Chapter VI - Blackout
Slippy sat at a large, flashy computer station in a room lined with racks of servers with cables running everywhere, typing furiously. Across the room in a swirly chair sat a lone operator, tied up with a few hundred feet of ethernet cables and unconscious.
Falco took one last peek outside, and shut the door. A small click from the handle indicated that no one would be getting in any time soon. The avian brought a feathered finger to his earpiece, and glanced over at Slippy who gave him a thumbs-up.
"Falco here. We're in."
/
Fox and Krystal stepped up to a large, rectangular box about the size of the phone booth, the sides of which had a few feet of snow piled around it. A large metal door stood proudly on one side, promptly denying access to anyone from the outside.
But on the inside, however...
The vulpine pressed a finger to his ear, and radioed to his teammates.
"Slippy, I'm gonna need a door opened."
Not long after came the toad's reply.
"What's the password?"
Krystal's bemused giggling floated through the icy air into his ears. The vulpine let out a frustrated sigh, but decided to play along.
"Gyro bad, arwings rad."
The large door slid open slowly, the metal on the sides groaning in protest after being atrophied from a prolonged lack of use. After a few seconds of covering their sensitive ears, the passageway stood fully open, like a beast's mouth waiting for its prey to walk right in to its demise. Fox glanced over to his blue teammate, who gave a small nod.
"Convenient, isn't it?" Krystal mused.
"Very."
The vulpine and the vixen slowly stepped into the small corridor, both drawing their weapons in preparation for anything or anyone to come their way.
"The security feeds are running blank loops, just stay on the path and you won't get noticed," came Slippy's voice once more.
"Copy that, imposing radio silence until further notice."
Fox and Krystal came to a longer hallway running perpendicular to the passageway they came in from. After sneaking through the main hallway, they stopped at a door labelled REACTOR MAINTENANCE. The orange vulpine opened the door and walked inside, his blue teammate following closely behind. After another short hallway, they were met with some sort of control deck, shielded by several thick panes of glass, behind which was a large cylindrical room with a giant nuclear reactor inside. Before any of the technicians could notice the two mercenaries walking in to destroy their base, Krystal picked up on their brain patterns and pulled Fox back into the small corridor between the main hallway and the control deck. Not wanting to make any noise, she spoke to him telepathically.
'There's about seven of them in there. What should we do?'
'We'll have to kill them. It would take too long to knock them all out before any of them sound an alarm,' Fox thought back.
Krystal gave Fox a grim expression, and nodded.
'I'll get the four on the left, you take the three on the right,' he said.
The two drew their blasters and quietly stepped into the control room, guns raised and fingers trained. They both went after their respective targets, taking no more than one shot for each. Accuracy with a handgun was a skill Fox had taken years to perfect, and had spent plenty of time training Krystal. Once the seven technicians were all dead, Fox checked the hallway to make sure nobody had noticed and come to investigate.
They were in the clear, and Fox dropped his bag on the floor. He pulled the bomb out, and began typing into the keypad on the top of it. Now realizing why the glass panes were there in the first place, he mentally facepalmed. A nuclear reactor was radioactive, and he needed a protective suit. Krystal seemed to understand what was going through his head, and checked a nearby closet for anything useful.
Opening the door revealed a yellow suit, with a large opening in the back that could close in and encapsulate the wearer. Fox craned his neck slightly to see past his blue teammate in to the closet, and smiled.
"Bingo."
Fox pulled his coat off, and began slipping into the protective clothing. He nodded to Krystal, and stepped through the door to the reactor room. He walked through a glass tunnel, with a door at the end opening up as the one to the control room closed. The vulpine made their way towards the gigantic reactor, a sickly green glow emanating from several parts of the tall structure. Fox walked to one side of the reactor and looked down.
A large pool filled to the brim with water, about twenty feet deep and with a glowing spot towards the bottom sat just below him. Fox looked at it for a few seconds, then turned away slightly. Krystal had been watching the outer hallway from the control room, and felt a knot of fear settle in her stomach at her teammates' conversation.
"Fox here. I'm at the reactor."
"Copy. Have you planted the charge?"
"Negative. Is there any way you can shut it off without anyone noticing?"
"Why?"
"I'm about to do something incredibly stupid."
Slippy sighed and laughed.
"Certainly won't be the last time, either. Give me a second."
Fox brought his hand down from his ear, and looked up at Krystal through the window. Confusion and anxiety was written on her face.
'You're not actually going down there, are you?'
'Not until Slippy ca-
The sound of an emergency alarm began blaring, startling the both of them. Several red beacons began rotating, casting sections of the room in a menacing, red glow.
'Well, I sure won't be going down there now, will I?' Thought the vulpine as he mashed a green button on the antimatter charge. The device gave a loud chirp, and Fox tossed it in the reactor's coolant tank and bolted for the door without a second thought. With any luck, it would settle down right next to the fuel rods, where he planned to put them in the first place.
Once out, Fox ripped the suit off of his body, and threw his coat back on. The voice of the toad at the computer station came over the comm.
"So, there may be a slight problem..."
"You haven't changed a bit, frog boy," Falco scoffed as he checked his blaster's charge.
"We've got no time to waste, let's move!" Fox barked over the radio.
/
The two vulpines made a break out the service hatch towards the spot where their return lines were set up, sprinting and panting all the way. Fox jabbed his earpiece, hoping that his other two teammates got out alive.
"Falco, Slippy, status report."
After a few anxious moments of waiting, Falco's voice came over the line.
"We're fine. Me and Butterfingers managed to slip out in the chaos."
"Hey!" The toad exclaimed.
Fox shot Krystal a smirk, her melodious laugh always managed to lighten the mood for him.
They both neared the edge of the cliff where they had climbed up, the return lines they had set up were calling out to them, encouraging them to grab on and slide down to safety. As they got closer and closer, Fox bent his knees at the last second...
And jumped.
The vulpine soared through the air, watching the taut steel cable of his return line getting closer and closer until he grabbed on to it, his legs swinging out in front of him from the speed of his exit. The kevlar and metal casing around his combat gloves spewed sparks behind him, the loud grinding noise barely reaching his ears from the wind of him flying down the cabling.
When the orange mercenary and his blue teammate reached the ground, neither of them bothered to look back as they sprinted for their arwings, neither of them seeing the livid Wolf O'Donnell standing over the edge of the cliff behind, watching the two of them before turning away and tapping a button on his communicator.
"Bring out the railgun. It's time for some target practice."
/
As the four white and blue arwings rose from the snowy surface, nobody had noticed the large metallic beam cannon being wheeled out of the giant hangar doors on a military truck. Wolf sat in the shotgun seat, a small screen in front of him displaying bits of information about the targets that the husky in the driver's seat was chasing down. As the truck entered the wasteland ahead of the base, several antennas slowly deployed from atop the truck's cabin. O'Donnell watched as four lines visualizing the intercepted transmissions slowly became brighter and brighter, just loud enough to be heard over the roaring engine.
"-ohoo! That was a close one!" Came a high-pitched voice, most likely which belonged to Slippy. Wolf scrolled down one more line to the next transmission, which turned out to be Falco.
"No thanks to you, froggie. We barely got out of there without gettin' our asses handed to us."
"That's enough, guys. We've only got one thing left to do before we're out of here."
Wolf's glare hardened at the new voice's owner, and tapped a button next to the display. A head-up display powered on, and a small orange triangle appeared over Fox's arwing.
"Light 'em up, ROB!"
"Affirmative, Fox. Transmitting blast command."
The lupine smirked. That wasn't going to work. A small text box appeared in the lower right corner of the windshield, indicating that the truck's hardpoint had been deployed. The railgun on the back began emitting a menacing red aura.
Silence, then,
"Nothing's happened."
"No shit, Slippy."
"Shut it, both of you! Someone's probably caught onto us and jammed the signal."
The cockpit's computer then read out the last thing the vulpine wanted to hear.
"Ship scan detected," the computerized voice droned.
"We're being targeted! Set your G-Diffusers to max!"
Each teammate responded with their own "roger," resulting in the four ships flying at breakneck pace away from the base and up towards the atmosphere. As Fox began to line up with the escape vector highlighted on the the HUD, things only managed to get worse.
"Warning; projectile inboun-"
The railgun fired its payload at a resounding speed, catching up to Fox's arwing at slamming into it with a deafening BOOM.
"FOX!" His teammates screamed in unison. Krystal watched in despair as she chased her captain's ship plummeting to the ground, only to be stopped by Falco.
"Krystal, don't! You're gonna get shot down too!"
The azure vixen ignored his warning as she spotted a large military truck with some sort of launcher on the back, and raced towards it as her hardpoints began deploying.
Off in the distance, the distinct sound of a fighter jet screaming across the sky was heard by Falco and Slippy. The avian looked over to see a gray aircraft, a bit wider than his arwing, but with its wings swept forward to make a large W across the body.
"This is Star Fox, state your purpose!" The avian yelled over the open channel.
A man's voice responded, calculated and professional.
"Troy and Madison Groomes, at your service. We're here to help."
/
Fox shook himself out of his dazed state when he heard another deafening BOOM similar to the one he'd heard when he got shot down.
'No...'
Ignoring the excruciating pain in his left leg and the massive headache from the whiplash, the vulpine pulled the emergency release to his canopy, and looked over to see Krystal's arwing nose down in the snow.
'NO!'
Fox fell from his cockpit and slowly pulled himself back up before he began limping over to the other spacecraft. Behind him, he heard the snow crunching under boots, and his blood ran cold. His eyes widened, and he tried to move faster to get away from his adversary, even if he knew it was futile.
BANG
A laser bolt flew through his shoulder, causing the vulpine to fall onto his knees; A laser shot that Fox was sure Wolf hadn't set hot enough so that it couldn't cauterize the wound on its way out. Fox yelped in pain and brought his hand up to his shoulder, watching as blood began leaking in between his fingers and staining his clothes. As Wolf neared him, the lupine kicked his opponent in the back, sending McCloud into the snow. Fox felt himself being rolled over by Wolf's boot, and looked up to see a blaster at his head. O'Donnell brought his boot back and slammed it into Fox's side, earning a sickening crack and a pained groan from the vulpine on the ground.
Before he could pull the trigger, a loud, fiery explosion sounded off from the base in the distance, causing smoke and ash to rain down in every direction. Despite the circumstances, Fox managed a smirk.
"You have no idea... how long I've waited to do this."
He held his finger down on the trigger, charging up a shot.
"Say hello to James for me," the lupine chuckled as his blaster flashed, indicating the shot was fully charged.
Fox closed his eyes. He grit his teeth, waiting for the feeling of having a laser zip right through his head, melting through his skull and brain in a split second, most likely leaving him feeling nothing but pure pain while his brain slowly ceased to function, until he was granted the sweet release of death.
However, the moment never came. The sweet sound of aircraft machine gun fire coupled with Wolf gasping for air as the lead ripped through his flesh would have been music to his ears if the continuous ringing hadn't been growing louder by the second.
Fox opened his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of Wolf on the ground with a few more holes in him. A ship made a fast VTOL landing nearby, and an orange vulpine with a few blue streaks jumped out, landing gracefully and sprinting towards him. Just behind him, another vulpine joined him, or it was a vulpine as far as he could tell; His vision had been steadily becoming blurrier and his eyes becoming increasingly heavy from the blood loss.
"McCloud! Are you alive!?" Troy yelled, nearing the downed mercenary. He pulled out a gauze pad, and started trying stop the blood with it. If he could get the wound to clot, Fox would be alive long enough to get him more serious medical attention.
"Fox, talk to me. Can you hear me?" He asked.
A thumbs-up was all Fox could muster before he blacked out.
- The way blasters work, or at least how I imagine they could work, is by firing heated plasma bolts; kinda like pelting someone with lightsaber chunks. The hotter the plasma bolt, the easier it melts through whatever (or whoever) it is you're shooting, cauterizing the wound. If you fire a bolt at a lower temperature, the plasma can't melt the wound shut on the way out, leaving a sizzling, bloody, gaping hole instead of just a sizzling, gaping hole.
- Hardpoint: A location on an airframe designed to carry an external or internal load. Basically, it's where you put the guns.
- If ROB is the voice for the Great Fox I/II, then I'd say the Arwing cockpit voice would be the COVAS "Verity" voice preset from Elite Dangerous. Either that or just copy ROB into your cockpit. Either one works, though it's not like it really matters.