The next day, Andross called James up to the command deck.

James arrived still putting his fur in order, damp and ruffled from a hurried shower. He managed a half salute in between his grooming motions, and Andross managed a partial smile, shaking his head. "What?" James finally asked bluntly.

"Asshole. Take a look."

James came up even with the command chair, looking at the battlefield that stretched out in front of them. It was extensive, probably a hundred cruisers total between the two sides. It was like a laser light show, thousands of fighters everywhere, and he blinked, mildly surprised. "I thought you weren't taking this cruiser into battle."

"Changed my mind last night." Andross replied mildly, sipping at a cup of coffee, eyes only half-open. "And just my presence seems to make a difference for troop morale."

James was inclined to agree, watching Venomian fighters do suicidal charges against Cornerian cruisers. "Looks like a stalemate out there." He finally ventured, glancing at Andross.

"Oh, give it another thirty seconds."

"What happens then?"

Andross just smiled behind his coffee, saying nothing.

"Ship coming out of warp, sir."

James turned to look at the screens, watching the new ship arrive and open three huge fins, and frowned. This wasn't a combat cruiser, he could see the hull taking damage from crossfire even from where he was. So what was it? He glanced at Andross, who mildly made a 'charge' hand gesture, and the aide who had spoken before yelled "Open fire!" over his shoulder.

Then the laser blasted forward, and James stepped back with wide horrified eyes as the laser traced the battlefield. He couldn't help but count as one Cornerian cruiser after another blew, hundreds of fighters getting torn apart in the laser's wake, both Cornerian and Venomian. It seemed to go on for hours, playing in slow motion in front of him, and he almost lifted a hand, almost cried out in agony. A large section of Corneria's space force was being decimated in front of him, and all he could do was stand there and try not to react.

Then the laser shut off, and the battlefield was silent as Venomian fighters limped back to their respective ships. What was left of the Cornerian forces was fleeing as fast as it could for home, leaving behind the wreckage of uncountable ships. James stood there shuddering, then realized that Andross was watching him silently, a sharp, curious look on his face. He glared, folding his arms.

"Why did you ask me to come up here?" James finally demanded.

"To show you that." Andross nodded at the view port. "To show you I mean business."

"I knew that to begin with."

"But you didn't believe it."

James couldn't argue that.

"You see, McCloud… there is nothing Lylat can do to stop my advance. You were bright to start working for me, because in the end it will guarantee your survival." Andross studied his fingernails.

"You wanted to break my morale, is that it?"

"McCloud, for claiming to be a mercenary, you have some unnaturally deep loyalties."

James snarled and stomped off the bridge, hands curled into fists.

Those in the gym jumped when James stomped in still wearing his uniform, tossing off his jacket and shirt without thinking about his scars, shoving ear phones into his ears and winding up the volume to near max, moving to a punching bag and laying into it with all his might, eyes tightly closed and anger still jerking through his body.

What could he do? He was just one man, and even if he rebelled and tried to fight for Corneria, he'd end up killed. The minute he moved for a fighter, Andross would have no problem taking him out of the picture, and he knew it. And the people on this cruiser were fanatical, the chances of him inciting a mutiny was none. He felt caged, restless and trapped, a rabid tiger lunging against the cage bars, claws falling just short of his target.

So it was no surprise that he nearly freaked out when arms snared him from behind, settling around his ribs and a forehead leaning between his shoulders. He started to defend himself, then jerked to a halt when he recognized the hands and arms, freezing and hearing the voice faintly beyond the angry music.

"You're bleeding James, you're bleeding, breathe, calm down… shhh…"

He gasped for air, tilting his head back and closing his eyes, letting himself become aware of his body, and realized that he'd been doing this for a very long time. It was a bad habit, a way he had found to spend his anger but he lost track of it. Peppy had reamed him years ago for running on a treadmill for so long he collapsed in exhaustion, and to him it had only been a few minutes. "Marisa?" He finally heard himself ask blankly, trembling.

"Yes."

"How long have I been doing this?"

"I don't know. I've only been here ten minutes."

He went to move, and she let him go, watching him pull the headphones out, the cords trailing over his shoulders. He stood there blurrily, eyes opening and looking at his hands and huffing. He had broken seven of his claws clean off, as well as broken the skin on his knuckles, and blood had soaked the fur on his hands, marking the punching bag. "Well, god damn it." He finally said, turning to look at her wearily, feeling his chest still heaving, and glancing around. The gym was quiet, most of the others had bugged out completely.

"Would you tell me why if I asked?" She crossed her arms, looking at his hands, then at his face.

"Internal monologues. I lost track of time. It happens a lot, sadly." He flexed his hands, wincing. "Listen, thanks. I probably would have ended up collapsing if someone hadn't stopped me, and these guys are too scared of me to bother." He nodded at the few others in the gym.

"No problem. You should go shower."

"Agreed." He scooped up his shed jacket and shirt, staggering out of the room wearily, and she watched him go, then looked back at the blood-marked punching bag. So much anger. She had to wonder how he dealt with it.

"So, what the hell are we going to do?"

Fox glanced at Falco, who was watching the hologram recording of one of the battles. It was a video someone had sent to them from the front lines, just some random fighter pilot who had had their fighter auto-recording. After a few minutes the recording fuzzed to a halt, it was fairly obvious the person recording had been killed. "We wait." He finally said, leaning on the edge of the projector and watching it play out again, watching Corneria's forces get butchered. "This asshole here…" He remarked, flicking one of the shuddering holographic ships, finger passing through the image. "That's a command ship. That's who's calling the shots."

"Did you just say we wait?" Falco asked, frowning. "In case you haven't noticed, Fox, our home is getting its ass kicked to kingdom come. If we don't do something and soon, we're not going to stand a chance."

"We're mercenaries Falco. If we move without being contracted, we don't get paid." Fox replied dryly. "And have you looked at the debt on this thing?"

"Two and a half million credits." Peppy said matter-of-factly, turning his chair and smiling sourly. "Give or take a few thousand."

Falco winced. "Remind me why I joined this crackpot group?" He glanced at Fox.

"Because the Academy had had enough of you?" Fox grinned, turning off the holograph projector.

"Yeah, fuck off McCloud." Falco scowled, and tossed up his hands. "Ok, so we twiddle our thumbs for unknown amounts of time. What if they never call us up and say "come save our asses"?"

"Pepper will if it comes down to it. That's how it's always been and always will be." Peppy remarked, trying to make Falco back off a bit. "As long as we're around at least."

"You are such an optimist." Falco turned his scowl to Peppy for a few seconds, and huffed.

"It'd be better if dad was here." Fox sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. "He had such good instincts for this."

"For what it's worth, your instincts aren't bad, Fox." Slippy said, pulling himself out of one of the bridge consols, where he'd been checking hardware.

"Thanks I guess." He looked at ROB. "Keep us on a perimeter patrol for now, I want us out of the action but close enough that we can be at Corneria in under twenty minutes warp if we're needed."

"Affirmative." ROB nodded once.

"A mercenary's holding pattern." Falco leaned on a wall, crossing his arms. "I am so god damn bored."

"Revel in it, because once this starts, we won't even really have time to sleep."

Andross glanced up when Marisa came into the lab, and smiled, unable to help it. "Hello dear, what brings you here this morning?"

"Just wanted to ask you about something." She replied, hopping up and sitting on one of his tables.

"Go ahead."

"I while ago, I asked James why he didn't want you working on his ribs, and he said he'd seen some of your other work." She said slowly. "But he wouldn't tell me what he meant. He said I should ask you." She met his eyes. "What did he mean?"

Andross froze for a second, looking at her, mind racing. At least James hadn't told her, he supposed, but how to explain all this? How to put it mildly? "Well, um, that is kind of hard to explain. You see when I was first starting my career years ago, I was working for the Cornerian government, not independently."

"I thought you hated them?"

"Well, now I do, but then I was a starving PhD looking for a way to get enough money to live on and pay my loans. Any port in a storm as they say, and the stuff they had me working on is a bit a step away from what I do now. Weapons design and testing in fact; specifically mass-damage weaponry other then nuclear powered." He tossed a hand. "Which, actually, is how I met McCloud in the first place. He was younger then, a full-out brat in fact, but a good one. He was a mercenary in the employ of the Cornerian Air Force, and for some reason they thought he'd be a good candidate for actually attempting to use the weapons I made. And he was. He wasn't some run-of-the-mill jarhead, even back then, he's brilliantly smart for a soldier. Hell he caught my mistakes a dozen times, narrowly escaping with his skin on most of those occasions.

But I digress. I got enough approval for my heavy weaponry to start getting funding for things that interested me more, such as genetic work, and slowly shifted my work focus in that direction. Eventually I went independent with it, working with things like super crops, serums for things like diabetes, the like. Mostly altruistic stuff, but the Government still decided it liked some of my darker dealings, and started employing contracts to me. It helped pay for some of my other work, so I went with it, and well… things sort of spun out of control…"

The laboratory, his beautiful laboratory, in chaos as it was stormed by soldiers. The Cornerian government, on a tour of the facililty, had suddenly decided that politically speaking this was a bad idea and had instantly backed out of the contract, stopping payment as well. Andross, already walking the fine line of mental health, had responded in one way: he had walked into the main lab and thrown the master gate switch, allowing his creations, which knew him and loved him, to run free into the city. It had been panic and chaos, dozens had died, more from shock and panic then from the creatures themselves. And then the soldiers had come… And James McCloud had helped lead the charge, and had personally cuffed Andross himself, General Pepper reading him his rights. Andross didn't say a word then, or at the trifuneral, or on the ship to exile. He was thinking, considering a way to recover from this series of mistakes. Of course, there was none, and in the end one viable, attractive alternative had opened: revenge.

"So here I am." He ended, editing out all the details of reality for that dark day. "Not that scary of a thing, is it?"

"It had to have been bad to be an exiling offense."

"Sweetie, forgive me, but you obviously know nothing of politics. The public was angry and wanted a scapegoat. They found me, and since I was in trouble anyway, I was all the easier of a target."

She frowned at him. "I can't help but think you're leaving details out."

"How else can I make a story of two decades last only a few minutes?" He relaxed when she smiled, sighing to himself. "Just always remember, young lady. I did some good things too."

James sighed, looking at the poster now hanging on the wall of his room. He had had someone on the command deck print it for him, and the same person had let him borrow two markers, one red one blue. On it he was tracking the advance of Andross, lines and arrows for the movement of the army, circles on the planets he'd taken for sure. Andross had already pressed halfway across the system, and judging by the formation the cruisers were taking, he was going to hit both flanks of Corneria's forces and crush them in a pincer.

God damn it.

He checked with the terminal, and stood there a moment, tapping the blue marker against his lower jaw. Then, slowly, he put a blue dot on the map, on the far side of Corneria from the direction of Venom, and wrote beside it 'Great Fox holding?' Only then did he set the markers back on the desk and resume his slow pacing of the room, trying to distract his mind.

He didn't have any options, he knew that, he'd known that when he started this whole thing. He had dropped everything just for a shot to be with his wife again, and it sort of looked like he may be getting that, he loved her, and she was overly kind to him, had hugged him, maybe they had a chance. And now that that was ok, he was finding himself restless, wanting to dive back into the war and try to help out the planet he'd lived on for so long.

God, am I that much of a bastard?

He rubbed his sore hands absently, sighing, and swept one foot back, going through sped-up Tai Chi moves automatically, struggling to find that center he had tried to maintain all his life. He had always been called a good soldier, but unlike the soldiers of old he had always idolized, his ability didn't come from some inner strength. He drew his ability from a subtle, teenage rage that had never been lost. His enemies enraged him, and he had learned to funnel that to useful things, like beating those enemies. And when that wasn't enough, he worked out or something to burn it off. He'd never really struck anyone who hadn't deserved it in some way.

He jumped when his terminal rang, chirps jarring him, and he walked over to it, frowning. Message incoming, accept? He shrugged, and tapped the button on the screen, and the little-used touchscreen responded easily, a video feed coming up. "Wolf?" He asked, lifting an eyebrow. The younger man was leaning on a terminal as well, looking down at it. He looked exhausted, the eyepatch was off, uniform disheveled and oil-stained.

"Yeah." Wolf said, sighing. "Wanted a friendly face."

"Ha, well, that's amusing in some light." James drug the desk chair over and sat down absently, staring back through the screen. "What the hell happened to you?"

"I could ask you the same thing, old man."

"Eh, usual bullshit. I was stressed and blew. Almost worked myself to collapse in the gym, hurt my hands." He shook his head. "Your turn."

"Just haven't slept much, and had to do maintenance on my own fighter. That was refreshing, I haven't done that since initial training." He shook his head. "Was Pigma always this annoying?"

James sat back and laughed, long and loud. "Yes."

"How the hell did you put up with him?"

"I ignored him. He's a good soldier, basically, a steady fighter with a little bit of flair. Before he got money greedy, I could always count on him and Peppy to have my back." James shook his head. "But somewhere in there, he got the idea in his head that the money was the only thing that mattered. It was all downhill from there."

"Ending in him attempting to kill you."

"Attempt is the word, it'd take the luck of the devil for him to manage to do it. He knows I'll always be better then him, he hates me for it."

"Modesty much?" Wolf managed a smile.

"I'm allowed, kid. So how are things going on the front lines anyway? I've been keeping track of it, as much as I can."

"Hasn't been very hard. Ever since Andross deployed the Gorgon, the resistance has been minimal for the most part. They've pulled back to try to defend Corneria, but we'll punch through it without too much trouble." Wolf shrugged.

"The Gorgon? Is that the thing with the laser that could destroy a moon?"

"Apt image, it was meant for planet sieges. It's not deployed anymore… I think Andross pulled it back because it suffered like a quarter million credits in damage."

"God almighty. I know that pain."

Wolf looked over his shoulder, then said, leaning closer to the screen, "Between you and me, if this doesn't work we'll all be screwed."

"Say what?"

"Andross told me he's nearly broke."

"WHAT?" James blinked. "That doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

"He's tapped. His war fund chest is down to its last, and while it sure as hell sounded like a lot of money to me, he said he won't be able to run the armada another month at full capacity, let alone enough time for another campaign. We need to take Corneria to resupply or we'll be very badly off."

"Well shit. Sucks to be Andross, because I'm only giving him a 50/50 chance of taking Corneria."

"Will you bet on those odds?" Wolf lifted an eyebrow. "Because from my view, looks like we've got it in the bag."

"Sure. 100 bucks?"

"You got it old man." Wolf grinned. "I will be seeing you after the war."

"You got it."