Chapter Ten: "The Blue Marine"
Four days of endless jubilation had taken place before Anilora could drag himself away from his home planet, but he could delay his return to Corneria no longer. Word had reached General Pepper from his defensive base on Fortuna that an unseen evil was stirring in the oceans of Aquas, so it seemed only necessary that the Katinan captain again allied forces. He departed in the late afternoon with roughly the same numbers he had arrived with, and hundreds of his kin were present to see him off.
Celestra, with Falco only a few feet behind her, found that she was not as distressed at his departure as she would have been a few weeks ago.
Bill, Fox, and Slippy returned to full action the next day, their bodies cryogenically healed by the top medical associates in Nexxus. The day after that, ROB announced that General Pepper had a new mission on hand, so it was with great regret that Star Fox and the pair of assassins withdrew into Great Fox on the sixth day after Katina's big victory.
"If you would have tried to tell me last week that you would all live through an ordeal such as that, I'm not so sure that I would have believed you," Pepper admitted with a sheepish smile. The six of them pulled chairs around the G-Diffuser screen, laughing at their employer as they did so.
"Didn't think we could handle the big bad Venomians, General?" Bill teased, stretching full out in his chair.
"Figured we'd get our faces ground into the dirt?" Falco added with a smirk. The laughter intensified.
Pepper held up his hands in defeat to quiet the lot of them. "Alright, forgive my lack of faith," he began in exasperation, "and I would like very much to reward you with a well-deserved rest, but I fear important events have arisen concerning all of you that I cannot ignore.
"First and foremost, our allies heading the underwater Aquatica center have provided us with intelligence concerning Lylat's eighth planet, Aquas. Specialists detect very abnormal activity stirring beneath the surface, leading us to believe that Andross has begun construction of a sub-aquatic bio-weapon. If we were to allow such an instrument of destruction to unleash itself in the ocean, life on Aquas may very well be completely wiped out."
"We don't have any water craft capable of such a mission," Fox pointed out, gesturing at a holographic grid detailing every one of the hangars within Great Fox.
"Waverunners, sure, but nothing with the diving capacity you're talking about," Celestra added glumly.
Pepper sighed in exasperation and lowered his gaze. "What other options have we?"
Behind his comrades, Slippy shifted uncomfortably. Peppy noticed and raised a furry eyebrow. "What's the problem, Slip?"
The youngest mercenary glanced up, one eye twitching slightly, and whimpered nervously. "Well, I never told you guys this, but I built and modified my own two-man submarine."
The room fell very still.
"It's called the Blue Marine. I recently upgraded the laser capacity to hold grade-A hyper beams; the thing's got the new line of Titanian engines, it can really motor, you know. The biggest problem is that I haven't had a chance to give her a test run, so I'm not sure she'll be fully functional--"
"Mission accepted, General," Falco interrupted, rolling his eyes. "Let's move on."
Pepper cleared his throat loudly, seemingly not reassured. "The second misson is not for the five of you, but for Bill alone.
"Although the efforts given on Fortuna were undoubtedly great, all four members of Star Wolf and Reivin Frost survived."
Bill covered his face with his hands and turned away from the others, forcing back a disgusted ball of bile that threatened to well in his throat. He didn't know why he was surprised; he could no longer count the number of times he had attempted to put an end to Andross's top five supporters and found out later that they had somehow escaped the fate they deserved yet again. Subconsciously Bill ran his fingers along a four-inch scar that ran along the side of his neck, remembering well the scenario and traitor that had dealt it to him.
Suddenly not only was his path through life littered with obstacles, it seemed to be sloping uphill at an impossible ascent.
Bill felt a hand at his shoulder and knew that Celestra was trying to comfort him. The words rang in his ears when she said, "Sir, with your permission, I would like to accompany Bill on his mission."
Pepper frowned. "Your teammates need you now, Marquette."
"My best friend needs me now as well."
But the male assassin shrugged out of her hold and turned back, forcing a grin. "Let it go, Celest. General's right, y'know--in the grand scheme o' things, this bio-weapon thing is a hell of a lot more important. Reivin and I have a score to settle--and I mean to honor it." Then, to Pepper, he asked, "Where can I find him? We don't have his flight path off o' Fortuna."
"He never left, according to Fortunan radar. Sensors indicate that Star Wolf returned to Venom following their defeat, but for some reason Frost chose to remain."
"Makes it easier for me to find him anyway," Bill affirmed lightly, shouldering his knapsack and making for the door of the briefing room. "He's itchin' for a rematch with Celest--bet he'll be surprised to see me, aye?"
Celestra crossed her arms and gave a great sigh. "Damn it, Grey, take care of yourself, you hear me?"
"Yeah, don't go getting yourself killed," Fox added.
With a smile that seemed both reassuring and sickening, Bill waved and exited.
"Good luck to the rest of you," Pepper murmured, then he, too, was gone.
"So this is a two-man craft you've got, Slip?" Fox inquired, sitting in an armchair and twining his fingers together. "If you pilot it, I'll run weapons for you."
Celestra looked to Falco, who grinned widely. "Better get your swim trunks, Lombardi--I know for a fact that there are two waverunners in that hangar."
Peppy sighed and massaged the back of his neck. "Guess I'll give the pair of you air cover--you're more likely to shoot each other or drown yourselves than get caught by the bad guys."
~~*~~
In roughly twenty hours of hyperspace travel, Great Fox had entered Aquas airspace and was slowly orbiting an area of sea into which Blue Marine would soon submerge. Celestra knocked rapidly on Falco's door, spinning her familiar plasma guns in her slender hands excitedly as the avian rushed to answer.
Falco tugged his bedroom door open and had to literally remind himself to glue his beak shut. The assassin, normally clad in denim shorts and black flight attire, had completely altered her code of dress for the water mission: she was wearing a navy blue bikini top and a pair of silver work-out shorts. Only her combat boots and heavily-laden utility belt remained; her hair, as always, was pulled back away from her pale face.
"Gotta say," he choked out, moving aside to let her enter, "water was never really my thing."
Celestra shook her head and chuckled at the sight of the avian's room; unlike her own, his was cluttered and disorganized. "I can see where it would be a problem, you having feathers and all."
"Shut up," Falco retorted, gathering his own weapons belt and beckoning to her. "Let's go already."
The pair of them marched down the hall, Falco leading in a pair of black swim trunks and old tennis shoes, Celestra a few paces behind, fiddling with the frequency of her weapons' fire and studying the taut outlines of muscle in the avian's bare back in interest. He had to lift weights often, she decided, for his upper body was a chiseled piece of athletic perfection and he was physically fit in every way. If possible, Falco was just as strong as Bill, whose house contained its own weights complex that he undoubtedly spent hours in every day.
They turned into the hall containing all hangars together, feeling the sultry, warm ocean air waft pleasantly against their faces as Fox and Slippy prepped Blue Marine in front of an open hangar. Peppy was nowhere to be seen, but Nebulafire was gone so they assumed that he was already in the sky waiting for them. Falco led the assassin around to the adjacent hangar and gestured to their transports for the day--a pair of black and white waverunners.
The water craft would have been normal and safe, but it was clear that they had been tampered with. Actually, Falco himself had modified the two transports, wiring in two adamantite lasers on each side that were capable of firing multiple shots at a time. A small antennae on the back of each waverunner (only a few inches in height) projected a shield much like those that protected their Arwings, encompassing even the underside of the craft and creating a bubble that would keep its rider safe.
Celestra pressed a button in the wall of the hangar and put her face close to a miniscule speaker. "ROB, open the hatch for Falco and me, will you?"
"Affirmative," came the cyborg's voice, and with a low rumble the hangar lifted into the ceiling, leaving the avian and the assassin with nebula light glancing off the cerulean surface mere feet below and a cool ocean spray in their faces.
"You've got your standard G-Diffuser system hooked up to that console there," Falco explained, pointing to the helm just below and between the handlebars. "The red button on the side of your right handlebar brings up the shields; the green on on the left handlebar fires your lasers. Keep in mind that I never got the chance to test these things, and don't bite my head off if something gets screwed up."
Rolling her eyes, Celestra leaned against the wall and stared out at the sparkling water, waiting for Blue Marine to deploy so they could follow.
~~*~~
Slippy tested the identical joysticks with his agile hands, re-memorizing the controls and attacks for the ump-teenth time in the past three months. This submarine had haunted the technician's spare time since before the Lylat War had begun, and when Pepper had called on the Star Fox team to lead the forces against Andross, Slippy had known his creation would be needed sometime soon. It was a work of art for the youngest mercenary, equipped with sub-atomic missiles as well as the highest frequency hyper beams available, and the new model Titanian engines would give them extra boosts of speed in the event that the water pressure compromised Blue Marine's outside. Fox could only look on in awe as the thirteen-year-old walked the controls through intricate manuevers, testing the mobility of the internal components.
"All systems prepared for deployment, Slippy," came ROB's voice over the submarine's intercome. "Shields and engines at maximum, hyperbeams warming, missiles prepped and ready to fire. Requesting permission to submerge."
"Permission granted," Slippy replied without hestitation. "Let's go to work."
Fox positioned himself at the weapons console, testing the mobility again fro his comrades' sake, and with a soft whoosh they had ejected from the hangar. Slippy caught a fleeting glimpse of Nebulafire in the sky before they dove beneath the surface.
His moment had come.
~~*~~
Falco was dragging his waverunner to the brink when he saw Blue Marine enter the water. Turning to regard Celestra, who was shoving her craft along several feet behind, he said, "Can't you go any faster, Celest? It's time to go."
The assassin paused at his side, glancing down at the churning waves and deducing that Fox and Slippy had begun their search for the bio-weapon. More than studying the shadow of the sub sinking down into the inky depths, though, Celestra was calculating the number of feet they would have to fall to make it down. Falco slung a wing around her shoulders and pulled her to his side, grinning widely.
"Don't like heights much?" the avian teased.
Celestra nosed the waverunner over to the edge until it was balancing precariously. "I just have this thing with death-defying free-falls into monster-infested waters," she responded sarcastically.
Falco laughed heartily and tightened his grip on her for just a moment before letting go. "Well said." He straddled his craft, smirking when she did the same. "On three, got it?"
"Sure, whatever. One--"
"--Two--"
"--Three!" In unison they kicked off the edge of the hangar and careened twenty feet toward the ocean, screaming as one with the thrill of the fall, and hit the surface, luckily landing right-side up and still on their mounts. The lukewarm water gushed up over their legs as the waverunners absorbed the impact; droplets shone in the avian's bright feathers and in Celestra's dark hair, and they revved the engines to life.
"You dead yet, Marquette?"
Celestra shot him an acidic look. "Sorry to disappoint you, Lombardi." And together they shot off across the aqua cascade, weaving in between one another as their shields came up around them, sparkling at their maximum. Peppy's engines surged, and his Arwing soared along above and behind.
~~*~~
Kelp and seaweed danced along a few yards beneath the submarine's belly; several harmless sea creatures scuttled to clear the way, and Blue Marine drifted serenely ahead, powerul lights illuminating the areas ahead of their current position.
Fox had never witnessed anything so perfectly beautiful in his entire life as Slippy turned a corner and an entire underwater ruin came into view. Great ivory and onyx remains of a once majestic city glimmered within the white sand; stacks of multicolored stones engraved with ancient runes dotted the ocean bottom. Slippy slowed their pace, and Fox shook himself from the sight.
"A defensible position," Slippy responded to his wing commanders' unspoken question. Fox nodded and tightened his paws about the weapons' joysticks, confident that they would soon see battle, and with a quick intake of breath, Slippy proceeded.
The pair of them had not moved forward fifteen feet when a dozen reelene, starfish-shaped monstrosities, filtered out from behind various piles of ruins and stone.
Slippy drove the sub hard to the left, giving Fox an opportunity to unleash a barrage of missiles at those on the left flank as they rolled. One reelene collided with the reat, but Blue Marine took the hit stoically and opened fire with dazzling shots of blue hyperbeam. More of the starfish poured out from concealed areas, diving at the underwater craft, and Slippy was hard-pressed to evade with unending precision. The shields bleeped once as another reelene rammed into the right flank, but Fox was ready with a second line of missiles, slamming into the bulk of their assailants and scattering those lucky enough to survive the strike. The technician seized the moment to motor through the ruins, spinning into another roll as a verdana, a sub-aquatic dragon, sliced through the water inches from the hull.
"That was living, breathing proof of why I fly an Arwing," Fox gasped out, steadying his radically trembling paws.
Slippy was grinning maniacally. "This is the coolest thing I've ever done!" He pressed a few buttons on his helm and a radar reading encompassed their entire windshield, mapping out the area of ocean around them for twenty miles around. Several white blips were migrating ahead, and to the northwest blinked a single, larger white dot, isolated from the rest of the environment.
"Is that--?" Fox began as he booted up the G-Diffuser system.
"Bingo," Slippy confirmed. "Andross's sub-aquatic bio-weapon." Re-angling Blue Marine to run a straight path in the direction of the largest blip, he added, "Make sure Falco and Celestra are aware that a score or so of those reelene are going to surface soon; according to these coordinates, they'll be within yards."
~~*~~
"This is tight!" Falco cried happily over the wind and spray. "Now all we need is an inner tube and some adult beverages."
Celestra's damp ponytail slapped the back of her neck as she cornered and dodged around to Falco's left side. "You might not care much for Fox's most recent news, then. We've got reelene just below us, surfacing at a rapid pace."
Falco glanced over at her, booting up the white fire of his adamantite lasers as he did so. "Damn it, that's the last straw. I'm putting in for a vacation. They're trying to ruin our fun by sending us a bunch of mutant starfish!"
"You can always do what I do," Celestra offered, readying her hand beside the button that unleashed laser fire. "Give yourself a vacation and conveniently forget to mention where you've gone and when you'll be back."
The avian's laugh came out as a strangled yell as the ocean exploded around the pair of waverunners and twenty or so reelene burst into the radiant sunshine, diving wildly for the assassin and mercenary. Falco proved to be as successful at manuevering the water craft as he was at flawlessly piloting an Arwing; he pivoted magnificently across the waves in amazing figure-eight formations, firing effortlessly at any creature in his line of sight. So great was his skill that Celestra, still learning the controls, barely got in a shot.
Just as the last of the reelene sank dead beneath the surface, the blue-grey, leathery wings of the verdana assaulted the pair as it broke the waves; water cascaded from the great thing's back as it ascended into the air above them, letting out an unearthly shriek and beating its wings furiously. Celestra killed the engines of her craft and spun her handheld lasers into her hands, but the plasma fire seemed only to anger the massive creature as it rose higher into the air to strike.
Its only fatal mistake was flying just high enough to intersect the flight path of Nebulafire.
Peppy swooped in, thrusters boosted to maximum, and opened fire on the verdana, razing long lines of scorched flesh along the monsters' neck and back. Its wings buckled as it screeched in pain, dropping several hundred feet in altitude, only to be attacked mercilessly by the female assassin. But as the aqua dragon dove, swooping and crying in agony, its tail sideswiped Falco's waverunner. The avian was thrown from the craft, unconscious, and sank, swallowed up by the churning water.
Celestra re-holstered her lasers and signaled for Peppy to finish the creature as she dove in after him.
~~*~~
"Lombardi's been unseated," Slippy reported as Blue Marine sliced quickly through the dark depths.
Fox looked up from the radar readout, eyes alarmed. "Vitals?"
"Stable, but he's unconscious."
The mercenary leader ran a hand through the fur between his ears and exhaled sharply. "He could be in for the long haul; between monsters and unconsciousness he could very well meet his maker."
Without warning, the small picture insignia next to Falco's flashed red and an identical red X appeared over Celestra's face. "Fox, it looks like Celestra's been taken out, too."
Fox wrung his hands together madly and glanced about, looking for some shred of comfort. If he lost two-fifths of his team today there would be no telling what he would do in his grief. "V-Vitals?" he stammered in fear.
Slippy re-checked Celestra's health readouts with bated breath, then his eyes widened. "Fully conscious and fully active. It looks as though she ejected."
"She's going after Lombardi!" Fox hissed in relief.
"Yes, and we have to pray she'll get to him in time," Slippy remarked, tightening his hands about the joysticks guiding his prized submarine. "We're only a mile or two away from the bio-weapon."
~~*~~
Celestra shuddered as she powered down through wave after wave of merciless cold; suddenly just being below the ocean's surface brought chills through her body. The silhouette of Falco's prone form was descending further into the depths several feet below, and the assassin had to work hard to close the gap between them. Every so often she heard the sizzle of a misfired laser shoot through the dark water as Peppy battled the verdana above, but aside from that the world seemed to have grown strangely quiet as she traversed the realm under the sea.
A trio of reelene spiraled up from the depths, encircling the avian with their tiny gnashing teeth, and Celestra propeled forward, firing with one plasma gun and grabbing at Falco's feathers. The creatures scattered without further incentive, and Celestra pulled Falco against her, turning and making for the faint shreds of sunlight reflecting off the ocean waves.
She was perhaps five feet from breaking the surface when she felt pressure at her ankles and could no longer kick. Glancing down she could just make out the shadow of an enormous octopus-like monster called a naidat, with oozing orange skin and eight sticky tentacles, one of which was wrapping tightly about her ankles.
Celestra opened her mouth to curse, but all that came out was a wealth of miniature air bubbles.
The assassin lashed out with her right arm, punching at the tentacle as she struggled to keep ahold of Falco, but the thing's grip only tightened and pulled her further down, away from the sun. Stars were swimming in her line of vision as she fumbled with the butterfly knife within her boot; her lungs screamed for oxygen, but somehow she sublimated her fear of suffocation and stabbed desperately at the naidat. The creature shrieked and loosened its grip, and Celestra stabbed hard one last time and set her sights again on the sun.
The oxygen revitalized her lungs not a moment too soon, and Celestra gasped and spluttered as she held Falco's head above the surface. One of the waverunners was bobbing belly-up nearby, and she pumped her one free arm madly and slowly gained on it.
When finally Celestra had slung the avian's body over the seat of the waverunner, he was neither moving nor breathing and she could not detect a pulse of any kind.
"Come on, Falco, you can't just drop dead whenever it's convenient for you," Celestra muttered as she floated, still rather cold, at his side. "Don't start thinking you can just kick off and leave me here."
Celestra hoisted herself up onto the rear of the craft, straddling the seat and Falco's body and prying his beak open. A few trickles of ocean water seeped down the corners of his mouth, and without any hesitation she covered his mouth with hers and blew two lungfuls of air. Then she rose and pumped his chest twenty times or so, and repeated the process.
Two minutes later Falco was coughing up mouthfuls of water, and Celestra was in the seat again, shivering but steadying the craft without protest as the avian literally came back to life.
~~*~~
"Fox, Slippy, do you copy? This is Peppy, over."
Fox fumbled with the G-Diffuser at the helm of the submarine for a moment. "Please tell me that our crazy friends are alive, Peppy."
"Affirmative. Celestra and Falco are both alive, and by the looks of things they're going off on their way again, heading in the same direction as you are."
Slippy re-checked the radar screen one last time and it flickered off. "We're in the near vacinity of the bio-weapon now, Peppy, and chances are it'll be extremely well protected. You three stand by for any more disturbances."
"You've got it." Peppy terminated the communication.
"How close are we, Slip?" asked Fox.
Slippy was glancing about nervously now, hands trembling in anticipation upon the controls. "A few hundred yards. Should be any second now."
The pair glided ahead with bated breath and wide eyes, straining to catch a glimpse of anything out of the ordinary, their hands memorizing the controls of their respective posts yet again. Directly above them, Celestra and Falco skimmed the water on their waverunners and displayed similar signs of anxiety. Peppy, content merely to wait for danger as opposed to looking for it, set his Arwing on a dull hover and clasped his hands behind his head, watching warily and waiting for signs of hostile movement.
Slippy caught a glimpse of it first and immediately powered down the main thrusters, slowing their forward momentum. With amazing reflexes the young mercenary sent Blue Marine through a series of quick lunges and barrel-rolls, eyes wide as dinner plates as an enormous echo resounded when the sub was hit with remarkable force. He was quick, though, and just managed to reverse direction, putting enough distance between them craft and their assailant so the battering momentarily ceased.
"Er . . . I don't see anything," Fox protested sheepishly.
With a profound sigh, Slippy sent the radar screen spiraling back across the windshield, and Fox gasped.
Planted directly in their path was the most enormous oyster shell the mercenary leader had ever seen in his lifetime of strange occurences. The outer shell was milky-white and seemed to have gained a few passengers during its growth, for a trio of anemones decorated the hard surface. The protective tendrils waved ominously, through, suggesting that the anemones had guests of their own. When the shell gaped open they could see a pair of pearl-emitting producters, the taut pink ligaments of its monstrous jaw, and a single, multicolored eye that danced around its socket as though immensely pleased to see the pair of them. Then the shell snapped shut with a crack.
"Ah, thanks," Fox continued as the shock wave carried Blue Marine back several feet. "I see it now."
Slippy was clearly not paying his wing commander any attention, or if he was he did not offer any retaliatory comments. Under his practiced hands the submarine danced gracefully through the inky depths, dodging another round of pearls as they spewed from the productors. "Fox! Can you hit those anemones?"
"What good will that do?!"
"Do you see anything else to shoot at?!"
Fox cursed and opened fire with the hyper beams as Slippy continued to evade with a series of magnificent rolls and dives. The lasers sizzled through the water and arced the entire upper lip of the shell, plowing into the anemones with massive force. Upon impact the laser burned through the rubbery exoskeleton and the creatures shrieked shrilly, releasing an elongated sea snake, an admura, from each. The three admuras spiraled upward, making for the surface, and the bio-weapon unleashed yet another wave of pearls.
"You were supposed to kill them," Slippy remarked, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth in anxiety.
Fox was still firing madly at the waving tentacles of the anemones, canines bared in concentration. "I'm a bit busy, Slip." A pearl slammed into one side of the sub, creating a dent in the metal, and Fox stumbled but was flung away from the weapons' helm.
Slippy somehow kept his feet and continued to evade the never-ending barrage. It was his turn to save the day, he decided, and nothing could quench the fire in his eyes.
~~*~~
"What's that sound?" Celestra asked.
Falco stalled his engine and turned his head from side to side, straining to discern the source of the odd, sucking sound meeting his ears. He had been to Aquas before during his career alongside Fox, but not enough times to be considered an expert of psychotic oceanic creatures. He cast a passive glance down, and his eyes widened. "Uh, Celest, we've got company."
The assassin followed his gaze and could just make out the trio of slender, narrow bodies darting for the surface. "Admura!" she cried, and the ocean around them exploded.
Admura greatly resembled enormous sea snakes, perhaps fifty feet in length but only fire feet around. The skin stretched across their slender forms was blue-grey and rubbery, so strong that it repelled the laser fire from Peppy's craft. But Falco had designed and built the waverunners well, and the adamantite core of their laser beams sliced easily through the smooth flesh. The pair tore one admura apart while attacking in tandem; Falco eliminated one by himself, and then Celestra began to have difficulties.
Celestra cut a hard right turn to rejoin Falco, who was attacking the last admura from about twenty feet away, when the creature rounded on her, bared its two-inch long teeth, and clamped down on the front of her waverunner. The assassin screamed as it lifted her and the craft into the air, and with a mighty surge of its jaw muscles the admura bit the craft in half. Celestra careened thirty feet and plunged back into the water, resurfacing a few seconds later and already firing at the towering monster.
Her plasma lasers bounced right off its flesh.
"Celestra!" cried Falco, whipping his waverunner about in a ninety degree angle to face her. "Swim to me! Swim hard!"
Without any further prompting she re-holstered her guns and began a quick breast-stroke in the direction of the avian's waverunner; he stretched out one hand, she grabbed for it, and he hoisted her up and fired the engines just as the admura dove for them. Its jaws missed them by mere feet, and Celestra gripped Falco's waist tightly as he increased their speed.
"What now?" Celestra called in Falco's ear.
"Now I finally get to be better than you at something," Falco shouted over his shoulder, revving the engine again and skimming across the water, picking up speed.
They circled the admura swiftly for several minutes, studying it for signs of wavering attention, and as soon as it began to tire Falco spurred the craft into new heights of speed and zoomed up its back. Before the creature could buck them off they had veered away, at a perfect angle with its head, and fired mercilessly. As the last admura crashed dead below the waves, Falco and Celestra collapsed against one another, dissolved into fits of exhausted laughter.
~~*~~
At roughly the same time, Fox and Slippy had eliminated the last of the anemones and the ocean lay quiet, an ominous concept as the pair of mercenaries stared down the truly devastating bio-weapon.
"What's it doing?" Fox whispered harshly, as though the oyster could hear his words.
Slippy squinted through the gloom, hands still ready at the primary controls. "I'm not too sure."
Even as he finished responding the shell creaked open, single eyes lolling around tantilizingly as it unleashed the greatest double-barrage of pearls yet, nearly overwhelming the men as they struggled to regain lost ground. Three of the great stones rapped against the submarine, slicing great chunks out of the protective metal and dropping the shield energy by half. Fox let fly torpedo after torpedo, blasting great gaps in the endless stream of pearls, but it was a blocking technique only and did no real damage to the oyster.
"Ligaments," Slippy muttered to himself.
Fox cocked his head. "Sorry?"
The youngest mercenary tipped his head in the direction of the gaping shell; for the first time since the battle had ensued Fox studied the two taut muscles supporting the upper portion. If the higher half of the shell were to collapse with enough force, might the pearl productors also be destroyed and their way cleared? Hope renewed, the vulpine feverishly punched a few buttons.
With a spark, the submarine shut down.
From somewhere in the darkness to his left, Fox heard Slippy shriek, "What the hell did you do?!"
"I don't know!" Fox screamed in reply. "What happened?!"
Slippy continued to boot up various skematics of Blue Marine's interior, cursing to himself. "The poison in the control rods has been cut off."
Fox bared his canines in frustration. "How about speaking a language I know, Slippy?"
"When the poison in the control rods decreases, more neutrons get into the fuel rods and everything overheats. We have to wait for everything to cool down before the sub can function properly."
"And this is where?"
The toad grinned at the ironic stupidity of it all. "The nuclear reactor."
"And that's really important, right?"
"Very." As an afterthought, Slippy added, "You failed your Cornerian physics field class, didn't you?"
The vulpine scowled deeply. "Yes, but I was never the one who wanted to be a technical worker for Arspace; that was you. I just wanted to teach at the Flight Academy."
Another gigantic pearl blindsided Blue Marine and sent both mercenaries crashing to the floor; for the first time on the entire mission the shields flashing the warning signal. Slippy struggled back to his feet and was more than a little alarmed when his commander did not do the same. The toad skittered back to his knees and felt around blindly on the ground for Fox's prone form; he was unconscious.
The youngest Star Fox member, already nervous, suddenly found himself truly alone, surronded by water pollution, kneeling in an overheated submarine and facing Andross's worst plot to date.
'Can't panic!' his mind screamed through the shield gauge warnings. 'I can fix this stupid thing, I just need . . . '
"ROB!" he cried desperately into the emergency communications speaker. "I need a nuclear reactor coolant pronto! The sub's getting hammered and we've lost all power except limited backup!"
For several horrible seconds Slippy was afraid that he was without backup as well, but then ROB said "Working" in his dull monotone and half a minute later a smal can of the stuff had materialized in a small canister upon the helm. Relieved beyond his growing panic, Slippy seized the bottle and poured about a quarter of the blue liquid down a dime-sized chute near him, praying to any deity that would listen for his wonderful craft to be quick on the recovery. He waited feverishly, one hand clutching a joystick of motion, the other ready at the weapons helm.
With a little jolt and a myriad of flashing lights, Blue Marine hummed back to life.
"Back in the game!" Slippy exclaimed, and he surged forward, rolling just in time to evade a pearl that may have spelled doom for his creation. "Alright you sad excuse for--damn, this stuff never sounds heroic when I say it." Shaking his head and grinning in a suicidal manner, he fired without mercy upon the ligament nearest to him, slamming it with both lasers and torpedoes until the taut muscle snapped in half, accompanied by an angry wail from the monstrous oyster.
"You're not gettin' away . . . "
Another pearl crashed into the side of the submarine and Slippy shouted a string of curses when a tiny jet of ocean water began sprinkling the metal floor. In his rage the mercenary was able to eradicate the other ligament; without those two muscles the top half of the oyster shell plummeted down and crashed down upon the lower half. When the sand clouds settled again Slippy crowed in victory, for the pearl productors had been brutally shattered.
"Just you and me now, buddy," the young toad sneered, and still cackling at his genius he let fly one final torpedo, which penetrated the unprotected eye and at last put an end to Andross's bio-weapon.
~~*~~
"Okay already, Slip--we owe you big for your quick thinking," Fox confessed later on when he and his three teammates had gathered around a large pot of black coffee in the back of the briefing room. "You definitely saved the day."
"You gotta admit," Falco began, swigging from his mug smoothly and pouring another. "I did a great job today, too."
Fox, Peppy, and Slippy burst into laughter, Falco joining them after a moment. "The only real useful thing you did today was drown yourself, kid," Peppy insisted.
Slippy poked the avian in the arm. "Nope, he's still alive. Damn--I mean, thank goodness!" Falco threw his arms about Slippy's neck in an inescapable headlock, and the youngest mercenary floundered his arms as Fox and Peppy snickered.
"By the way, where's Celestra?" Fox asked.
Falco released Slippy and even straightened the toad's baseball cap for him. "I think she's asleep--maybe I should go steal her boots or something." The avian rose and started off down the hall, grinning to himself.
His comrades hadn't noticed him turn left in the direction of the docking bay, as opposed to right, the only route to living quarters.
~~*~~
"I honestly thought you were joking."
Celestra turned to face Falco, and for the second time that day the avian had to remind himself to keep his beak closed. The normally conservative assassin was wearing a pair of white-washed blue jeans and a white spaghetti-strap shirt, but her black hair, as always, was pulled back away from her face. Falco made a mental note to comment on this at a later time. "What, about your little vacation? Why would I joke about something like that?"
Falco dusted off his baggy black jeans unnecessarily and absently straightened his grey tank top. "I'm not sure--it just seemed like the sort of thing you'd do to get a rise out of me."
The assassin smirked and ran one hand idly along the speedboat towering about the pair of them, their transportation of choice to escape Great Fox. The boat was quite beautiful, a great white majestic thing with a glittery navy finish and the name Cerulean Breeze spiraled across the back. "I'm glad you've labeled me such a pleasant person, Lombardi."
"Aw, come on, Celest," the avian begged, opening the hangar and slinging himself into the speedboat. "Let's try and get along on this little excursion, can't we?"
She crossed her arms. "Depends on where you're taking me."
"I know where I'm taking you; you'll know when we get there," he answered with a wink.
Celestra accepted his hand and leapt into the boat with him; in a matter of minutes the pair had left the Great Fox and their comrades far behind them in a cloud of mist.
Four days of endless jubilation had taken place before Anilora could drag himself away from his home planet, but he could delay his return to Corneria no longer. Word had reached General Pepper from his defensive base on Fortuna that an unseen evil was stirring in the oceans of Aquas, so it seemed only necessary that the Katinan captain again allied forces. He departed in the late afternoon with roughly the same numbers he had arrived with, and hundreds of his kin were present to see him off.
Celestra, with Falco only a few feet behind her, found that she was not as distressed at his departure as she would have been a few weeks ago.
Bill, Fox, and Slippy returned to full action the next day, their bodies cryogenically healed by the top medical associates in Nexxus. The day after that, ROB announced that General Pepper had a new mission on hand, so it was with great regret that Star Fox and the pair of assassins withdrew into Great Fox on the sixth day after Katina's big victory.
"If you would have tried to tell me last week that you would all live through an ordeal such as that, I'm not so sure that I would have believed you," Pepper admitted with a sheepish smile. The six of them pulled chairs around the G-Diffuser screen, laughing at their employer as they did so.
"Didn't think we could handle the big bad Venomians, General?" Bill teased, stretching full out in his chair.
"Figured we'd get our faces ground into the dirt?" Falco added with a smirk. The laughter intensified.
Pepper held up his hands in defeat to quiet the lot of them. "Alright, forgive my lack of faith," he began in exasperation, "and I would like very much to reward you with a well-deserved rest, but I fear important events have arisen concerning all of you that I cannot ignore.
"First and foremost, our allies heading the underwater Aquatica center have provided us with intelligence concerning Lylat's eighth planet, Aquas. Specialists detect very abnormal activity stirring beneath the surface, leading us to believe that Andross has begun construction of a sub-aquatic bio-weapon. If we were to allow such an instrument of destruction to unleash itself in the ocean, life on Aquas may very well be completely wiped out."
"We don't have any water craft capable of such a mission," Fox pointed out, gesturing at a holographic grid detailing every one of the hangars within Great Fox.
"Waverunners, sure, but nothing with the diving capacity you're talking about," Celestra added glumly.
Pepper sighed in exasperation and lowered his gaze. "What other options have we?"
Behind his comrades, Slippy shifted uncomfortably. Peppy noticed and raised a furry eyebrow. "What's the problem, Slip?"
The youngest mercenary glanced up, one eye twitching slightly, and whimpered nervously. "Well, I never told you guys this, but I built and modified my own two-man submarine."
The room fell very still.
"It's called the Blue Marine. I recently upgraded the laser capacity to hold grade-A hyper beams; the thing's got the new line of Titanian engines, it can really motor, you know. The biggest problem is that I haven't had a chance to give her a test run, so I'm not sure she'll be fully functional--"
"Mission accepted, General," Falco interrupted, rolling his eyes. "Let's move on."
Pepper cleared his throat loudly, seemingly not reassured. "The second misson is not for the five of you, but for Bill alone.
"Although the efforts given on Fortuna were undoubtedly great, all four members of Star Wolf and Reivin Frost survived."
Bill covered his face with his hands and turned away from the others, forcing back a disgusted ball of bile that threatened to well in his throat. He didn't know why he was surprised; he could no longer count the number of times he had attempted to put an end to Andross's top five supporters and found out later that they had somehow escaped the fate they deserved yet again. Subconsciously Bill ran his fingers along a four-inch scar that ran along the side of his neck, remembering well the scenario and traitor that had dealt it to him.
Suddenly not only was his path through life littered with obstacles, it seemed to be sloping uphill at an impossible ascent.
Bill felt a hand at his shoulder and knew that Celestra was trying to comfort him. The words rang in his ears when she said, "Sir, with your permission, I would like to accompany Bill on his mission."
Pepper frowned. "Your teammates need you now, Marquette."
"My best friend needs me now as well."
But the male assassin shrugged out of her hold and turned back, forcing a grin. "Let it go, Celest. General's right, y'know--in the grand scheme o' things, this bio-weapon thing is a hell of a lot more important. Reivin and I have a score to settle--and I mean to honor it." Then, to Pepper, he asked, "Where can I find him? We don't have his flight path off o' Fortuna."
"He never left, according to Fortunan radar. Sensors indicate that Star Wolf returned to Venom following their defeat, but for some reason Frost chose to remain."
"Makes it easier for me to find him anyway," Bill affirmed lightly, shouldering his knapsack and making for the door of the briefing room. "He's itchin' for a rematch with Celest--bet he'll be surprised to see me, aye?"
Celestra crossed her arms and gave a great sigh. "Damn it, Grey, take care of yourself, you hear me?"
"Yeah, don't go getting yourself killed," Fox added.
With a smile that seemed both reassuring and sickening, Bill waved and exited.
"Good luck to the rest of you," Pepper murmured, then he, too, was gone.
"So this is a two-man craft you've got, Slip?" Fox inquired, sitting in an armchair and twining his fingers together. "If you pilot it, I'll run weapons for you."
Celestra looked to Falco, who grinned widely. "Better get your swim trunks, Lombardi--I know for a fact that there are two waverunners in that hangar."
Peppy sighed and massaged the back of his neck. "Guess I'll give the pair of you air cover--you're more likely to shoot each other or drown yourselves than get caught by the bad guys."
~~*~~
In roughly twenty hours of hyperspace travel, Great Fox had entered Aquas airspace and was slowly orbiting an area of sea into which Blue Marine would soon submerge. Celestra knocked rapidly on Falco's door, spinning her familiar plasma guns in her slender hands excitedly as the avian rushed to answer.
Falco tugged his bedroom door open and had to literally remind himself to glue his beak shut. The assassin, normally clad in denim shorts and black flight attire, had completely altered her code of dress for the water mission: she was wearing a navy blue bikini top and a pair of silver work-out shorts. Only her combat boots and heavily-laden utility belt remained; her hair, as always, was pulled back away from her pale face.
"Gotta say," he choked out, moving aside to let her enter, "water was never really my thing."
Celestra shook her head and chuckled at the sight of the avian's room; unlike her own, his was cluttered and disorganized. "I can see where it would be a problem, you having feathers and all."
"Shut up," Falco retorted, gathering his own weapons belt and beckoning to her. "Let's go already."
The pair of them marched down the hall, Falco leading in a pair of black swim trunks and old tennis shoes, Celestra a few paces behind, fiddling with the frequency of her weapons' fire and studying the taut outlines of muscle in the avian's bare back in interest. He had to lift weights often, she decided, for his upper body was a chiseled piece of athletic perfection and he was physically fit in every way. If possible, Falco was just as strong as Bill, whose house contained its own weights complex that he undoubtedly spent hours in every day.
They turned into the hall containing all hangars together, feeling the sultry, warm ocean air waft pleasantly against their faces as Fox and Slippy prepped Blue Marine in front of an open hangar. Peppy was nowhere to be seen, but Nebulafire was gone so they assumed that he was already in the sky waiting for them. Falco led the assassin around to the adjacent hangar and gestured to their transports for the day--a pair of black and white waverunners.
The water craft would have been normal and safe, but it was clear that they had been tampered with. Actually, Falco himself had modified the two transports, wiring in two adamantite lasers on each side that were capable of firing multiple shots at a time. A small antennae on the back of each waverunner (only a few inches in height) projected a shield much like those that protected their Arwings, encompassing even the underside of the craft and creating a bubble that would keep its rider safe.
Celestra pressed a button in the wall of the hangar and put her face close to a miniscule speaker. "ROB, open the hatch for Falco and me, will you?"
"Affirmative," came the cyborg's voice, and with a low rumble the hangar lifted into the ceiling, leaving the avian and the assassin with nebula light glancing off the cerulean surface mere feet below and a cool ocean spray in their faces.
"You've got your standard G-Diffuser system hooked up to that console there," Falco explained, pointing to the helm just below and between the handlebars. "The red button on the side of your right handlebar brings up the shields; the green on on the left handlebar fires your lasers. Keep in mind that I never got the chance to test these things, and don't bite my head off if something gets screwed up."
Rolling her eyes, Celestra leaned against the wall and stared out at the sparkling water, waiting for Blue Marine to deploy so they could follow.
~~*~~
Slippy tested the identical joysticks with his agile hands, re-memorizing the controls and attacks for the ump-teenth time in the past three months. This submarine had haunted the technician's spare time since before the Lylat War had begun, and when Pepper had called on the Star Fox team to lead the forces against Andross, Slippy had known his creation would be needed sometime soon. It was a work of art for the youngest mercenary, equipped with sub-atomic missiles as well as the highest frequency hyper beams available, and the new model Titanian engines would give them extra boosts of speed in the event that the water pressure compromised Blue Marine's outside. Fox could only look on in awe as the thirteen-year-old walked the controls through intricate manuevers, testing the mobility of the internal components.
"All systems prepared for deployment, Slippy," came ROB's voice over the submarine's intercome. "Shields and engines at maximum, hyperbeams warming, missiles prepped and ready to fire. Requesting permission to submerge."
"Permission granted," Slippy replied without hestitation. "Let's go to work."
Fox positioned himself at the weapons console, testing the mobility again fro his comrades' sake, and with a soft whoosh they had ejected from the hangar. Slippy caught a fleeting glimpse of Nebulafire in the sky before they dove beneath the surface.
His moment had come.
~~*~~
Falco was dragging his waverunner to the brink when he saw Blue Marine enter the water. Turning to regard Celestra, who was shoving her craft along several feet behind, he said, "Can't you go any faster, Celest? It's time to go."
The assassin paused at his side, glancing down at the churning waves and deducing that Fox and Slippy had begun their search for the bio-weapon. More than studying the shadow of the sub sinking down into the inky depths, though, Celestra was calculating the number of feet they would have to fall to make it down. Falco slung a wing around her shoulders and pulled her to his side, grinning widely.
"Don't like heights much?" the avian teased.
Celestra nosed the waverunner over to the edge until it was balancing precariously. "I just have this thing with death-defying free-falls into monster-infested waters," she responded sarcastically.
Falco laughed heartily and tightened his grip on her for just a moment before letting go. "Well said." He straddled his craft, smirking when she did the same. "On three, got it?"
"Sure, whatever. One--"
"--Two--"
"--Three!" In unison they kicked off the edge of the hangar and careened twenty feet toward the ocean, screaming as one with the thrill of the fall, and hit the surface, luckily landing right-side up and still on their mounts. The lukewarm water gushed up over their legs as the waverunners absorbed the impact; droplets shone in the avian's bright feathers and in Celestra's dark hair, and they revved the engines to life.
"You dead yet, Marquette?"
Celestra shot him an acidic look. "Sorry to disappoint you, Lombardi." And together they shot off across the aqua cascade, weaving in between one another as their shields came up around them, sparkling at their maximum. Peppy's engines surged, and his Arwing soared along above and behind.
~~*~~
Kelp and seaweed danced along a few yards beneath the submarine's belly; several harmless sea creatures scuttled to clear the way, and Blue Marine drifted serenely ahead, powerul lights illuminating the areas ahead of their current position.
Fox had never witnessed anything so perfectly beautiful in his entire life as Slippy turned a corner and an entire underwater ruin came into view. Great ivory and onyx remains of a once majestic city glimmered within the white sand; stacks of multicolored stones engraved with ancient runes dotted the ocean bottom. Slippy slowed their pace, and Fox shook himself from the sight.
"A defensible position," Slippy responded to his wing commanders' unspoken question. Fox nodded and tightened his paws about the weapons' joysticks, confident that they would soon see battle, and with a quick intake of breath, Slippy proceeded.
The pair of them had not moved forward fifteen feet when a dozen reelene, starfish-shaped monstrosities, filtered out from behind various piles of ruins and stone.
Slippy drove the sub hard to the left, giving Fox an opportunity to unleash a barrage of missiles at those on the left flank as they rolled. One reelene collided with the reat, but Blue Marine took the hit stoically and opened fire with dazzling shots of blue hyperbeam. More of the starfish poured out from concealed areas, diving at the underwater craft, and Slippy was hard-pressed to evade with unending precision. The shields bleeped once as another reelene rammed into the right flank, but Fox was ready with a second line of missiles, slamming into the bulk of their assailants and scattering those lucky enough to survive the strike. The technician seized the moment to motor through the ruins, spinning into another roll as a verdana, a sub-aquatic dragon, sliced through the water inches from the hull.
"That was living, breathing proof of why I fly an Arwing," Fox gasped out, steadying his radically trembling paws.
Slippy was grinning maniacally. "This is the coolest thing I've ever done!" He pressed a few buttons on his helm and a radar reading encompassed their entire windshield, mapping out the area of ocean around them for twenty miles around. Several white blips were migrating ahead, and to the northwest blinked a single, larger white dot, isolated from the rest of the environment.
"Is that--?" Fox began as he booted up the G-Diffuser system.
"Bingo," Slippy confirmed. "Andross's sub-aquatic bio-weapon." Re-angling Blue Marine to run a straight path in the direction of the largest blip, he added, "Make sure Falco and Celestra are aware that a score or so of those reelene are going to surface soon; according to these coordinates, they'll be within yards."
~~*~~
"This is tight!" Falco cried happily over the wind and spray. "Now all we need is an inner tube and some adult beverages."
Celestra's damp ponytail slapped the back of her neck as she cornered and dodged around to Falco's left side. "You might not care much for Fox's most recent news, then. We've got reelene just below us, surfacing at a rapid pace."
Falco glanced over at her, booting up the white fire of his adamantite lasers as he did so. "Damn it, that's the last straw. I'm putting in for a vacation. They're trying to ruin our fun by sending us a bunch of mutant starfish!"
"You can always do what I do," Celestra offered, readying her hand beside the button that unleashed laser fire. "Give yourself a vacation and conveniently forget to mention where you've gone and when you'll be back."
The avian's laugh came out as a strangled yell as the ocean exploded around the pair of waverunners and twenty or so reelene burst into the radiant sunshine, diving wildly for the assassin and mercenary. Falco proved to be as successful at manuevering the water craft as he was at flawlessly piloting an Arwing; he pivoted magnificently across the waves in amazing figure-eight formations, firing effortlessly at any creature in his line of sight. So great was his skill that Celestra, still learning the controls, barely got in a shot.
Just as the last of the reelene sank dead beneath the surface, the blue-grey, leathery wings of the verdana assaulted the pair as it broke the waves; water cascaded from the great thing's back as it ascended into the air above them, letting out an unearthly shriek and beating its wings furiously. Celestra killed the engines of her craft and spun her handheld lasers into her hands, but the plasma fire seemed only to anger the massive creature as it rose higher into the air to strike.
Its only fatal mistake was flying just high enough to intersect the flight path of Nebulafire.
Peppy swooped in, thrusters boosted to maximum, and opened fire on the verdana, razing long lines of scorched flesh along the monsters' neck and back. Its wings buckled as it screeched in pain, dropping several hundred feet in altitude, only to be attacked mercilessly by the female assassin. But as the aqua dragon dove, swooping and crying in agony, its tail sideswiped Falco's waverunner. The avian was thrown from the craft, unconscious, and sank, swallowed up by the churning water.
Celestra re-holstered her lasers and signaled for Peppy to finish the creature as she dove in after him.
~~*~~
"Lombardi's been unseated," Slippy reported as Blue Marine sliced quickly through the dark depths.
Fox looked up from the radar readout, eyes alarmed. "Vitals?"
"Stable, but he's unconscious."
The mercenary leader ran a hand through the fur between his ears and exhaled sharply. "He could be in for the long haul; between monsters and unconsciousness he could very well meet his maker."
Without warning, the small picture insignia next to Falco's flashed red and an identical red X appeared over Celestra's face. "Fox, it looks like Celestra's been taken out, too."
Fox wrung his hands together madly and glanced about, looking for some shred of comfort. If he lost two-fifths of his team today there would be no telling what he would do in his grief. "V-Vitals?" he stammered in fear.
Slippy re-checked Celestra's health readouts with bated breath, then his eyes widened. "Fully conscious and fully active. It looks as though she ejected."
"She's going after Lombardi!" Fox hissed in relief.
"Yes, and we have to pray she'll get to him in time," Slippy remarked, tightening his hands about the joysticks guiding his prized submarine. "We're only a mile or two away from the bio-weapon."
~~*~~
Celestra shuddered as she powered down through wave after wave of merciless cold; suddenly just being below the ocean's surface brought chills through her body. The silhouette of Falco's prone form was descending further into the depths several feet below, and the assassin had to work hard to close the gap between them. Every so often she heard the sizzle of a misfired laser shoot through the dark water as Peppy battled the verdana above, but aside from that the world seemed to have grown strangely quiet as she traversed the realm under the sea.
A trio of reelene spiraled up from the depths, encircling the avian with their tiny gnashing teeth, and Celestra propeled forward, firing with one plasma gun and grabbing at Falco's feathers. The creatures scattered without further incentive, and Celestra pulled Falco against her, turning and making for the faint shreds of sunlight reflecting off the ocean waves.
She was perhaps five feet from breaking the surface when she felt pressure at her ankles and could no longer kick. Glancing down she could just make out the shadow of an enormous octopus-like monster called a naidat, with oozing orange skin and eight sticky tentacles, one of which was wrapping tightly about her ankles.
Celestra opened her mouth to curse, but all that came out was a wealth of miniature air bubbles.
The assassin lashed out with her right arm, punching at the tentacle as she struggled to keep ahold of Falco, but the thing's grip only tightened and pulled her further down, away from the sun. Stars were swimming in her line of vision as she fumbled with the butterfly knife within her boot; her lungs screamed for oxygen, but somehow she sublimated her fear of suffocation and stabbed desperately at the naidat. The creature shrieked and loosened its grip, and Celestra stabbed hard one last time and set her sights again on the sun.
The oxygen revitalized her lungs not a moment too soon, and Celestra gasped and spluttered as she held Falco's head above the surface. One of the waverunners was bobbing belly-up nearby, and she pumped her one free arm madly and slowly gained on it.
When finally Celestra had slung the avian's body over the seat of the waverunner, he was neither moving nor breathing and she could not detect a pulse of any kind.
"Come on, Falco, you can't just drop dead whenever it's convenient for you," Celestra muttered as she floated, still rather cold, at his side. "Don't start thinking you can just kick off and leave me here."
Celestra hoisted herself up onto the rear of the craft, straddling the seat and Falco's body and prying his beak open. A few trickles of ocean water seeped down the corners of his mouth, and without any hesitation she covered his mouth with hers and blew two lungfuls of air. Then she rose and pumped his chest twenty times or so, and repeated the process.
Two minutes later Falco was coughing up mouthfuls of water, and Celestra was in the seat again, shivering but steadying the craft without protest as the avian literally came back to life.
~~*~~
"Fox, Slippy, do you copy? This is Peppy, over."
Fox fumbled with the G-Diffuser at the helm of the submarine for a moment. "Please tell me that our crazy friends are alive, Peppy."
"Affirmative. Celestra and Falco are both alive, and by the looks of things they're going off on their way again, heading in the same direction as you are."
Slippy re-checked the radar screen one last time and it flickered off. "We're in the near vacinity of the bio-weapon now, Peppy, and chances are it'll be extremely well protected. You three stand by for any more disturbances."
"You've got it." Peppy terminated the communication.
"How close are we, Slip?" asked Fox.
Slippy was glancing about nervously now, hands trembling in anticipation upon the controls. "A few hundred yards. Should be any second now."
The pair glided ahead with bated breath and wide eyes, straining to catch a glimpse of anything out of the ordinary, their hands memorizing the controls of their respective posts yet again. Directly above them, Celestra and Falco skimmed the water on their waverunners and displayed similar signs of anxiety. Peppy, content merely to wait for danger as opposed to looking for it, set his Arwing on a dull hover and clasped his hands behind his head, watching warily and waiting for signs of hostile movement.
Slippy caught a glimpse of it first and immediately powered down the main thrusters, slowing their forward momentum. With amazing reflexes the young mercenary sent Blue Marine through a series of quick lunges and barrel-rolls, eyes wide as dinner plates as an enormous echo resounded when the sub was hit with remarkable force. He was quick, though, and just managed to reverse direction, putting enough distance between them craft and their assailant so the battering momentarily ceased.
"Er . . . I don't see anything," Fox protested sheepishly.
With a profound sigh, Slippy sent the radar screen spiraling back across the windshield, and Fox gasped.
Planted directly in their path was the most enormous oyster shell the mercenary leader had ever seen in his lifetime of strange occurences. The outer shell was milky-white and seemed to have gained a few passengers during its growth, for a trio of anemones decorated the hard surface. The protective tendrils waved ominously, through, suggesting that the anemones had guests of their own. When the shell gaped open they could see a pair of pearl-emitting producters, the taut pink ligaments of its monstrous jaw, and a single, multicolored eye that danced around its socket as though immensely pleased to see the pair of them. Then the shell snapped shut with a crack.
"Ah, thanks," Fox continued as the shock wave carried Blue Marine back several feet. "I see it now."
Slippy was clearly not paying his wing commander any attention, or if he was he did not offer any retaliatory comments. Under his practiced hands the submarine danced gracefully through the inky depths, dodging another round of pearls as they spewed from the productors. "Fox! Can you hit those anemones?"
"What good will that do?!"
"Do you see anything else to shoot at?!"
Fox cursed and opened fire with the hyper beams as Slippy continued to evade with a series of magnificent rolls and dives. The lasers sizzled through the water and arced the entire upper lip of the shell, plowing into the anemones with massive force. Upon impact the laser burned through the rubbery exoskeleton and the creatures shrieked shrilly, releasing an elongated sea snake, an admura, from each. The three admuras spiraled upward, making for the surface, and the bio-weapon unleashed yet another wave of pearls.
"You were supposed to kill them," Slippy remarked, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth in anxiety.
Fox was still firing madly at the waving tentacles of the anemones, canines bared in concentration. "I'm a bit busy, Slip." A pearl slammed into one side of the sub, creating a dent in the metal, and Fox stumbled but was flung away from the weapons' helm.
Slippy somehow kept his feet and continued to evade the never-ending barrage. It was his turn to save the day, he decided, and nothing could quench the fire in his eyes.
~~*~~
"What's that sound?" Celestra asked.
Falco stalled his engine and turned his head from side to side, straining to discern the source of the odd, sucking sound meeting his ears. He had been to Aquas before during his career alongside Fox, but not enough times to be considered an expert of psychotic oceanic creatures. He cast a passive glance down, and his eyes widened. "Uh, Celest, we've got company."
The assassin followed his gaze and could just make out the trio of slender, narrow bodies darting for the surface. "Admura!" she cried, and the ocean around them exploded.
Admura greatly resembled enormous sea snakes, perhaps fifty feet in length but only fire feet around. The skin stretched across their slender forms was blue-grey and rubbery, so strong that it repelled the laser fire from Peppy's craft. But Falco had designed and built the waverunners well, and the adamantite core of their laser beams sliced easily through the smooth flesh. The pair tore one admura apart while attacking in tandem; Falco eliminated one by himself, and then Celestra began to have difficulties.
Celestra cut a hard right turn to rejoin Falco, who was attacking the last admura from about twenty feet away, when the creature rounded on her, bared its two-inch long teeth, and clamped down on the front of her waverunner. The assassin screamed as it lifted her and the craft into the air, and with a mighty surge of its jaw muscles the admura bit the craft in half. Celestra careened thirty feet and plunged back into the water, resurfacing a few seconds later and already firing at the towering monster.
Her plasma lasers bounced right off its flesh.
"Celestra!" cried Falco, whipping his waverunner about in a ninety degree angle to face her. "Swim to me! Swim hard!"
Without any further prompting she re-holstered her guns and began a quick breast-stroke in the direction of the avian's waverunner; he stretched out one hand, she grabbed for it, and he hoisted her up and fired the engines just as the admura dove for them. Its jaws missed them by mere feet, and Celestra gripped Falco's waist tightly as he increased their speed.
"What now?" Celestra called in Falco's ear.
"Now I finally get to be better than you at something," Falco shouted over his shoulder, revving the engine again and skimming across the water, picking up speed.
They circled the admura swiftly for several minutes, studying it for signs of wavering attention, and as soon as it began to tire Falco spurred the craft into new heights of speed and zoomed up its back. Before the creature could buck them off they had veered away, at a perfect angle with its head, and fired mercilessly. As the last admura crashed dead below the waves, Falco and Celestra collapsed against one another, dissolved into fits of exhausted laughter.
~~*~~
At roughly the same time, Fox and Slippy had eliminated the last of the anemones and the ocean lay quiet, an ominous concept as the pair of mercenaries stared down the truly devastating bio-weapon.
"What's it doing?" Fox whispered harshly, as though the oyster could hear his words.
Slippy squinted through the gloom, hands still ready at the primary controls. "I'm not too sure."
Even as he finished responding the shell creaked open, single eyes lolling around tantilizingly as it unleashed the greatest double-barrage of pearls yet, nearly overwhelming the men as they struggled to regain lost ground. Three of the great stones rapped against the submarine, slicing great chunks out of the protective metal and dropping the shield energy by half. Fox let fly torpedo after torpedo, blasting great gaps in the endless stream of pearls, but it was a blocking technique only and did no real damage to the oyster.
"Ligaments," Slippy muttered to himself.
Fox cocked his head. "Sorry?"
The youngest mercenary tipped his head in the direction of the gaping shell; for the first time since the battle had ensued Fox studied the two taut muscles supporting the upper portion. If the higher half of the shell were to collapse with enough force, might the pearl productors also be destroyed and their way cleared? Hope renewed, the vulpine feverishly punched a few buttons.
With a spark, the submarine shut down.
From somewhere in the darkness to his left, Fox heard Slippy shriek, "What the hell did you do?!"
"I don't know!" Fox screamed in reply. "What happened?!"
Slippy continued to boot up various skematics of Blue Marine's interior, cursing to himself. "The poison in the control rods has been cut off."
Fox bared his canines in frustration. "How about speaking a language I know, Slippy?"
"When the poison in the control rods decreases, more neutrons get into the fuel rods and everything overheats. We have to wait for everything to cool down before the sub can function properly."
"And this is where?"
The toad grinned at the ironic stupidity of it all. "The nuclear reactor."
"And that's really important, right?"
"Very." As an afterthought, Slippy added, "You failed your Cornerian physics field class, didn't you?"
The vulpine scowled deeply. "Yes, but I was never the one who wanted to be a technical worker for Arspace; that was you. I just wanted to teach at the Flight Academy."
Another gigantic pearl blindsided Blue Marine and sent both mercenaries crashing to the floor; for the first time on the entire mission the shields flashing the warning signal. Slippy struggled back to his feet and was more than a little alarmed when his commander did not do the same. The toad skittered back to his knees and felt around blindly on the ground for Fox's prone form; he was unconscious.
The youngest Star Fox member, already nervous, suddenly found himself truly alone, surronded by water pollution, kneeling in an overheated submarine and facing Andross's worst plot to date.
'Can't panic!' his mind screamed through the shield gauge warnings. 'I can fix this stupid thing, I just need . . . '
"ROB!" he cried desperately into the emergency communications speaker. "I need a nuclear reactor coolant pronto! The sub's getting hammered and we've lost all power except limited backup!"
For several horrible seconds Slippy was afraid that he was without backup as well, but then ROB said "Working" in his dull monotone and half a minute later a smal can of the stuff had materialized in a small canister upon the helm. Relieved beyond his growing panic, Slippy seized the bottle and poured about a quarter of the blue liquid down a dime-sized chute near him, praying to any deity that would listen for his wonderful craft to be quick on the recovery. He waited feverishly, one hand clutching a joystick of motion, the other ready at the weapons helm.
With a little jolt and a myriad of flashing lights, Blue Marine hummed back to life.
"Back in the game!" Slippy exclaimed, and he surged forward, rolling just in time to evade a pearl that may have spelled doom for his creation. "Alright you sad excuse for--damn, this stuff never sounds heroic when I say it." Shaking his head and grinning in a suicidal manner, he fired without mercy upon the ligament nearest to him, slamming it with both lasers and torpedoes until the taut muscle snapped in half, accompanied by an angry wail from the monstrous oyster.
"You're not gettin' away . . . "
Another pearl crashed into the side of the submarine and Slippy shouted a string of curses when a tiny jet of ocean water began sprinkling the metal floor. In his rage the mercenary was able to eradicate the other ligament; without those two muscles the top half of the oyster shell plummeted down and crashed down upon the lower half. When the sand clouds settled again Slippy crowed in victory, for the pearl productors had been brutally shattered.
"Just you and me now, buddy," the young toad sneered, and still cackling at his genius he let fly one final torpedo, which penetrated the unprotected eye and at last put an end to Andross's bio-weapon.
~~*~~
"Okay already, Slip--we owe you big for your quick thinking," Fox confessed later on when he and his three teammates had gathered around a large pot of black coffee in the back of the briefing room. "You definitely saved the day."
"You gotta admit," Falco began, swigging from his mug smoothly and pouring another. "I did a great job today, too."
Fox, Peppy, and Slippy burst into laughter, Falco joining them after a moment. "The only real useful thing you did today was drown yourself, kid," Peppy insisted.
Slippy poked the avian in the arm. "Nope, he's still alive. Damn--I mean, thank goodness!" Falco threw his arms about Slippy's neck in an inescapable headlock, and the youngest mercenary floundered his arms as Fox and Peppy snickered.
"By the way, where's Celestra?" Fox asked.
Falco released Slippy and even straightened the toad's baseball cap for him. "I think she's asleep--maybe I should go steal her boots or something." The avian rose and started off down the hall, grinning to himself.
His comrades hadn't noticed him turn left in the direction of the docking bay, as opposed to right, the only route to living quarters.
~~*~~
"I honestly thought you were joking."
Celestra turned to face Falco, and for the second time that day the avian had to remind himself to keep his beak closed. The normally conservative assassin was wearing a pair of white-washed blue jeans and a white spaghetti-strap shirt, but her black hair, as always, was pulled back away from her face. Falco made a mental note to comment on this at a later time. "What, about your little vacation? Why would I joke about something like that?"
Falco dusted off his baggy black jeans unnecessarily and absently straightened his grey tank top. "I'm not sure--it just seemed like the sort of thing you'd do to get a rise out of me."
The assassin smirked and ran one hand idly along the speedboat towering about the pair of them, their transportation of choice to escape Great Fox. The boat was quite beautiful, a great white majestic thing with a glittery navy finish and the name Cerulean Breeze spiraled across the back. "I'm glad you've labeled me such a pleasant person, Lombardi."
"Aw, come on, Celest," the avian begged, opening the hangar and slinging himself into the speedboat. "Let's try and get along on this little excursion, can't we?"
She crossed her arms. "Depends on where you're taking me."
"I know where I'm taking you; you'll know when we get there," he answered with a wink.
Celestra accepted his hand and leapt into the boat with him; in a matter of minutes the pair had left the Great Fox and their comrades far behind them in a cloud of mist.