing into the room, whether it was dust from pulverized air filters to moisture from now-cauterized water pipes. Slippy wore the kind of face Fox only ever saw when the frog watched someone else repairing the Arwings.
"I've been looking at the mechanical reports for that guy, McCoy's ship. It looks like he blew three coolant seals." Fox blinked at him without changing his expression. He already knew that.
Maybe Slippy guessed what he was thinking, because he kept going: "That ship he flew, the Veno-Three-Type-Five, blows its seals pretty often, like he said. There was a recall on them right before the war that got overturned by Andross because he needed lots of supply-haulers for the war. Thing is,"
Slippy put his clipboard down and pressed two fingers together like he caught onto something in midair. "The seals that usually blow? They're all the ones that are hard to reach. The ones that need you to physically take the ship apart to get at, right? The safest ones are the ones you can reach and replace easily. Those are the ones closer to the outside."
Fox watched intently, narrowing his eyes as he slowly closed in on what Slippy was getting at. "...so which seals blew on McCoy's ship?"
Slippy smiled with pursed lips, turning his palms upward. "Forty B, Forty F, and Forty R."
"Are those hard to get at?" Leaning forward, Fox picked up the clipboard to take a look.
"Fox, you could search that online and find a three minute video on how to do it. You could get it done yourself with a screwdriver," The mechanic's smile slowly morphed into something less readable as he bit his lip. "It feels...off."
Fox took a deep breath as the implication dawned on him. "You think McCoy might've rigged his ship to fail."
"I-I mean..." Slippy's shrug carried more weight than he probably meant to. "It's too weird. There's a chance it was an accident, but...this feels wrong in all the weirdest ways."
Fox passed a paw over his ears, rubbing his neck as he pieced together the information. "So it's suspicious."
"...I don't know. It could be nothing. But the fact that he and that cat know each other's also a weird thing, right?" Slippy put both gloved hands in his pockets.
A few seconds passed before Fox stood. "Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean. We're gonna keep an eye on them. Where's McCoy staying?"
"Right next door to her." Slippy furrowed his brow. "Can we keep them apart?"
"What are you doing there?"
Both heads snapped towards the door, where the source of the sound reached them. Slowly, Fox took a step towards it...
"What are you doing there?" Miyu froze, her mind racing to find an explanation or a believeable lie. The one asking, the hare, sounded more curious than angry.
Now standing a safe full step away from the door, the words left her muzzle without much thought. "I-...I thought this was my door and I got confused when I heard voices in it."
It looked like the hare was close to accepting the answer. His ears flattened as he knit his brow. She pushed a little more by adding some of the truth to her half-lie. "I...accidentally walked into this room the first time I got on."
The hare, Peppy, blinked. The awkward pause dragged on until she took a few steps back. She groped around in her mind for anything else to follow up with, something that would help her out. Her muzzle already opened to say whatever came up first. Instead, her muzzle clicked shut as she made the short walk to her own quarters. She sped up as she heard the door open and then flattened her ears in an effort to avoid hearing what they said.
As the door slid shut behind her, she stood, head bowed with one paw rubbing the bridge of her muzzle the way someone would when they felt an oncoming headache.
Her entire body tilted right to lean against the wall with her shoulder, followed by the rest of her as she slid down with her back against the wall. She exhaled a curse that lasted the whole way down.
Curiosity got the better of her back there. She almost walked through the door, but she remembered it was the wrong room right at the moment she heard the voices inside. Miyu only caught some of it, but what she did hear convinced her to lean in closer. They mentioned McCoy, and she felt her skin prickle when she heard them mention that cat.
Her plan to lay low crumbled the moment the hare spotted her. She imagined what they said about her, and pushed those thoughts away just as fast as they showed up. They already didn't like her, and she just gave them more reasons to take it further.
She needed to be somewhere where she wouldn't be bothered. Somewhere that took her far away from the crew and the looks they sent her way. Miyu opened the door and made the conscious effort to avoid looking in the direction of the hare. Reaching the corner of the hallway, she felt a little less tension, but now she needed somewhere truly quiet.
Making her way to the galley, she walked past the room with a couch. She debated staying there, but it looked like the natural place for someone to crash, so she turned to move on when she saw the white dog again, coming from the opposite direction.
Miyu immediately decided that the floor was the best thing to look at as she briskly walked past the dog. The dog ignored her, too. Miyu felt a little more of the tension fade away as she left her further behind.
Soon, she reached the hangar. She saw a row of the Star Fox team's fighters by the wall, near her own Titanian strike craft and the white dog's Cornerian surplus fighter. When she didn't see anyone else, she let out a small sigh as every feature of her face relaxed a little. Her back stood a little straighter, her head held a little higher.
Finding a space to hide wasn't hard. She spotted a long row of closed cargo containers set up end-to-end and checked the door to see if it was locked. It creaked open with some effort, and Miyu peered inside. A brass pistol shell met her boot, spinning away with a tinkling sound as it clinked against the darkened wall. She saw her own silhouette in the floor of the room as light from the hanger flooded in.
Reaching for a switch on the wall, she noticed the rows of cheap decorative lights lining both upper corners of the corridor. Flicking the switch, she saw all the way down to the end where scorched, sometimes holed, hubcaps stood propped up on metal posts or wooden planks.
Her gaze wandered to the tables nearby, where she found a tool cabinet and a bucket full of black-streaked rags and a small pile of magazines on the floor.
She nodded. This felt good enough.
Miyu immediately found a metal folding chair, eaten away with rust at the edges, and she found herself able to relax in a way she couldn't while she was close to the Star Fox team. Picking up the magazines, she found mostly gun magazines, several official Cornerian Army magazines, a few dogeared copies of Papetoon Monthly, and even three thick fashion magazines with typeface that took up half the cover. She blinked at those, then flipped through a political journal from three years ago. Her eyes settled on a column about the cleanup for a Venomian lab complex on Macbeth that looked dense enough to not even leave room for a claw tip between sentences.
She curled her lip and decided not to even get past the first page right as the intercom crackled again. "Miss Lynx, you're needed on the bridge."
Miyu hissed another long, slow curse, her head leaning back as she let the magazine fall to her lap. Maybe she could hide. Act like she never heard the announcement. Avoid giving them the satisfaction of finding her too quickly by making them work for it. It'd be petty, sure, but she'd feel better knowing that she didn't make things easy for them. Fuck the Star Fox team, anyways.
A flicker of warm satisfaction rippled through her at the thought. It vanished when she heard the intercom crackle again with the same message.
Walking out of the cargo crates, she made her way to the bridge, doing her best to ignore Fay's contact-averting eyeroll when she walked by, and the sound of the white dog's boots as she followed Miyu. The feline kept up her pace until she reached the door to the bridge, where the bird, Falco, greeted her with folded wings.
The word shitbird surfaced in her head when she noticed the near-smile only visible past the edges of Falco's beak. She pretended, or at least tried, to not notice the blaster strapped to the side of his chest, barely visible under a white jacket.
"Hold it," He held up a wing, "You, c'mere."
He motioned for someone behind Miyu to come closer. Before she could turn, Falco's blaster already reached his wing and swept its nose back and forth at neck level. "Ah ah. Paws where I can see 'em."
Two instincts dueled in her mind. One got really, really mad. The other insisted that maybe staying alive was more important than lashing out as a gunsight traced her face. She raised her arms with a glare that the falcon met coolly, with only a second spared to glance at the dog. She didn't flinch.
"Alright, get it done." Falco motioned for Fay to move closer, and Miyu felt the white dog's paws frisk her. Her anger reached a boiling point as she felt the paws search her. She quietly imagined kicking every person in the room into a lit fusion torch engine before watching them evaporate.
The dog stepped back with an announcement, "She's good."
Falco re-holstered his blaster with what Miyu was convinced was a disappointed snort. Opening the door manually from the control panel beside him, Falco led the way inside.
Everyone stepped in, and at that moment the familiar red fox and hare stopped talking as she stepped in. Both wore holsters. The hare spoke first with a raised paw, "You can relax, Miyu. We just want to know a few things."
Miyu slowly lowered her arms as she stared at the fox. "So, you usually send your goons to gang up on a crew member?"
She spotted the faintest bristling in his tail and a curl in his lip that disappeared as he spoke. Her satisfaction at getting a rise out of him vanished just as fast. "What was your friend up to?"
Miyu's ears flattened. She sincerely didn't expect that question. She still felt the buried accusation, but it felt strange hearing McCoy referred to as a friend.
"...McCoy?" She met the fox's gaze. "I don't know, and...I don't really know him."
She heard a derisive snort from behind her as the hare stepped in. "We found him crawling out of one of the bulkhead spaces in the ship. We already have him locked up. We just wanted to know if you knew anything about that."
Miyu froze, rooted to the spot. Her thoughts drifted towards McCoy's cryptic warning, and suddenly all her anger faded from her, replaced by confusion. What was he planning?
"Just lock her in a cell. It's the safe bet-" Falco added the second part with a shrug. Before Miyu could snarl an answer, the frog mechanic raised his voice from across the room.
"Fox? We have ships approaching us. They're unmarked and not showing transponders."
The unreadable look on Fox's face lasted less than a second. "We need to get to our fighters. You,"
Fay straightened up with a questioning look and a paw about to point at her chest. Fox never broke stride, "Take her to her bunk, lock it, and get to your fighter. Everyone but Peppy, mount up and be ready."
He already made it past the door and shouted the last of it over his shoulder. The semicircle broke as Miyu got shoved along. Her resistance felt halfhearted. She felt a familiar, dark feeling wash over her again. The kind she felt when she learned who her employers on the asteroid were, and an echo of what she felt when the Venomians took over her crew.
"All wings, check in."
"Spaniel, standing by."
"Falco, here."
"Slippy, all systems good."
Fox frowned thoughtfully at the complement of fighters around him. With two prisoners, someone needed to stay behind with the ship, just in case. His scanners registered a small formation that screened a pair of craft that the HUD marked as larger red triangles. They looked like shuttles.
The XO of the Mirandan Causeway already hailed him three times to coordinate, and now the fourth hail flashed across his HUD in a hazard-stripe red banner. It chimed as the banner expanded to form a portrait with some of the hazard-stripes artifacting across the screen. For half a second, half the cheetah's jaw moved as the rest froze in place.
"McCloud, we're positioning ourselves behind the Great Fox," he swallowed, "Can you confirm the pirates' approach?"
Pirates. They didn't confirm the identity of the incoming fighters, but some part of Fox's brain screamed at him to recognize them as just that. Matte black Venomian surplus, plus one oddball fighter shaped like a dart sitting on triangular wings. He couldn't take his eyes off of them, even as he spoke to the freighter's XO. "Causeway, this is McCloud. Acknowledged, and we do confirm."
As the XO's portrait minimized, Fox toggled a switch, cycled through channels, and sent a hail anyways. "Attention unidentified strike craft. Activate your transponders and turn back, or we will have to assume hostile intent."
Fox set it to repeat right as six teal starbursts launched from the fighters' hulls. He gritted his teeth.
Fine, then.
He rapped out orders as his finger squeezed the trigger, joining three trails of blaster fire to intercept the missiles.
"Star Fox, break formation and engage all hostiles. Falco, I want you and Fay to keep them away from the freighter. Slippy, on me-"
The black dart instantly barreled towards Falco, and a storm of small missiles arced from the wings.
"What-the-hell-" Falco's sentence formed a strained grunt at the end. An alarm blared as Fox noticed a name on his HUD flicker in dark maroon before turning an urgent red. Falco's shields ate most of the salvo.
"Slippy, we need to take care of that fighter. He's eating Falco alive-"
One of the shuttles swooped by, arcing towards the freighter. New orders left his muzzle on reflex: "Fay, the shuttles-!"
"Already on it!" Two teal bolts launched from her fighter's nose and streaked towards one of the shuttles. The shuttle ejected a small salvo of crates through its rear doors, trailing out behind it in a stream of white pings that the Arwing's HUD jotted down as debris.
The crates exploded, showering the area behind the shuttle. One missile collided with the debris, meeting its end with an abrupt sputter as a piece of metal hail probably holed its main thruster.
The second streaked down towards the target, entering the open doors and turning the shuttle into a teal starburst bloom. Fox let out a relieved sigh that died the moment he saw the second shuttle's trajectory...
"Claw Team, entry in thirty." The voice grated.
Lights flickered as something rocked the shuttle. Harnesses jangled as loose buckles clacked against empty seats. Eight figures clutched railings built into their seats, all wearing sealed, vacuum-rated armor from head to foot. One's helmet banged into the railing before jolting upright again.
If you passed a paw over their armor, your fur would've caught on the cracks, dents, and scratches that ate into their surfaces. The spaces that didn't look worn down to their matte-black armor plates occasionally gleamed a dull red, thanks to the two lights left in the eight-light ceiling.
One last figure towered over them all, locked in place with ceiling struts, near the end of the passage between their seats: a suit of power armor that looked even more worn and beaten down than the armor on everyone else. Bundles of wires coiled visibly under sections where plates should've been. Some of the hydraulics dripped on the floor with a visible thunderbolt-trail of amber fluid across one of the heels. A spotlight with a metal cage muzzling its nose sat on the armor's shoulder with a noticeable amount of metal-colored tape and a bungee cord holding it in place.
The letter Y stood out on the armor's shoulder, with curled claws on the top two prongs of the letter. One figure leaned forwards, unbuckling his harness. He spoke again, his voice rasping with a smoker's wheeze. "Claw, stand and stand by."
The shuttle jolted one more time as some of the troops staggered upright. The fishbowl helmet on the power armor swiveled to face the speaker. The voice grated one more time, "Oh, I'm going to enjoy gutting this ship."
The floor abruptly shifted to the right with a shudder Miyu could feel in her ribs. Her ears flattened. She knew a battle already started, and she spent the last few minutes pacing angrily at the thought of being a prisoner to Star Fox.
Again.
Miyu clenched her fists with gritted teeth. The thought ate deeper into her now.
She let it happen again.
She let out a curse that took her whole breath to voice, leaving her feeling hollow. Right as her ugly thoughts started to sink into the empty space she felt, the floor jolted, and a new feeling settled in.
Something hit the ship.
Something hit the ship, and she couldn't do anything about it.
Something new invaded her thoughts, uninvited, seeping into the corners of of her mind. A cold feeling of helplessness wrapped her with a chilling shiver that prickled her skin. The thought reared its head in her mind that this could be how she dies: with a ship breaking around her, while she couldn't do anything to stop it.
The cold feeling pooled in her limbs, pulling them down. Her bones felt heavier at the thought that maybe, just maybe, this would be how it ended for her. A prisoner on a dying ship.
She shook her head and gritted her teeth. Miyu buried the thoughts as deeply as she could and braced herself against the wall. She didn't hear the groan of buckling metal yet. Maybe Star Fox would win. Maybe she'd live.
She put more hope into the second thought.
A distant bang rumbled through the walls on one side of her room. Her ears flicked, and she heard the thump of boots outside her room. Someone knocked with the full force of a closed fist, enough to rattle the door.
Right as her fur stood on end at the sound of more pounding, she heard a voice through it.
"Miss Lynx?"
"Fox they've reached the ship they're inside-"
Slippy spoke fast enough for it all to be a single word. Fox turned his fighter away from the melee as the meaning of the words sank in. He already hailed the Great Fox, "Peppy? Peppy. Are you there?"
He tried to keep his voice from trembling. A small wash of relief flooded him as he heard a familiar voice. "Fox! Fox, I tried shutting the hangar doors, but they just blasted through 'em. I got the hangar locked in, but I don't think I can keep them there forever-"
"We'll come to help you-" Fox tried his best to sound calm, but a three-tone shield alarm grabbed his attention moments before a black strike craft turned around for another attack run.
"-I'm pretty sure I can hear them cutting through the walls." Fox could hear Peppy sliding a magazine into his blaster.
Fox fired a pair of missiles at the fighter just in time for another dark fighter to swoop in and shoot them down. He growled. "Falco, Fay, Slippy, I'm heading back to help with the Great Fox. I need you to keep them busy long enough for me to help out Peppy."
"Gotcha, gotcha. I'm on it." Fay answered first, interrupting Falco. The blue falcon snorted over the net before Fox turned his Arwing end over end and pointed the nose towards the Great Fox.
Fox swallowed. "Peppy, I'm gonna need you to do something for me."
Miyu froze as she heard the conversation unfold outside her door. The hare's muffled voice came through one more time. "Miss Lynx?"
The silence lasted several heartbeats before the hare sighed with a frustrated huff. "Miyu."
She stepped towards the door, slowly as the hare went on, "Miss Lynx, we're in a bind. I'm just one man, and we have eight pirates, plus someone in full power armor knocking at our door."
Miyu swallowed. Right as she heard the hare take in a deep breath to speak again, she raised her voice. "What do you want?"
"I want these boarders off my goddamned boat. That's what I want." A flash of anger surfaced in his words, and Miyu's eyebrows shot up at the sound.
A short silence followed with a sigh, "Miss Lynx, I don't have options, here. I need people helping me. You said you didn't know what McCoy was up to. Can I trust you to help me?"
Miyu couldn't find the words to answer. A deep, sinking feeling threatened to overtake her as she thought about an entire boarding squad breaking into the ship. She just stood there, frozen as the hare repeated the question, forcefully. "Can. You. Help. Me?"
Miyu wrestled with the ugly feeling of helplessness, pushing it down with a swallow and an icy trickle that she felt in her spine. She forced the words out of her muzzle right as she started to hear the hare step away. "What can I do?"
On the bridge, Miyu watched as cameras recorded the boarding team. The feed occasionally stuttered, and the light glared off their helmets in a way that sometimes obscured their faceplates. One of the boarders cut into the wall with a circular saw that spat out what looked like dark flecks.
On a nearby table, Peppy set aside a small pile of guns. He picked up a blaster and rubbed down the contact points inside the grip with the tip of a rag that he pulled from the bottom of the pile, sending some of the tools clattering to the floor. Peppy ignored the sound as he pushed a magazine battery into the blaster. It rewarded him with a high-pitched trill and some flickering LED numbers at the back end of the gun, right above the grip. He thumbed the safety and offered the gun, grip first to the lynx.
Miyu stared as the hare just offered it a little closer. "You're just gonna give it to me?"
The hare gave her a wry smile like he almost pitied her for not getting it. "Miss Lynx, I could maybe die because I gave you a blaster, or I could almost definitely die because some punk with a Venomian surplus power armor suit decided to turn my head into a canoe with a gun meant to punch holes into other suits of power armor."
Miyu stared at him as he practically shoved the gun into her arms. "I did the math. You're a better bet. Now, if you'll excuse me,"
The hare stared out the window at an Arwing that started to close in, "We have a welcoming committee to plan."
Fox McCloud nervously fingered his trigger, checking his team's status every other second. Some part of him screamed that he left them to fight the enemy alone, and another part reminded him that he needed to be here and ready for the moment.
He saw the shuttle buried in the Great Fox's emergency hangar doors: it used the traditional method of latching onto a wall before blowing a hole in it to make a door into the ship. He thought about the pirates who made the mistake of invading his home.
He swallowed.
He waited an unbearable wait, with every second spent thinking about whether or not he should've spent that second staying behind to fight with his squadron. Every second added a weight on his mind, and when that weight started to make him shiver, it happened.
A bright flash shone through the doors of the Great Fox, outlining the very edges of the metal. The massive metal doors fell away, taking the shuttle with them. Inside, Fox could see the boarders, and each of them showed up as a highlighted red silhouette on his HUD that either scrambled for cover, stood rooted in place, or raised their guns to aim at him.
With a deep breath, he squeezed the trigger.
Three of the boarding team fell in the first wave of fire, hit with blaster bolts meant to bore through ship armor. The airless hangar flashed noiselessly as blaster bolts found targets with armor meant for small arms fire.
The pirate in power armor crouched as low as hydraulic knees would allow, hiding behind a wall that already bore craters from the strike craft's salvo. One of the boarding team, the one hiding behind a far section of the same wall, furiously waved upwards at the power armor. The fishbowl helmet swiveled and gave an almost invisible nod before standing up and pointing the gun through one of the holes in the wall. The gun thundered in the airless hangar with a sound that you could only feel through the soles of your boots. The pirate at the far end of the wall motioned furiously at another member of his boarding crew, the one hiding behind a pallet of crates. This crouching pirate nodded and pulled a long tube off the side of their pack as more bolts flew overhead.
Some of the solid-slug rounds found their target, and the strike craft's shields flickered as rounds pinged off of the shield bubble. This time, the Arwing found a new target, and opened fire.
The power armor absorbed the first bolt. It even absorbed most of the second. It didn't absorb the third, the fourth, the fifth, or the tenth. By the time the Arwing stopped firing, most of the power armor was gone above the waist.
At that moment, the pirate by the crates fired something from the tube, and it streaked towards the Arwing. The pilot didn't even have time to react.
The missile found its mark right above the wing, biting through a blue nacelle and warping the thrusters behind it. The fighter's engines sputtered, then died as the ship listed towards the hangar.
One of the pirates grinned from behind a dark visor before opening a new channel. "Caroso. Send one over."
Miyu stared at the projection of the battle as Hare kept a paw over his mouth.
A small green wireframe stuttered in the middle of a holographic projection of the battle. It flashed red, lagging as the Great Fox jotted down its position. A single circle of green rippled out as the projection flagged the listing wireframe: Arwing Fox McCloud, Incapacitated.
The Star Fox team's chatter reached a peak as the message relayed to each of their fighters.
"FOX!"
"What, what just happened?"
"I'm hit, I'm hit, I've lost main thruster control-"
"Fox, you have to maneuver-"
"QUIET!"
Peppy's shout interrupted them all, and Miyu almost flinched at the force behind it. He said the next few words leaning into the hologram, as though it would help him be heard more clearly. "Fox, can you move?"
"All I got are RCS thrusters. I'm moving at a crawl, and they're taking potshots at me."
"Why do I feel like I know who these people are." Falco's growl didn't sound like a question.
"Wait, hold on, where's that one going?"
"I'll stop it-" Fay spoke almost before Slippy even finished, but not before her fighter visibly stuttered with another green ping and a grunt.
"What happened?" Peppy let the paw slide down to his chin. Miyu almost didn't see him swallow.
At that moment one of the red triangles stuttered in place, then reappeared on an approach towards the Great Fox. Miyu blinked, and the realization sank into her like swallowed ice. The Great Fox couldn't defend itself from a strike craft.
The hare hissed as he breathed in. Falco spoke up, "They got us busy over here, Pep, but I'm sure the Great Fox's armor can handle one fighter until we get there-"
Miyu thought about the Great Fox's neck, the metal bolted in place to keep the vacuum out, and winced. Falco wouldn't be the one on the ship to stress-test that idea.
"There's a fighter coming behind you, Fox." The hare spoke, forming the words with a deep breath.
"Damn it, I'm turning, I'm turn-"
Thunk. The sound reverberated through the speakers, followed by silence.
"What was that? Fox? Fox." Peppy's voice didn't quaver. Miyu gave him credit for that.
At that moment, a banner unfurled across the Great Fox's HUD. Incoming message.
It took a full second between seeing the the banner and seeing the approaching fighter before the realization sank in. The message came from the pirates.
The fighter slowed down to a stop before the hangar, guns aimed at the hangar below, where Fox's Arwing listed.
Peppy hesitated for a full heartbeat before accepting the message.
A familiar portrait blew up to fill the screen, and a familiar, rasping voice echoed through the speakers.
"Hello again, Star Fox. Your captain is mine."
Alright, time for reviews:
Nail Strafer: I'm glad the letter clears some things up! Also, it was Falco who threw the wrench at Miyu, not the other way around.
Elarix: Miyu being resigned made the most sense. To me, the person who'd make the biggest deal would be Falco, who answers with a fastball wrench. I'm also really happy this chapter's a favorite! Always feels good hearing that.
NadaYNadie: I'm glad you think that about Miyu and Fay! I'm still figuring out how to make them stronger characters, and how to give everyone on the team a standout personality. And yeah, I better go back and rewrite that part where I called McCoy Swift by accident. That's a bad mistake, and thank y'all for catching that.
Chapter 16 won't take anywhere near as long as this one did. I'll have it up in two weeks, so stick around.