There was a sudden banging on the door. She bounced up and ran to it, afraid that she'd got the time of the job wrong, but the display by the door showed a head of hair in a violent shade of violet.
"Can I come in?"
Hope was confused by the question. It was not like Kursed to ask.
"Sure!" she answered and opened the door. Kursed barged in looking even more gloomy than usual, but then she just stopped in the middle of the room, not uttering another word.
"Do you need some cheering up?"
Kursed just shook that head with the purple hair.
"I heard that your boy..." How should Hope put it? "That stranger is still here on Kew looking for you."
Kursed nodded. "I bumped into him."
"Oh, how did that go?"
"I shot him."
"Good girl!"
Hope hesitated, afraid of what the reaction might be, but then she slowly put her hands on Kursed's tense shoulders and started massaging very gently.
"Can I borrow your room?" said Kursed. "Alone!"
A second question? Hope was getting worried. Kursed was acting very strange.
"Huh? Yeah, sure!"
She slipped into Hope's bedroom, which very much was a bedroom, since the bed took up most of the room. There were mirrors on walls and ceiling, and she knew what the room sometimes was used for. 'Pleasure dancer' and 'luxury escort' were just fancy euphemisms for Hope's profession, so that her clients could feel better about themselves. Kursed didn't feel and didn't care, yet she somehow has started to care about Hope and wanted a better life for her.
Kursed closed the door behind her and sat down crosslegged on the bed. Then she took out a small device tucked into her pants, and studied it closely. She had needed to punish him. She couldn't let him have that little win, that he might have tickled her curiosity. For a moment she had not known what to do, but then she had realised that her ship had been right behind her with the canopy open. She had a good aim, and the memory unit had landed in the cockpit the moment after she shot him.
She turned it on and started watching the hologram that appeared. It was an unorganised jumble of voice comms, video transmissions, ROB regurgitating data and Fox commentating what he saw in his headset camera. She saw lush forests being engulfed by lava, Corneria City covered in thick smoke, and General Peppy with an absentminded expressing telling everyone that everything was all right. She saw an enormous starship orbiting Corneria, and people looking like her. She saw a woman that could be an older version of herself, holding a staff like hers, although longer and even more ornamented. Was it a queen? Was it her mother? But her parents were dead. Or were they? Cerinia was doomed. But was it destroyed? And there was a name: Randorn.
Her mind went out of control and all sorts of memories flashed in front of her eyes - from Corneria, with the team, with Fox, her taunting him, from Sauria and the dinosaur tribes. But there was nothing before that. Why couldn't she remember?
Suddenly a different vision appeared in her mind, like a dream although she was wide awake. She was running through a forest and stopped at the edge of a clearing. Hiding in the undergrowth she pushed some vegetation aside, and from the size of the hands she could tell that she was a child. In the clearing there was a camp, but the dwellings were broken, black smoke rose from smouldering fires, and bodies were strewn around on the ground. In the middle of it all stood a lonesome figure in a hooded cloak, leaning on a staff like an old man. Then the figure turned towards her. She couldn't see the old man's face clearly, but she could see a big tear running down his cheek.
And the tear splashed onto the memory unit in Kursed's hands.
"DAMN YOU FOX!" she screamed.
The bedroom door opened and Hope's concerned face appeared. Kursed got up and just pushed past her.
"Remember how I said I was the last of my kind. Turns out I'm not. Sorry, I've got to go."
She opened the door to leave the unit, but stopped in the doorway. She stuck a hand down a pocket and fished out another little device.
"Here!" she said and handed it to a shocked Hope. "That's my cyber-coin account and some credits I've saved. I don't know when or if I'll be back. Use them wisely. Get out of this place!"
And with that she was gone.
Fox came to very slowly. Was it a dream? Was he dead or alive? His body ached and he had a pounding headache. Ok, so he was alive, but she had definitely set that blaster on the slightly lethal side of stun. Well, it was a start.
Where was he? Still in his Arwing obviously as his eyes adjusted and the cockpit came into focus. He looked through the windows and saw the familiarity of the Great Fox's flight deck. Clever girl! She must have put him in the plane and activated the autopilot's homing mode.
But where was she now? He had no idea how long it had been.
He popped the canopy, climbed out of the cockpit and onto the floor, but got dizzy and had to hold on to a wing for a while to steady himself. This is not good. He started wobbling his way towards the living quarters, and it seemed like it took half an eternity to get there.
"ROB? ROB?" he called out. Where was that droid?
"Are you OK?" buzzed the reply.
"Been stunned," he mumbled. "Please scan for that Cloud Runner and let me know if you find it."
"Affirmative."
Fighting with the door for a moment, he made his way into his bedroom, took off most of his clothes and went into the shower. The nausea eased as the warm water ran through his fur. What had he expected? That she would throw herself in his arms? Of course not, but he'd hoped that she would listen, and not just throw the memory unit away. He simply had find her and try to talk to her again, and he knew he would do it over and over again, until she either listened to him or killed him. But right now he was too exhausted. He stepped out of the shower, dried himself halfheartedly and then crashed into his bed with towel and all.
The Cloud Runner was hiding amongst some of the space junk that was orbiting planet Kew, while Kursed was sitting in the cockpit watching the large ship in the distance and listening to the comms channels. Absentmindedly she wondered why he had been so stubborn about calling it the Great Fox. Being a repurposed Cornerian assault carrier, it was really a poor replacement for the stellar ship with the same name, which they had lost in the war against the Aparoids. Maybe he wanted some sense of familiarity?
The comms channels were busy. The transmissions were encrypted, but she had the decryption keys. It seemed his little stunt in the Primordial Race had caused quite a stir. Especially one contestants and his team felt cheated, which really meant that their own cheating hadn't worked, and they were looking to recoup their losses. She didn't want to reveal her position by using her radar, but then again she didn't need to. Her keen eyes saw the streamers after four smaller vessels trying to sneak up on the Great Fox. One of them was a jet black speeder.
She waited for a retaliation that didn't come. Then she recalled. Of course, this so-called Great Fox didn't have the defences and weapons of the original design. Still, there should be something! Have I actually killed him? What are the rest of his team doing?
A fighter entered the starboard plasma gate and a shuttle to the port, while the other two speeders circled outside. Still there was nothing for quite a while, but then she saw the telltale flashes of blaster bursts.
"Oh, what the heck!" she muttered and ignited her engines.
Fox woke up to alarms going off and ROB's repeating voice.
"INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!"
He pulled himself out of the bed and tried to stand up, but was still feeling worse for wear. That stun gun had given him a worse hangover than whiskey. There was no time to get dressed properly, so he just pulled on his pants, put on his belt with holsters for two blasters, and grabbed his wrist communicator and his headset.
"Where, ROB?" he called out as he scrambled out of the room.
"Two ships on flight deck. One to the starboard, one to port, and two more outside."
"How many enemies?" He'd gotten to a weapons locker and pulled out a decent rifle and some spare charges.
"Scanning," replied Rob. "Eight visual contacts, but they are taking out the cameras."
"What about the motion sensors?" called Fox as he tried to sprint down the corridors, while adjusting his headset.
"Online! Patching through! Two targets ahead!"
Fox ducked into a doorway as a map of his surroundings appeared on his HUD, showing two bright dots that were closing in. Twenty metres, fifteen, ten, ...
He lunged out and unleashed a short burst of automatic blaster fire. Two bodies slumped to the floor. He jumped over them and kept sprinting.
"Arwing start sequence initiated"
"What's your plan with it, ROB?"
"It is not remote controlled by me."
"SH-T!"
He was mere paces from the entry to the flight deck. He knew exactly where the Arwing was standing, and could see a workbench some ten metres from the entrance. As he went through it he dropped to the floor and while sliding on his knees swung his rifle around and fired a single shot. While the blasts from the bandits returning fire went over his head, he could see his round hitting true and a helmet being knocked out of the Arwing's cockpit, before he slid behind the workbench. Blasts were hitting the bench, tearing pieces of metal off it, so he flung himself to the floor and looked though the narrow gap underneath. He saw feet running towards him and fired. There was a scream as the body the feet belonged to crashed to the floor. He jumped out from behind his cover and finished the job with a well placed double-tap.
But he needed to find a better shelter. Blasts were coming his way as he bolted towards one of the enemy shuttle, hoping that they would have moved away from it in search of him. He threw his rifle when the charge pack ran out, pulled out the two blasters from his belt and fired on repeat towards the enemies as he was running. Then ducking behind the shuttle he saw something odd through the plasma gate. A silver speeder flew past, while lasers hit it from behind, cutting through the wings and disintegrating the engines. What? Are they fighting each other out there? But the sight had side tracked him.
"Behind you Fox," came ROB's call. Damn! A bogey had appeared and Fox jumped out of the way at the last fraction of a second before rounds hit home. Sprinting away from the ship he fired the blasters on repeat behind him, and saw a shot hitting his target.
That left three bandits, but suddenly he found himself with overheating blasters and his back against the plasma gate and open space. Then he saw all three of them with guns pointing his way. Sh-t this was really bad, he thought and desperately looked for a solution.
GET DOWN!
He obeyed the voice inside his head on pure instinct, and threw himself to the floor as laser beams tore through the flight deck, taking down the intruders and a fair chunk of the opposite wall. After catching his breath for a moment, he slowly turned his head and looked over his shoulder. The familiar outline of the Cloud Runner was hovering outside the gate.
Kursed shut down the engines, popped the canopy and did her signature leap out of the cockpit onto the floor. With her staff ready in one hand, she looked around the flight deck of the Great Fox.
"Krystal!" exclaimed Fox.
"Any foes left?" she interrupted.
"No, you took care of the last ones."
Then she took her first good look at him, as he was standing there just a few paces away, wearing nothing but his pants and with a still smoking blaster in one hand. He was staring at her matte black staff with a puzzled look. The first thing that struck her was his face. It looked drawn and older. Of course it was four years or more since she'd seen him in person, but he seemed to have aged much more than that. Still, his arms and torso were as buffed as ever. He must have been working out like crazy. But why do I care about that anyway?
"Krystal," he started. "I... It's so good to see you!"
"Krystal is gone!" exclaimed Kursed and her eyes narrowed.
"No, she's not!" objected Fox. "I saw you playing with the switch on your blaster. Kursed would have killed me. Krystal set it to stun."
She noticed a mark on his chest, where the fur looked like it had been slightly singed right where she'd shot him. She was tempted to tell him that she had really been playing Ruffian Roulette with the switch, but decided to keep that for later.
"If that's what you think," she said and took a closer look around the flight deck. "Where are the rest of the ships?"
"I had to flee Lylat without a chance to stock up. Cornerian credits are worthless here, even if mine hadn't been frozen. So I had to sell ships, parts, weapons, fuel..."
"And where's the crew?"
"It's just yours truly and ROB!"
"Sheesh, you must really be desperate," she said and started making her way to the bridge with Fox in tow, whether she wanted to or not.
"You... You've changed a bit," he said, trying to strike up a conversation. "Umm... I like your hair!"
"Shut the front door!" she interrupted him, unknowingly using an expression she'd learnt from him. "Okay, so you win! You made me interested in seeing the ship and people supposedly from Cerinia, so let's head to Corneria on the double. But I'm not in the mood for chitchat. I never am in fact."
They walked in silence, past the living quarters and the common room. Kursed noticed that it was cleaner and tidier than usual. Fox could be a sloth when it came to housework, but someone had been very busy cleaning, which she found rather odd.
"Welcome back, Krystal!" droned ROB as she stepped onto the bridge.
"I'm not Krystal!" she spat in reply and gave the robot a glare.
"But you are Krystal! My voice recognition detects a perfect match," it persisted and then turned to someone behind Kursed. "Fox, why are you trying to cut your throat with your hand? Fox, why are you slapping your forehead?"
"Whatever, just get this ship on course to Lylat, before I disassemble you and sell the parts," Kursed continued and headed out the door. "Don't follow me!"
She was really hangry, so she went to the kitchen in search of food. To her despair the pantries were mostly empty, and what's left were the usual foul Quango conserves and rations. She realised that Fox must have been serious about leaving Lylat in a hurry. At least at the back of a cupboard she found some standard issue Cornerian Army grub, which not only was a small step up in taste, but more importantly perfectly balanced nutrition. She threw a portion in the oven and drained a bottle of water while the food rehydrated. She found a plate but didn't worry about cutlery, and just shovelled the food into her mouth using her fingers. Even before she'd finished, she decided to rehydrate another portion, and started chowing it down as soon as it was ready. She let out a sigh of satisfaction.
"Life as a bounty hunter not all it's made out to be, is it?" said Fox, nonchalantly leaning on the door frame with arms crossed. In shock she looked up from the plate. How the heck did he sneak up on me? Had her senses been dulled from hunger? Had she been too distracted?
"You should know, mercenary," she replied and shoved the last morsel in her mouth.
"Touché!" said Fox with a wry smile.
"I'm beat," she said, flung the plate on a bench, licked her fingers and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I need to sleep! I hope you two are not too useless to keep guard. A black speeder got away, so the pilot might come back with more friends."
"Vince!"
"What? Vince Vitesse?"
"Heard of him?"
"The cheating cheetah?" said Kursed. "Yeah, he's just a smalltime scum, a smuggler who likes challenging people to races."
"I've noticed," said Fox. "We'll keep you safe!"
"Just keep out of my way," she said as she barged out of the kitchen. Fox moved to get out of the way, but she demonstrably gave him a little hip-and-shoulder tackle on the way past anyway.
She made her way towards the living quarters. Having her senses on alert all the time was really draining on her mind. After long missions she was always exhausted and could sleep a whole day. She walked straight to the guest room and touched the door panel. The door slid open, and closed again as soon as she'd stepped through, but the room remained dark. The auto-lights must be broken, she thought. The ship really was in a state of disrepair. But she didn't need the lights anyway, since she knew the layout of the rooms. She just pulled her boots off and flopped onto the bed flat on her stomach, fast asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
Fox was lying on the bed in the room next door. He was wide awake staring at the ceiling in the darkness. He was confused as strange feelings washed over him. Feelings of wanting to be left alone despite the loneliness. Feelings of loving to hate and hating the love. An overwhelming sensation of hurt. What was the point of everything? Anything? Yet there was a desperate feeling of clinging to a small hope.
But he had a purpose now, so why was he feeling like this? There was an odd tingling sensation in his mind, and he realised that he was sensing someone else's dreams. Someone in the bed on the other side of the wall.
Sure, he was shocked at how much she'd changed; how cold, hard and void she'd become. But that was his purpose now - his only purpose - to help her heal in any way he could.
