Chapter 27

"Your ceaseless curiosity is beginning to bug me." Said Blaze.

Matt opened one eye, confused. "Blaze, what? I was just about to fall asleep." He sat up, looking in the general direction of Blaze's voice. Their latest hideout was one of Macbeth's abundant mine shafts. It was cold, gloomy and pitch black inside, but at least it was dry, and the labyrinthine tunnels would be daunting to search even for the super-soldiers of the enemy. Of course, Blaze could safely and easily find his way around, though he seemed to have gotten mildly agitated in recent days.

"Blaze, what?" Matt repeated. "I didn't say anything before."

"Your thoughts ring out clearly." Blaze replied. Or rather Blaze's voice- in the thick darkness Matt was virtually talking into an abyss, with Blaze's voice floating back to him. Blaze could be far away and talking loudly, for all Matt knew.

Matt frowned. "So now you're psychic?"

"No, I've just been annoyed by the ceaseless questions you ask during the day, and the way you keep shuffling around in thought every night."

"So why did you point that out right at the threshold of my slumber, when I wasn't bothering you?" Matt said, getting slightly annoyed himself.

"Because your questions keep bothering me, even when you're asleep." Blaze replied softly. At this Matt started, for the tone was not Blaze's usual cold, stern voice, but a softer, less rigid voice that Matt had never heard from Blaze.

"You have questions for me, and they remain unanswered. And as annoying as you are, I do respect your persistence." Blaze remained silent for a while before continuing; "There's a good chance we might never make it off this rock. Ever since we sent that data to High Command, I've been half-hoping for a rescue but now I guess rationale states that one isn't coming."

Matt was shocked. This wasn't Blaze he was talking to. "Hey, listen, even if rescue doesn't come we can find our own way out. C'mon, you're the one who's usually telling me this"

"We can't be sure we will make it out, eh?" Blaze sighed. "I say again, you have questions for me. Ask them now, while we're both breathing and the child is asleep."

Matt glanced where Damon should have been, but of course he couldn't see a thing, he only heard the boy's soft breathing.

"All right." Matt felt resolve rise in him. For long he had been eager to learn about Blaze's past, but now, suddenly, he was not excited by the opportunity. He felt that perhaps what he wanted would be granted, but what he would get would be totally unexpected and even unwanted once he got it. Still, whatever dark secrets Blaze had, Matt was still prepared to hear out.

"Who are you?" Matt asked.

Blaze was quiet again, this time for quite a while. But Matt did not press, he suddenly did not wish to put this new Blaze to trial.

Blaze, however, found words at last and his story began to spin forth.

"Matt, this is the whole story. I am young- even younger than you, even younger than Damon there. You might find that hard to believe, but it's true. I am around eight years old by Cornerian standards.

I guess that doesn't make sense. All right, from the beginning, as far back as I can remember. And the furthest back I can remember, I was waking up in a hospital bed, little more than seven years ago. My head hurt and my joints creaked as I tried to move them. I didn't remember or recognize anything- sure I remembered how to speak and some basic things like that but my name, my past, everything, all gone. Not even a passing shadow of a memory was left in my mind.

For many days, I lay in the bed, slipping in and out of consciousness. It was all a painful blur, punctuated by brief glimpses of bodies under shrouds in beds around me and victims coming in with missing limbs, or horribly burned skin.

Finally, after two weeks, the nurse that had been assigned to me- Siara, I think she was- told me why I was in the hospital.

I had been brought out of the Katina Redlands following the great massacre there, near the end of the war with Andross. His last bio-weapons were sent to the densely populated zone to do as much damage to Katina as possible. Hundreds of civilians died, nearly everyone in that settlement. Those that remained had been hiding underground or had fled early.

I was told that in the fury of the ensuing battle, I had been knocked out cold by an explosion from a starfighter's Nova Bomb, and had miraculously survived with minimal injuries. In the space of time I had been unconscious, Andross had been overthrown and his forces were completely shattered at their strongest point, Area 6.

For the next week while I fully recovered in hospital, I asked plenty of questions and used whatever resources I could, but nobody could find any background on me. I was just another person without a history, who had lost his past in the war. The hospital had actually gotten a few cases that had lost their memory after a crash, or a cataclysmic event so I was by no means special.

So when I left the hospital, I gave myself the name Brad Walters, a plain, unnoticeable name, and went about trying to build a life for myself.

It wasn't easy. I couldn't get shelter because nobody knew who I was, and I was forced to live in a homeless shelter. I met plenty of good people there, I still remember. Some of them were other survivors of the Redlands massacre who had lost their homes. They took pity on me, because I lost my home and my life.

Because I didn't have a background, I couldn't get a job easily, and I had to scrape money together by street cleaning during the day, and drug-dealing by night. I busted the cash I got on drugs and alcohol, usually.

I lived that way for two months. One night on my way to my usual watering hole, I saw the flashing blue lights of a police speeder outside the joint, and a couple of my rival dealers were getting busted. Luckily for me I was still really far away, and went into the nearest nightclub I could find. It was a bit classier than my usual joint, and there were a lot of military guys there, most of them starfighter pilots. I sat down, and went about being discreet.

Well, I sat down right next to what looked like an arcade game of some sort, but in fact it was a compact, one-on-one flight simulator. A half-drunk pilot challenged me to a match, and I replied that I hadn't flown anything before, not even on a computer.

Well, he persisted, and promised to buy me a round if I tried, win or lose.

I lost. I landed a few blows onto his wing, but he had blasted me apart within 30 seconds. After the simulation, he stepped out, came up to me and clapped me on the back.

He was very deeply impressed. "You say you've never flown before, and even though I wasn't really going that hard on you, I think you flew really, really well. In fact, some pilots I know wouldn't have held me off for more than 20 seconds."

He was one William Grey, a well-respected and well-known fighter pilot.

I came to that bar more and more often, and I flew against more and more pilots, beating a few of them. Eventually I was faced with a whole bar of pilots encouraging me to join the Starfighter Corps.

Again, this wasn't easy, given that I had no past, and security had to be sure I was genuinely an amnesiac, and medical had to be sure I had no mental conditions that could suddenly cause me to lose control in the middle of a mission. But Bill pulled a few strings and got medics to vouch for my amnesia, and soon I was posted with Bulldog Squadron. The guys were really curious about me, and I got on with them reasonably well, but when it came to my past, I had nothing to tell. Many of them thought I was feigning amnesia, but at the time, my past didn't exist.

I had some interesting times there, fighting pirates and the like.

I remember this one time, we caught a squad of six pirate ships raiding a Cornerian freighter. It was only me and my three flight-mates out there, so the numbers were tipped in their favour, but we had better ships and weapons. We shot three of them to pieces and the rest buzzed off. I nailed one as it was running- it was an invader jet, an ex-member of the Venomian armed forces. This triggered something in the very back of my mind, something telling me there was a memory back there, somehow linked to the invader jet or to Venom, but what it was, I didn't get until much later.

After my skills got to par, Bill invited me to Husky and I accepted immediately. It was then that I found my past.

A mission which landed us in Venom hunting terrorists saw me paired up with Bill as we explored a previously unknown Venomian base. We had just wiped out half a squadron of Andross Liberation Group jets and had discovered the staging area of the terror organization. We called for ground troops, but we were told it'd be a couple of hours before they arrived, due to a timing error. Bill made the call straight away. Some were already escaping, and we had to snag them there and then. Half the squadron landed, and we went off in groups of two. Bill and I broke into the computer core of the base, and found an abundance of files and documents, an intelligence agent's dream.

It was there that we recovered some documents of Andross' last bio-weapon experiments. I was in one of the files, and had been given the registration number 2-FBW-101. I was one of the creatures they sent to kill and maim in the closing stages of the war. I wasn't another victim of the Redlands massacre. I was one of the bio-weapons that Andross sent to wreak havoc. I had to have killed at least one hundred civilians.

I basically went catatonic. Now that I'd found my past, I wanted more than anything for it to disappear again. I expected Bill to flip. But he just said he'd deal with it later. He destroyed my file there and then, and we finished the raid quickly, though I was in something of a surreal world at the time.

So, in his office some days afterwards, he asked if I'd told anyone about what we'd found out.

I said I hadn't, and he asked if I had no recollection of events beforehand whatsoever.

I said that before I found out about my past, I didn't remember a thing. But in the days following, pieces of my memory had started coming back.

He considered this for a moment, and told me that I shouldn't worry about the past and just remember that I wasn't under Andross' control anymore, and since I was a completely different person who had truly made a fresh start from that hospital bed, I should look to the future and do what I can do for the forces of good. He encouraged me to develop my powers, (and gave me the nickname Blaze) so that if I continued to feel remorse for things I had done in the past, even if I wasn't in control of my own mind at the time, I could at least atone in some way by using my powers to serve the people of Katina.

Still, he forbade me from telling anyone until I was ready to reveal who I truly was, or until I felt the squadron was ready to accept who I was.

So that's the answer to your questions. I am responsible, at least in part, for the massacre of hundreds at Redlands. I have no childhood or even teenage past, I have no family, I was born for destruction, and though I do it from a cockpit in the sky, not as a ball of flame on the ground, I still carry out that singular purpose in my life, and that is no exaggeration. The only thing I do is destroy. I am a weapon created by Andross in his laboratories, I am 2-FBW-101."