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I The sun crested the jagged ridge, bathing the plain below in a vermillion half-light.On most planets the arrival of day heralded a new beginning: a fresh start for the world. On Titania, a new day meant another sixteen hours of suffering beneath the sun’s punishing rays.There were many tyrants on Titania: petty lords and bashars who laid claim to this or that fiefdom, constantly in a state of low-level violence with one another over the rights to own every parcel of vacuous wasteland. But they all paled in comparison to the true despot of Titania. The laws of the true lord were final – not to be contested. Sixteen hours of blistering, scorching pain – and eight of frozen deathliness. The king dictated the low degree of moisture, and the absence of arable farmland; and no petty lord could broach argument, for the true lord was beyond reproach. He sat from his throne on high and passed judgment on his subjects with his glorious rays. All men were laid low by the sun of Titania, regardless of caste or keep.But that did not stop some from trying to rebel – to usurp the natural order and declare themselves the true king.One such pretender to the throne was Chazem IV, son of Adach the Reformer and High Lord of the houses of the Cantal League. He cemented his position as uncontested ruler of the most densely populated region of Titania through a combination of true valor, willingness to forge political alliances between houses, and a ruthless streak that caused those who underestimated him to rue the day they did so. There was no question he was king of the lands of Cantal, either among the populace or his court – but for all of this, he was no true king of Titania.Chazem sought to change this, and so he launched a grand military campaign to unify all of Titania under one banner: his own. For too long the planet had remained underdeveloped, lacking in the abundant resources and technological prowess that blessed such worlds as Corneria or Aquas. There was potential in Titania – he knew it to be so. Even now there were new technologies being developed on worlds like Fichina that altered weather patterns, changed climates. Titania could be a center of power and commerce, if only it was a united polity unto its own!And so the Great Sand War began, guided by grand designs, yet reaping only terror and sorrow in its wake. Cities and spaceports ruled by those who opposed Chazem were leveled. Agricultural zones, of which very precious few exist on Titania, were ruined when the environmental domes protecting them were shattered by light-missiles and artillery fire. The nomad bands of the Bedanti peoples doubled in size, absorbing countless refugees and runaways left without permanent homes. Ultimately, the great capital city of the Cantal League territories – the shimmering Azdana, birthplace of King Chazem himself – was obliterated by a tactical atomic blast. To this day, no one knows which fiefdom was responsible for firing the warhead.Chazem sought to war against the true king, and for this he was laid low and punished.It has been fifty years since the War, and Titania now lies more desperate than ever. New political tensions are flaring around the metropolis of Tytos, arguably the largest and most developed of what pithy cities remain on the planet in the wake of the War. The bashar Tertulli and his council of merchant-princes find their reign over the city opposed by a Bedanti rebel group, and their attempts to quell the rising tide of violence have summarily failed.Now Tertulli beseeches the leadership of the Lylat System for help. Though a minor member, Titania is part of the Lylat Protectorate – and the Cornerian Navy is beholden to act in the defense of an ally, no matter how nominal.However, nowhere is it said that the Navy must respond by sending its own forces… ………. “Slip-py! Where’s that wrench!?”Falco’s voice echoed across the hangar bay. Fox heard Slippy make his way over to Falco from his bench; apparently he’d gotten distracted chatting with Amanda over the holo-messager. It’d become a more frequent occurrence since their engagement.That particular piece of news still shocked Fox.It wasn’t as if he was surprised that Slippy and Amanda were finally getting around to tying the knot; at least not directly. They’d been dating for over three years now and they were both obviously serious about it.No, what got Fox was what the news represented. No one had brought it out into the open yet, but it was readily apparent that Slippy’s marriage inevitably meant the toad’s departure from Star Fox. It was one of those things that everyone knew, but which no one quite wanted to address; least of all Slippy, for whom Star Fox had been his entire life – arguably to an even greater extent than Fox himself.“Here you go. Sorry about that, Falco.”The bird in question only rolled his eyes in response. Fox knew he didn’t mean anything by it though, and surely Slippy knew too. Falco was just a little too abrasive sometimes: prone to flitting in and out of moods that could last days on end before dissipating just as quickly. It was a part of him they’d all come to accept.Fox was currently engaged with the extranet. He was killing time before they made it to Corneria, sifting through the copious messages addressed to Star Fox, replying when he felt it necessary. They just got so much mail sometimes. Some of it was fan mail clearly written by children. Some if it was decidedly adult fan mail, more often than not addressed to Krystal (Fox once made a habit of deleting all such messages before Krystal could read them until she caught him in the act; she apparently didn’t want him to, thought they were funny). There were a few communiques from the Cornerian Navy here and there with Fox cc’d on them, news about sociopolitical goings-on throughout Lylat and beyond.Fox was in the middle of reading a fairly dry report on damages from a recent hurricane on Fortuna when he was interrupted.“I see they want to allocate three million credits for repairing the Palmaris Stadium. Very interesting – worthwhile reading, I’m sure.”Fox smiled as Krystal moseyed around him, taking an opposite seat at the station.“Well, you never know when this information might end up being important.”Krystal chortled and stirred her tea. Fox could smell the honeyed chamomile he’d grown to associate with her. She blew softly across the top of the mug and took a sip, apparently satisfied. She cocked her head to the side. “You really think we’re being contracted to do post-disaster clean-up duty?”Fox deliberated for a few seconds. “I’m not sure. I’ve been reading through all this for the last hour, and it doesn’t look like there are any situations that require Star Fox to help out.”Krystal’s forehead creased. “Not public ones anyway.”Fox let out a sigh. “That’s what I’m worried about too.”A loud crash rang out in the hangar, causing both Fox and Krystal to flinch. They heard a series of aggravated curses coming from Falco interspersed with nervous apologies from Slippy. Fox laid his head in his paws and Krystal chuckled.He pried his fingers apart just enough to form a gap. “When are we making planetfall?”, his voice came out somewhat muffled through his paws.“In about forty-five minutes, I think.” Her eyes flitted in the direction of the clang. “We won’t have to put up with the peanut gallery for much longer.” She took another sip of the tea, calm and collected.“Yeah, I guess we won’t.”Fox’s face fell to a degree that would be imperceptible to most, but not to Krystal. “You’re thinking about Slippy and Amanda?”He let out a low laugh. “Can I hide something from you? At least once?”Krystal smiled knowingly in response. “It would be difficult, seeing as I can’t help overhearing your thoughts.” Her expression grew a shade more serious. “Are you concerned about Star Fox’s future?”He frowned as he ruminated over it. “Yes. I know it’s dumb, but the thought of Slippy leaving… Eventually we’re all going to leave. We’ll get old, retire.” His expression turned pensive. “I guess I’m just thinking about how many members of Star Fox you can lose before it stops being Star Fox.”She sat there patiently, waiting for more. She knew there was more, because of course she did. He might as well let it out.“It was something Wolf said. You know, when we… met.” He fought to keep himself from cringing as he spoke; but she said nothing, and no sign of judgment passed her face. Fox took a deep breath and continued. “He told me he wasn’t sure if he could call his team Star Wolf anymore without Leon involved. It’s like – if Wolf is the only person left on the team who was on it to begin with…”“I see what you mean”, she said. “I disagree with the sentiment, but I understand your anxiety.”Fox relaxed some. “Thanks. For listening, I mean.”She smiled. “Any time. Do you want to talk about it?”“Not now, no. I don’t want to have my thoughts flying off in another direction when we’re about to embark on a mission.” She nodded and went back to her tea, flipping through news on a comm-device in her off-hand.They sat in a peaceable silence; or as peaceable a silence can be while Falco and Slippy are both making mechanical repairs to their Arwings. Fox continued to parcel through their messages, but it was a half-hearted effort. Despite what he said to Krystal, his mind was now thoroughly elsewhere. It was drifting back to a poorly-lit alleyway on Zoness; to an enemy, a rival, a friend. A lover, however briefly.He and Krystal had a long talk when he returned to the Great Fox after that encounter. They were up all night and well into the morning hashing it out, the scents of chamomile and coffee mingling together. They’d made some headway; or at least Fox hoped they did. He wasn’t wallowing in a combination of self-denial and self-loathing anymore, worried about how he viewed himself in that way – but he was still plenty worried about what others might think. Worried enough that he hadn’t paged Wolf in the last three months since their encounter, despite being tempted to do so several times.Krystal was supportive during the whole ordeal. Slippy and Falco both knew something was up too, and despite not knowing the details they ensured Fox that they had his back. He’d choked up when they said so. He’d been purposefully avoiding both of them, and at some point they finally had enough of it and forced a meeting to mentally slap him around a bit and get his head out of his ass. They’d been a much tighter unit since then. He still felt terrible for leaving them in the dark, but he just couldn’t make it over that last hump. And as awful as he felt about that, he felt even worse about Krystal, who loved him in a way he didn’t think he could reciprocate. She assured him it was alright time and time again, but he still felt at fault.He glanced at the chronometer – another forty-three minutes to go. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, attempting to daydream about something innocuous; like flying through the atmosphere of Aquas, or exploring the streets of a charming, tucked-away village on Katina.But his thoughts kept taking him back to Zoness, and a lopsided grin. ………. They made it planetside around 11:30 AM local time. The Great Fox was moored at one of the orbital docking rings, and they’d taken a private military transport designed for extra-atmospheric ferrying from the space station to Central City.Corneria’s capital had grown haphazardly over the centuries. It started as a single municipality, and as the population grew over time it grew and grew right alongside it, slowly morphing into a highly-vertical metropolis. It eventually became untenable to keep building upwards and outward growth became necessary. However, the planners wanted to avoid the sort of lateral urban sprawl that plagued cities on other developed worlds, so they came up with an unorthodox solution: the capital would consist of a series of self-contained urban districts connected by hyper-rails, with plenty of wild greenspace between them. New districts could be added as time went by if it was called for.And called for it was. As Corneria became the undisputed legal and commercial center of the Lylat System, the population continued to skyrocket. The entire northern hemisphere of the planet was technically one giant city – though due to the expert planning of its engineers, you’d never be able to tell while you were on the surface. From space it looked like a distorted web of hyper-rail “threads”, with the gray splotches of city districts placed along semi-regular intervals, all filled with greens and blues. But from the ground it didn’t look so planned: rather it looked like a sort of garden city, an urban Eden.Center City was the crown jewel of the capital: the oldest and largest of the disparate city-districts. The Oberon Spire dominated the skyline, its glass façade glimmering in the sun. The building had served many purposes over the millennia of Corneria’s history, but today it acted as the central hub for both the House of Commons and Cornerian Navy.Their transport alighted on one of the landing pads about halfway up the Spire. The upper half of the building was dedicated to civilian leadership and the lower to military, with the headquarters of both branches of government at the very top and middle floors (though Fox knew there was also a large, secret basement complex housing the leadership of special forces and black ops). Upon departing the transport and setting foot on the landing pad, they were instantly met with a massive gust of wind. Being so high up with no guard rails was a little disconcerting, even to trained space pilots. Slippy in particular looked queasy – but then again, that was normal for him.The General was already there to greet them, flanked by armed guards, his long-tailed jacket buffeted by the wind. He had a warm smile on his face, and it was reciprocated by his guests. As Fox approached, the General stretched his right hand out. “Nice to see you, Fox.”Fox grasped it firmly and shook it once. “You too, Peppy.” ………. “Now, you’re probably wondering why I brought you all in here today.”They were seated at a conference table in Peppy’s office. It was just large enough to make conversation uncomfortable, with everyone spaced a bit too far apart. It made Fox miss the old days when they’d sit around a beat-down cafeteria table on the Great Fox to plan their missions, Peppy chiming in with sage advice every so often. Fox wondered how Peppy felt about working in such an imposing environment.Falco was hunched over the table and playing with a pen. “Nothing good, I’m guessing.”Peppy’s chagrined smile answered his own question. “Unfortunately, Falco’s right. We’ve received word of a… problematic situation on Titania.”Fox knew Peppy too well to miss the intonation on ‘problematic’. In Peppy-speak, ‘problematic’ could run the gamut from something as innocuous as an uncomfortable meeting with an acquaintance you’re not fond of all the way up to an armed interstellar conflict. “What type of problematic are we talking about here?”Peppy pressed a button on the table and brought up a holo-image of Titania. He pointed out a specific, highlighted region of the globe. “This is Tytos. It’s the biggest city on the planet, and it’s been a hotspot of political violence for a good solid decade or so”. His face was painted blue by the light of the holo as he spoke. “Up till now, the locals were more than willing to handle it themselves – but something must have changed, because their bashar just asked us for aid.”Falco squinted his eyes in confusion. “Their bash-what?”“Bashar. It’s an old Titanian word, means ‘sun-struck’. The etymology’s lost on me, but for practical purposes it roughly equates to a combination of ‘mayor’ and ‘lord’. The bashars rule the cities like monarchs, passing the title within the family, whereas the outlying provinces have their own forms of government that vary from region to region.”Peppy brought up an additional holo-image, this one the headshot of a smug-looking elephant wearing the barest hint of gold eye-liner. Fox picked up Krystal’s frown while she looked at it.“This is Fazanh Tertulli, the current bashar of Tytos. He claims to be the victim of a failed assassination attempt by one of the nomads that live around his city. Incidentally, the political violence I mentioned earlier has been between these nomads and the city’s defense forces. According to Tertulli, tensions have escalated to the point where he feels he’s no longer in control of the situation, and he’s appealed to the Cornerian government for help.”Slippy frowned and spoke up. “Umm, Peppy… I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help but notice that you’re using your words pretty… carefully? With how you say he ‘claims’ to be targeted, and all that.”Peppy caught his drift. “You mean it doesn’t quite sound like I buy Tertulli’s story?”“Yeah”, Slippy admitted.The old hare sighed. “It’s because I don’t. We’ve had intel reports about how things are run on Titania for years now, and his name seems to pop up an awful lot in seemingly unrelated incidents of criminal activity.” He stroked his whiskers, grown long during his career as General. “There’s never enough solid information to implicate him in anything, mind you – but we’re suspicious nonetheless.”Fox folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “So what do you want us to do?”Peppy grinned. “Thought you’d never ask. Tertulli requested help from the Navy, and we’re obliged to respond since we’re technically in charge – but we don’t have to send in Navy forces, per se.” A chorus of chimes went off as he sent a dossier to all of their comm-devices. “Officially, I want Star Fox to provide the support Tertulli’s asking for. Unofficially, I want all of you to keep your eyes and ears open for any hint of criminal activity, and to send me regular reports on what’s actually going on down there.”Krystal scrolled through the information on the dossier: names of individuals, maps, historical records. “So you want us to spy on him?”Peppy sighed through his nose and chewed on the idea. “I suppose, yes. I don’t like the way that sounds, and it’s a bit outside of Star Fox’s usual line of work… but I also don’t like how fishy this whole situation is, and I want people I can trust on the ground there.” He pressed another button on the table, recalling the holo-images and restoring the room to normalcy. “Do you accept?”Fox looked around at his teammates. Slippy shrugged noncommittally, fine with whatever Fox chose. Falco nodded, always ready to jump into action. Krystal seemed the most hesitant of them, but finally gave Fox the look that signaled the okay.The decision’s made, then. “Yeah, we accept.”“Good!” Peppy clapped his paws together. “Now that’s all out of the way, how about we grab some lunch? It’s been a while since I got the chance to catch up with you guys.”Slippy beamed, and even Falco couldn’t help but smile. “I’ve missed you, old man. Won’t lie.”Peppy chuckled and slapped the bird on the back – perhaps a little too hard, judging by his indignant squawk. “Now don’t be making fun of your elders. You’ll be in the same boat one day.”Falco started off on a rebuttal and Slippy laughed to himself. As the three of them exited the room, Fox lagged behind. He knew Krystal picked up on something, and wanted to know what it was. He made eye contact with her, and she picked up on his picking up. Their empathic connection was a double-edged sword, Fox felt. On one hand it ensured maximum battle efficiency, and it made it easier for them to communicate quickly and discreetly. On the other, Fox missed being able to think without someone else passively catching his train of thought.She lingered behind with him, watching their teammates (and former teammate) head to the mess hall. “You’re wondering why I’m reticent about this mission.”“Yes”, Fox said with a nod. “And I trust your judgment, so I want to hear why, in case we’re about to run headlong into a shitstorm.”She closed her eyes and frowned. Fox knew she was recalling the image of the elephant bashar. “It’s hard to put into words. I can’t gauge emotions and thoughts from images and videos, only in person.” She reopened them and looked into his own. “But I do have a lot of experience in matching minute elements of facial expressions with emotions and patterns of thought. It’s just something I picked up after a while: when you’re used to seeing people make specific body language in conjunction with what emotions you’re picking up from them, you can sort of… estimate what they’re feeling based on holo-stills.”Fox knew her abilities were getting stronger over the years, or at least more focused. He had no idea they’d gotten that powerful. He supposed it was a skill like any other, and it could be further honed to perfection in the same way as talent in flying, or combat. “And what do you… estimate Tertulli’s thinking and feeling? In that one image anyway.”She looked like she was about to speak, but then thought better of it and scoffed at herself. “It’s ridiculous, I’m overthinking it. I highly doubt I can gauge something like this to any degree of reliability.”“Well I don’t.” And it was true. He didn’t. Any hint of information they could get on this guy prior to meeting him would be beneficial, even if it had to be taken with a grain of salt.She closed her eyes again, conjuring the mental image. “He’s powerful. Or at least he perceives himself to be that way. He could probably get away with anything if he really tried. Domineering. Self-satisfied. Used to getting his own way with little effort, but willing to take action to assure he does.” She opened her eyes, and looked a little bashful. “Bear in mind, this is all a little…”“I know. Up in the air.”“Yes. We’ll have to wait and see, I think.”Fox nodded in agreement, but couldn’t help but be disconcerted by Krystal’s assessment. Assuming it was at least partially accurate – and he believed it was, he knew for a fact certain intel agents working in the darkest corners of the Cornerian Navy could gauge people to extremely precise degrees without being empaths – it heralded a potentially difficult job ahead.But what else was new?
………. The lunch had been fun. It’d been so long since the five of them were together again like that, and to Fox it felt like a piece of himself that he didn’t even know was missing was restored. Peppy acted like a glue for their team in so many subtle ways. He tempered Falco’s aggressiveness, boosted Slippy’s confidence, and got Krystal to open up more easily. They’d gotten along fine in his absence – and in some ways were made stronger people by it, learning to work out their issues themselves – but Fox couldn’t deny they’d lost something when Peppy answered the call to action and became Corneria’s lead general.It was just the two of them now, Fox and Peppy, overlooking the city from a scenic garden-balcony outside the cafeteria. The rest of the team was still inside, and Fox could hear their laughter. Peppy must have heard it too because he started chuckling himself. That was how it was with old teammates: you laughed with their happiness, cried with their sorrow, even when you didn’t know why they felt that way. Especially then.“You know, I was worried when I took this job. Thought you guys might have some trouble working out your kinks.” Peppy looked remarkably relaxed for someone in charge of such a large military apparatus, Fox thought. “I’m glad I was wrong.”“I am too. Though I wouldn’t say we’ve got everything worked out.” Fox watched a passing transport float by in the distance. “We all have our issues.”A gust of wind blew up and over the shielded balcony, the breeze setting the leaves on the trees to shiver. Peppy looked thoughtful. “That’s true. But as long as the core is strong, you’ll hold. You all will.” He breathed softly, taking in the sight of the city, the interplay of verdant forests, pristine waters and plasteel skyscrapers. “I wish I could say the same of my own team.”Fox scowled, visibly confused by the comment. “What do you mean?”Peppy turned to look at him, and Fox knew something was off. He had that same expression on his face he always had when delivering bad news. “I don’t know how much you’ve been paying attention to the political situation on Corneria recently, but it’s a bit… contentious at the moment. Bowman’s been making some big waves in the House, and it’s not going over well with certain interested parties.”Fox was surprised. Dash Bowman was an old acquaintance; one he might even dare to call a friend. He’d helped Star Fox considerably during the Anglar Blitz. He struck Fox as a kind, if naïve individual; which was perhaps surprising considering his heritage. Bowman was Andross’ grandson, though the two never had any contact. Fox knew he’d become Venom’s senator in the wake of the Anglar Emperor’s defeat and the liberation of Venom, but he hadn’t kept up with his career in the two years since.“What sort of waves?”, Fox asked.“The kind that gets noticed.” Peppy looked uncomfortable, and not for the first time Fox was struck by his age. “He’s been lobbying for more rights for outlying planets. Rights to self-governance, increased self-defense capabilities – that sort of thing.”Fox knew he looked a bit nonplussed. “How is that an issue?”Peppy gave a harsh, singular laugh; the kind that carried more irony than humor. “It’s not. At least I don’t think it is, and about half the House and arguably the Prime Minister agree with me. But just as many seem to think Bowman’s trying to kickstart another Lylat War – that he’s following in his grandfather’s footsteps. And that second half won’t be ‘half’ much longer. Their influence is growing, and they want the Navy to take a stronger stance against any of the outer colonies having their own military. Especially Venom.”Fox felt something drop in the pit of his stomach. The Aparoid War and Anglar Blitz were horrible – but having to fight in another civil war against fellow Lylat citizens, this time against someone he knew and respected instead of his father’s murderer…“I don’t like this.”“Neither do I, which is why I haven’t made any official statements.” He sighed, and tried to force a smile back on his face again. “Look, I don’t want to get you all riled up about this. It probably won’t go anywhere. We should try to enjoy ourselves as long as we’re here together.”Fox agreed, but he still couldn’t draw his mind away from negative topics. Wars on Venom, potentially criminal lords of desert cities, Andross and his legacy, Wolf’s face when he told him –
No. I’m not going there. Not right now.
“You’ve still got something on your mind.”If Fox didn’t know any better, he’d guess at Peppy being an empath too. The truth was just that the old rabbit had practically raised him and could figure his moods with little effort. “I have lots of things on my mind.”Peppy chuckled, that warm smile back on his face again.“Don’t we all?”
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II The last vestiges of night were slowly retreating before the coming onslaught of dawn. Already the first light of the sun was starting to peek over the distant dunes, mingling with the dust devils and seemingly permanent fixation of loose sand in the air to cast an eerie orange glow over the visible landscape.Wolf took in the sight from the cockpit of his starfighter, Panther and the new recruit flanking his right and left, respectively. The near-sinister aura might fill a lesser man with a sense of unease, foreboding, or at the very least caution about what might lie ahead on this job. It only filled Wolf with boredom. Maybe a little bit of hunger too – he hadn’t had a chance to grab his regular nutrient bar breakfast yet.Panther’s voice cut across the comm, choppy with static from all the dust in the air. “We’re at the specified coordinates. Where are they?”The lupine chewed on the inside of his mouth, wondering the same question. “Give them some time: they’re probably scoping us out. You remember how cautious they were at the depot?” He wheeled the Wolfen around, taking a careful look at his surroundings and paying close attention to the scanner. “Let’s do a few loops. Nothing too fancy though, don’t want to freak them out.”He could hear Panther chuckling darkly. “When has that ever been a priority for you?”“A man can change his habits”, Wolf said with a lilt of danger that seemed at odds with his comment.“I like loops! They make me think of rings.”The shrill voice shot through Wolf’s brow like he had the worst sort of hangover, the kind you got after doing vodka body shots for five hours straight. He’d only done that the one time, and yet every inane, incomprehensible comment from their novice recruit made it feel like he was reliving it all over again.He and Panther had scoped out the recent graduating class of Cornerian Flight Academy students to see if they could poach one to act as a new teammate, and she was literally the only one who responded to their offer. She wasn’t that bad a pilot, Wolf thought, but he found her to be an absolute headache-and-a-half to work with. They desperately needed a third though, just so they could work more jobs. That’d become apparent after wrapping up that abysmal gig where they got paid in stock shares for a fishery company. On Zoness. As if anyone was ever going to invest in fish farmed in a noxious ocean filled with energy refineries. Though the affair wasn’t a total waste, there was that rendezvous with –Wolf cut the thought off there. If he’d call, he’d call. Wolf preferred to live each day as it came, rather than worrying about possibilities. Living too much in the past had ruined his father, and living in the future ruined his brother. He wasn’t going to repeat their mistakes.“Wolf. We have contact.”Wolf looked in the direction Panther indicated via his ocular link, and sure enough there was a line of robed figures standing along the precipice of a jagged rock formation. The fact they made no attempt to signal their ships was disconcerting: it implied they knew Wolf would see them, and that they didn’t have to bother. He filed that thought away for consideration.“About time”, he grumbled. “Let’s touch down in that depression over there, the one off to their right. Don’t want to land too close and spook them.”“You’re right”, their new teammate chimed in with a concerned tone. “One time my brother jumped off of a tree and landed right next to me, and it really spooked me. If you landed that close to them they’d probably die though, because it would squish them with our ships.”It was said with such earnestness, not even a whiff of irony or self-awareness. Every conversation with her was like this – he had no idea how she graduated. Wolf knew he had to do something now before they caused an incident at the landing site. “Hey, Fay?”“Yes, cap’n?”He hated it when she called him that. “Let me do the talking when we land, alright?”“Sure thing, cap’n! My lips are sealed.”At least she can follow orders well enough. At least he hoped so. He was half-afraid he’d get out of his ship only to find her with her lips literally glued together.They landed easily enough. The escarpment was deceptively large, with lots of hidden nooks and crannies shielded by overhangs that were invisible from the air. Wolf jumped out of his cockpit, followed shortly thereafter by Panther and Fay. He was pleased to see her lips were not physically sealed, but her buoyant smile was worrisome.Wolf led the trio towards the group of robed figures. There were six of them by Wolf’s count, but his infrared eye-sensor indicated there were at least three more hiding behind shelves of rock scattered in a semicircle around them. The figures themselves varied in size, obviously being a variety of different species, though Wolf couldn’t quite make out which underneath their tattered, dull brown garments.One stepped forward from the group and lowered their hood. It was the female lynx that initially contracted Wolf for the job back on Sargasso. She’d been very cagey then, and didn’t show any sign of changing that demeanor despite being back in her home environment. Wolf had been pretty hesitant to accept her offer, since she provided virtually no details when they met, instead promising to explain after he agreed to the job. But for one, she promised it was nothing illegal; and for another, there was a lot of cash on the line. Easily the biggest sum offered to Star Wolf since they went on the straight and narrow path. That alone raised some red flags – but since when did he ever worry about that?She appraised them silently for a moment, and finally spoke up. “This is your team, yes?” There was the vaguest hint of an unplaceable accent in her voice, but it was well-masked.Wolf nodded. “Yeah. This is Star Wolf.”“Good. We do not have much time. Please, follow me.”She turned on her heel and marched away without waiting for a response, her entourage trailing her. Wolf made eye contact with Panther and Fay – part of their capacity to gel as a team came from their ability to say an entire sentence in a look, to understand each other’s read on the situation. Wolf was confused but willing to play along. Panther was somewhat uncomfortable. Fay looked like she was experiencing a moment of bliss; but then again she always looked like that.Wolf shrugged to the group, and signaled them to follow. They knew this gig was probably going to be weird when they signed on. If they were going to bail after something as innocuous as a bunch of people wearing rags staring at them for a few minutes, then they didn’t really deserve their reputation for taking on risky jobs.And what more was there in this life than reputation? ………. They followed the group down around the side of the cliff, through a twisted series of passageways looping in and out through the mountain. As five minutes turned into ten turned into twenty Wolf’s patience began to grow thin. Why had they insisted on them landing where they did if they were going to walk this far?By around the thirty minute mark his question was answered: he thought they’d been looping around the hilltop, but they were actually spiraling down inside of it. He’d been fooled by the disorienting landscape, where everything was covered in a fine mist of dust and rays of light permeated down into the depths of the cavern, tricking the mind’s eye into thinking they were still near the surface. It was either a very remarkable natural formation that allowed for this effect, or – more likely – the mountain had been hollowed out in such a way to achieve it.He’d been picking up signs of life here and there during the descent. Nothing absolute, no solid evidence that people lived here; but there were scuff marks along some of the walls that looked like they were made by boots, square-shaped “holes” in the dust that looked like there was a tarp or perhaps a rug laid down there shortly before they passed. It gave off the vibe of a camp that was quickly and stealthily broken.They must have reached their destination, because the Lynx abruptly stopped and turned to face them in front of a decorative hanging rug that appeared to cover a passage beyond. Lines of worry creased her youthful face. “Before we go inside, there are things that need to be known.” She glanced at all of them in turn. “I must know what you intend. What you seek here.”Panther cocked an eyebrow, and Fay’s expression, which hadn’t shifted an iota once during the descent, remained the same. Wolf took the initiative and responded. “We seek employment. You promised us a lot of credits, kitten, and you haven’t proven you’ve got them, or even told us what we’re doing here.” He let a bit of venom enter his voice. Straight and narrow or not, he found getting his way required some massaging of the situation – and Wolf’s preferred method of communicative massage was more on the order of thrown fists. “Now, I’ve been a real nice guy, parked where you wanted me to, even walked all the way down this lovely anthill you got here. But even nice guys have limits.” He flashed a toothy grin. Sometimes even Wolf wasn’t certain how much of this was an act, how much was really him, or if the two had bled together so long ago they couldn’t be extricated.The lynx, to her credit, maintained solid eye contact the whole time, face like stone. “So you’re purely mercenary? The only thing that makes your soul sing is money?”Makes my soul sing, Christ, these people, he thought. “Yeah, sure. And I want to know you have it before I do what you want me to do. I also want to know what that is, by the way.”She frowned, almost in disgust, and gestured to the largest of the robed figures flanking her with a flick of her wrist. He came forward and dropped his hood, revealing an aged, ugly rhino. He reached into his robes and retrieved a mid-sized bag, apparently made of the same material as their garments. With another gesture from the lynx, he opened it up and dumped its contents on the ground: a shower of solid gold ingots.Wolf just stood there, staring at the pile, staring at the lynx, then staring at the pile again. “What is this?”“Your payment. The first half of it at least.” Her eyes had a somewhat predatory cast to them as she spoke. “The second will come after you finish your task.”He really didn’t want to jump the gun on a job without knowing anything about it, but he could tell at a glance that was a lot of money sitting on the dusty cavern floor there. “That looks like more than what you promised.” And that was supposedly only half of what she wanted to give them?“Shach!”, she exclaimed with repulsion. “Money is nothing. Gold is nothing. Shiny things for off-worlders and men whose veins run with tar. Now come into the qitnah: there we will discuss our fate.”She turned and walked beyond the curtained passage, and the rest of her unit fell in behind her, leaving Wolf and his team outside. The pile of gold just sat there on the ground. As far as Wolf could tell, he could snatch it up and waltz right out just as easy as he came in. Panther must have thinking along the same lines too; he was staring longingly at the pile.This was a test for Wolf. Every once in the while he felt God, or the universe, or whatever jammed some kind of ethical dilemma into his life for him to face, just for shits and giggles. He’d faced many tests in his life, and on almost every single on he chose the path of selfishness. It wasn’t anything personal, or pathological; it was just how he survived. You needed to think about yourself before anything else if you wanted to get anywhere. If there was one thing his deadbeat sack of shit for a dad taught him, it was that.But that was before he was forgiven by the Cornerian government, before they kicked Leon off the team, and before Wolf started to make the conscious decision to “do good”. He still didn’t really believe he was good. That thought didn’t bring him any discomfort. He had to actively force himself to take the high and mighty path at every juncture where a fork in the road presented itself. It was obnoxious. But he’d committed to it so far and he wasn’t going to bail now. He might not be a good person, but he was a stubborn one.He let out a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan, leaned down, and collected the lumpy and misshapen ingots into a rag, tying it up with a knot. It was really weird he was still carrying around this rag, he knew. If Fox knew about it he’d never hear the end of it. But it really wasn’t anything sentimental – it was just a perfectly fine rag. It had lots of utilities.He signaled to Panther and Fay to follow before walking through the rug-covered passageway. ………. Wolf felt that, whatever this “qitnah” was, it needed more interior lighting. The trio walked a short distance through a misshapen hallway of stone that deposited them into a large chamber. Sconces lit with sputtering, smoky fires ringed the hollow, and there were several rows of tiered benches along the sides. He was surprised to see a somewhat sizeable number of people occupying them, hoods down and gazes hard. More surprising was the age range – he’d expected a group of fighters, not an assembly made up mostly of women, children and the elderly. At the head of the room stood their feline client, speaking in hushed tones to a seated figure. He was a reptile, that much was certain, but what species was impossible to determine due to his advanced age. Wolf had never seen a reptile this old before. His scaly skin sagged over a frame of sticks and bones, eyes barely visible beneath ancient folds. He looked like he was melting.Wolf stopped at the center of the chamber, and his teammates stopped with him. Panther looked alert, cautiously taking in the room and analyzing it for potential threats. Fay was still smiling, visibly oblivious to everything that was going on. Wolf could only hope their client wouldn’t take her to be a psychopath.On second thought, maybe he did. Leon had proven having a nutjob on your team could be a solid threat to hang over people. It was another thought to consider.The lynx held up her paw, and the low murmuring in the room died down. She lowered it, and cast a piercing glance at Wolf. “You have followed. Now it is time for us to keep our promises.” She drew a knife from her robe and made a shallow cut across her palm, quickly sheathing it again. It must have been a casual, common occurrence, Wolf thought. She let the thin welling of blood drip to the middle of the floor, and then gestured for Wolf to approach.This is the point a normal merc would bail, Wolf thought. He hadn’t exactly built a reputation on normalcy, however. Weird, dumb rituals were a dime-a-dozen in the galaxy, he’d found, especially on backwater planets. He’d worked with people like this before and he could do it again, especially for another bag of cash as brimming as the one he already got. If he completed this job, they’d finally be above water for the first time in months.He approached the lynx and drew a combat knife of his own from his belt. For the first time since he met her, she actually looked surprised. She didn’t have to tell Wolf what to do because he’d already figured it out as soon as she drew her knife in the first place. He mirrored her action from before and cut his palm, letting a bit of his blood drop to the cavern beneath their feet. She looked satisfied, and bowed her head to him. He returned the gesture.“Your blood mingles with mine own on the ground of the qitnah. Let our fates be as intertwined.” She smiled, looking visibly relaxed now that they’d gotten… whatever this was over and done with. “I am Rena of the bedanti of Uzach Basin. I welcome you and your own to our humble home.” She closed her eyes and nodded, and the motion was repeated by the attendees all around them, even including the aged lizard. Wolf looked back to his partners and nodded, and they did the same, performing the gesture in turn.Rena grasped her paws together and moved to the side, seeming to defer to the seated reptilian. Wolf had pegged him for being an elder or a chief or something upon seeing him, and he was right. She spoke up again. “We come to you beseeching your aid, and are willing to pay in precious metals for it.”Wolf fought back a demeaning grin at her phrasing. “What is it you want us to do?”She made eye contact with the elder, and he nodded to her silently. Apparently that was all the permission she needed to explain the situation. “Every night, raiders attack our home from above. They pilot starfighters, of which we have none to retaliate against them in kind. Their forces come over the Yazdah Pass, and bomb our hills and mountains.” She took a break, visibly distressed. “We did not always live in the qitnah, the safe space. We once lived along the basin, with waters available to be called from just beneath the surface. We had to retreat here to survive.”Her eyes hardened. Wolf recognized that amount of hate in someone so young. He’d seen it enough in the mirror. Now wasn’t the time for going down that mental avenue. “We want you to put a stop to this. Take to the skies and destroy them. Then you will be paid in full.”Wolf thought it over. It was obvious the people here, these bedanti, were in distress. There were precious few people of fighting age gathered here, and he couldn’t detect any sign that Rena was lying.But he also knew this wasn’t the whole story. There was more going on here, and damn him if he didn’t want to know what. His curiosity always fucked him over.“I need to speak with my team before making a decision.”She bowed her head. “Of course.”He walked back to Panther and Fay, and they huddled, keeping their voices low. “So, what do you think?”Panther was the first to speak. “They’re paying an awful lot of money just to fight some bandits. There’s more they’re not telling us.”“Agreed. Isn’t it worth it though? Like you said, it is a lot of cash, and it doesn’t look like there’s anything illegal going down here. How much criminal activity could a bunch of old fucks and saggy-titted housewives get up to?”Panther shot a dashing grin that belied a hint of menace. “Oh, my dear, dear captain. If only you knew.”“Well I think she looks like a nice person. And I like their mascot, he’s so baggy! I could probably pinch his cheeks and there’d be this much skin between my fingers!” Fay indicated the length of about a foot using her paws.Wolf was starting to wonder if he didn’t have to hype her up as a psychopath to scare off opponents because she might actually be one. “Well, you can’t argue with that logic.”“That’s only because there isn’t any logic to argue with.” Panther sighed. “I’m in, anyway. That introductory sum was more money than I’ve seen in the last six months combined, and I’m tired of eating canned food and drinking box wine.”Fay was all but jumping up and down in place. “I want to do it too! You guys promised me there would be action and adventure, but we haven’t done anything yet – I want to shoot some stuff! It’s what I went to school for and I need to pay off my student debt!”Wolf raised his paws in a placating gesture. “Alright, alright. I think I get it. For the record, I’m into it too. So we’re all on-board?”“Yes.”“Aye!”Then that’s that. Here’s to hoping this doesn’t turn into a catastrophic cock-up.Wolf returned to Rena at the seat of the elder. She looked pleased. He didn’t like it; it reminded him of when they landed and she seemed to just know they’d find her. “You accept, then?”He grasped her paw with his own and shook it. “Yeah, we do.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
III Streaking, spiraling lines of teal-green flashed past the port window. The interior of warp-space still wasn’t fully understood, its physics a quantum jumble of functions and layers of sub-reality that made Fox’s head whirl when he tried to think about it. Slippy’d explained it to him once, at least what they knew of it. Fox had to stop him by the time he began to mention something about parallel strings of space-time coalescing into phase-changed singularities.Even if he didn’t understand it, he could appreciate its beauty. A translucent, effervescent egg of regular time enclosed the Great Fox as it traveled between warp gates, keeping it stable amidst the storm of solid space-time weaving around it in freewheeling fractals. Fox had only done hallucinogenics one time, during a memorable (and embarrassing) party at the academy: the world outside the window didn’t look too dissimilar to what he had experienced.His reverie was interrupted as Slippy entered the lounge. At first glance it might have seemed like a pointless room to have on board what was effectively a warship – but the Great Fox was more than that. It was their home, and having at least a few lived-in accoutrements here and there was necessary to keep them sane on the long away-missions which made up the bulk of their life.Slippy took a seat at the booth across from Fox. He had that expression he always wore when he needed to talk about something serious. It always made Fox a little sad that the look was so similar to the one he made when he was scared during a pitched combat encounter. Fox had done everything he thought he could to make Slippy feel at ease with their group, but it never felt like it was enough. The frog was so young when they joined, younger even than Fox, and he’d never really had any friends before becoming a member. He’d confessed that to Fox a few years ago – he was wearing the same face back then that he was right now.“Umm, Fox?”, the toad said like he was stepping on eggshells. “We… kind of need to talk about something.”Fox knew this was coming. He’d almost brought it up himself a few times, feeling as if he needed to take charge since he was the leader. But he’d wanted to give Slippy enough time to bring it up himself. He was proud of Slippy, actually. He would have never been courageous enough to wade into emotionally rough waters like this when he joined.
Slippy’s grown up.
Then and there it hit him. Fox was like an older brother figure to Slippy, and he’d watch him develop from a timid frog fresh out of the academy – out at fifteen years old because he was that much of a tech genius – all the way to a decorated war hero. He was engaged to be married. He still had confidence issues, as his expression proved, but he was a fully-fledged adult.Fox found he didn’t have to force himself to smile. “Go ahead. I’m listening.” He didn’t want to pressure him or put words into his mouth. It was Slippy’s time to talk.Slippy took a deep breath. “So, Amanda and I… We kind of set the date. We’re getting married in six months.”He said it with such reservation, and Fox finally understood. Slippy wasn’t scared for himself – he was scared for Fox. Scared that he’d break the team and hurt Fox right along with it.He felt like an idiot. He should have understood this right from the get-go. He’d made no secret of his and Krystal’s conversations about the trajectory of the team, his anxieties about the future. And Slippy thought Fox blamed him for it.He had to fix this. “Slippy, you know I’m fine with this, right? In fact, I’m not just fine: I’m happy for you. Amanda’s a wonderful girl, and she’s lucky to have you.”Slippy brightened, but still looked unsure. “Are you sure? Because I know you’re worried about – ”“Listen.” Fox had to head him off before he inevitably started rambling. “I am worried about the future of Star Fox, it’s true. But I’m absolutely not blaming you for that, because there’s nothing to blame you for. All of us are going to have other lives eventually; we can’t be mercenaries forever. It’s just…” He trailed off, trying to find a way to put it into words.“…It’s just that it wasn’t real for you until I got engaged?”Fox smiled, and Slippy smiled in turn, no sign of the earlier hesitation written on his face.“Yes, exactly that.” He sighed. “I’m not sure what the future will bring for all of us, but we have to meet it head-on.”Slippy nodded, but couldn’t help himself from giggling a little bit.Fox was confused. “What?”Slippy smiled broadly. “It’s just, that sounded so much like something your dad would have said.” The smile turned a little sad.Fox wasn’t immediately sure how to respond to that, mostly because it was right. He settled on a resigned smile. “Yeah, I guess it does.”Slippy looked thoughtful. “Either that or Wolf. You know, Wolf kind of reminds me a lot of your dad in a lot of ways.”Fox’s face dropped like a stone, and Slippy must have noticed because he immediately looked uncomfortable. Fox wanted to apologize, but his comment… As if he didn’t already have enough issues he needed to work out. He firmly decided to throw the comment away in a mental dumpster and then set the dumpster on fire.The door slid open and Falco peaked in.“Yo, we’re almost at Titania. You guys ready?”Fox nodded, and Slippy responded in the affirmative.“Alright, well – get your asses down to the bridge, or whatever.” He turned and left.Fox was surprised Slippy didn’t say anything. “When are you going to tell Falco and Krystal? You know, about the marriage?”Slippy looked to the side rubbed the back of his head. “…Six hours ago.”“…You waited to tell me last?” He wasn’t sure whether to be miffed or start laughing.The anuran threw his arms up. “I didn’t know how you were going to react!”Fox only smiled and shook his head. “Let’s get to the bridge before Falco comes back even surlier than before.” ………. “That’s the city?”Fox wanted to fault Falco’s tone but found he couldn’t. They were making the descent to Tytos through the planet’s atmosphere in their Arwings, the Great Fox left in orbit under ROB’s jurisprudence. Fox hadn’t expected anything as advanced as the cities of Corneria or Fortuna; he knew Titania was an economically underdeveloped world that hadn’t recovered from its planet-spanning conflict half a century prior – and even before that, it wasn’t exactly a stellar place to live.But he’d expected something more than this, especially for what was supposedly the largest city on the planet. Tytos looked to be comprised primarily of lopsided hovels made of red baked mud bricks, none reaching more than three stories tall – sans a very conspicuous, opulent, sandy-gold-colored palace looming over the rest of the city, perched high enough that it cast a shadow over a big chunk of the residential areas. The town (because that’s what it really was, titles be damned) was surrounded by a wall that looked sturdier than most of the actual architecture within its ramparts; he could just make out armed guards travelling between fortified towers along its length.“Make sure not to disparage it where the bashar can hear you. This is a tense situation we’re flying into, and we don’t want to antagonize anyone.” Fox wasn’t exaggerating either – Krystal’s potential warning about their client still flashed in his head.“Yeah, yeah, I know”, Falco grumbled. “I’m not that much of an idiot.”Fox grinned. “Never said you were, Falco. You said that yourself.”He could hear Falco chuckling on the other end of the comm-line. “Fuck you too, Fox.”“We’re coming up on the landing site now. Comm request incoming.” Krystal’s collected voice acted as a gentle reminder of the task at hand. Missions were often like this: each member of Star Fox unconsciously falling into predetermined roles, each one serving a greater purpose. Fox’s leadership in acting as a command authority; Falco’s flippancy defusing situations with humor; Krystal keeping them on point to counterbalance Falco’s flippanc; and Slippy keeping track of everyone’s status. They were a fully synchronous unit: a well-oiled machine. Fox wondered how much of that was innate talent and how much was practiced skill.“Request accepted. Patch them through”, Fox ordered. He listened with rapt attention.Game time.“This is Tytos Defense Authority flight control speaking. I take it this is Corneria’s… reinforcements?”The voice was somewhat defiant – entitled. The hopes Fox had been harboring of Krystal and Peppy’s assessments of the situation being wrong died a little. “Yes. This is Fox McCloud of Star Fox speaking – the other pilots with me are the rest of my unit.”There was a pause in the conversation just long enough to be awkward before the flight controller spoke up again. “Very well. I’m sending landing coordinates now. Do not deviate from the flight pattern.”“Understood. Fox out.”Fox hadn’t missed the unspoken threat in the warning to stay on-track. That was when the rest of his hopes for this mission died.They stayed radio silent as they followed the coordinates to a landing site in the central courtyard of the palace they saw earlier. It was their team rule whenever they weren’t sure if potential non-friendlies were eavesdropping over the comm-lines. Better to hold onto their thoughts until they could speak in person.The landing pad was incredibly spacious, easily accommodating all four of their Arwings with plenty of room to spare. As Fox exited his starfighter he was instantly taken aback by the tremendous heat of the planet’s atmosphere. It was a dry, bright heat at that, the kind you couldn’t tune out so easily.The courtyard was just as lavish as he expected it would be based on what the palace looked like from the outside. Despite being in a desert environment, it was positively verdant inside this space. An artificial oasis in the middle of an endless wasteland. Arabesque screens and gazebos dotted the garden space, and the courtyard led to at least seven different visible passageways that he could count.Falco looked unimpressed with the décor; no doubt aware that it was positively wasteful, and yet for all that waste it wasn’t even half as nice as the ridiculous manses and family homes of the impossibly wealthy that could be found on worlds like Fichina. Slippy stayed quiet as a mouse, as he always did when wading into unknown territory for the first time. Krystal looked disturbed, probably picking up on strange thought patterns and emotions and unhappy with what she was sensing, Fox figured.For his part, he was wary. He could tell the palace was more than just a dwelling space for a powerful man. He couldn’t help but notice when they were flying into it that, despite its luxurious appearance, the actual architecture of the structure was far more akin to a bona fide military fortress than a playground for a rich buffoon. The building itself felt like an act.His thoughts were interrupted as a trio of figures approached them. Two elephants wearing thick, imposing armor and hefting Zonessan gatling guns flanked an older, genteel-looking fennec fox with a kindly smile on his face. He barely made it up to their waists. “It appears Corneria has seen fit to lend us a handful of its finest warriors. For this, I am very grateful.” His voice was heartfelt and held no hint of sarcasm, as far as Fox could tell.It wasn’t the reception he was expecting after all that buildup. “Uh, thank you.” He’d been caught off-guard, but he quickly regained his composure. “My name is Fox McCloud. This is Falco Lombardi, Slippy Toad, and Krystal.” They each nodded their heads in turn as he named them.The fennec smiled again, crow’s feet along his eyes crinkling. “Yes, of course. I know who you all are. Why, I imagine very few in Lylat don’t.” He chuckled some, as the elephants behind him continued to stare straight forward, not making eye contact with anyone and acting practically like robots.“Oh, where are my manners?”, he asked himself before bending at the waist in a sweeping bow. “My name is Inigo, steward of Tytos. Welcome to the Eish-da-Tertulli, ancestral home of the bashars of this great city.”He waved his arm towards them. “Now come! I will take you to the bashar’s office. He meant to be here to welcome you – but he is busy, you see. He apologizes for this of course. But it is no matter: he will be finished shortly, and then we may discuss what needs be discussed.”Fox shared a wary glance with his teammates as they followed after the steward.He had a bad feeling about this. ………. The four of them had been waiting in Tertulli’s office for about an hour. It was a graciously large space, meticulously decorated with all manner of expensive art pieces and fanciful décor, all of it tastefully arranged to create a unified aesthetic. The golden-brown walls had exotic floral patterns engraved into them. White ribbons of fine cloth hung from the ceiling in arcs like billowing clouds. The chaise-lounges artfully laid out to create a homey ambiance were the softest Fox had ever sat in.There was little doubt in Fox’s mind as to the purpose of all these creature comforts. It coupled perfectly with the bashar’s obviously intentional plan to leave them hanging in this room for so long. He wanted them disarmed – disoriented. If they were equal parts impatiently on-edge from waiting so long and lulled into relaxation, it would be that much easier to ply information from them, if even simply by their body language.This wasn’t lost on his teammates either. Falco chose to stand the entire time, leaning against a corner of the wall next to an almost sensuously curvaceous white porcelain vase, face locked into a dangerous scowl. For Krystal’s part, she looked unusually disconcerted. He wanted to talk with her but couldn’t – they’d limited themselves to idle chat as long as they were in the palace. Who knew what listening devices Tertulli had in this place, especially within his own personal quarters?Another five or so minutes passed, marked by Falco’s periodic sighing and Slippy rhythmically smacking his lips in a vaguely annoying fashion, before a large door on the other side of the office opened.Through it walked one of the biggest animals Fox had ever seen.The bashar was another head again taller than the guards who’d protected the steward, and an elephant’s head of length wasn’t to be underestimated. But more than that, he was absolutely massive. His corpulence was greater than that of the average elephant, but despite this he carried himself fully upright and with measured strength. The combination of height, width, overbearing demeanor and large, billowing robes made him look more like a small vehicle than a person.He took a seat behind the massive desk in the center of the room with a grumble. He set his hands upon it, slowly and calculatingly setting his gaze each of them in turn. Elephants were historically among the most relaxed and peaceable of the large herbivorous species that developed sapience early on in the evolutionary chain, but Fox’s mind had only one word to describe the glance the bashar had spared for him.Predatory.“Well, at least Corneria’s offering me some help. Beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose.” His voice was a deep baritone, highly resonant and commanding authority. “I am the bashar Fazanh Tertulli, chief administrator of Tytos.”Fox began to introduce himself before he was interrupted – Tertulli had raised his hand to stop him mid-sentence.“Enough of that, I know exactly who you all are. Introductions are worthless. I’m a busy man, you see, and my time is wasted on niceties when there’s work to be done”. His voice carried a soothing honey-slick note at odds with his coarse words.Fox shared a quick glance with his team. Caught off-guard for the second time in one mission, and the mission technically hadn’t even begun yet.He returned his gaze to Tertulli and spoke with a business-like tone. If this was how the bashar wanted to play it, he’d play right along. “Alright. What’s the situation?”Tertulli smiled, and Fox was surprised to see it wasn’t as terrifying as he’d imagined it had to be. “You’re direct. Good! I like that in a man. Perhaps you’re not as much of a waste as I took you for.”Falco made an indignant noise, but Fox quickly silenced him with a raise of his hand. Tertulli was obviously testing them. Fox nodded to the bashar, indicating he should continue.“About, oh, a week and a half ago now, a bedanti assassin snuck into my personal quarters and tried to kill me.” Tertulli reclined in his chair and folded his hands. “He was a clever bugger, he was – pinned my arms and legs before I had a chance to respond. Of course, he forgot that an elephant’s trunk is perfectly as capable of strangling a man as an elephant’s hands. That oversight cost him dearly.”The bashar allowed himself a cruel, indulgent smile. Fox kept his face staid.“Anyway – it wasn’t an entirely surprising development. You see, we’ve been in a bit of an ‘underground war’ with the bedanti for a while now. They’ve been testing our city’s defenses, sneaking their troops inside, generally rabblerousing – that sort of thing.”“Why are they fighting you?”, Fox asked.Tertulli made such an exaggeratedly sorrowful face that Fox had a hard time believing anyone would be tricked y it. “It all stems back to that awful, accursed war fifty years ago. The bedanti always held the dwellers of the cities in scorn, but they were incapable of doing anything about it. After the war, the cities grew so small – so weak – as the bedanti’s numbers swelled. Is it any surprise that they’ve become… emboldened?”Fox didn’t buy this explanation for a second. “And you’re sure they’re doing this unprovoked?”Tertulli waved his hand in a noncommittal gesture. “Well, I never said their emboldening was the only reason for this recent, unfortunate bout of violence. Certainly it’s true when one takes the wider perspective of history into account. I suppose the current hardships trace back to an unfortunate incident at a basin not far from here, where some bandits apparently massacred a village of bedanti.”“How awful”. Krystal spoke up for the first time since they landed. “Why did the bandits do that?”“Only the gods know what goes on in the mind of a criminal, my dear.” Tertulli sighed and stared at the far wall in an almost noble way. The effect was somewhat comical. “I often ponder these questions myself, alone at night, when the moon casts its milk-glow upon the sands. Have you ever seen a Titanian night?”Krystal looked discomfited by being singled out. “I haven’t. In truth, I’ve never been to Titania before.”“Oh, to be sure, to be sure.” Tertulli nodded emphatically. “Well, when the sun finally sets and the moon comes up, it bathes the sands in a truly heavenly way. They take on a hue and glimmer of a precious blue diamond.” He paused as his eyes flicked down her form before returning back to her face. “The color of your fur reminds me quite a bit of it, actually. I wonder if that’s why I have Titanian nights on my mind. I must say, you’re certainly their equal in beauty.”Fox noticed Krystal working very hard to keep any semblance of disgust from showing on her face. “Thank you, my lord”, she responded graciously. Much more so than Fox would have if he were in the same position.Tertulli simply nodded to her with a smile. “Anyway, what I want from you is very simple. The bedanti are staging raids on the city from a canyon base a few leagues away from here. I want you to shoot it to bits. My steward will provide you with more information – his office is right next to mine, you can’t miss it.” He harrumphed and began to stand up from his chair, shuffling some papers on his desk into a neater pile. It was a clear sign the meeting was over.“Understood”, Fox said with a clipped tone. They filed out of the room, Falco last to leave and closing the door behind him.The bashar stood at his desk for another few seconds after their departure, pondering the exchange. In truth, he’d been blindsided by Corneria sending the legendary Star Fox unit of all things. He’d been expecting at most a small team of Dogfighters, inexperienced and easy to spare for such a mission.This complicates things. ………. The steward’s office was a far cry from the bashar’s. It could charitably be called “cozy”, but a more apt description would be “cramped.”Inigo didn’t seem uncomfortable, though. He was still smiling, still very much at ease in his surroundings. He was everything Tertulli wasn’t: affable, mild-mannered, and courteous. Fox found himself wondering if this was just by chance or if there was some kind of “good cop/bad cop” routine going on here.“Yes, the canyon base, of course. Here are the coordinates.” He sent each of them a copy of a very detailed three-dimensional map of the desert surrounding Tytos, with glowing markers placed on certain locations.“We’re not sure exactly where the bedanti are holed up – but whenever they begin a raid, they come out of caverns in the canyon here, a few clicks away from the Yazdah Pass.” He pointed out a glowing red marker overlaying a particularly jagged cascade of mountains. “We’ve sent in plenty of air forces to root them out in the past, but all our efforts have been fruitless. So far.”Fox tried to compartmentalize his misgivings about the mission and to start thinking like a military commander instead. Regardless of whatever was going on with Tertulli, he had orders, and he had to be on point. “What makes you believe we’ll do any better?”, he asked, genuinely curious.Inigo smiled. “You’re Star Fox. You have an impressive record of getting results.” His face took on a sly appearance. “You also have Arwings, whose lasers are far more effective at penetrating stone than our fighters.”Fox frowned. “What are you fielding here?”The steward’s smile hovered somewhere between embarrassed and apologetic. “M80 Skip-Hoppers.”Falco grimaced. “Jesus. You might as well be flying blimps and dropping molotovs on them.”Inigo laughed. “I won’t disagree with that, young bird. The Great Sand War was devastating for Titania. Most of our armaments are leftovers from that era.”Something didn’t add up here. Fox thought back to the top-of-the-line gatlings those elephant guards were holding. He knew he wasn’t the only one to think of this, as Slippy caught his eye in a knowing fashion. He also know he wasn’t going to mention this to the steward – Peppy would certainly be hearing about it in his report, though.Krystal chimed in. “What of violence in the city? We were under the impression that there were deadly conflicts between the bedanti and security forces within the city walls.”The steward nodded respectively towards her. “It’s true. However, we feel it’s best for the security forces to deal with that as they have. We believe the bedanti in the city are inspired by the attacks from outside, seeing it as a rallying cry to violence. So, if the attacks from the canyon cease…”“…Then the tension in the city evaporates.” Fox understood the logic.“Precisely.”They had their orders and their location. There’s no getting out of this now, Fox thought.“Alright, when do you want us to strike?” ………. Fox and Krystal were sitting at a table overlooking the street below. Falco and Slippy had gone on to explore the town together, leaving the two of them to eat in relative peace. The permanent haze of dust in the air took some getting used to as it was continuously tossed up by foot traffic and blown there and hither by the wind. The restaurant was undeniably crummy, but it at least looked cleaner than anything else in the immediate district. It was just after sunset, and the town’s activity was already dying down.Not a hotspot for nightlife, I suppose.“This has been a strange overture to a mission.” Krystal had been silent most of their meal, and Fox was glad she decided to speak up.“I won’t debate you there. Peppy wasn’t happy to hear about what I’ve told him.” The rabbit in question had been particularly upset by Fox’s mention of the gatling guns, as they were the weapon of choice for the Zonessan mafia.She looked as unsettled as she had been since they’d landed on the planet’s surface. Fox had hoped it would clear up after leaving the palace, but clearly something more was going on. He didn’t want to press her and make her uncomfortable; but on the other hand, they were on a mission. A dangerous one at that. He couldn’t have any of his teammates distracted. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Krystal. I know something’s wrong.”She looked up at him, a strangely sad smile on her face. “Am I that obvious?”Fox shook his head. “Probably not to most people. But to me, you are.”Krystal sighed. “There’s something… wrong going on here.”Fox had to keep himself from snorting. As it was, his rising smile was probably annoying her. “I mean… Krystal, I respect your empathic abilities more than anyone, you know I do. But you don’t exactly need them to figure that out.”She shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. It’s bigger than that.” She looked from side to side, a surprising, almost paranoid gesture from someone Fox knew to be incredibly level-headed. “I haven’t felt anything in that way since we landed on this planet.”It took a few seconds for it to sink in – and when it did, he took the news about as well as he hoped he could, slowly raising a glass of water to his mouth and drinking it in a very measured way, intentionally putting off having to think too much about this new piece of information. She sat there and waited as he drained the whole glass, and slowly replaced it on the table. She threw him a mischievous glint. “Would you prefer something alcoholic?”He laughed nervously. “Not from here, no.” His laughter faded. “Now, what exactly to you mean by not…”“…Feeling anything?”“Yeah”, he nodded. “That.”She lean back in her chair. “I mean my empathic sense is muddled. I can catch drifts of thoughts and emotions, but they’re so… muted. It’s like everything is drowned out, impossible to grasp onto.”Fox didn’t like the sound of this.“I don’t like the sound of this.”She took a sip of her own drink. “I don’t like the feel of this either. Trust me, it’s mutual.”“Has this ever happened before? Losing your powers, I mean.”“I haven’t lost them. They’re just… fuzzy. Unfocused.” She thought the question over. “And no. No, not like this. I mean, there were ways on Cerinia to weaken peoples’ abilities if they were imprisoned; you know, dampeners and the like.”“I don’t know”, he shook his head.“Don’t be a smartass.” She went silent for a moment as someone passed closely to the table. “Hypothetically – and I have to say as much because I’ve never been subject to a dampener before – I’d guess they would feel like this. But dampeners are compact devices and only cover so much ground. For a whole planet to be hushed in that way… It feels like it should be impossible.”Fox was disturbed by this revelation. He knew Krystal was a great pilot powers aside, but he couldn’t deny that her empathic abilities were a boon to the team – and he’d been especially planning to rely on them while navigating the complicated political situation here.Krystal must have read his mind. Metaphorically, anyway. “I should mention now, I have no greater an idea of what Tertulli wants than you.”“Not even based on body language?”“Well, yes, I can tell by that – but that’s it. I can’t read his thoughts, can’t read the finer gradients of his emotion. Whatever he’s planning is hidden from me.”This was a major blow to Fox’s plans, but it was no matter. They’d played things by ear plenty of times before. They were adaptable. “Alright. That’s unfortunate, but we have to continue as planned. First we take out the raiders, then we look into what’s going on in the city.”Krystal looked uncertain. “Are we… sure we want to fight the bedanti?”The question had been bothering Fox too. “No. Which is why we absolutely will not be shooting first.”She nodded. “Good. I also have plenty of questions about why the bedanti are attacking, I don’t buy this story about a bandit massacre. And the timing about the assassination attempt is too neat.”“I agree.” Fox looked solemn. “Honestly? I’m hoping we don’t have to shoot at them at all.”“No?”He folded his arms. “If we can get them to talk, we might get some solid answers.”Krystal quirked a brow. “Or we might get a story equally dubious as Tertulli’s.”Fox grimaced a bit. “Or that, yeah.”He looked out the window again, at the dwindling number of passers-by, all wearing loose-fitting robes of a variety of subdued colors. The sun had fully set, bathing the town in a gray twilight. He could see the silhouettes of armed patrolmen along the wall facing out into the open sands and wondered what they fought for. Were they defending their city from barbarians at the gate? Knowingly persecuting an innocent group of people? Blindly following orders from a distant and menacing bashar?Fox wondered what he was fighting for too.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
IV “Alright. Last systems check, people. Look alive”, Wolf ordered over the comm.All gauges read stable, thrusters active, blaster systems online and heating. The targeting computer in his cybernetic eye was synchronizing with the Wolfen’s radar systems, providing him with a constantly updated tactical display. In a perverse sort of way, losing his eye ended up being a blessing – he couldn’t for the life of him imagine having to go back to looking at a secondary screen while trying to fly at the same time.“Systems are green”. Panther sounded as calm as he always did when they started a mission.“Green as the grass on the other side, cap’n!” Fay did not.Wolf took a stabilizing breath, slowly letting it out into the cockpit. They were about to take off from the escarpment and fight off some bandits.At least he thought they were.He had little doubt Rena’s tribe were being wrongfully attacked by armed marauders: he’d seen the evidence himself in the hollow eyes of the people hiding in that cavern, in the slipshod way they had tents set up and were hiding in them. Rena’d even provided him with physical evidence in the piece of a downed fighter they’d manage to knock out with a rocket launcher.But something still wasn’t adding up.He knew things got rough on the fringes of the Lylat System. Hell, he’d lived it growing up. But he also knew it made no sense for bandits to be attacking them with such regularity and ferocity while not gaining anything from it. And it wasn’t like Rena’s people didn’t have plenty of riches to spare – the bag of gold stowed away under his dashboard was evidence enough of that. So why weren’t the outlaws moving in and trying to take it? And why were they acting with seeming impunity from the local government?No, there was more going on here.And as long as I don’t technically know I’m breaking the law, then it’s not illegal.At least that’s what he told himself.“Alright, Star Wolf. You guys better be ready to burn up some bandit ass. Let’s ride.”He pulled the drive-shift and let the sound of the humming engine relax him, get him in the zone. He felt like he could face whatever the galaxy threw at him as long as he met it head-on.And it was time to do exactly that. ………. It turned out Tertulli wasn’t just trying to freak them out: the color of Titania’s dunes in the moonlight genuinely did look similar to that of Krystal’s fur. Slippy told him the sand that made up most of the planet’s surface had a relatively high density of clear silica that reflected the blue light of Titania’s crystalline moon.It really was a beautiful sight. Fox was disappointed he had to see it under such inauspicious conditions though.They’d taken off from Tertulli’s palace about a half hour ago, but they hadn’t travelled alone – the steward had insisted on them taking the bashar’s forces with them. Fox had tried to argue that a handful of Skip-Hoppers weren’t going to help them (on top of his own unspoken personal reasons of not wanting any of Tertulli’s people with them on a mission); but Inigo had insisted, so here they were.Fox was nominally the leader of this mission, but he didn’t feel like it. As soon as they were joined by Tertulli’s pilots, led by a gruff jackal who only went by the callsign “Fang”, whatever authority Star Fox had over this mission felt like it had evaporated.He kept course though. Realistically speaking he and his teammates would be doing most of the heavy lifting if it came to blows.That was really what worried him, however. He briefed Falco and Slippy on what he and Krystal had discussed over dinner before they set out, about how he wanted to try at a peaceful resolution with the bedanti. He was afraid having the bashar’s forces alongside him would complicate the situation.“We’re coming over the Yazdah Pass now", Fang's voice came over the comms. "Form in on me.”Fox thought he sounded very bored and businesslike for someone with as try-hard of a code name as “Fang”. He absentmindedly wondered where and how Tertulli selected his recruits.Their craft glided over the empty sands, congealing together into a tight-knit group as they flew somewhat inside of and over a narrow canyon pass, keeping as close to the ground as they dared so as not to be spotted from far away. There was a hot ball of nauseous tension in Fox’s gut, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. This was a very low-risk mission that might not even end in violence - but there was just something off about the whole thing. He wished Krystal’s powers weren’t so denuded.And wasn’t that a mystery? Fox knew she was more disturbed by it than she let on, and she let on being plenty disturbed. It disturbed him too. He was worried for her, of course, but he was also worried for their team. Her abilities had clued them into so many dangers in the past. It felt like he was flying blind without them.He stayed near the front of the pack, slightly above and to the right of Fang’s junkheap of a starfighter, and tried to put these thoughts out of mind.He had a mission, and he needed to focus. ………. Wolf surveyed the powder blue plain below him. Something was niggling at the back of his mind, and he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. He could tell Panther was edgy too, his uncharacteristic lack of running commentary giving him away.As jittery as they were, he could tell Rena’s company was worse. They’d been huddled up in the middle of the empty desert for an hour now, doing… something. Wolf had commed her a little while ago to ask what was up, and she responded with a vague, noncommittal answer to the effect of ‘doing what has to be done’.Wolf hadn’t liked that one bit, and his discomfort was matched only by his irritation. Literal bag of gold or not, his current client was way too cagey with what exactly was going on. He was still willing to let it slide, but whatever was occurring there on the desert floor was starting to test his resolve. The last thing he wanted right now was to get Star Wolf entangled with the criminal world again – but the second last thing he wanted was for them to be embroiled in some greater conflict.He did another casual loop of the basin, continuously watching for activity. But the only activity to be seen was Rena’s tribe impaling metal rods into the ground and tapping them with small hammers. Some kind of pre-battle ritual? He had no fucking idea.Before he could ruminate on it further, his eye read contact, off to the northeast. And sure enough, it was on his HUD too – nine bogeys inbound, all of starfighter-class size.“Panther, Fay", he got down to business. "We’ve got company inbound.”“Reading", Panther responded instantly.“I spy them, with my not-so-little eyes!" Wolf knew he had to work with Fay on appropriate battle chatter – not now, though.He veered his Wolfen off to the right, Panther and Fay flanking him, and picked up speed. He liked to hit fast and hard, and preferred to fight opponents already in the midst of maneuvers. It threw them off-guard and gave Wolf an element of surprise.And with three-to-one odds, he knew any advantage wasn’t to be thrown away idly. ………. They exited the canyon pass at a cautious pace – and took fire immediately.“Incoming!”, Fox shouted. “Evasive maneuvers!”Fang pivoted off to the left, his small squadron of Skip-Hoppers falling in line, while Star Fox veered to the right.The hits had come so hard, so fast. Fox had obviously underestimated just how pissed of the bedanti were. But aircraft? That wasn’t part of the steward’s briefing.Slippy’s voice ringed out over the comms. “Counting three aerial bogeys, and there’s a group of bedanti standing… in the middle of the desert?”Fox would usually take whatever Slippy said at face value, but he had to confirm this – and sure enough, it was true. Their enemies were standing out in the open, making no apparent move to attack.Before he could give any orders a rocket was launched from a cliffside off to their left. And then another. And another, all of them aimed at both their group and Fang’s.“Slippy! You didn’t mention the anti-air defenses!” Falco sounded pissed.“That’s because they didn’t come up on radar!", Slippy complained. "Actually, they’re still not coming up... I don’t know why. There’s something really weird going on here.”Fox agreed. “Alright: Falco, Slippy, wide flanking maneuvers, strafe the general area the rockets came from with laser fire.”“You got it.”“Roger!”“Krystal, you’re with me – it looks like Fang’s having trouble with the aircraft.”“I think he’s in more than just trouble", Krystal replied.Fox took a second to check his HUD; she was right, Fang’s squad had lost two of its ships already. Old, busted craft or not, that was a might more impressive than Fox had expected from what were supposedly an unorganized group of nomad raiders.He wished he could be impressed under better circumstances.“Okay, we need to take out their starfighters", he planned out loud to himself just as much as to his team. "Potential negotiations are going to have to wait until they’re not trying to kill us.”“Agreed, we need to –”She cut off as she executed a flawless barrel roll, narrowly escaping fire from one of the bogeys, and…No.No, it couldn’t be.The enemy Wolfen was relentlessly locked-on to Krystal’s Arwing, looping and swirling and undulating as it flew, like a snake slithering through the air. Fox didn’t hesitate – he darted behind it and took some potshots, warning it off.He commed the bogey.“Star Wolf!? What the hell are you doing here!?”A decidedly unexpected feminine voice responded. “Watch your language, mister! This is a family mission we’re on. And how do you know I’m with Star Wolf, hmm?”Fox shook his head in disbelief.
What the hell’s going on here?
He was about to send another comm before a second Wolfen shot past him, cutting him off from the unknown female pilot. A general transmission from the interloper went out to all the ships in the area.“That’s enough! Everyone stop shooting, hold the fucking phone.”Miraculously, the firing stopped.Fox slowed his Arwing down, taking heavy breaths. He could see what was left of Fang’s team cease fire too. A trio of Wolfens formed up across from their four Arwings and paused.“Didn’t expect to see you here, Star Fox.”The gruff voice stirred up a cascade of confused emotions in Fox. “I could say the same, Wolf. I was under the impression Star Wolf wasn’t taking on criminal jobs anymore.”“And I was under the impression Star Fox never took on criminal jobs to begin with.”Fox’s nascent sense of disappointment in and anger with Wolf falling back into old habits was halted. “What are you talking about?”“I’m talking about you joining up with a bunch of bandits and attacking civilians.”Fox was starting to see red. Enemy, rival, friend, (more?) – whatever Wolf was, he did not get off making aspersions like that. Falco verbalized his thoughts for him before he got a chance: “Fuck off, Wolf. You’re the one teaming up with bandits here, not us.”“Be quiet, bird.” Panther’s voice sounded particularly violent.Fox knew he had to take control of the situation. Apparently so did Wolf, who cut him off as he began to speak. “Look, we were hired by these people to defend them from raiders who already massacred a nice chunk of them and chased them out of their village. I have proof.”The story matched up with what they’d already heard back in Tytos, but…“No”, Fox said. “No, look, we’re helping a defense authority of a nearby city that’s been attacked by these people. Those Skip-Hoppers over there aren’t being piloted by bandits, they’re basically the local police.”“That why they’re revving up behind you to make another pass at the cliffside?”Fox frowned. “What are you –”“Fox! Look!” Slippy’s voice sounded urgent.Fox wheeled his Arwing around, and sure enough Wolf was right. Fang’s trio of starfighters were making for the canyon wall despite the ceasefire. Fox commed them urgently.“Fang! What’re you doing!?”“Following orders.”That wouldn’t do. “I’m in charge of this mission – I order you to stand down.”Fang ignored him and sped up. Fox wasn’t even sure why; their starfighters weren’t enough to put a dent in that cliff. He was instantly proven wrong, as all three Skip-Hoppers let loose a payload of smart bombs on the escarpment. Fox was temporarily blinded by the shock of piercing white light against the darkness of the night sky before his Arwing’s light-sensitive cockpit windows could adjust to a darker tint. Wolf and his comrades shot out into the light to chase down the apparently rogue defense force.
What’s happening to this mission?
“Fox…”It was Krystal’s voice.“…Something is coming. Something big.”Fox kept his Arwing stable as he replied. “I thought you couldn’t sense anything?”“I can’t.” Her voice was shaking. “But I also can. I can’t even really explain it. The reason I can’t sense anything – the space in my vision – it’s almost here. It’s not this planet; it’s a thing.” ………. Wolf deftly navigated his ship through the flying rubble and chunks of rock blown out of the cliffside, stalking those pieces of junk piloted by people Fox deigned to call “local police”. Obviously the stupid vulpine was hoodwinked; he was too naïve for his own good.He was interrupted by a comm from… Rena? He patched it through.“Mercenary. There is no need to chase them anymore”, she said with a respectful tone. “You have fought admirably, but it is as we feared. It was not enough.”Wolf was absolutely pissed. “What are you talking about!? It’s just three of them left and they’re piloting airborne dumpsters, we’ve got this covered.”“No, mercenary. Look at your scanner.”He growled, but did as she requested. It had to be a glitch. There were thirty airborne bogeys closing in on their position, an even spread between starfighters and gunships.“What the hell is this!?”“Wolf!” It was Panther’s voice, and he sounded anxious. Doubtless he’d seen the reading too.“Panther, Fay, close in on me. They’re coming from all directions, but we can break their ranks –”“No.” It was Rena again. “You will not defeat them. These are not the “dumpsters” of which you spoke, but refined and powerful ships. They will destroy you.”If he was pissed before, he was absolutely frothing with rage now. “Then WHY THE HELL DID YOU EVEN CONTRACT US ON THIS MISSION!?”There was a long pause before she answered. “We hoped you might allow us to escape the inevitable. But it is not to be. We have no choice – we must summon the god.”Wolf started laughing to himself darkly, hysterically. He really hated to bag on clients, it was exceptionally poor form; but he really didn’t have a choice. He wasn’t going to let his team get killed off for something this monumentally stupid.“Panther, Fay. We’re busting this joint.”“Umm, Wolf…?” Panther sounded worried.“Cap’n! Big, big bogey incoming!”He was about to ask for clarification before he noticed it on his radar himself. There was something massive inbound. Not from along the surface, or coming from the atmosphere, but from below them. And it was approaching fast, right for the part of the desert Rena and her troop were clustered in.“Rena! You’ve got… something incoming! Get out of there!”There was another pause, and then an answer: “There is no need to fear, mercenary. The god approaches, and will do no harm to us. I suggest you land your ships and take cover, lest you invoke its wrath.”He didn’t need radar to audibly hear the entire ground outside his ship rumbling. The dunes were trembling like the skin of a drum, struck in a strangely rhythmic fashion.Dum.Dum.DUM.Rena’s voice called out across a general comm channel, echoing to all those gathered like a preacher from the pulpit. “Now! Bear witness to the might of an old god of the desert!”There was a beat of silence as the drumbeats stopped. For a second Wolf thought it had all been a hallucination – it had been strange enough to be one. But just as he recovered a sense of normalcy, a gargantuan appendage shot out of the desert floor at high speed, bent at an unnatural angle, and shot right back down into the ground, impaling the sands like a spear through the hide of an animal. The segmented, chitinous tentacle vibrated slowly, as small hair-like cilia grew out from it, wavering in the wind.Another one emerged, and this time Wolf noticed the pincer at the end of it, large enough to grasp a small warship and cut it clean in half.A third arm burst out of the sands, followed shortly thereafter by a fourth.The entire desert began to shake again, vibrating at such a frequency it looked like a blurry mirage. The four tentacles went rigid, as they worked together to heft something of immense size out from the depths. The sand began to pour away from the space between the arms, as the bulk of the creature crowned. It let out a bone-rumbling noise, a call so deep it couldn’t be registered as sound but rather as feeling.The “old god of the desert” fully rose. Wolf could only describe it as a colossal insect-crab-thing, a mess of exoskeletal portions and long, limbering arms. A smaller bit of it extended below the primary mass of its shell, dangling from the central “crab-body” held aloft by the arms. He could see Rena and her group calmly standing on it.Just as the beast finally began to stand fully on the surface, the small armada of ships closing in on them appeared over the canyon walls.Wolf had only one thought.
What the fuck did I just get us into?
………. Fox watched in horror as the Goras emerged from the sands. It was nothing like the one he’d taken down during the Lylat War though – this one was way bigger.He could hear Krystal screeching in pain over the comm. Whatever effect this thing was having on her psyche was too enormous for him to consider staying in the immediate area.He spied a secluded, sheltered spot hidden under a shelf of rock at the edge of the basin, and pinged it on his display. “Everyone! Follow me to the indicated spot on your HUD. Krystal, are you with me?”She could barely speak, grunting out her words. “Yes. Mostly.”Fox buried down his worry – he had to remain on point. “Alright. Get to that rock shelf. Move it!”They formed up on him, Krystal’s piloting a little wobbly, and sped over to the cliffside. They weren’t the only ones: Wolf’s team was headed for the same spot.They made a rough landing and Fox jumped out of the cockpit as soon as he was able, rushing to Krystal’s Arwing, Slippy and Falco right behind him. They opened her cockpit from the manual lift on the outside, and Fox hefted her out of the seat. She looked to be in agony, but was trying to mask it, hold it under control.The three of them carried her over to the farthest edge of the canyon wall as Wolf and his teammates landed haphazardly amongst their Arwings. Wolf and Panther made their way over to them, along with a white-furred canine he didn’t recognize – presumably the pilot who’d been shooting at Krystal earlier.Fox sat on the ground and held Krystal in his arms. She was breathing rapidly, and it looked like she was on the verge of fainting. Slippy was visibly distraught, and even Falco couldn’t put on an air of cool control.Wolf looked half like he was ready to throttle someone and half like he was intruding on a private moment. He made eye contact with Fox, and the lid Fox had placed on the box of his and Wolf’s rendezvous almost flew off. He managed to keep it on through sheer mental force of will. Now wasn’t the time to start poking around in there.The lupine spoke up, his voice surprisingly apprehensive: “For the record, we didn’t know they had a giant bug monster for reinforcements.”Falco barked out a desperate-sounding laugh, and Fox tried to steady his mind: his hands were shaking. “For the record, we did know something was up with our ‘allies’, and we ran with it anyway.” He looked down at the Fox in his arms. “This is my fault.”Wolf looked like he wanted to say something, but Panther tapped him on the shoulder, and pointed back to the middle of the desert.They all turned to watch the spectacle taking place. The Goras was lashing out, its clawed appendages ripping through gunship and starfighter alike. The fighters were fast, sleek things too – nothing like the junkers Fang and his team were flying.Speaking of the devil, Fox saw Fang’s fighter skulking around the edge of the battlefield, circling it. He knew how large teams like this coordinated: it was obvious Fang was leading them.The fighters pulled back from the beast and began to barrage it from afar with laser fire and missiles. The Goras responded by extending its tendrils even further; it must have had a sizeable length of them still coiled up inside of its central mass. Fox estimated it to be about roughly three times the size of the giant crab aparoid he’d fought on Katina. He had no idea the legendary bioweapons of Titania could grow to this magnitude.“What even is that thing?” Wolf asked the question with a hint of awe. He was no stranger to giant “boss-class” bogeys, having fought alongside them in the Lylat War and against them in the Aparoid War; but by all accounts it didn’t look like he’d ever seen something quite this huge.“It’s a Goras”, Slippy spoke up. Fox found he often did this: delve into explaining scientific or technical knowledge to calm himself during tense situations. “They’re ancient bioweapons made by the civilization that used to rule Titania tens of millennia ago. They’re really rare… I never knew they could get this big. I don’t think any of this size have ever been recorded.”They continued to watch the monster as it dueled with the fighters. Two of the gunships fired harpoons and tow cables into its side, trying to… Fox wasn’t even really sure. Drag it around?“What are they doing?” Wolf’s voice echoed his thoughts. The gunships flew in the same direction at full throttle, apparently trying to drag the monster, but the Goras barely moved an inch. Fox wondered how they ever thought that could work as another pair of gunships fired harpoons from the other side of the beast and began to pull. The Goras responded by slicing through the cables with its claws, causing the gunships to spiral out of control for a few moments before righting themselves.Fang’s Skip-Hopper continued to slowly encircle the crustaceanesque monster through this bizarre endeavor before coming to a slow stop. He launched a single projectile from his ship, and it embedded itself deep into the Goras’ shell. It bellowed a roar so deep Fox’s teeth chattered, as Krystal screamed in pain again.Fang turned his craft around and flew out of the area, the starfighters and gunships echoing his actions and leaving along with him. Fox had no idea what to make of this development, and judging from Wolf’s expression he didn’t know either.A few minutes passed as the Goras stood there, apparently waiting to make sure the battle was done. Content, it began to wobble, and lowered its central body back down towards the surface of the desert. Its clawed tendrils began to swirl and churn around it, creating a whirlpool of sand and dirt that slowly sucked the entire beast back down into its home environment.And with that, Krystal took a deep breath, and gradually returned to a state of comparative normalcy.Most of them continued to look out into the sands, unsure if the madness was over. But Fox stayed seated, watching Krystal sleep in his arms, psychically exhausted by whatever just happened.And Wolf stood off to the side, arms folded.Watching Fox.
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V The dimly-lit cavern reeked of sour engine fuel and musk, but it had the only free cushion in the qitnah. Beggars can’t be choosers, Fox thought as he kept his vigil next to Krystal. She’d been asleep for the last few hours, chest rising and falling slowly in tempo with her breath. Fox had willingly sat on the gritty stone floor and hadn’t budged an inch since Falco and Wolf had helped him lay Krystal down on the musty divan.Slippy and Falco were outside the chamber discussing the evening’s events with Star Wolf in hushed voices. Fox couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he could tell it carried undercurrents of unease. The fact that their skirmish had been rooted in misunderstanding brought a modicum of comfort to Fox. For a fleeting moment he was worried Wolf had returned to a life of criminality. On one hand he wanted to distance himself from his own anxieties. Why should he worry what Wolf did with his life? He had no stake in it.But that was the crux of the problem. He wanted to have a stake in it. The thought of Wolf turning coat and re-entering the shadow world of organized crime felt like a slap to the face.He wasn’t sure how or when these emotions started to take root in his thoughts. It was long before their encounter at Zoness, he knew that much. Regardless of what the two of them were or could be, before he even considered those ideas, he’d stuck his neck out to help Wolf get cleared of all outstanding bounties by Corneria. On some level he’d always respected the lupine.Krystal stirred in her fitful slumber next to him, and he felt a stab of guilt. He was worrying about himself when he should have been worrying about her – about the team. He was the leader of Star Fox, dammit. He shouldn’t be sitting and doing nothing while the rest of his unit was left to discuss their next move by themselves.He sighed and stood up, making sure to stretch his limbs out (rocky cavern floors didn’t make for good long-term seating). He was approaching the mouth of the cave to push aside the ratty blue curtain covering it when said curtain moved before he got a chance, and someone entered.It was Wolf.They stood facing each other for a few seconds, neither sure what to do. Fox couldn’t help but analyze Wolf’s face. The gray fur matted by sweat, the coarse salt-and-pepper fur of his muzzle, his lips turned in a pained grimace. His visible eye burned a low violet in the dim light of the cavern.“How is she?” Wolf broke the silence. He always had to act first. “She’s fine now.” Fox turned to look at her, made note of the tranquil expression on her face. “Sleeping.”They continued to stand there, locked in a dance without motion. Fox could feel the unspoken tension in the room: a low thrumming of unsaid intentions and unstated sentiment.Wolf heaved a sigh. It carried an air of resigned disappointment. “We’re not going to talk about this, are we?”This was one of those vital moments, Fox knew. A crossroads of action that could lead to a number of outcomes depending on what he did here and now. And he wanted to act, but he was afraid to – there were so many variables. But not acting was tantamount to an action in and of itself. He needed to do what he always did when faced with these critical instants in the past: forge a path of his own.“No.”For a split-second Wolf’s mask dropped, and Fox could see the pain of dejection written on his face.“But we will. I promise.”And he really did. Fox was going to face this. But now wasn’t the time.Wolf must have understood this too, because he shot Fox his trademark cocksure, lopsided grin. Fox tried to push down his heavy desire to kiss him, claim that grin with one of his own. There would be time for that later, he hoped.“Well, come on then. Slippers and Bird-Boy have been out there floundering for a while now. Isn’t saving their asses your job?”Fox chuckled. “From a certain perspective, yes.” He turned his head and looked back at Krystal, at that stable rise and fall, breathe in, breathe out. He felt a steady paw on his shoulder.“Hey. She’ll be fine.” Wolf’s smile turned a reassuring shade.Fox met it with a steady one of his own, albeit a little forced. It was difficult to smile under the circumstances.“You’re right. Let’s go.”He shook Wolf’s paw off and walked ahead of him, drawing open the curtain and letting in the brighter light of the large grotto beyond.It was time to be a leader. ………. Falco and Panther were mid-argument as Fox entered the room. It may or may not have been rooted in something rational to begin with, but by the time he got there it had devolved into pointless back and forth ad hominem jibes and unsubtle declarations of the other party lacking manhood.Slippy watched the argument with a hesitant expression, unsure if he should dive in to defend his teammate or let things play out as they were. Wolf’s new recruit observed the quarrel with a strangely vacant smile on her face.Falco had a finger pointed challengingly at Panther. “Well if you hadn’t shot us first, we could’ve figured out what was happening before everything got blown to shit!”Panther looked utterly unbothered. “And if you hadn’t aligned yourself with criminals, bird, none of this would have happened to begin with.”Falco threw his arms up in the air. “Oh, that’s real fucking rich coming from the toady of Mr. Crime-Lord himself.”“Hey!” Slippy looked miffed.Falco’s vitriolic expression turned into an apologetic frown. “Uh, sorry, Slippy. You know I didn’t mean that, like… that.”Fox palmed his face and let his paw slide down his muzzle. Wolf chuckled from behind him and spoke up. “Don’t ruffle his feathers too much, Panther. If they hadn’t joined in, all that shit would’ve ended up happening anyway.” His expression took on a shade of contemplation. “They got caught up in something they didn’t understand. We all did.”Slippy spoke up. “Fox, while you were out, uh…”Fox smiled repentantly. “…Licking my wounds?”“Yeah”, Slippy continued. “We’ve been trying to figure out what happened. We can kind of work out a general framework, but… there are a lot of gaps.”Wolf folded his arms. “What Frog-Boy means is that Rena – that’s the bedanti who gave Krystal that room by the way, the Lynx.”“I remember her.” Fox had been in a haze for most of the events after the Goras descended back into its underground abode, but he remembered a female Lynx ushering him to the little cavern.“Well, she neglected to tell us the ‘bandits’ they were fighting were actually local security. The lupine frowned. “She also forgot to mention they had a giant fucking bug monster on reserve.”Fox was beginning to understand what Slippy meant by ‘gaps’. Things weren’t quite adding up here. “Why did they bother contracting you if they had a Goras to begin with?”Wolf snorted. “I wish I knew. She says it was because they were hoping we would do all the work for them without them having to use it, but after all this shit I don’t know how much I believe that.”“To be fair, they were quite hesitant to summon the beast.” Fox couldn’t help but be impressed by Panther’s ability to flip from a state of heavy argumentation to collected reasoning at the drop of a hat. “They referred to it as a ‘god’, if you recall. Perhaps there is a religious stigma against summoning their deity unless there are no other options?”Slippy looked thoughtful. “That might make sense. But it doesn’t help us understand what Tertulli’s up to; you know, his side of this conflict.”Falco, on the other hand, just looked pissed. “What is there to understand? Isn’t it obvious? The ‘bandits’ who blew the bedanti’s village to smithereens were his own guys – probably the exact same asshats we flew with. He wants to kill them off.” He spoke with determination. “We should tell Peppy about this. Get Cornerian forces to come fight against him instead of fight for him.”Slippy looked unsure. “Yeah, but why does he want to wipe them out?”Falco waved his arm in a dismissive gesture. “Does it matter?”“Yes”, Fox interrupted their back-and-forth. “I agree with Falco – the general timeline I think we’re working with is that Tertulli ordered an attack on the bedanti in an aggressive action that probably constitutes a war crime.” He paused for a beat. “But there are two unknowns here: first, what he’s trying to accomplish, and second, why he asked Cornerian forces to intervene on his behalf. The former could easily be simple racism, but the latter makes zero sense if he intended on conducting a clandestine genocide.” He sighed as he tried to think things through. “…We need to tell Peppy about this, no question about that. But I don’t want us to pull out without understanding what Tertulli wants and why he’s going about trying to get it this way.”“We also don’t have any evidence of wrongdoing on his part”, Slippy said. “Skip-Hoppers are really old and really commonly used by low level criminals on backwater planets, so their wrecks don’t mean anything from an investigative standpoint.”Wolf chuckled. “Can’t lie, that was a smart move on this bashar’s part.”Fox turned to him. “What do you mean?”The lupine’s eye glinted in a dangerous way as he appraised the viability of criminal enterprise. “Think about it: he’s obviously got tons of high-quality tech. Those starfighters and gunships that came in to fight the Goras were all top-line models straight out the FDE. But why use those to bomb civilians and potentially implicate yourself?”“You’re right.” Fox thought for a moment. “When you say FDE…”“You know exactly what I mean when I say it: the Fichina Design Enclave.”Falco’s expression darkened. “That’s mafia shit.”Wolf’s smile turned downright treacherous. “You better bet, birdbrain. You guys are really playing with fire now.”Panther hummed thoughtfully. “Don’t forget, boss: so are we. It’s us who downed possible Fichina Family agents provocateur, not them.”Wolf’s new recruit was practically bouncing in her seat. “I played with fire once, it was pretty fun! I accidentally burned down my aunt’s house though.”It was the first time Fox heard her say something since he entered the conversation, and he… wasn’t sure what to make of that comment.Wolf cleared his throat. “Uh, by the way, Fox. This is Fay. She’s Star Wolf’s newest member.”Fox approached her and outstretched his right paw. “Pleased to meet you, Fay.”She responded by grasping it with both of her paws and sort of shimmying it from side to side. “I’m pleased to meet you too, Fox! Sorry about shooting your friend earlier.”“It’s no problem, I’m sure she understands.”She continued to wave his arm around with no sign of stopping. As five seconds turned into ten, Fox made desperate eye contact with Wolf, who looked to be enjoying himself far too much by this. Fox knew he had a sadistic streak, but this was overkill.Finally Wolf decided to intervene. “That’s enough, Fay. I think he’s been properly shaken up by now.”“Shaken and stirred!”Fox had no idea what she meant by that and decided not to press as she released the vice grip on his paw.Falco watched the bizarre display with a sardonic, unbelieving smile, while Slippy sat head in hand and continued to think.“…Why were they trying to fight the Goras like that?”Fox responded cautiously. “What do you mean?”“Like, with the harpoons and cables. Were they trying to pry its shell open? Get at a weak spot on the inside?”Wolf frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. The shell only covered the top half; they could have easily shot it from a low angle and not bothered with the whole cable thing.”“Perhaps they weren’t aware of this detail?”, Panther queried.Falco scoffed. “They can’t be that stupid, it was pretty obvious.”Fox considered the facts. There was something here, he knew there was. It was just on the tip of his conscious thought –“They were trying to capture it.”Everyone in the room turned to face the source of the new voice. She looked somewhat worse for wear, holding onto the cavern wall for support and clutching the side of her head. But she was finally awake, and for that Fox was thankful.Slippy shot up out of his seat. “Krystal! Are you sure you should be up?”He approached to help her along with Panther, but she waved them both off. “No. But I think it would be even more irresponsible for me to sit this discussion out.” Fay scooted to the side of the carved stone bench she was seated on and gestured for Krystal to sit next to her. Krystal smiled and took up her unspoken offer. Fox found his estimation of Fay improving, despite the bizarre handshake from earlier.Wolf wore a distant expression tinged with the faintest, almost imperceptible glint of fear. Fox had rarely seen him look perturbed before. It wasn’t right. Wolf was supposed to be an impenetrable, impassible wall of solid stone – a bulwark. Fox felt guilty for having these thoughts. It made him wonder how much he was really interested in Wolf versus the idealized persona of Wolf the lupine put out to face the world.“…Can you imagine if they caught one of those things and weaponized it?”Suddenly Fox understood his undercurrent of fear.A look of epiphany dawned on Falco’s face, followed by the elation of realization. “That’s what Tertulli’s up to! Don’t you guys get it? Only the bedanti know how to call a Goras, so he’s been attacking them to get them desperate enough to do it. He’s in with the Fichina Familes and he’s trying to sell them a Goras!”His euphoria slowly, visibly morphed into distress. “Oh shit. He’s in with the Fichina Families and he’s trying to sell them a Goras.”The room went silent for a moment, everyone processing this idea in their own way.Fox found the idea of that nightmarish insectoid bioweapon falling into criminal hands unconscionable. In his gut he’d known Tertulli was involved with criminal activity – how could he not? They all sensed it in that office, in the way he conducted himself. Between Peppy’s words of warning, Krystal’s profiling, the reception at the palace, the convenient timing of bandit attacks, the use of FDE weaponry, and now this…“We can’t know for sure if that’s his goal, but we need to move forward as if it is.” He turned to look at Wolf. His dread rival, possible romantic interest; whatever he was, Fox needed to put it aside. The mission comes first.“We need your help.”Wolf stood arms folded, staring straight back into Fox’s eyes. “You’ve never asked Star Wolf for help before.”“Did that stop you from doing it in the past?”Wolf barked out a laugh. “No, obviously. If it had, none of you would be standing here.”Fox couldn’t deny the truth of those words. Slippy looked unsure of this development, and Falco looked irritated. Panther seemed aloof, and there was no way for Fox to gauge Fay’s opinion. But he didn’t look to any of them.He looked to Krystal. She nodded once, giving her approval.That settled it.“Look. I know our teams have a frayed history. But we’ve worked together plenty in the past –”Wolf interrupted with an obnoxious wag of his finger. “That was either in life-or-death situations or when we were officially contracted for something, not working together out of the goodness of our hearts.”“I know.” Fox bit the words out. “But you could really help us do good here. Aren’t you working for Rena? Isn’t she paying you to help her?”Wolf’s eyes narrowed as he realized the tack Fox was taking. “Yes…”The vulpine ticked a brow. “Then, on some level, isn’t it fulfilling your contract to help us?”Wolf exhaled powerfully through his nose. “It’s not that simple, pup, and you know it. We’re not a charity here. We don’t have the Cornerian Navy to fall back on.”Wolf was right. He wasn’t being entirely fair, but he was right. Part of Star Fox’s success undoubtedly came from its government connections. How many mercenary units had a former member acting as General? Star Wolf didn’t have that boon, and they had a lot of baggage that kept them from getting clients to boot.So how could he pressure Wolf into doing this, given the circumstances?“You’re right. I have no right to ask you for this. I only thought…”Wolf looked somewhat indignant. “That Star Wolf turned over a new leaf? That we’re ‘the good guys’ now?” He sighed. “Look, we’re not criminals, but we don’t have the resources to help every person in need. The bedanti are in a bad spot, I get it. But we can’t start taking unpaid missions.”Falco exploded. “So you’ll let a bunch of criminals get their paws on a bioweapon? Yeah, real high and mighty ideals there.”Wolf curled his lips and bared his teeth. Fox had never seen him perform such an openly aggressive display. It made him think Falco struck a nerve. “Watch it, bird. I told you already: it’s nothing personal. We’re mercenaries, not crusaders.”“What if we paid you?”Wolf shot his head back towards Fox. There was no sign of deception on the vulpine’s face. “What are you talking about?”“What does it sound like I’m talking about? I’m offering to contract Star Wolf for a job.”Falco squinted his eyes and looked at Fox like he was an alien. “What are you talking about, Fox?”Fox cleared his throat. “Well, we’re contracted by Corneria right now to help Tertulli. Star Wolf isn’t. So we could quit right now and help Rena, publicly breaking the contract…”Slippy was the first to understand, and his face broke into a wide smile. “Or Wolf can do it while we go back to spy on Tertulli! He even has an ‘in’ with the bedanti already since he’s worked with them.”Wolf stroked the end of his snout with his paw. “This sounds like it might be a tough job. What’s the pay rate?”Fox thought on that for a moment. Wolf was bound by necessity, but Fox wasn’t, and that was what led him to his ultimate conclusion. “Three-sevenths of the total rate Star Fox is getting for this mission, one for each member of your team. Out of Star Fox’s pocket.”“And that rate is?”Fox pulled his comm-device out of his pocket and scrolled through to the dossier Peppy provided them for the mission. He handed it to Wolf.The lupine stood there for a few seconds looking at the screen, almost like he was daring it to change. “That’s a pretty generous sum.”“And a cut of it’s yours, if you help us.”Wolf glanced at his team mates. Fay gave two thumbs up while Panther simply nodded.He grumbled. “Alright, fine. What do you need us to do?”
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VI Fazanh reclined in his office chair. Like all of the furniture in his quarters, it had a history tied directly to his past. He liked to think of his suite as a reflection of himself, and therefore refused to display or even own any objects that didn’t factor into his own life story in some capacity. He wanted every piece of the room to be a physical manifestation of a piece of himself. And what are we but the sum of our life experiences? No man is a man unto his own – we are only made individuals by how others perceive us, by our interactions with them. It was a lesson he learned from his father, and he from his father before him, all the way back to his storied ancestor who founded this heap of rubble of a town all those eons ago.This chair was his favorite piece. It didn’t have the grandest origin of his many objets d’art, but if he held his forebears’ words to heart, he thought the story behind it reflected him better than any of the other antiques in the room.He was in his late seventies, middle-aged by elephant measures. His father, bless him, was still doddering along as bashar despite his advanced age of a hundred-thirty and three. Fazanh was the youngest of his father’s six children; he never planned on becoming bashar, never even considered it a possibility. He was always the unruliest of the bunch: the ‘wild child’ as it were. Where his siblings would spend their free time versing themselves in politics and statecraft, Fazanh preferred to ‘slum it up with the riff-raff’, as one of his older sisters put it. He didn’t care though. He forged tighter friendships with the criminals and convicts of Tytos than he ever did with his own kin. To this day he still found himself more comfortable in that world, leaving his put-upon steward to handle most of the affairs of state.One day, he returned to the palace around mid-morning after a night of revelry in the slums to find his father had died of poison in his nightly glass of wine. Apparently his eldest brother had grown tired of waiting for the throne to this oh-so-glorious burg and had decided to take matters into his own hands. Their father had opposed that magnificent Chazem IV, unifier of Titania – and eldest brother believed that, for the safety and prosperity of Tytos, they must join their banners with those of the mad warlord-messiah. He had the support of his politically-minded siblings in this endeavor. They all believed it was time for change to come to Titania.Well, Fazanh had loved his father dearly, and had no particular fondness for the rest of his fratricidal family, so it wasn’t much of an ethical dilemma for him. He marched right back into the slums and called his own banners to action. Thieves, murderers, assassins, pickpockets, drug-dealers, gun-runners, rapists, tax cheats, drunks and swindlers. They stormed the bastille of the Eish-da-Tertulli in an orgiastic typhoon of destruction. It was a night the city would never forget: the lost and degenerate of Tytos great and small all came out to take revenge on a society that had cast them aside, and Fazanh marched at their head.He let the worst of the rabble loose in his own ancestral home. They went room-to-room, killing everyone inside down to the lowliest housekeeper – except for Fazanh’s siblings. He ordered them brought to him alive.The five of them were arrayed before him as dawn broke the next day, down on their knees amidst the crimson light of the rising sun, guns held to the back of their heads by his new criminal army. His youngest sister looked like she was going to piss herself, while his eldest brother glared at him with pure, unfiltered hatred. Fazanh found he felt nothing in response to their emotions. He simply stood aside and summoned that specialist in certain unusual and forbidden forms of art he found in a bar a few months back proffering some of his debased wares, and set him to work.The courtyard was filled with screams and blood that morning. It was quite an unpleasant experience – but by the end of it, Fazanh had procured a wonderful chair made of solid ivory carved into the most exquisite patterns.His desk-anchored comm-device lit up, and he pressed the button to activate it.“Yes?”“Fang has arrived, your excellency.” Inigo spoke with the same warm and collected tone as he always did, even when discussing matters of high crime. Fazanh often found himself wondering what he would do without his steward.“Alright, let him in.”The line went dead, and Fazanh waited. He’d already received a report from the spy he’d placed in Fang’s group – it was always good practice to keep additional eyes on your eyes – but he wanted to hear the night’s events from the man himself. The jackal was a useful tool and he didn’t want to waste him out of hand.Fang entered the office with no visible hint of fear on his face. Fazanh took this as a good sign. A failed pawn who knows they’ve failed due to faults of their own will be fearful of reprisal. Either Fang truly was blameless for his failure, or he didn’t think of himself as a pawn. If the former was true, all was forgiven. If the latter was true, he was sorely wrong – but Fazanh respected that sort of inflated sense of self. It was a necessary emotional state to get anywhere in the underworld.“Well? What happened?”The jackal stood at ease with military precision. “We failed to capture the target. Our cables weren’t strong enough; its claws cut through them like butter. We’ll need something sturdier.”He correctly diagnosed the failure as outside of his control and also provided a solution. Fazanh was right to gauge him as useful. “And how do you plan to get the beast now that it’s gone underground?”Fang smiled. “I shot a tracking device into a weak spot below the shell, somewhere it can’t excise without injuring itself. We also recorded the bedanti summoning the creature, so we now know how to call it up ourselves.”Fazanh reclined in his chair again, a false frown on his face. In truth, he was pleased. He’d underestimated the jackal. Now he began to worry that he was too useful – it wouldn’t do for someone to catch his Goras and then spirit it away from under his nose.“Very well”, he said a tone of casual dismissiveness that belied his thoughts. “I expect you to replicate their summoning and subdue the creature this time. I’ll provide you with the tougher cables; they won’t fail you.”Fang gave a curt nod. “Understood.”Fazanh waved him off. “You’re dismissed.”The jackal inclined his head and walked out through the door.Fazanh continued to sit in the chair made of his brothers and sisters, and idly wondered what they’d think of how he ruled in their stead.But he found he didn’t really care. ………. Fox’s Arwing weaved across the sand. He kept it low to the ground on their return to the city, kicking up the slightest of dust clouds in its wake. Slippy and Falco’s fighters flanked him to either side, the former holding Krystal’s Arwing in tractor beam-tow. She was sitting behind Fox in his own ship; it was a bit cramped, but everyone in Star Fox was used to the tight fit, having all been in similar situations at some point or another.She said she was fine to fly back at the bedanti holdout, but she was outvoted by the rest of her team. Better safe than sorry, they figured.Fox kept a steady course. She could tell he was distracted, and even without her empathic powers she knew why. The encounter with Wolf had shaken him. She knew he’d been putting off messaging him over the last few months, and that he felt residual guilt over it.She sighed through her nose and tried to relax in the restricted space. He was too hard on himself – he always had been, from the first time she met him. She’d wanted so badly to heal him of his self-destructive tendencies. It made her want to laugh: she managed to fall into the ‘I can fix him’ trap, and hard. She’d never loved anyone in a romantic way before Fox.Oh, there were lovers before him, for sure – but she never truly fell for them. She’d loved them in her own way, and had always been a good partner, but none of those relationships ever lasted more than a few months. She could never really connect with any of them in a meaningful way.Then came Fox, and she thought this is the one; this is the man I’m going to spend my life with. But fate was cruel, as it always had been to her. He was always so strangely reticent with displays of physical attraction. Despite being together for several years, far longer than any of her prior romantic flings, Fox was shier and less eager to have sex than any of her previous partners. She’d always assumed that was an extension of his own internal issues, that he was hesitant to do anything to please himself because he was so hellbent on sacrificing his own happiness for the good of others that he forgot to make any time for himself in his own life.But that assessment failed to hold water. She’d noticed his aroused emotions when they would pass an attractive male, even as he failed to notice them himself. At first she played this off, told herself it was a miscalculation on her part. But as time passed she couldn’t deny it anymore. She knew he felt guilty over their breakup – but in truth, she was the one to blame. She’d known for so long how he felt and she’d selfishly kept it to herself, keeping the dream alive for as long as she could.She felt like scum over it – and the worst part was that Fox refused to accept her apology, swearing that she did nothing wrong. It made her smile even in her own misery. Even when Fox denied her a chance for closure, he did it unknowingly, and for what he perceived to be the best for her.She loved him and she hated him.It was irrational, and she knew she’d eventually get over it, but for the time being it simply was what it was. She’d seen him as her chance at happiness, and he had to go and ruin it.She did laugh then – an undignified, ugly snort. She was being so petulant.“…Are you alright?”, a worried voice filled her ears.Damn him, why couldn’t he just be angry at her so she could be angry at him and get it all out?“Yes”, she said with a laugh. She wasn’t even sure why she was laughing. It wasn’t funny.Fox remained quiet.Maybe, just maybe, he would be able to leave it alone and let her stew to herself for a while –“You’re lying.”Of course not.“You’re right. I am lying.” Why was she even angry at him? He didn’t do anything to her. Besides end her chance at love.The sound of the Arwing’s engine humming dominated the cockpit, backed by the silty echoes of the sand clouds sifting along the ship’s wings. “Do you want to talk about it?”She really didn’t want to.“Yes.”“Well, alright”, he said with a practiced casualness. “What’s up?”She chewed on her lower lip, unsure how to put it into words. She reflected on the question for a little while.She knew part of the problem right now was that she was unstable. The sudden jolt of losing her ability to ‘see’ waves of thought – it was like being blinded, or losing the ability to hear, or smell. Then that coupled with the Goras… She didn’t even know what to make of that, that absolute emptiness. That pure void of any kind of thought or emotion.No, it was worse than that. It wasn’t just a lack of thought – it was the outright negation of it. The fact that there could even be such a thing as ‘anti-consciousness’, and that it could be localized in a living creature… it was mystifying. Mind-boggling. How could ‘anti-consciousness’ be a thing? How could it exist?But she couldn’t blame all of this on the beast. The trauma of encountering it had just served to tear down all her mental walls and let out what was brewing behind them. She needed to voice this before it consumed her. “I’m never going to fall in love again.”There. It’s all out in the open now.Fox remained silent for a moment, gaze fixed ahead on the endless expanse of sand before him. When he spoke, he did so very calmly and quietly. “You don’t know that.”Not being able to sense what he was thinking as he spoke made it feel like she was missing half the words. “I do”, she said with a certain amount of bravado. “Because I won’t let it happen.”A longer quiet met that pronouncement – one long enough for her to realize just how ridiculous she was being. It ended with the exact two words she didn’t want to hear: the two that she knew were coming, lack of psychic senses be damned.“I’m sorry.”“Don’t!” She snapped at him. “Just… don’t”, she reiterated before letting out a breath. “Stop apologizing. You didn’t do anything wrong. The only thing you keep doing wrong is saying ‘sorry’”.He started to say it again as a kneejerk reaction and stopped himself mid-sentence. “You’re right. I do saddle you with that too much, don’t I?”She let out a sound of relief. “Yes. It’s maddening.”Silence smothered the cockpit like a physical pall. She couldn’t decide if she found it welcoming for saving her from having to continue this conversation; or deadening for putting such a damper on everything.“What am I supposed to do then?”, Fox asked, obviously beleaguered.“What do you mean?”“With you. With us.” He sighed somewhat exasperatedly. “You don’t want me to apologize, you don’t want to talk about how you’re handling any of this – and then you drop bombs on me like that ‘never fall in love again’ bit.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”“Maybe I don’t want you to do anything.” She knew it was petty and cruel as the words left her mouth.She could make out the bob of his Adam’s apple in his reflection on the cockpit window as he swallowed. “But I want to help.”She couldn’t help but love him dearly in this moment. This was her curse. She’d tried to cover it up as much as she could over these last few months, but the shock of this planet carelessly threw aside her mental veil and laid bare the actuality of her own thoughts to herself. It didn’t matter how much she publicly presented herself as the ever-present friend – how could she live with this kind of turmoil? The person she loved more than anyone else always at hand and yet forever outside her reach?“I know you do, but I don’t know how you can”, she admitted.“…I might”, he said with no small degree of trepidation. “You have to get over me.”The accuracy of his words shocked her. He wasn’t as oblivious of her situation as he indicated, then; he knew she was still struggling with all of this. “How do I do that?”He stayed silent for another few seconds, thinking over his choice of words. “I don’t know. But we can figure it out. Together.”She snorted. “Do you really think that’s advisable, or even possible?”He shrugged. “I genuinely have no idea. But I do know you’re my best friend, and I can’t watch a friend suffer like this.”Best friend. What a mixed bag of emotions that was. Incredibly warming and excruciating at the same time.“…Alright”, she said at last. “We can try.”She saw the edge of his smile from her vantage point behind him, illuminated by the golden noon glow of the sun.“But not here!”, she quickly continued. “This planet… this planet is a nightmare.”He laughed. “I, uh… I can kind of tell you feel that way.”She smiled despite herself. “Am I that obvious?”His own smile faded somewhat. “You’re frayed. You’re never this edgy. I take it the Goras did a number on you?”“Yes.” She shivered. “That thing is…” She trailed off. She didn’t know how to explain highly theoretical concepts like anti-consciousness to someone without empathic powers.“It’s a monster”, he finished for her. He paused for a moment before continuing in a lighter tone. “Did I ever tell you about the first time Star Fox fought on Titania, back during the Lylat War?”“No”, she said with a shake of her head. “Though I’m assuming you fought one of those things based on your familiarity with it.”“Yeah. It wasn’t nearly that big though.” He glanced to the side, looking at a line of hover-vehicles making their way across the desert. She wondered who they were, where they were going. “Andross had gotten his hands on a few of them, and we were sent in to clear them out. We only learned after the war that his edits were minimal, and that they were more advanced than most of his own bioweapons despite being so ancient.”She frowned. “I wasn’t aware of this history.”“You and almost everyone else”, he continued. “There used to be a huge, advanced civilization on Titania – but it collapsed way before Cornerian explorers ever made it here. No one knows how or why.”They stayed silent for a bit. Krystal thought on this new information, parceling it through, taking into account everything else she knew.She audibly gasped as she came to an obvious conclusion.“There are more of them.”“…Pardon?”“The Goras, the really big ones”, she reinforced. “There are more of them, everywhere, deep inside the planet. It’s why I can’t sense anything. I’m sure of it.”He didn’t say anything for a little while – but when he spoke up again, it was with an authoritative tone. “When we get back to Tytos, I want you to stay behind when Tertulli inevitably sends us on another mission.”She almost did a double-take. “What? Why?”“Because we need to learn everything about him, and you’re the best person for the job.”Was he trying to piss her off? “You’re trying to keep me safe”, she accused him.“Yes.” He said it with a finality that left no brook for argument. “I’m also trying to finish our mission.”She could feel her ire rising. “What right do you have –”“I have no right.” He cut her off. “I have orders from Peppy, and I have common sense.” He softened his tone. “Look – you won’t be able to help us if we end up near another Goras. You’ll be in extreme danger while also being a liability to the team. You’re also the most qualified person to investigate Tertulli even without your abilities, since you have so much experience with reading people and situations. I’m killing two birds with one stone here.”“Don’t let Falco hear you use that expression.” She was annoyed and borderline insulted by his logic… but she also couldn’t debate its soundness. She leaned back in what passed for her seat in this one-person cockpit and sighed. “…Alright, fine. I need Falco or Slippy to stay behind with me though. It’s too dangerous to go poking around here without backup.”“Agreed.” He sounded relieved – he must have assumed she was going to fight him.And why shouldn’t he have assumed that, based on her conduct on this flight? She knew she had to resolve this at least somewhat before they got back to the palace where they couldn’t talk as freely. It never boded well to let things like this hang over missions.“Fox?”, she started in a careful tone. “I’m sorry for what I said.”He chuckled. “Now you’re saddling me with apologies?”She laughed awkwardly. “We really are terrible, aren’t we?”He paused for a moment as his head turned to take in the desert landscape flying past them “Maybe. But at least we’re terrible together.”It’ll have to do for now, she thought as her gaze was drawn to the approaching city on the horizon. From this far out the palace looked like a golden egg nestled atop a red nest.She wondered what sort of foul thing would hatch from it.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
VII It was fucking hot – and if there was one thing guaranteed to further sour an already pissed-off mood of his, it was excessive heat.He felt like an idiot standing in the middle of the desert. The protective robes provided by the bedanti chafed against his fur. They were really itchy too. Rena’d sworn by their ability to guard the wearer from the most dangerous elements of the scorching desert days and freezing nights, but Wolf wondered if that was really worth the trade-off of being constantly annoyed by your own clothing.She was only doing her best to help him and his team, he knew; but he wasn’t sure whether he liked that or not. Star Wolf had only been doing active patrol duty for the bedanti for about a week prior to that mess with Star Fox and the Goras – hardly enough time for them to develop any kind of respect or trust for each other. Wolf took everything Rena did with a high degree of cautious appraisal, and he knew the feeling was mutual. The bedanti had made their philosophical stance on mercenaries abundantly clear. Whenever Wolf had retired back to the qitnah after a fruitless night of doing loops around the desert in his Wolfen, he faced a reception of glares and muttered curses from his benefactors. He wondered which was frostier: the desert night air, or the feelings the bedanti harbored for him?The status quo rapidly changed after that shitstorm with the Big Bug though: that night when Fox and his team sought refuge among the bedanti. The modern mythos of Star Fox’s legendary deeds had penetrated even this distant edge of civilization, and the bedanti’s treatment of Star Wolf had improved greatly when they learned of their tenuous relationship with the heroes of Corneria. Apparently Andross had attacked Titania at some point in the Lylat War and managed to snag a Goras of his own, and it was the Fox McCloud who’d brought it down single-handedly and liberated the planet from Venom’s oppression.Wolf hadn’t known this bit of history, but it didn’t surprise him in the slightest. Andross had his fingers in so many fucking pies during the war that Wolf could barely keep track of which planets had been caught in the conflict and to what degree. He basically just took it for granted that Andross had pulled some dumb shit on all of them – it wasn’t his job to chronicle every stupid thing the warlord did. No, his job had been to follow the madman’s orders.And wasn’t that a nice, constant source of latent rage? His whole adolescence and early adulthood had been one long saga of stupidity and aggression. Better to just forget about it altogether.He couldn’t help but laugh a bit to himself. Not about what he did during the war, but what Fox did. He wondered if the vulpine even realized how much of a hero he was. Here he stood, in what had to be one of the most isolated pockets of culture in the entire Lylat System, and the people here still talked about Star Fox with a sense of awe. You couldn’t even dive into some forgotten civilization on the fringe of animaldom operating on a tech level several millennia behind the galactic average without hearing about how great Fox was.Wolf’s own feelings about Fox were complicated at the moment. He didn’t like this current status of technically working for him. He also didn’t like how Fox had basically punted their much-needed conversation down the line. He understood why he’d done it – in the middle of a mission, friend and ex-lover injured, stuck between two potential enemies. It was a perfectly rational call to make. A very Fox call to make. But he didn’t have to like it.“Why are you laughing?”Rena’s whispered words were poised like the crack of a whip: swift and offensive. As if he’d done something worthy of reprimand by chuckling to himself.Wolf shot her a challenging glare. “I’m thinking about something funny. Why do you think I’m laughing?”“Well stop.”, she spat. “It’s unbecoming.”It felt like every day he learned about some new, dumb social ritual these people had. They were like an entire nation with sticks jammed permanently up their asses. He supposed it made sense for them to be such a rigid group given their need to live in an environment as unfriendly as this; but come on, could they not lighten up just a little bit?“Why?”Her head turned to face him like a shot, bright yellow-green eyes shining out from within the hooded shadow like beacons. “’Why’ what?”“Why is it unbecoming?”She exhaled forcefully through her nose. “The time for laughter is at home, with family. We are not home, and we are not family.”Wolf wondered if she had to actively try to tailor her emotions to the norms of their society, or if it came to her naturally. Based on what he’d seen of the bedanti he guessed it was the latter. These were a people whose lives were dictated by the desert. He’d learned they had twelve different words for ‘sand’ alone, based on its consistency. They preferred to live in discrete tribal units occupying different basins or valleys, and more or less kept to themselves.That was changing today.According to Rena, the attacks on their village and qitnah had ignited a firestorm of discussion amongst the disparate tribes. The summoning of the Goras had a deeper effect than Wolf had initially realized. It was something he’d learned only this morning, as they set out on their journey to this dune-top. Panther had been right: summoning their god wasn’t something done lightly. To call up a Goras was tantamount to a beacon, or a rallying cry. If you summoned the Goras, you were in effect summoning all bedanti to meet in council.It was why he was out here, the lone outsider in a group of hardened bedanti warriors. They were awaiting the arrival of the chiefs or representatives of several other tribes.They were awaiting a meeting to discuss the possibility of war.Wolf hoped they wouldn’t have to wait for too much longer. He thought he could make out something on the horizon: shadows dancing over the distant dunes. It could be a convoy of hover-vehicles… or it could just be a mirage. The deserts of Titania were rife with them, more so than those of any other world he’d been on. The sand was so crystalline here – so pure. It was like someone sprinkled a fine layer of powdered glass over everything. The distances all morphed into glittering illusions.He made an educated guess this was the real deal though, based on his compatriots’ fixation on the same point. As the shadows grew larger it became obvious even to him. It was a convoy of vehicles. His cybernetic eye helped to bring them into clearer relief even from this distance: dirty, beat-down hover-skiffs manned by throngs of robed, hooded figures. Rena had already told him all the nearby tribes were coming together in one group for this assembly. He wondered how many of them were represented by that multitude.They stood in silence for about a half-hour as the vehicles approached. Wolf was hyperactive by nature and kept fidgeting; scratching his muzzle, tapping his foot. Rena and the other bedanti were still by contrast. If it weren’t for the wind blowing their robes, Wolf thought they could be mistaken for statuesThe skiffs broke off their single file advancement as they neared. There were five of them in total, and they encircled Rena’s troupe. Each skiff played host to a band of about twenty or so bedanti, and every band had a somewhat different style or color of robe.The tribes disembarked from their vehicles and approached in an uneven circle. Wolf had to control himself; he wasn’t a fan of being surrounded, even when those doing said surrounding were ostensibly his allies. He took a deep breath to calm himself, and focused his anxious energy into analyzing the new arrivals, each coming at the head of a group.A tortoise so elderly he could give Rena’s chieftain a run for his money was aided by a slightly younger tortoise donned in dun-colored robes, clearly unable to walk on his own. A haughty fennec fox wearing gray robes inlaid with a russet bismuth-spiral pattern took in the gathering with a sneer. A small creature wearing solid black robes and wearing a fearsome mask stalked forward along with a party of similar-sized animals – Wolf couldn’t make out any of their species or genders. A lemur so thin she looked like she would collapse in on herself didn’t wear any robes at all, but rather had a yellow sash tied around her waist.But they were all dominated by one imposing figure. At the forefront of the largest group was a scarred lion wearing a tattered patchwork cloak of messily sewn-together rags. Wolf had to rethink the ‘scarred’ bit as he got closer – it was too much of an understatement. The lion’s face was absolutely mangled. It was like someone stuck it in a blender. Wolf almost had to laugh at how ridiculous it was, like an extremist parody of the rough-and-tough ‘scarred warrior’ archetype. The lion’s expression walked a fine line between nobility and cold calculation, and he took in the assembled tribes like they were his next meal. Wolf could already tell this guy was going to be trouble.“Bedanti of the Valleys of the Greater En: I welcome thee.” Rena’s voice ran clarion over the assemblage. Wolf was surprised at the strength of her vocal projection.While most of the tribal leaders nodded with varying levels of respect, the lion proudly marched forward from his group, glaring at Wolf all the while. “I wasn’t aware the Yazdah Tribe had fallen so low as to accept help from outsiders.” He pronounced the last word like it was a slur.The haughty fennec chieftain balked at this. “And I was not aware the presence of outsiders was a sign of weakness. Or do you forget that mine own family is descendant from such, along with so many others in our tribes?” The fennec folded his arms. “Would you judge my right to rule, Izaak?”The lion – Izaak – only laughed in response. “I judge no such thing, old friend. There are outsiders, and then there are outsiders. I only need glance at this wolf to know he’s one of the latter.” He refused to break eye contact with Wolf, so the lupine did what he always did when contested for dominance like this: return the challenge with a cruel, belittling grin.The lion shook his head. “Look at the way he smiles. This is a demon in mortal flesh, I tell you. No good can come from associating with such.” He sighed and turned to Rena with mock concern. “I am ashamed and embarrassed for you, Rena.”A low murmuring broke out amidst the gathering. Wolf could make out bits and pieces of what was said, and none of it was good.Rena stepped forth to meet Izaak face-to-face. “Well I am not ashamed for myself, for I have nothing to be ashamed of. The wolf is uncouth, yes, but he offered us help when no one else would.” Her eyes narrowed as she stared down the larger feline. “Least of all you, Izaak.”The ancient turtle made a rumbling, almost gurgling noise that Wolf had to assume was him clearing his throat. “Hrrrhhmm… What does she mean by this, young lord?” The assembled tribes shifted their focus from Rena onto the lion, who only continued to stand straight and smile in response.He gave an easy shrug. “Rena requested help from my tribe, and I refused.”Another round of murmurs began, this one much more astonished and indignant than the last. The lemur chieftainess actually hissed in response, along with the rest of her tribe. “Shach! That is monstrous!”The lion met the growing outrage by raising and lowering his paws in a steadying gesture. “Yes, it was. I do not deny it. But hear me out, fellow bedanti, for there is more to this tale than that.” Wolf recognized that tone of voice. It was the gloating tenor of someone who’d already won before the battle began: someone ready to strike a verbal deathblow. He recognized it because he’d used it himself, many times at that. He looked over to Rena and saw she was trying very hard not to show her fear.This is bad.“Rena speaks truth. Shame came to me for help after the Yazdah Tribe’s village was razed and they fled to their qitnah. She said the strength of the Boue Tribe would assure their victory against the invaders.” He paused and let his words seep into the assembled audience. The fact he was revealing such damning evidence against himself in such a flippant and unconcerned manner set off all of Wolf’s alarm bells.Izaak grinned an unreasonably toothy grin. “What she does not say is that she also asked for our military might prior to her village’s destruction. That she wanted the Boue Tribe to help her start a war against Tytos and its bashar.”
Wolf bit down to stop himself from groaning.
And there’s the needle-drop.
“We did not come to help the Yazdah Tribe after their village was destroyed, for we knew it was destroyed in retaliation for their own actions. ‘What one does to another will be turned in kind’ – this is the law of the desert, and the Boue are a lawful clan.”A wave of silence came over the tribes, followed swiftly by a violent uproar. The tribal chieftains were alternatively shaking their heads in disbelief and glaring at Rena – who, for her part, kept her head high and refused to be cowed.She spoke up; almost yelling, really. “Izaak speaks the truth! But there is yet another truth beneath this one!”The unidentifiable masked chieftain spoke in a raspy, almost mechanical-sounding tone. “Is this some kind of farce?”Wolf had to agree: this was getting ridiculous.Rena pointed a finger at Izaak, which was apparently a strongly negative gesture among the bedanti if their reactions to this were any indication. “We only asked for the Boue Tribe’s aid after our own people were mistreated and even murdered by the bashar prior to our village’s destruction! And it was Izaak who suggested to me that we should attack Tytos in retaliation, based on that very same law he would wield against us!”Izaak began to show actual anger for the first time since this meeting started. He was practically growling when he spoke. “As I said, the Boue are a lawful clan.”The fennec spoke up again. “Enough! Who are we to prattle on like this in a circle of blame? We are chieftains of proud tribes, not shamefaced children. We came here to discuss one thing and one thing only: the call of the god!” An approving chorus rang out from the crowd, and the other chieftains nodded their agreement. “So be it”, Izaak grumbled. “Then tell us, Rena, why you have summoned us?”Wolf thought she looked like a scared little girl placed under the spotlight. “…I humbly request the might of all the tribes of En, so that we may prepare for war.”The noise level reached its highest peak yet, and Wolf almost had to lower his ears to muffle the sound. The masked chieftain yelled out, their shrill, distorted voice somehow overpowering the rest. “Ah! So Izaak spoke the truth! You are a little warmonger!”“No!” She sounded desperate, trying her best to speak over the din. “Please, hear me out! I would not have summoned the god and called this meeting if there were any other way!”“Harrummph… and what makes you say this?” The tortoise was shaking with rage. Well, either that or just arthritis, Wolf couldn’t really tell.She responded so fast her words practically ran over each other. “Because the bashar seeks to steal a god for himself!”Izaak laughed inappropriately loudly. “What is this madness, Rena? Do you take us for fools?” He shot a pompous, commiserating grin the fennec’s way. “Perhaps Chazek was wrong, and some of us truly are shamefaced children?”Wolf knew he was eventually going to have to speak up at some point – Rena had brought him out here to act as a witness, after all. No time like the present.“It’s true”, he interjected. The chieftains all turned to look at him, so he continued. “I led my squadron against the bashar’s forces. They were trying to haul your ‘god’ away with tow cables; airlift it out of the desert.”Dark whispers spread through the crowd. Wolf felt bad – it was likely a nice chunk of them hadn’t ever thought of their deity as a physical thing that could be stolen away. This was bound to cause some existential crises before the day was out.The minute chieftain finally took off their grimacing tribal mask, revealing a middle-aged kangaroo rat. “Is this true?” His voice was deeper than Wolf would have guessed – the high-pitched vibrato must have been from a voice-modifier in the mask.“Yeah”, Wolf said with an almost bored-sounding tone. “I saw it, Rena saw it, a bunch of her people saw it. Even Star Fox saw it.”The uneasy whispers grew in volume, voices careful and quavering. “Hrrrrmm… This is a dire time, to be sure.” The tortoise continued to shake.“It may be we have no choice”, the lemur spoke in an even tone. “An attack on the gods of the sand is an attack on bedanti culture itself. The bashar would steal our souls even as our bodies continue to persist.” Some of her adherents made hand gestures that Wolf guessed were religious warding signs.The fennec sighed wearily. “But to go to war? The bedanti have not waged war in generations. Oh yes, we fight in skirmishes and scuffles, mostly amongst ourselves – but to wage war on Tytos would be tantamount to a declaration of war against all the cities of Titania.”Rena frowned. “You exaggerate, Chazek. The bashars have little love for one another, they will not rise to defend one as reviled as Tertulli.”The kangaroo rat chieftain turned to her with the air of an adult explaining something hard to a child. “You misunderstand, small one.” Wolf thought that was ironic given the speaker’s species. “The bashars will see a bedanti attack on one of their own as a threat to all of them. For if one bashar can be deposed by us, why not more? They will come to his aid – be sure of it.”“Then let them!”Izaak roared the pronouncement, and it echoed across the immediate dunetops.“My fellow chieftains, think on these words you speak! You chatter and babble like fussy old women while the path forward is obvious. It is true! The bedanti have not gone to war with the cities for an age. And in all this time, the cities have grown weak. Feeble. Their resources shrink, their populations dwindle, and their bashars are mostly hated by their own populace.”The chieftains were listening with rapt attention.“How many wars have the lords of the cities waged on one another in this age? How many atrocities have they committed?” He turned towards the fennec chieftain again. “Chazek, your own family is bedanti because your noble ancestors were all either murdered or exiled after your forebear failed to unify the planet.” He looked back towards the rest of the crowed. “Think on that, my fellow bedanti! The bashars finally find a trustworthy leader to rally behind, and they obliterate his homeland and force his people into exile as reply! They are, to a man, avaricious and cruel by nature.”He took a deep breath and proclaimed even louder than before. “We can end this! The Boue Tribe has long stood as a lawful clan, and we are not alone in this! All bedanti are as like the Boue Tribe when compared to the lords of the cities. How many more of our people will suffer at the bashars’ hands? How many more of their own people will suffer by their hands? We stood by and allowed the Great Sand War to happen – for what was it to us? It was a war of the cities, whereas we are people of the outlands. But we were wrong! For we are all people of Titania, and now the bashars seek to take our god!”Wolf could see many in the crowd nodding feverously, and even more cheering and raising their fists in solidarity with the lion. He’d seen this type of speech before too many times during the Lylat War and was immune to it himself, seeing it as empty bloviation; he prided himself on having strong bullshit resilience. But Andross had been great at whipping the troops into a frenzy, and he pegged Izaak as fitting right into the same mold.“Will we let them?”, the lion set his call to action. “Will we let the fat lords of the cities take our spirit?”“No!”, the crowd shouted. Even the lemur chieftain joined in.“Then let us answer Rena’s call! Titania was a bedanti planet long before the growth of the cities, and it will become so once more. This is our time, a time of destiny. We will rise, and Tytos will fall!”The assembly bellowed and began to chant Izaak’s name, pumping their fists in unison.“Izaak! Izaak! Izaak!”Rena broke through the celebratory crowd to reach the lion and grabbed his arm, speaking desperately to him. “Izaak! This is not what I meant.” The fear in her eyes was obvious “I wanted the aid of the tribes to defend the god, not attack the city!”The lion gently removed himself from her grip. “And that has been our way for the last age, and it is not working. We continue to wallow on the outskirts of society, and now a bashar wages war on us and tries to steal a god.” He sighed, all the pomp and circumstance replaced with what looked like genuine concern. “It will not stop with Tertulli, Rena. What the chieftains said was true – but it works both ways. Just as an attack on Tytos will rally the bashars, so will a successful bashar’s attack on us signal to them all that we are ripe for attacking. Surely you understand this.”She looked distraught and uncertain. “I… I don’t know.”“Well I do.” It was the kangaroo rat chieftain, with the others at his heel. “I do not like this. In fact, I hate it. But Izaak speaks truth.” His grip tightened on the mask in his paws. “We are at an impasse, and any action we now make will lead to war. Better we be proactive about it then be forced on the defensive.”The fennec, Chazek, spoke in a somewhat sorrowful manner. “That it has come to this… We really do have no choice. The rest of the chieftains agree. We will go to war.”“The bashar cannot be allowed to steal a god.” The lemur spoke with fervor, her voice barely under control. “The heresies he would commit with it – can you imagine that power in the hands of a man with no scruples?”“Haaarrrruummm… Yes, I can. It is not a pleasant image, but I can imagine it. I have the unfortunate distinction of being advanced in age. I remember the destruction of Azdana.” The tortoise’s eyes glazed over. “All that fire… that destruction…” He shivered.Izaak stepped forth. “Then it is settled. The bedanti will go to war.” He turned to Rena. “…Will the Yazdah Tribe answer its own call?”Wolf had never seen Rena look so unsure. In this moment he finally realized how young she really was. What was she? Nineteen? Twenty? And to be put in charge of a leadership position like this? It reminded him of himself at that age, answering Andross’ request. Not a pleasant memory.“…Yes. It will.”Izaak smiled and firmly grasped her paw. She tried to smile in response, but it came out more like a grimace.“Then it is done”, the lion said with a sense of finality.No, Wolf thought. It’s just beginning.
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VIII Fox tried to keep his mind on-task as he walked down the long hallway to the Eish-da-Tertulli’s banquet hall. Even though it was midday, with the sun just reaching its peak above the city walls, the interior of the citadel was dim. The hallway was surprisingly bereft of décor; unlike the bashar’s quarters and the courtyard garden, the interior design philosophy of the rest of the palace was downright spartan. It reinforced Fox’s earlier belief that this structure was a military facility first and foremost, with only the bare minimum of lavish niceties set out for the benefit of guests and perhaps Tertulli himself.The comparative emptiness of the hallway made it difficult to distract himself from his thoughts. The only sights were feeble incandescent strip-lights and bland stone doors set regularly in the walls, leading to equally bland rooms beyond; and the only sounds were the footsteps of him and his teammates as they made this almost funereal-feeling march down the path set before them.They’d barely had time to recuperate upon landing before the steward issued them a summons to join Tertulli for an early dinner (or perhaps late lunch). He’d given them just enough time to freshen up in their guest quarters a bit, but not an iota more – and he had a guard stand inside their room during their all-too-short repose, making it impossible for them to talk freely.That same guard was now leading them to the bashar himself. Fox felt like a convict being walked down the path to the execution chamber, the empty rooms adorning the hallway turning into cells full of jeering inmates in his mind’s eye. It was difficult to keep his thoughts straight – Tertulli, the bedanti, the Goras, Krystal.Wolf.He never even considered the possibility he’d just bump into him like that. He’d compartmentalized Wolf’s place in his life down to that number on his comm-device, always accessible should he finally bite the blaster and ring him up. The concept of his meeting Wolf existed only as a possibility he denied himself – just keep putting it off and it won’t ever be real. But of course Wolf wouldn’t follow the arbitrary rules Fox constrained him by in his own mind. If he had, then he wouldn’t be Wolf.And Krystal…“Make sure to bow to the bashar as you enter the banquet hall.” The guard’s coarse voice shook him out of his thoughts.Focus, Fox.The guard pushed the wooden vermillion double doors aside and ushered them in. Fox had to squint upon entering – after the hallways of the palace, the banquet hall was eye-wateringly bright with natural light. Fox could barely make out a large shape directly across from him in the distance.He felt a forceful nudge on this shoulder followed by a rough whisper. “Bow, I said!”Fox grudgingly bowed in a halting manner along with the rest of his team. None of them were happy about this, but Falco in particular looked pissed – Fox knew he hated being forced into showing signs of respect.Loud clapping emanated from the front of the room, and Fox looked up, his eyes now adjusted to the light. The room was airy and spacious, with high off-white walls leading to a vaulted ceiling. There were long row-tables vertically stretching the length of the hall, with a finer-looking row-table set horizontally on a raised dais at the head of the room beneath a cerise-colored woven tapestry. Tertulli was seated at the center of the table; and unsurprisingly, it was his clapping that echoed throughout the hall.“This room has wonderful acoustics, doesn’t it? My great-grandfather had it restructured this way so that pronouncements from the bashar during feasts could be heard by all.” He took a sip of a dark orange drink; fox Figured it was some sort of spirit. “Well, why do you dawdle? Come, take a seat.” He gestured to four chairs set across from him at the high table.Fox shared a subtle, uneasy glance with Krystal as the four of them made their way to the front of the room, Tertulli staring down at them with a smug and somewhat malignant expression all the while. Unlike the bashar’s large and comfortable miniature couch that acted as his chair, their seats were scrawny wooden things covered with scratches of wear and tear, and just a size too small. Fox made sure to now show any emotion over this.“You know, the acoustics aren’t the only thing he changed in this room. I’m sure you’ve noticed how bright and cheery it is in here, and with natural light at that. And yet, you see no windows! How did he achieve such a feat?” He pointed to a glistening, glowing metallic lining along the ceiling of the room. “Mirrors! They reflect the sunlight into the hall, allowing us the comfort of daylight without the risk of windows.”Falco couldn’t help himself. “Risk? What’s risky about windows?”Fox wanted to grab his beak shut.Tertulli’s smile was like unguent. “With windows, you can never be sure who’s looking in.”Fox decided to speak before Falco put his talon in his mouth again. “I’m sorry to cut the pleasantries short, but can you tell us why you summoned us here? My team is very tired – we haven’t had a chance to properly rest yet.”The bashar waved his hand impatiently. “Yes, yes; after that mission of yours, to be sure – that’s actually the exact reason I brought you in.” He clapped loudly twice and a line of servants entered the room bearing trays of food and drink. “I wanted you to brief me on it, and I thought a midafternoon repose with a fine meal would be an enjoyable way of doing so. Pardon if I was mistaken.”Fox shook his head politely. “It’s no problem.” The servants laid out beds of rice pilaf topped with spiced roasted vegetables and honeyed fried crickets in front of each of them, with glasses of an alcoholic citrus beverage to the side. Fox couldn’t deny it all looked and smelled delicious.“Additional pardons about the crickets if any of you are vegetarian”, Tertulli said with a tone that could only charitably called apologetic. “I figured we’re all omnivores here.”Slippy frowned. “I thought elephants were herbivores?”Tertulli laughed. “They are. But I’m not.” He punctuated this by spearing a cricket with his fork and eating it, munching it loudly in an almost obscene manner.Fox composed himself and took a bite, albeit less extravagantly than that of the bashar. It really was quite tasty. The rest of his team joined in, and the table was overtaken by an awkward silence punctuated by loud chewing noises.“So”, Tertulli spoke. “I’ve heard from my people that your attempt to chasten the bedanti was interrupted by a horde of bandits?”So that’s how he’s going to play it, Fox thought. He couldn’t believe the audacity of this man.“Partially. The bedanti summoned a Goras, and before we could do anything to deescalate the situation a third party intervened.” Fox thought his words over carefully – Tertulli had to have known they rendezvoused with Rena’s tribe after the battle, there was no point in lying about it. “I’ll have to be completely upfront, bashar. One of ours was injured in the battle, and the bedanti offered us help. They were very hospitable. I don’t think they want this war any more than you do.”Tertulli made a thoughtful noise. Fox noticed he wasn’t acting nearly as straightforward as he did during their first meeting.He knows something’s up.“I believe that you believe them. But unfortunately, I know better, having lived alongside them for so long. They’re a dangerous bunch.” He kept his bearing light and conversational as he continued. “Did you even know they could bend Gorasi to their will before this skirmish? Because I didn’t.”Fox fought very hard not to call bullshit. He tried as best as he could to look surprised. “Really?”The bashar gave a sagacious nod. “We heard rumors, of course. Old wives’ tales about the bedanti and their connection to the ancient beasts. I never put too much stock in them myself – but I was wrong, and here we are.” He took a gulp of his drink.“Have you had trouble with these… bandits before?” Fox kept his voice neutral, questioning.“Oh, yes. The ones with the Fichinan craft, right?” Fox nodded. “We have reason to believe they’re engaged in a war of their own with the bedanti – I have it on good authority that it was they who destroyed the village near Yazdah. So in a way, you could say this current nasty bit of business is largely their fault.” He adopted a mournful expression that carried all the sorrow of a distant relation falling into a substantial inheritance. “It’s a terrible situation; if I wasn’t wrapped up in defending my city from the bedanti, I’d lobby Corneria to oust them.” He hummed to himself. “Actually… now there’s a thought.”Fox didn’t like where this was going. “What’s a thought, if you don’t mind my asking?”Tertulli’s expression broke into a wide smile. “Why, we could send you to handle the bandits! The bedanti will surely by licking their wounds for a little while; they won’t come out again tonight.”Krystal spoke up. “Bashar, the bandits were not a simple outfit. They had a small fleet of gunships and starfighters at their disposal.”Tertulli waved his hand dismissively. “Small fry for a team as decorated as Star Fox. If you could obliterate the Aparoid Queen I’m sure a handful of pirates will be nothing.” His eyes glinted in the reflected sunlight. “Of course, if you’re not up for the task…”“We’ll do it”, Fox said. “You’re right: the bandits are a threat to all of our efforts here.” He put on the face of an upstanding leader – he knew he had to perform this role right if he was going to pull one over on Tertulli. “To be honest, we don’t really want to fight the bedanti, bashar. We think it’s possible to come to a peaceful resolution – but that’s not going to happen as long as their homes are under attack. Taking out the bandits would ease the bedanti, restore security to your city, and bring our mission to completion.”Tertulli nodded emphatically. “Excellent. I may not agree with your assessment of the bedanti, but I can’t deny your gumption – and any result that restores order to Tytos is a result I’m comfortable with.” He reclined in his seat, and Fox noticed his devious affect dwindled some.
Did I just pull that off?
“Now!”, the pachyderm shouted with a thunderous clap of his hands. “Let’s have a round of dessert, shall we?” ………. Fox couldn’t sleep.He knew he was walking headlong into a trap. It was obvious Tertulli was in charge of the supposed ‘bandit’ fleet, and planned to have them kill Fox and his team to tie up loose ends. Fox would comm Peppy as soon as they were out of the town limits and in their Arwings on the mission tomorrow to request support. He’d commed the old hare earlier in the day to let him know about the business with the Goras and the small FDE armada. Peppy responded by putting a Cornerian reserve on potential standby for intervention, ready to come to their aid at a moment’s notice. Fox hated the idea of starting a proper battle with official Cornerian boots on the ground – but what other choice did he have? Tertulli’s murderous intent was blatant.
Or was it?
It went back to their discussion with Star Wolf at the bedanti qitnah: why would Tertulli request official Cornerian forces to intervene on behalf of what was painfully, obviously one of his criminal schemes? What would that accomplish except highlight his own mafia connections and war crimes? The only reason Star Fox was even here was because he requested help. He hadn’t expected Star Fox though – he specifically asked for a small contingent of Cornerian Dogfighters. Was the plan always to have the ‘bandits’ kill off any group of Cornerians? To what end?He wondered if Wolf was faring any better with the bedanti. He felt bad about pressuring the lupine into sticking with them, even with the generous amount of money on the table (on top of whatever sum the bedanti had promised him). He felt even worse about the fact he wasn’t able to hear anything from him – Fox had made it very clear that communicating was only safe when he initiated it, since Tertulli was doubtless listening in to comms chatter in Tytos. Right after he commed Peppy tomorrow he’d have to comm Wolf too, find out what was happening on the bedanti end.And then there was Krystal…He was rethinking his decision about leaving her behind in Tytos. If he really was going to bring down the official hammer of the Cornerian Navy, it would be too dangerous to leave any of his teammates in Tertulli’s vicinity. That’s what he told her before they retired to sleep anyway, after Slippy made sure all the bugs in the room were disabled.But she hadn’t seen it that way, insisting that they would need irrefutable evidence of the bashar’s wrongdoing to formally prove anything. Slippy had agreed with her, and said he could hack into the palace’s databsase with enough free time.Fox hated the idea of the two of them staying behind – ironic, given it was his own idea in the first place. But he’d also learned to trust his teammates’ intuitions over the years. Leadership was always a struggle between acting with authority and having faith in your comrades.With all these thoughts churning in his head like a whirlpool, he sat up. He knew it was going to be one of those nights: those fitful, broken periods of restlessness before an anxiety-inducing mission. He gave up with a sigh and got out of bed. Whenever he got like this it was always better to be active. He put on some light clothing and slowly slid the door aside, hoping to not wake anyone up. They all had their own personal bedrooms branching off of the central guest quarters suite, but he knew they were all light sleepers and didn’t want to disturb anyone.“Can’t sleep either, huh?”Fox startled for a second then laughed quietly. It was just Falco, looking somewhat pensive.“When do I ever before a dangerous mission?” He tried to say it jokingly, but it came out flat.Falco snorted. “You and me both, pal.” He shifted aside on the couch and stared into space for a few seconds. “Why are we even here, Fox?”Fox wanted to give a reassuring answer, but he couldn’t find one. “Because Corneria asked us to be.”He got a quiet, exasperated laugh in response. “I’m sick of Corneria.”Fox laughed a bit to himself. “Honestly? I kind of am too.”A moment of comfortable silence passed before Falco spoke up again. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”Fox looked curious. “What do you mean?”“I mean… you know… Star Fox? Not being a thing anymore, I mean.” Falco looked like he was put on the hot seat. “Look, don’t get me wrong, I love working with you guys, flying’s my life. But with Slippy getting married, and…”“And dealing with Corneria bullshit?”Falco laughed again, more confident this time. “Exactly. Maybe it’s time to, like… Take a break? Move on?” He sighed. “I don’t know, man. It’s late and I’m tired. I don’t know what I’m saying.”“No, you’re right.”Falco looked surprised at this pronouncement. “Really? This coming from Mr. Star Fox himself?”“Maybe.” He thought for a second. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now: what happens next. And I don’t have any answers… But there has to be something, you know?”“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”They stayed in silence for another moment. Fox began to move towards the main door of the quarters and Falco frowned. “You’re not seriously about to go wandering around this place by yourself at night, are you?”“What if I am?” He said it with a mischievous glint.Falco only sighed and shook his head. “Whatever, man. You do you.” He relaxed back on the couch. “Hope you find your inner peace or something. Just take your blaster with you.”Fox smiled. “Way ahead of you.” He lifted up his shirt to show it tucked in the rim of his pajama pants.Falco started laughing. “If you blast your balls off don’t come crying to me.”Fox shook his head, smiling, and left the room. ………. Fox drew a mental map of the fortress as he strolled through it, no destination in particular. The steward had said they had free reign of the first two floors, and night walks were something of a pre-mission ritual for Fox.He got sick of looking at the same reinforced cement walls over and over though, and decided to head for the gardens. At least there would be a bit of visual variety.When he got there, he was surprised to find he wasn’t alone. The steward was standing in a corner of the courtyard with his paws behind his back, overlooking a patch of large, lilac-colored flowers Fox wasn’t familiar with. Fox silently watched him for a few seconds, about to turn and leave when he called out.“They’re beautiful, aren’t they? They’re called utaab – they’re native to Titania, though exceedingly rare.”Fox was caught flat-footed. “Uh, yes. They are.”The steward smiled kindly and turned to face him. “I’m sorry to catch you unawares, but I couldn’t help but overhear your footstepsso.” At Fox’s confusion the jovial fennec pointed to his ears. “When you have ears like mine, it becomes a trial not to notice the presence of others.”Fox chuckled politely. “I see.” He felt awkward; the steward was clearly having a vulnerable moment. Fox saw how he kept his vigil over those flowers – it reminded him all too strongly of his own visits to his father’s grave back home.“As I was saying, these flowers, these utaab – they used to grow in abundance all throughout the equatorial latitude of the planet, back in the days when the Cantal League had turned it into a paradise.” A look of simultaneous loss and acceptance flittered across his face. “But alas, they exist only in captivity now. Only in the gardens of the bashars of Titania do the wildflowers still grow.”Fox noticed the play of emotions. “Has anyone tried reintroducing them back into the environment?”The steward smiled sadly. “Several times. There simply isn’t enough moisture to support them in the wild. We can grow hardy stock crops and dry grasses; but not the flowers, nor the fruits.” His smile fell somewhat at the corners. “Titania does not know sweetness or beauty.”Fox thought on the predicament. “You mentioned the Cantal League, and I’ve read about it before. I’ve seen holo-stills with that band of green circling around the planet. Why hasn’t anyone tried to…”“Rebuild it? Regrow it?”Fox nodded cautiously.The steward sighed. “It is an issue of scale, child. It took centuries of careful planning and geoengineering on part of the League to turn the barren desert into an Eden – and it was all undone when the warheads fell. It died along with Chazem IV.” He paused and stared at the largest of the utaab blossoms. “But here we stand regardless, and here we do what we can.”Fox detected a certain level of… not quite anger, but something from the steward. He’d been nothing but sympathetic and helpful to him and his team since their arrival, and he couldn’t reconcile this gentle old man working for a glorified crime lord like Tertulli.“How did you end up working for the bashar?” It was out before he could stop himself.The steward laughed. “Oh, child. You despise the man, don’t you?” Before Fox had a chance to defend himself, the steward cut him off. “Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.” His grin turned conspiratorial. “Though, truth be told, you’d be loath to consider it a ‘secret’. Most people despise him; he takes it in stride.”Fox didn’t say anything for a moment, and the bashar spoke up again. “You’re wondering if I despise him.” It was a statement, not a question.“I didn’t ask that.”“No, but you thought it.” The steward had an impish twinkle in his eye. “Let us say, I understand him. I’m probably the only person still living who understands him.” He turned to look at the flowers again. “Fazanh brought me on to act as his aide decades ago, when he was still a young man himself. I was a child – living as a street urchin, you understand. The lowest of the low. You think you know poverty from your homeworld, I’m sure, but call the image of it to mind. I guarantee you the plight of the Titanian poor is worse.”Fox had walked through the alleys of Tytos, ostensibly the largest and wealthiest of the Titanian settlements. He believed him.“I pickpocketed from him, you see.” The steward laughed softly at Fox’s stunned face. “It’s true! I knew he was the bashar of Tytos, and yet I stole a wad of credits right from under his nose – and trust me, it’s a large nose to dodge. I ran as fast as I could, as far as I could get, and he still found me. And do you know what he did?”Fox shook his head.“He hired me. He was impressed by my flightiness, by my speed. By my boldness. He was also impressed at how knowledgeable I was for my age; how good I was with words and numbers. I was his aide for many years, then his city councilor, and finally steward.” He smiled proudly. “So, do you see? He gave me purpose, something I thought was lost to me at a very young age. How can I despise what gives my life meaning?”Fox wasn’t sure how to respond. He understood what he meant about purpose – it served to remind him of the constantly hanging inevitability of Star Fox’s dissolution. What would he do when it was done? And it would be done, there was no way around it. Would he go to work for Corneria like Peppy? He shared Falco’s view of the Navy – it was ultimately a force for good and he was proud of his service, but he was damn tired of doing missions for them; especially when they ended up like this one.“I can see I’ve made you reflect on things. I’m sorry for that, I’m sure you don’t need the distraction.” The steward sounded genuinely apologetic.“No, it’s fine. I was already in this mode of thought when I came out here. Hell, it was why I started walking around in the first place.” He looked up at the moon. “I should probably get back to quarters. Dawn’s coming soon.”“Indeed it is – and with it your mission. I wish you luck.”Fox nodded appreciatively but took that with a grain of salt. Kindly or not, the steward was working for Tertulli, and there was no way he could be in his employ for that long without knowing about his criminal activities. “Thanks. Good luck with affairs of state.”The steward bowed his head with a smile, and Fox departed, mind still playing over the conversation.He absentmindedly noted the steward returned to face the flowers, the utaab, once more. He wondered how often he came out to pay homage……And who it was he was paying homage to.
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IX The coffee left a bitter taste in Peppy’s mouth as he swallowed it. His new secretary obviously hadn’t learned how to work the machine without burning its contents yet. He was surprised to find he wasn’t as annoyed by this as he normally would be – the acridity of the drink matched his current mood.He’d barely gotten any sleep last night, poring over the contents of Fox’s last communique and pacing back and forth in his office. He was beginning to feel guilty over not sharing all of his suspicions about the Tertulli situation, even though he had damn good reason not to. He’d unhesitatingly placed two squadrons of Dogfighters and a capital corvette on immediate standby as soon as Fox asked for backup, and his constantly updating readout of Cornerian Navy forces showed they were still stationed near Sector X, ready to warp at a moment’s notice. It brought him a modicum of comfort, but not nearly enough.He stared out the large window of his office, his gaze set on the cityscape below and the glimmering sea beyond. He sipped his bitter coffee and waited. He knew exactly what he was doing, but he certainly didn’t like it. Politics infected everything, even the Navy – and whether he wanted to or not, he had no choice but to play the game. Billions upon billions of lives across the Lylat System were in the balance here. He couldn’t have clandestine elements working outside of his purview putting Corneria’s hard-won peace at risk; certainly not ones operating right under his nose. He’d let the situation fester for too long, and it was starting to grow beyond his ability to control. He needed to put the foot down now, and hard.His comm-device lit up.Here we go, he thought as he answered it. “Peppy speaking.”“General, Captain Hugin is here and he wants to see you?” It was his secretary; poor kid sounded a little afraid. Hugin had almost certainly put the fear of God in him, probably threw a fit as he was wont to do. Peppy sighed. “Alright, send him back.”“Yes, sir.”Peppy knocked back the rest of the cold coffee, draining a third of the cup in one gulp. He placed the mug on his desk and sat in the wingback chair left behind by his predecessor. Now, Pepper – he’d been a man with a firm handle on his subdivisions. Peppy begrudged his retirement, though he knew it was necessary. The old dog was in no shape to be leading anything. Even now he was still permanently hospice-bound. Peppy wished he had a jot of Pepper’s ability to hold down the fort.I’m afraid some day I’m going to lose your whole empire, old friend.He shook the thoughts off and prepared for the inevitable confrontation, finding some random papers and a pen and making it seem as if he was busy with some bit of unrelated work.The automatic doors slid open and admitted an irate raven. He was lean, of indeterminable age by looking, and had a dangerous aspect about him. “What do you think you’re doing?”Peppy wasn’t surprised by his lack of decorum. Hugin may have officially held the comparatively lowly rank of captain as far as the general public was concerned; but in actuality he was the director of Lylat Central Intelligence. Hugin was de facto all but Peppy’s equal. They both answered directly to the prime minister, and the LCI – despite ostensibly being part of the Navy – acted like a separate unit outside of Peppy’s orbit. Peppy still outranked him though, and could put certain sanctions on his activities. Sometimes.For his part, Peppy acted flummoxed by his question, shuffling his papers aside. “Well good morning to you too, Captain. Though you’re going to have to be a bit more specific. I do lots of things.” He shot the raven a warm smile.It had the intended effect: Hugin scowled. “You know exactly what I mean”, he all-but growled. “Don’t play dumb with me. It won’t work.”Peppy only responded by staring at him in silence over his glasses. He had to starve the bird out into sharing his secrets himself. Peppy didn’t mistrust Hugin per se, as he knew he only did what he did for what he perceived to be the greater good of Lylat. But Peppy was old, and he’d lived through plenty of history. He knew the part the LCI played in the early days of Andross’ secession. Peppy wasn’t fool enough to think that war could have ever been avoided – Andross was too dead-set on it – but he firmly believed the aggressive actions taken against the madman’s allies by the LCI escalated the conflict far beyond would it should have been. Hugin obviously couldn’t be held accountable for that since he only became director after the war – but Peppy didn’t doubt he followed the same philosophy as his antecedents.The raven finally relented after a twenty-second long staring contest, throwing his hands up in the air. “Fine! The Titania affair. Why is there a force ready to descend on the planet hovering around Sector X?”, he demanded. “Why is Team Star Fox, of all people, involved!?”Peppy frowned at him. “You do realize this is basically solid admission on your part that the LCI is involved with Tertulli?”Hugin looked at him in disbelief. “Are you daft!? Of COURSE we’re involved with Tertulli!”, he sputtered. “And you have absolutely no place getting yourself involved in our business. You know this!” He looked like he was going to have an aneurysm.Peppy raised his palms in a placating gesture. “If you don’t want the Navy to get ‘involved in your business’, you need to keep us appraised of what that business is.”Hugin’s expression darkened, his eyes cruelly narrowed. “…Is that what this is about then? You want to threaten us into submission?”. He scoffed. “I thought you were better than that, General Hare.”Peppy kept eye contact with him. “So did I. Turns out both of us can put aside out better selves for what we think the greater good is.”They stood in silence for a beat, Hugin glaring at Peppy in an evaluating manner. Peppy felt he was being reassessed.“Alright. Have it your way.” Hugin broke eye contact and fished out his comm-device, scrolling through it to find the right documents to send to Peppy. “You want to know what you might have just ruined? You want to know just how bad you stepped in it? Be my guest.”A few moments passed as Peppy cursorily looked over the pertinent points of the LCI’s Titania operation. He finally sat the comm-device down, and looked Hugin in the eye gain. The raven looked both vindictive and vindicated.Peppy felt tired, and old. He wondered how Pepper ever put up with the constant barrage of things like this. “You know, you could have come to us with this from the get-go. We would have helped with some of it.”“But not all of it”, the raven instantly shot back.“No.” Peppy looked over one of the diagrams in particular. “Definitely not all of it.” He sighed exasperatedly. “And you were cleared to do… this?”“By the prime minister, yes.” Hugin had the good sense to look somewhat cowed.“Remind me to vote for the other guy next election”, Peppy said with a grumble.Hugin laughed at that. “It doesn’t matter what we were trying to do anyway, anymore. The mission’s dead thanks to you. All of it. Even the parts you appear to be fine with.” He sounded like a man whose life’s work amounted to nothing.It made sense, Peppy thought – obviously they’d spent years cultivating Tertulli. And it’s all down the drain thanks to me. Peppy was conflicted by this. The loss of the LCI’s Titania Operation Goal #1 was a legitimate blunder on his part… but the thought of Goal #2 coming to fruition gave him the shivers; he felt no guilt about that collapsing due to his own actions.“You know we have a man on the ground there, right?”, Hugin’s voice brought him back to the moment. “In Tytos.” The raven actually looked a little worried. “We have an agent stationed right in the bashar’s inner circle, and his life’s in jeopardy thanks to you.”Peppy quirked a brow. “His life was in jeopardy from the get-go if this read on Tertulli’s activities is accurate. And you helped him with this?” Peppy had always known the LCI’s penchant for getting involved with… dirty operations. But it was one thing to know it as a theoretical piece of knowledge, and a very different thing entirely to see it written out as a blasé field report.Hugin’s beak clacked softly as he slid one rostrum over the other. “…With some of it, yes. We had to. The goals of the operation –”“Yes, yes, are ‘desirable by the state’, I see that”, Peppy cut him off, earning another irritated glare. “I disagree with the way you went about this though.”Hugin huffed. “So we’re back to this again.“Yes, we are. Because we have to be.” The hare leaned back in his chair and sighed, steepling his paws. “There’s too much afoot in Lylat right now – this report only confirms it. The fact you didn’t bring this to me right away means you don’t trust me, and if we can’t learn to trust each other then the whole system’s at risk.” He sent the corvid a weighty look.“…Fine”, the raven spat after a prolonged silence. Peppy just continued looked at him expectantly, and he made an exasperated sound. “I already said fine, rabbit, what more do you want? I’ll try to trust you more often.” He tilted his head in that particularly avian way, all held on a swiveling joint and making you feel like you were looking at them cock-eyed. “You have to try and trust me in turn, though. This isn’t a one-way street.”“Agreed.” Peppy relaxed somewhat. It wasn’t a true relaxation though – the hard part was just about to begin. He put on a self-deprecating smile and raised his empty mug. “Care for a cup of crappy coffee?” ………. Wolf prowled around the edge of the encampment under the light of the moon, a trace of his wild, pre-sapient ancestry about him. The combined tribes of the Greater En were more of a wild rabble than a proper fighting force. Wolf didn’t doubt they were all individually more than capable – but an army of individuals wasn’t really an army. Only Izaak’s forces showed any kind of military discipline in the traditional sense, and they gave off more of a ‘blood-starved berserker’ vibe than anything else.The tribal chieftains and representatives were feasting in the lion’s overlarge tent, and Wolf could hear the sounds of revelry all the way out here. Soon they would perform the ritual of the summoning, and then march to war against Tytos at the break of dawn with the aid of a few Gorasi.In the plural.It took every ounce of willpower Wolf had to not just comm Fox now and get it over with once he learned this bit of news – but the vulpine had been very clear that he needed to initiate the conversation once they cleared the city limits, lest the bashar’s forces listen in. Wolf despised this sitting and waiting. His entire life’s axiom was to act, not wait for others to dictate his actions.He sucked up his pride and chose to trust that Fox knew what he was doing. It didn’t do anything to resolve his anxiety, however. Wolf had that lingering, electric feeling in the pit of his stomach that he always got when he was in a difficult situation outside of his immediate ability to control. It was the feeling he had during so much of the Lylat War, acting as a glorified pawn of Andross. He’d been so on-board with it at the beginning, too; finally doing something to stick it to those hoity-toity, uptight Cornerians.But then Andross started to reveal his true colors, and it turned out they weren’t all that pleasant to look at. It started with James McCloud’s death, and it only got worse from there.Wolf often wondered why he even bothered sticking around during those days; why he continued to work under a lunatic for whom he harbored no respect. He suspected it was because of Fox. He’d built up Fox into his rival: his distorted mirror image. Where Wolf was rough, callous, and cruel, Fox was an upstanding hero of the people.But that meant Wolf had cast himself as a cruel person in his own mind – when had that happened? Was it before or after he started working for Andross? Was it before or after what happened to his family?He put these thoughts out of mind. He hated the desert, it always brought out this side of him. He didn’t think it was a coincidence so many religious movements throughout the galaxy originated in deserts – there was something about the emptiness of the environment that made people introspective in all the wrong ways.As he looked across the dunes, he wished Panther was with him. Hell, he even wished Fay was with him. He’d ordered them to stay behind at the Yazdah qitnah when he marched out with Rena, ready to fly out along with his Wolfen in tow on command. He knew he’d need it soon enough. He’d need them soon enough.Speak of the devil, he thought as he saw the silhouette of Rena approach him from the makeshift tent-garrison of the bedanti militia. She looked apprehensive. It wasn’t surprising – she was easily the youngest of the leaders assembled here by a generous margin, and her raison d'être for calling the tribes out here had been subverted by Izaak in favor of an impromptu crusade. “Well, you look like shit” is how he chose to greet her. Such a charmer he was.Rena just glowered at him in response. Well-deserved. “Is this how you always treat those who hire you?”, she asked. “If so, it is no wonder you are always desperate for money.”Wolf stood in stunned silence for a beat before he let out a laugh loud enough to attract the attention of some of the bedanti guards nearby. “You couldn’t pay me all the cash in the galaxy to stop being an asshole. It’s what I do best.”He was hoping the self-deprecating humor would help her to let her guard down, loosen up a little. It didn’t look like it was working. If anything, she only looked more worried. He sighed. “Look, it’s not your fault what happened today.”Her head swiveled so fast to face him he was afraid she’d snap her neck. “What makes you think I feel at fault?”, she bit out.Why did it always feel like he was walking on eggshells with her? “How about the fact you’re approaching the one guy here who isn’t one of your people to vent your frustrations?” He asked the question with a calm tone of voice, hoping to mollify her.Maybe it was starting to work, because she visibly relaxed some. She looked out across the desert with those golden-green cats’ eyes of hers and spoke so softly Wolf had to strain to hear. “I’m scared.”Wolf looked out into the same distance she did, wondering what she saw or imagined out there. “You should be.”She turned to face him again – a little less dramatically this time, thankfully. “Is that how you reassure people in your culture?”He laughed darkly. “Hell, no. I’m no good at the whole ‘pep talk’ thing.” A gust of wind ruffled his fur, crystal cool on his face. “Fear is nothing to be afraid of. If you weren’t scared, you’d be no better than that pompous ass of a lion back there.” He jerked his head to indicate the feasting tent. “He’s not afraid of anything, which makes him willing to sacrifice everything.”Rena sought his eye contact, a downright pleading expression on her face. Holy hell, she was scared.“Is that not admirable, though?”, she asked. “Izaak is highly-regarded amongst the Tribes… did you know that every scrap of cloth in his tattered cloak comes from the robe of an enemy he bested on the field?”Wolf’s sardonic grin was rotten enough to curdle milk. “Yeah, he may have mentioned it once or twice.”Rena developed a chagrined smile herself at that. “Or perhaps a hundred times?”He chuckled. “That’s probably a closer estimate.” He gave her what she wanted, and made eye contact. “Look, I’m not the guy you want to ask about respect, or honor. Those things don’t mean anything to me.” His expression turned a shade more serious. “I’m the guy you want to ask about survival. And Izaak? That’s not something on his radar.”She nodded. “I agree. And it is why I am scared.”Wolf was lost for a second, but his ears twitched as he started to catch her drift. “…You’re not scared for yourself, are you?”“No.” She looked resolute for the first time in their conversation so far. “I am scared for my Tribe. I am scared for the bedanti.” She cradled her elbows in her paws. “Izaak has wanted war with the cities for years now. I fear that my Tribe’s circumstances are merely the excuse he has waited for.”The cool desert air started to feel a little frigid against his fur. “I know a little something about warlords waiting for an excuse to go nuts myself.” He was surprised at how painful the words were as they left his throat. He thought he had gotten over this years ago. Clearly he was wrong.Rena’s expression turned circumspect. “…You speak of Andross, correct?”Wolf held his tongue for a second before confirming. “Yeah.”She continued to stare at him even as he turned away. “Do you… think Izaak is…?”“Like Andross?” Wolf thought on it for a moment. “I don’t know. I think a lot of people are like Andross. It’s just that most of them don’t have the means to do what he did.”“But Izaak does.” She said it with unfaltering surety.Wolf sighed again. “Yeah. Yeah, he does. Those Gorasi you guys plan on summoning tonight… They could really fuck shit up, you know? Just because one bashar is after you doesn’t mean they all are, and their cities are populated mostly by random civilians, not soldiers.”Rena listened intently as he spoke. “You are right. I cannot allow Izaak to spill the blood of innocents.”She turned on her heel before he had a chance to say anymore and began marching away. Wolf was about to stop her, but thought better of it. At least someone was acting tonight. ………. Fox activated the final systems check on his Arwing, prepped for takeoff. He took a deep breath and settled into the cockpit. The lack of sleep was starting to catch up with him.He looked off to the right and saw Falco in his own cockpit, giving him the thumbs-up. Fox smiled and returned the gesture.He pushed the thruster and sat back as the engines heated up. He’d already said his good mornings and good-byes to Slippy and Krystal. They were in position to enact their part of the plan – he had to trust they knew what they were doing. It was his and Falco’s turn now.The steward had already told him they’d be flying solo on this endeavor, so he didn’t wait for any other pilots to show up before initiating the takeoff process. He triggered the G-diffusers and watched as Falco did the same, their Arwings now no longer beholden to the limits of the planet’s gravity. That sudden freefall-feeling of the G-diffusion kicking in always excited Fox. He quickly acclimated to it and turned his craft on a dime, and rose out from the palace courtyard and into the morning sky.He accelerated into that endless blue, Falco tailing him.They were in the homestretch now.
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X Krystal stood just inside the entrance of the guest quarters, ready to run interference on the chance anyone should surprise them and drop by. Slippy sat surrounded by equipment in his room; he had several portable computers arranged around him, all plugged into a hefty battery he brought with him on the mission (he apparently kept a few in his Arwing, just in case). He’d already warned her that the hacking process could take a couple hours – he had to do it very carefully, making sure not to trigger any virtual alarms and alert anyone to what he was doing.It was a different sort of nerve-wracking than Krystal was used to on a mission. Her forte was dancing with death up close and personal – but this comparative lack of action may end up being a blessing in disguise, she thought. Her condition had improved some over the last day, but the empathic trauma of the Goras’ anti-awareness still left her a little queasy. When Fox had insisted she stay behind in Tytos when they were called up next (in case another Goras was involved), she had fought him on the matter. Then, when he changed his mind and decided he really did want her with him in case Tertulli wised up and held her as leverage against him, she fought him again. Krystal figured she was going to be up against hard knocks either way, so she might as well take the path that didn’t include the possibility of being sent into another psychic seizure and potentially crashing her ship and dying. Fox had finally relented and agreed.Besides, the part of the mission relegated to her and Slippy entailed much less risk than Fox and Falco’s. If Slippy pulled this off they wouldn’t even need to encounter the bashar; just sit back and wait for Fox to arrive with reinforcements, and then provide them the necessary evidence to implicate him.Krystal had faith in Slippy’s abilities on this matter. A few years ago, Star Fox had found themselves squared up against a notorious pirate who’d wreaked havoc around Sector X. He distinguished himself by using a fleet of advanced drones that were synced to a central computer on his cruiser; it allowed him to orchestrate complicated maneuvers, since the drones were synchronized with each other and displayed very little error in their flight and attack patterns. In the end, they solved the problem of the pirate without ever having to get in their Arwings and duke it out: Slippy wirelessly hacked into the enemy cruiser’s central computer system from the Great Fox, took control of the entire squadron of drones, and threatened to set them loose on the pirate unless he turned himself in.If he could do that, she figured he could hack into Tertulli’s comparatively archaic system. It was just a matter of time and patience.Krystal startled when she heard a gentle but persistent series of knocks on the door. This was the one potential wrinkle in their part of the mission. She and Slippy had hoped it wouldn’t come to pass, but they had a contingency plan in case it did.She opened the door with a content smile on her face. She had to carefully measure the expression: too cheerful and it would come across as fake and potentially arouse suspicion. “Good morning, steward. To what do I owe the pleasure?”The steward’s body language radiated a balmy, tranquil aura. Without the ability to truly read his emotional state, though, Krystal couldn’t be sure if it was genuine or if he was simply as good of an actor as she was.“A good day to you too, mistress Krystal.” He bowed his head to her respectfully, paws held in his sleeves. “The bashar requests your presence in the banquet hall, along with that of your fellow teammate. He wishes to take lunch with his honored guests.”Krystal let a semblance of worry enter her expression. “Thank you for the offer, but unfortunately I have to decline. Slippy is feeling ill.”The steward mirrored her guise. “Oh no, is that so? I feel terribly. Perhaps it was something in the food – it’s not uncommon for non-natives to fall ill here.” He cocked his head to the side, his tail swishing in the opposite direction. “Is there anything we can do to help?”She shook her head. “Thank you, but I don’t think so. He’ll be fine, it’s not too serious.” She donned a somewhat bashful smile. “But he probably doesn’t want to eat anything right now.”“Of course, of course.” He stood there for a beat, and his expression brightened. “But it is possible for you at least to join him, correct?”“Oh, I don’t think I could impose –”“Nonsense! The bashar insists.” He smiled cordially, with just a hint of mischief in his eyes. It was the first inkling Krystal had gotten of a slip in his demeanor, indicating that it probably was an act… but she didn’t see a way out of this without cluing him in to the fact something was up.She relented with an air of humorous acquiescence about her. “Well, alright. I’d request a few minutes first to freshen up and let Slippy know I’m leaving.”The steward bowed again. “Take as much time as you wish.” ………. She was seated at the high table at the head of the hall again, albeit on a much more comfortable chair this time. She thought it might have been the one from the bashar’s office – its legs and backing were made from some kind of pearly white material she wasn’t familiar with, perhaps a kind of local form of ceramic-work.The seat across from her remained vacant. She’d been uncomfortably seated on this very comfortable chair for fifteen minutes now, waiting for Tertulli to arrive. During this time, several servants had wordlessly approached her and refilled her glass of citrus juice (non-alcoholic this time), despite her only finishing roughly a third of it each time they came by.When the bashar finally deigned to arrive, it was with two of his hulking elephant guards beside him. He waved them off after taking his seat, leaving just the two of them alone in the large banquet hall.Krystal broached the silence. “Good day, bashar.”He snorted: a decidedly loud noise coming from his trunk. “Spare me.” He clapped twice, just as he did the first time she’d been party to a meal with him, and that row of fearful-looking servants rushed in and handed him a drink, but no food. For Krystal they deposited a plate with… something on it. She supposed it was food of some sort, but it looked incredibly unappetizing. It was mostly of a dark reddish color, gelatinous in nature, and it had strange periwinkle-colored growths emerging from it.The bashar explained with a sonorous voice. “It’s the stomach of a sand-squid: a fine delicacy amongst certain households of the southern hemisphere dating back centuries, I’m told. They remove the stomach and have it fermented in its own gastric juices, from which certain types of fungi then sprout.”Krystal stared wordlessly at Tertulli, and he stared back with utter contempt. “I had it made just for you.”She tried to keep her expression neutral, but as the fetid smell of the infected organ reached her nose, she couldn’t suppress her gag reflex.Tertulli smiled wickedly. “Well? Don’t you know it’s rude not to eat what your host prepares for you?” He took a swig of his drink and glared at her expectantly.She didn’t know what he was playing at, but she was afraid not going along could put the mission at risk.Better his attention’s here than on Slippy.She took a cautious spoonful of the stomach, and the whole organ jiggled when she scooped it out. The effect almost caused her to loose the contents of her own stomach. Tertulli continued to stare at her unwaveringly as she held the lump of fungal meat aloft on her utensil. She decided it was best to just not think about it as she swallowed the morsel. It burned her throat going down.She met the bashar’s fixated gaze with her own, and smiled at him.Tertulli smiled wickedly in turn. “You’re a fighter, and so is the rest of your team. I like that.” He relaxed back into his chair. “It’s a shame I’m going to have to dispose of your friends in the field. My squadron is probably raining hell on them as we speak.” He looked at her with an almost apologetic expression. “The galaxy would be a better place populated by people like you and yours. More honest. More direct. Trust me when I say it’s nothing personal.”Krystal dropped any attempt at acting. There was clearly no point anymore: the game was up. “If you’re so disturbed by it, then why not let us go? Why even bring us here in the first place?”The bashar sighed. “I never wanted Cornerians here at all; it was simply part of the bargain I struck. I become the undisputed powerbroker for all criminal activity on Titania, a feared and respected lord of the underworld, and use a Goras to pay my way into the Enclave – and in turn, Corneria gets a pair of eyes and ears on the inside of the deepest ring of the criminal inferno. They told me they were going to send a squadron of Cornerian fighters here for me to ‘destroy’, to preemptively disavow any notions the Enclave might have of my being a double agent.”He took another sip of his drink. “Of course, that was before they double-crossed me and sent you instead of the team of trained agents that were supposed to feign being killed. The way I see it, I might just as well actually kill you and join the Enclave anyway.” He smiled maliciously. “I know a great, great deal of Cornerian secrets: what fronts you use, what planets you have spy stations on, what shell companies lead back to you. Don’t think for a second I won’t share them with others. I don’t forgive, and I don’t forget.”Krystal stared at him. She was flabbergasted.“…Corneria was working with you!?”The bashar gave her a withering look; but as he continued to stare, it slowly morphed into a countenance made up of equal parts disbelief and glee.“Heavens above… You have no idea, do you? None of you do!” He began to laugh uproariously. “Oh, oh gods. This is unbelievable. ERAD! MAZUK!”The two elephant guards from earlier charged into the room, having been waiting just outside the door. Tertulli pointed at Krystal. “I’ve changed my mind – we won’t be executing this one. Throw her in the dungeon alongside her toad friend.”Krystal shot up and took a combat stance, but saw Tertulli had already drawn a blaster and had it squared right at her – on top of the guards’ gatling guns aimed in her general direction.“I wouldn’t fight if I were you. You won’t make it out of this room alive.”She growled at him. “And how do I know you won’t just kill me anyway?”He smiled. “Because now I know you’re not a double-crossing scumbag, I know the Cornerian leadership is divided, and I know they’ll pay top dollar to get you out. You have to understand: I was ready to drop out of this deal entirely and hope for my survival. But this? This changes everything. I can still walk away from this whole debacle and set things back on track.”The audacity of this man, Krystal thought. “You really think Corneria will want to work with the man responsible for killing Fox McCloud?”“Not in the slightest – but they won’t really have a choice, now, will they? Not if I threaten to share all the tidbits about Corneria’s secret operations I’ve learned over the years.” He stood up from his seat. “No, we’re in this together now, Corneria and I, whether we like it or not. It’d be too costly for either party to renege.”The guards grabbed both her arms, and she didn’t resist. She couldn’t overpower three large elephants armed with guns. As they dragged her from the room, she heard Tertulli call after her.“I hope you don’t find the dungeons too uncomfortable! I promise we’ll feed you.” The grin he sent her way was downright unctuous. “…Most of the time, anyway.” ………. The dungeons of the Eish-da-Tertulli were surprisingly spacious and comfortable – much more so than Krystal expected they would be, anyway. Or perhaps that was just this special cell Tertulli set aside for her and Slippy, and the rest of them were dank, dismal affairs.Slippy was already here when the guards escorted her inside; a group of sentries had fallen in on him minutes after Krystal left for lunch. Their current working hypothesis was that the bashar must have had another surveillance method in their quarters that they somehow missed. Slippy was apologetic, taking the blame onto himself for missing whatever it was, but Krystal shut him down with a refusal to accept his apology on the basis there was nothing to apologize for. It certainly wasn’t his fault Tertulli had outsmarted them – that was a failure on part of the group, not any one member.They’d spent the last hour hashing out the details of Krystal’s conversation with the bashar. They knew for certain he could listen in if he wished, but what did it even matter anymore?“I still don’t understand. How could he be working for Corneria? He has to be lying.” They’d been over this several times – Slippy outright refused to believe it. “Why would Peppy send us here if it was true?”“Maybe Peppy didn’t know.” Krystal looked downcast. “I don’t think Tertulli is lying – or at least he doesn’t believe he is. He could be mistaken about his role, though.”Slippy sat head in hands, looking thoughtful. “You know, my dad always did say Corneria’s Navy and Secret Operations branches never got along. Maybe that’s what he meant by Corneria being ‘divided’?” He stared off into space. “And what’s the Enclave?”Krystal didn’t like any of this. “I don’t know, and it’s probably too soon for us to make any kind of judgment. We don’t have enough information.”Slippy nodded in agreement, but startled and jumped up as a loud bang emanated from the hallway outside their cell. Krystal approached the windowless steel door and pressed her ear to it – her heightened canine sense of hearing allowed her to make out some of the noises from outside. A pained grunt, the slamming flesh sounds of a fistfight, and a muffled blastershot.She jumped back from the door and took a position hugged against the wall. “There’s blasterfire.”Slippy gulped and took a space parallel to hers, both of them lined up against the wall on either side of the door. “You go high and I go low?”Krystal nodded.The door slid open and someone walked in. Krystal leaped in and grabbed his arm as Slippy tackled his legs. The intruder tried to shout but Krystal held his muzzle shut and Slippy relieved him of his blaster, aiming it right back at him.Now that she got a good look at him, she realized who it was: Fang, Tertulli’s abrasive jackal captain. “I’m going to let go of your muzzle, and you’re not going to shout out when I do so. You’re going to explain, calmly and clearly, what you’re doing and why you’re here.”The ‘or else’ was left unspoken, but a flit of Fang’s eyes to the gun in Slippy’s hand showed he understood. He nodded, and Krystal released her grip on his face.The jackal shook his muzzle out a bit before speaking. “My name is Gerald. I’m an agent working for the LCI.”She glanced Slippy’s way, and judging by his expression, was just as lost as she was. “What are you talking about?”, she asked the jackal.He glared at her. “What does it sound like I’m talking about? I’m here to rescue you!”Slippy was in a rare mood: Krystal had rarely seen him so angry. “We wouldn’t need rescuing if you had helped us out earlier!”, he chastised their would-be savior, hands unconsciously tightening around his thighs.The jackal seemed to be resisting the urge to growl. “And you wouldn’t have even been here in the first place to need rescuing if Hare hadn’t sent you here.” He sighed. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been working to get close to Tertulli? How much time, effort and resources went into this? And it’s all down the fucking toilet because the old rabbit couldn’t resist sticking his nose in places where it doesn’t belong.”“I need proof.” Krystal spoke up before Slippy had the chance to gear up into a tirade in defense of Peppy.Fang stared at her. “I don’t have any. You’re just going to have to trust me.”Slippy scoffed, but Krystal kept eye contact with the jackal. She could really use her telepathy right now. Her judge of character was going to have to stand in for the moment, though.“Alright.” Slippy looked at her in disbelief and she shrugged softly. “I think he’s telling the truth.” She thought back to her earlier confrontation with the bashar, how taken aback he was by her lack of knowledge. “I think they both are.”She stepped back from Fang and let him stand up. Slippy did the same, but he wasn’t going to let this end without getting some answers. “Why were you trying to team up with Tertulli?”Fang glowered at him. He cut an imposing figure – now that Krystal paid a little more attention, she was starting to see his disheveled, scummy appearance was something of an act. “That’s classified.”As Slippy started to argue with the agent, Krystal thought about it. They obviously wanted to use him as an inside man to infiltrate whatever this ‘Enclave’ was, but that hardly necessitated such a long con as this, with so many moving parts and –And then it clicked.She interrupted their increasingly vitriolic back-and-forth. “You wanted to snag a Goras for Corneria, didn’t you?”His silence spoke volumes. After a moment he began to speak. “You’ve seen one in action – you’ve seen what they can do. How impenetrable of a defense they provide the bedanti. Andross tried but failed to work with any of the large ones; if we could capture one and study it, we could replicate them and –”“I don’t want to hear this.” She cut off his justification with a raised paw, trying to imagine living in a Lylat System where every planet was as much of a psychic void as this one. Where she would regularly fly beside a Navy wielding weapons of anti-consciousness.Fang clapped his paw on her shoulder. “You’re right, now’s not the time to debate military ethics.” Slippy made an indignant sound at that, but he continued. “We need to get out of here.”She shook off his paw – she didn’t appreciate the attempt at comfort. “Fine”, she spat. He at least had the wherewithal to look embarrassed as she glanced past him and towards the door. “I presume you know the way out of here?”He nodded. “Follow me.”Krystal and Slippy trailed him stealthily as they exited the cell and entered the broader dungeon complex and began to sneak their way towards the courtyard, where their Arwings awaited.She hoped Fox and Falco were having a better time.
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XI The parade of the Gorasi was a sight to behold. Kind of a grotesque sight if Wolf was being honest with himself: the buggers weren’t exactly pleasant to look at, and were just a tad too reminiscent of certain other insectoids he still had nightmares about every now and again. But damn if it wasn’t impressive to see a line of six gigantic desert crustaceans, each larger than the last, march across the sands.He was only too glad to see it from this distant vantagepoint though. Nothing seemed quite as serious when you were in the cockpit – from the seat of the Wolfen, he was in control of his situation. Throw a thousand giant bug-monsters at him and he’d be fine as long as he was in charge of his own fate.Panther and Fay flanked him to either side, the latter uncharacteristically silent. Panther had divulged to him that Fay was feeling a little ‘out of her element’, as he put it. Wolf understood all too well. He remembered his own early days, being flung into dangerous situations with no clear heroes and villains. The doubt, the guilt – it was something so central to Wolf’s life it turned into a sort of background radiation and he stopped thinking about it.That’d changed over the last few years, especially in the last few months. Wolf kept finding himself examining his own life choices – his trajectory. It annoyed the shit out of him, but he understood why it kept coming to mind. How could he live with Fox if he couldn’t live with himself?Of course, that implied he ever would live with Fox, which was a far-out notion itself.He kept course for now, flying slowly above and behind the ever-marching Gorasi. They really were disgusting creatures – he couldn’t help but think of them that way. There was something about the way they moved that was just wrong, as if they were marionettes under the control of a drunken puppeteer. They had none of the sleek, diamond-precise movements of the Aparoids. Every lurch forward of their giant claws was halted. Jagged. The affect of their movement reminded Wolf of those old stop-motion claymation movies his dad would put on for him as a kid. He’d hated those. He hated them now.“Cap’n, I’ve picked up something on radar!”Wolf realized he was letting his sideways thoughts derail his focus on the mission if Fay of all people saw something before he did. He needed to get his head in the game. “Read me the details.”“Two starfighters coming in from the east!” She paused for a beat. “Hold on… Huh. That’s weird.”Wolf also realized he really, really needed to work with Fay on clarity. He had no one to blame for this but himself. And also her professors at the flight academy. “What, exactly, is weird?”“They’re not headed for us. They’re on trajectory to pass us by completely. I thought for sure the bashar would throw his big fleet of mafia ships at us by this point.”Panther chimed in. “Perhaps we should count this as a blessing?”Wolf considered the possibilities. It could be two unaffiliated bandits, or…“We’re going after them.”“Captain?”“Odds are too high they’re the bashar’s scouts, and if we saw them on radar then they saw us too. We need to take them out before they let anyone know about our approach.”“Understood”, Panther replied.Fay’s voice rang out, sounding uncertain. “Um, captain…”Wolf sighed exasperatedly. “Yes, Fay?”“What if they’re leading us into a trap?”Wolf chewed his lip. It was an incredibly obvious possibility, and it was one he hadn’t considered. “That’s a good question.” He kept on track to follow the potential interlopers. “But it’s a bridge we’ll have to cross when we get there. We’re working for two clients right now, and both of them want us to help the bedanti. The best way to do that is to make certain no one knows where they are yet.”Panther grumbled. “Are we? I could’ve sworn one our clients dropped us – and rather unceremoniously, at that.”Wolf grimaced. Rena had disappeared after she talked to Wolf last night, along with the rest of her tribe. No one had any idea where they went or what they were doing. Panther had suggested they bag the mission outright, but Wolf pressed on, Fay agreeing with him. She really wanted to pay off that student debt.“Maybe she did, and maybe she didn’t. We got one big-ass bag of gold off her anyway; I’m not going to complain about losing the other. Especially now that Star Fox is paying us as much as they are.”“You’re the boss, boss!”Wolf couldn’t help but smile, at least a little bit. “You heard her, Panther. My house, my rules.”“Alright, I get it.” He sounded sufficiently cowed for Wolf’s taste.“Well, technically we don’t really have a house, but –”Wolf cut her off before she could start on another tangent. “Alright, that’s enough chatter. Radio silence until we find out what’s up with the fighters.” Two green-light indicators from his teammates popped up on his HUD.He accelerated his Wolfen, and they accelerated alongside him. ………. Fox tried to ignore the leaden sense of impending danger in his gut and kept his Arwing steadily flying onward. He and Falco were racing across the sands to reach the supposed hideout of their fugitive ‘bandits’.Tertulli’s true goal may have been to destroy him and Falco by use of his proxies; but Fox knew he would succeed at the stated goal the bashar gave him: to wipe out the bandit fleet. He had an ace in the hole, one that he was about to call up as soon as they were outside the comm-range of the city.As they crossed that invisible marker in their Arwings, Fox sent out an encoded wide-range signal to the small fleet of Dogfighters lurking just outside of Titanian space. It was the ‘primary’ signal, the one to let them know their services would be needed soon, and to prepare for conflict.Now all that was left was to engage the bashar’s criminal forces, put out the secondary signal to properly move in, and wait for backup. That initial engagement was going to be the most dangerous part of this mission, Fox knew, but there was no way around it. They had to meet them head-on.Falco commed him. “You sure about this, Fox? I’m giving you one more shot to change your mind.”The vulpine laughed to himself. He jokingly wondered if Krystal was the only one on their team with psychic abilities. “Yeah, I’m sure. If we wait for Corneria to attack them first, it turns this whole thing into an interplanetary incident. But if they attack us first, and Corneria just happens to come to our defense, there’s no potential for fault.”Falco sighed. “Hope you know what you’re doing, is all.”Fox nodded absentmindedly, focus elsewhere, before he remembered that Falco couldn’t see him nodding and made a verbal response. “I do. Or at least I think I do.” He heard laughter on the other end of the line.When they approached the designated coordinates, Fox knew something was wrong: there was nothing there. He and Falco had discussed this exact contingency however, guessing there was a 50/50 shot their enemies would initiate the conflict via ambush. Without having to say anything to each other, the two pilots took up a constantly circling formation, as ‘back-to-back’ as two starfighters can get without crashing into each other. They had to keep moving so as not to be sitting ducks, but they needed a 360-degree field of vision to spot incoming attacks, and this was the best way to cover both of those problems.After a few moments of this, Fox spotted action on the radar. “We have incoming: three starfighters inbound.”“Copy; I see them. Do we attack?”Fox thought on it for a second. “No, they could be a distraction while someone else hits us from another angle.”“Without us seeing them come in on radar too?”Falco had a point. “I don’t know. They’re clearly planning something. Keep your eyes peeled.”“Way ahead of you.”The interloping starfighters banked off before committing to engage them, outside of their range of immediate visibility, and beginning their own circling of Fox and Falco’s position. Wheels within wheels: the thought popped into Fox’s head unbidden. This whole mission had been wheels within wheels, really. It was making his head spin.“What are they doing?” Falco sounded like he couldn’t decide between being wary and annoyed.“I don’t know.” He glanced at the radar again. “We have incoming though.”“Where?”“Below us.”He didn’t need to explain any further as he and Falco split off like a shot in opposite directions, maintaining their circle but expanding its circumference. Falco cursed. “Can you tell where it’s going to emerge?”“No, I’m reading a lot of movement but it’s hard to pin down –”He didn’t get a chance to finish his thoughts before the desert surface exploded in a familiar and very unwelcome spray of sand and dust that threatened to ruin Fox’s visibility.He gave up maintaining the watchman-like circle and accelerated as far from the cloud of desert debris as he could. He could barely make out gnashing claws in the grimy mist: towering shadows put into relief by the unsparing sun.As the beast fully surfaced and the dust-storm of its emergence subsided, he realized it was the same one they’d encountered in Yazdah – he could make out the projectile Fang shot into its underbelly.“Well that’s just fantastic”, Falco seethed. “Now what do we do?”“Get out of its range, and let me think.”Fox began to go down his mental checklist. Engaging the Goras was folly, and he rejected that idea outright – it would only serve to get him and Falco killed. The fact that the Goras was planned to be here and primed to attack meant Tertulli had succeeded in capturing this one – was this the only one he owned, or were there others? And if the Goras was here by itself, where was the bashar’s squadron? Probably back at Tytos if he had to guess… with Krystal and Slippy in their midst.“We have to get back to the city”, he said to himself just as much as his teammate.“Yeah?”, Falco responded with a worried tone. “That might be a bit of an issue.”“Why?”“Because it doesn’t have a range!”The words were barely out of Falco’s mouth as Fox did a barrel roll to dodge a huge, sweeping claw. He could make out his teammate doing the same, weaving and bobbing between clawed arms and fleshy, undulating tendrils that snaked their way out of the beast’s underbelly like the hair of a medusa. Every time either of them thought they made it out of striking distance another appendage swiped at them at high velocity.Falco rolled deftly beneath one claw and over another, before taking a few potshots at its shell. “If we turn our backs on this thing, we die.”“Agreed, which is obviously what’s Tertulli planning on.” Thoroughly enraged, Fox took a new position at roughly the level of the Goras’ underbelly. “Alright. New plan. You piss it off, I hit its weak spots while it goes after you.”“Why am I always the bait?” Falco complained before fulfilling his orders. He began to careen his gyrating ship in an unorthodox manner as it wove and freewheeled back and forth in front of the monster’s claws, baiting out its attacks and getting its tendrils tied up.Fox spun into a high-speed dive, made a rapid upward turn just before hitting the ground, and unleashed a barrage of focused laser fire at the unprotected meat of its underside revealed as it overextended to get at Falco. The Goras let loose a distorted-sounding roar, clearly harmed by Fox’s efforts.Their upper hand didn’t last long however, as the beast quickly recuperated and took up a heavier defensive position, covering up its weak spots once more and thrashing its appendages about like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Fox and Falco barely managed to dodge the haphazard paroxysm of its claws and regrouped above it.“I don’t think we have the firepower to fry this thing”, Falco said as he spun through another barrage of claw attacks, taking a few ineffectual shots of his own. “We have to call in the Dogfighters.”“Agreed.” He hated to do it but they didn’t have another choice. He backed off some from the Goras and sent the secondary inter-system to call in the troops… to no response. He waited a few seconds and tried again. And again. And again.“Something’s wrong: I can’t get through. Can you do it?” Fox reengaged the Goras and distracted it from Falco, giving him a moment to try.“I can’t reach them either!” Fox couldn’t quite make out the bird’s muttered curse. “It’s not just us. It looks like the whole damn extraplanetary comm system is down. Titania’s been grounded.”That can’t be good. Planets could only be cut off from the system-wide Lylat communication system through either extreme disaster or acts of malice. Fox bets were on the latter. “I think the bashar might have some connections with whoever’s in charge of Titanian comms.” His calm tone of voice belied his current state of mind.“You think?!” Falco couldn’t resist being sarcastic in the face of imminent death. Fox thought it might be a coping mechanism.“We can’t give up – hit it again, and hit it harder!” This time Fox took bait duty, accelerating to a high speed and flying through the gaps between Goras’ appendages. He imagined he was back on Corneria, dodging through rock formations and around columns of stone. Falco let loose a furious barrage of his own on the monster’s belly, cursing like a dockhand all the while. The creature screamed again, but none of their attacks were causing it any noticeable harm.A furious lash of one of its tendrils struck Fox’s Arwing like a whip and knocked one of his wings off, and the Goras primed another one to take off the other. “I think we might die here”.“Can’t let you do that, Star Fox.”A red-and-silver blur intercepted the secondary swipe of the monster with a well-placed series of shots, and another launched a smart bomb across the brow of the beast’s shell and caused it to stagger somewhat: a window of opportunity Fox took to back up and make some space between him and it.The last Wolfen took up position alongside him, and Fox could just barely make out a familiar silhouette in the cockpit. “Thought you might be able to use the assist.”“Wolf!” Fox was surprised and somewhat embarrassed to hear how grateful he sounded. Wolf laughed in response.“Don’t shoot your load just yet, pup. We’ve still got to blow this thing to bits.”Fox frowned. “Do you always have to be so vulgar?”“No, but it’s fun.”Wolf peeled off from his position, banking to the right of the Goras, and Fox paralleled his move by veering to its left. They began to pepper it with laser fire, and it responded by swinging its claws around, narrowly missing them.“How are we supposed to kill this thing?”, Wolf demanded.“That’s what we’ve been asking ourselves for the last few minutes”. Falco almost grunted his response out in between maneuvers.Panther and Fay reformed on Wolf’s flank. “Its armor appears to be impenetrable: none of our attacks can pierce it.” The feline sounded surprisingly calm given the situation.“If only we had a giant hammer…”Fox still couldn’t tell if Fay was joking or not.He shook his head and focused. How did Fang and the rest of Tertulli’s agents provocateur handle it last time? They tried to capture it by towing it away and eventually gave up after shooting that thing into its side, which was presumably a tracker. But what had they done differently that had gotten the beast to stop fighting and go back under of its own accord?Or was he looking at this whole thing the wrong way – chasing down the incorrect lead? Was it not about what Tertulli’s forced did last time, but rather the circumstances it was summoned… and who had done that summoning?“Wolf.” Fox was spit-balling here, he needed a sounding board. “When you were with the bedanti, did they summon any Gorasi?”The lupine laughed darkly. “Only six of the fuckers.”“Six!?”, Falco sputtered.Fox ignored him. “How do they keep them under control?”Wolf paused before answering. “What do you mean?”“The Gorasi. These things are mindless; constantly enraged by themselves.” He dodged another attack, his Arwing responding awkwardly due to the loss of wing. “What do the bedanti do to make them not act that way – and what do they do to dismiss them?”Wolf understood his tack. “They have these metal rods they strike at certain frequencies. They stick them in the ground and hit them to call them up, but they also have a few buried into the undersides that they use to control them. Like they hit them in a certain way to make them go forward, stop – you get the picture.”Fox began to descend, fighting against his damaged ship’s predilection to veer off to the side. “Which part of the underside?”He was met with silence for a second before Falco spoke up. “Fox, you ain’t hinking what I think you’re thinking… are you?”“That I’m going to fly down to the surface, disembark, climb up its side, and bang on the rods until something happens?” He aimed his prow for a sand dune he really hoped was as soft as it looked. “Because that’s what I’m doing right now.”He didn’t give anyone the chance to speak sense into him – he all but crashed his Arwing into the dune. Nope – not as soft as he was hoping. But it would do. He went unnoticed by the Goras, distracted as it was by the flying prey snapping at it from above, and he began to sprint towards the ‘shelved’ part of its underbelly he saw Rena and her compatriots standing on the first time it was summoned.He pressed the comm-device on his headset. “If anyone wants to give me some cover fire, that’d be great!”He was met with a string of curses from Falco and a disbelieving laugh from Wolf. “Consider it done”, the lupine said. He saw a Wolfen in his peripheral vision fly interference for him. He redoubled his own efforts to reach the middle of this storm of a beast.He could see the metal rods from his vantage point, glinting in what little sunlight made it down under the Goras. He drew his blaster, attached the grapple extension, and fired it into the underbelly, eliciting a scream he tried to tune out. The beast began to throw another tantrum as the grapple-line drew him up, and it was in full swing as he alighted on its ‘shelf’. He was almost thrown over the side, holding on from the edge as the Goras swayed back and forth.When the seizure subsided, he made his way to the rods and commed the others. “I’m at the, uh… ‘controls’.” His eyes rapidly darted between the handful of black metallic rods. “Wolf, what do I do here?”Wolf was dodging the beast’s attacks. “How am I supposed to know? I wasn’t watching that closely when they were piloting them.”Fox took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m going to start hitting the rods. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Everyone: brace yourselves!” He picked a rod at random and slammed it with the butt of his blaster, causing the entire shelf beneath him to vibrate and the entire Goras to start flailing around.“FOX, WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWN THERE!?”, Falco screeched in his ear. YOU JUST MADE IT WORSE!”“Give me a moment, I’m trying!”He started hitting all the rods with varying levels of force, every action of his causing the Goras to begin some strange new maneuver. One even caused it to start making a purring noise.Wolf’s voice shouted across the comms. “Everyone back up! Give him some time.” Fox was happy for the vote of confidence as he kept striking the rods, waiting to see what the response was, and striking another.Finally, a hard tap about two-thirds up the way of what he considered ‘rod #4’ caused the Goras to freeze. It didn’t move, didn’t attack, didn’t attempt to slink beneath the surface – it just stood motionless, its claws and tendrils frozen mid-action.He paused for a moment, making sure the change was permanent. After about half a minute, he let out a deep breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He all-but collapsed into a relaxed seated position. Excited chatter echoed in his comm-device.“I cannot believe you just did that.” Falco’s voice was simultaneously pissed-off and proud.“I can.” Wolf sounded the same, albeit veering more towards the ‘proud’ end. “He’s always been crazy…”Panther groaned. “Please don’t say it.”“…Crazy like a fox.”Fox sighed very loudly, and Fay let out a shocked gasp. “That’s offensive!”“I’m offensive.” Wolf didn’t sound apologetic in the slightest.“It’s not offensive”, Fox interrupted. “It’s just a terrible pun.”“Which is why it’s offensive”, Panther grumbled.Falco was at breaking point. “Look, can we get back on track here? It’s great and all that we just stopped that thing, but where are Tertulli’s forces?”“You came here to fight that FDE fleet? By yourselves?” Wolf sounded taken aback. “You know, if you guys are really that suicidal you could always just fly into Solar, it’d probably be quicker.”“We weren’t supposed to be by ourselves.” As the adrenaline of their victory subsided, Fox found himself growing anxious again. “We have a squad of Cornerian Dogfighters hanging just outside the sector on call – but interplanetary communications are down, so we couldn’t reach them.”“And then that thing attacked, okay, I get it.” Wolf paused. “Where are Krystal and Frog-Boy?”Fox grimaced. “Back in Tytos. Presumably with the bashar’s forces who were supposed to be here.”Falco made an inpatient noise. “We gotta go back there now, hit ‘em hard.”“Bad idea, Bird”, Panther stated calmly. “You’ll be eaten alive without backup.”Wolf concurred. “Panther’s right. The three of us aren’t going to turn the tide. Lucky for you though, you’ve got a lot more than the three of us.”Fox’s eyes surveyed the borderline wreckage of his Arwing as he slowly descended back to the ground using his grapple-line. “What do you mean?”, he asked.“There’s an army of bedanti marching on Tytos right now”, Wolf answered casually. “I think that might be enough of a distraction to bail out your presumably captive teammates. And bail out of here in general.”Fox sighed. He really wished the comms weren’t down. “Alright.”“Alright?” Falco sounded affronted.“We don’t have any other options”, he said. “It’s time to do or die.”Wolf smiled. “Now that’s what I like to hear.”As Falco and Wolf sniped back and forth at each other, Fox clambered back into the cockpit and started up the initiation sequence. The G-diffusion system was still working, and he let out a sigh of relief as the Arwing dislodged itself from the sand and started rising. Slippy’d have a heart attack when he saw it next.And he would see it. Fox would ensure it would happen, no matter what.Hold on, he thought of his teammates. We’re coming.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
XII They stood in the shadow of an ostentatious statue depicting one of the elder bashars Tertulli; the large shield it carried provided cover from which the three of them could peek out and analyze the situation in the courtyard.Krystal marked three guards on the ground level: two of them hefty armored elephants standing at watch by their Arwings, and a third rhinoceros slowly circling the garden. She could make out two more leaning on a balustrade on the second floor, watching the courtyard with bored expressions and making small talk with each other. There were certainly several more outside her field of vision, too.She shook her head. “This isn’t going to work”, she whispered. “There are too many of them – even if we take them by surprise and make a run for it, we won’t survive to reach our ships; not with only one blaster between the three of us.”Fang – or ‘Gerald’, apparently, though she couldn’t think of him as such – nodded his agreement. “I don’t think we’re going to make it out of here without backup.” He reached for his comm device with a somewhat pained expression. “Damn it all to hell – we’re going to have to blow this whole mission to bits.”Slippy caught his arm before he had the chance to activate it. “Who are you contacting?”, he demanded. Obviously he still held a substantial amount of distrust for the jackal.Fang ripped his arm out of Slippy’s grip. “I’m going to comm reinforcements – your reinforcements, to be precise. A Cornerian squadron suddenly showed up in Sector X a few hours ago and has been waiting there rather conspicuously since. It was all the guards were talking about this morning.” He quirked a brow. “I’m going to take a wild guess it’s Hare’s cavalry come to the rescue?”Krystal and Slippy nodded, the latter reluctantly.“Good. Because it’s now or never, and we need them now.” He activated his comm and stood there expectantly. His eyes narrowed and he fruitlessly tried to activate it again. “Oh for – the damn thing’s not working.”“Let me try”. Slippy reached for it and Fang complied, handing it to him. The frog fumbled with it for a few seconds before his face fell. “It’s working fine – it’s just the extraplanetary comm system is down.”They stood there for a moment in disbelief. “Now what?”, Krystal asked.Fang flexed and unflexed his paw a few times, either trying to relieve stress or just as a nervous tic. “Now we go find whoever deactivated the satellite connection, kill them, and turn it back on again.”Slippy looked doubtful. “You think the connection was severed from here?”Fang shook his head. “No. I don’t think it was – I know it was. Because I’ve been in the room where Tertulli set up the relay. He said it was a failsafe.”Krystal composed herself, preparing for the inevitable firefight to come. “Alright. Lead the way.” ………. Fazanh paced back and forth across the floor of their makeshift ‘war room’. In truth it was his father’s old game room: a spacious chamber in the heart of the palace that, during his childhood, was filled with all sorts of game tables and cabinets that his father had collected from across the galaxy. Some were physical, some electronic; all fun. His father had it built for his children after their mother died; perhaps in an attempt to keep their pain at bay. The pool tables and arcade distractions were a poor substitute for a mother, however.The games were ultimately all lost in Fazanh’s invasion and sacking of his own palace, taken this way and that by the criminal army he commanded. He wondered if they had ever managed to fulfill their purpose and brought joy to children elsewhere. They certainly hadn’t for him.His reverie was interrupted by yet more inane, fearful anger, as his whole day had been so far.“This is madness! We must call the other cities for support: I’m sure Radiya and Jazeh would come to our aid. I’m sure of it!”The old rat looked positively rodentlike today, Fazanh thought; squealing in displeasure and wringing his hands. Fazanh loathed his council. The only reason he put up with them was that he had no way to effectively control his city without them, for they commanded incredible levels of sway in every single facet of Tytos’ economy. Hypothetically, they could even freeze him out of his own powerbase and leave him a ruler in nothing but name, as was the case with the bashars of many other cities.Luckily, they were cowards to a man, and had taken the lesson of his siblings’ fate to heart.“As I have already said several times: no. We solve this problem ourselves. I refuse to let Tytos look weak in front of the other cities.” He wasn’t exaggerating either – they’d been over this three times since the council was called. He almost wished they weren’t such a cowardly lot. It would be more dangerous for himself, but at least they wouldn’t all roll over at the slightest suggestion of danger.Fazanh was no fool: Radiya was one such city controlled by its own council, every one of them an avatar of avarice – and Jazeh was ruled by an upstart young bashar who dreamed dreams of a united Titania, an aspiring new Chazem IV.No, Tytos would not let its fate be dictated by other cities – certainly not ones who would impose their will on it.A sloth whose skin appeared to made more of wrinkles than fur spoke up. “Esteemed bashar, how would you have us face this threat, then? Our walls cannot withstand the might of a Goras, let alone six of them.”The council members began to prattle on again, arguing amongst themselves about just how strong the walls of Tytos were. The rat prince swore they would withstand any assault (his being the one who funded them).Fazanh wondered how many repercussions he’d really face if he just killed them all anyway, their influence and how much it would ruin him be damned. Inigo would have an aneurysm though, he knew. He already saddled his steward with so many of the day-to-day troubles of running the city; throwing the roles of every single council member on top of that pile would be far too cruel, even for him. Especially towards someone who was possibly the only person he trusted other than himself – at least as far as he was capable of trust.He absentmindedly glanced towards him, wondering how he was viewing this carnival of foolishness. Inigo was watching the proceedings with a look of rapt interest on his face, but Fazanh knew him well enough to recognize its falsehood. Even Inigo was finding this tiresome, and that man was a font of patience.That settles it, then.“This meeting is adjourned”, he trumpeted, interrupting their blather. “You’ve all given me plenty to think about”. Like how easy it would be to snap you all in half. “And I think you for your counsel, which is wise as it always is.” Not at all.They began to speak up as Inigo raised his paw to silence them. “Your bashar has spoken. Please, return to your homes.”They grumbled their displeasure but ultimately did as he said, doddering out of the room at paces of varying levels of glacial.When the final one departed, Fazanh let out a noise somewhere between a sigh and an aggressive battle-cry. It was a strained, awkward sound. “How is it they listen to you without talking back, but not me?”Inigo simply smiled. “Because I’m nothing to them. They lose no pride by acquiescing to nothing.”Fazanh snorted. “Fine, speak your riddles.” He drew himself up to his full height and drew a device from his pocket. “You know what this is, correct?”His steward nodded carefully. “You plan to use the family warheads on the Gorasi then. You think that tactic will work?”“It worked on Azdana and the rest of the Cantal League. I see no reason why it wouldn’t work here.”They were interrupted as a guard entered the room. “Bashar, we’re receiving a message from the enemy over the broad comms.”Fazanh and Inigo shared a glance. Fazanh stared at the guard, who simply stared back at him like a deer caught in the headlights.
Why are all of my underlings ready to piss themselves at a moment’s notice?
“Well? What are you waiting for!?” The guard jumped in surprise at his bellicosity. “Patch it through!” ………. The Gorasi lined up in a curved arc some distance from the city walls, each of them statuesque in their stillness, immobilized by the same strategy Fox had used himself just an hour ago – albeit by happy accident, whereas this motionlessness was enacted by those actually familiar with the beasts, and who knew how to ‘operate’ them. There would be no unintentional actions taken by these Gorasi.Fox was uneasy about this. Not the Gorasi themselves surprisingly: he trusted the bedanti knew what they were doing with them.No, it was the bedanti that made him uneasy. He knew and sort of trusted Rena – at least to the extent that he trusted she wouldn’t be needlessly cruel, or destructive. But she was nowhere to be found, and his meeting with their erstwhile leader – Izaak – left him apprehensive. The lion had struck him as proud, vain and arrogant: a bad combination of traits in a military commander. He was more worried than he let on about the likelihood of civilian casualties if Izaak led the assault. Would the lion do anything to rein the Gorasi in? Would he do anything to rein his own troops in?Because that was the real kicker here: despite the bedanti army being comprised of a number of different tribes, somehow all six of the Gorasi just happened to be commanded by Izaak and five of his captains. There was no question in anyone’s mind that Izaak’s Boue Tribe was the real bulk of the bedanti force, in terms of both numbers and expertise.Fox tried to keep his Arwing braked, but it kept veering off to the left due to the missing wing. Falco and even Wolf had begged him to leave it behind and come back for it later, taking a backseat in one of their fighters – but Fox declined. Combat-worthy or no, he’d meet this trial in the air.Wolf’s ship held steady beside his own, standing in contrast to the wavering of his own craft. “So what’s the game plan here, commander?”, he asked with more than a hint of impetuousness. Fox knew Wolf respected his leadership, but he also knew he wasn’t keen to take orders from him.“I want to parley with Tertulli; we can end this now without any bloodshed.” He realized how hollow it sounded even as it came out of his mouth.Wolf scoffed. “You don’t honestly believe he’ll give in, do you?”“No. But we at least have to try.”Fox turned on the Arwing’s comm system and pinged the defensive forces rallying along Tytos’ walls. They were digging themselves in, setting up turrets and small-scale force fields – and he could see a few FDE gunships hovering just within the city limits, ready to provide aerial support.A few moments passed before he got a response.“I see you’ve survived. You have my respect; the Goras must have put up quite a fight, but not enough to slay the mighty Fox McCloud.”Fox hadn’t expected the bashar himself to answer, at least not right away. “Sounds like we’re not pretending you’re not trying to kill me anymore. That’s progress, I guess.”Tertulli laughed, and again Fox noticed it wasn’t entirely cruel. If anything he sounded like he was enjoying himself; like this was his element, what he lived for. “No, no – there’s no reason to waste time with that. Tell me, Fox: what do you hope to accomplish by talking with me? My surrender? A chance at peace? Because you’re a damn fool if you think that I’m going to roll over just because a rabble of desert-dwelling halfwits and their insectoid mounts line up in front of my walls.”“Stop bluffing”, Fox said with authority. “You yourself admitted those ‘mounts’ are powerful enough that you thought one of them could take me down. You can’t survive this fight, not even with your Fichinan support. You’re risking your city and its people.”“Oh, so now the legendary hero of Lylat uses the death of noncombatants as a bargaining chip? I’m impressed; didn’t think you had the guts.” He laughed again, cruelly this time, and Fox felt his stomach drop.“I’m not using them. I’m warning you.” Fox’s voice carried a note of desperation in it. “I’m not in charge of the bedanti; I’m not even on their ‘side’. They’re being led by someone with a penchant for violence equal to your own, and I can’t do anything to stop him. I’m asking you to surrender for your own peoples’ sakes.”The line stayed silent just long enough that Fox feared Tertulli had cancelled the call before he spoke up again. “You’re a true hero, aren’t you, Fox?” The bashar’s voice grew calm. “Two choices present themselves: you find them both unconscionable, and so you choose neither. What a noble stance.” A beat passed. “It doesn’t work in reality, though. You must choose one or the other. Circumstances will force you to – circumstances like the fact I have your teammates in captivity and can kill them whenever I want.”Fox had to exert a fair amount of effort to keep the unbridled rage out of his voice. “You wouldn’t dare.”“Wouldn’t I?”, Tertulli asked. “Tell me why I shouldn’t. Give me a good reason – right now – to not have your friends killed. Tell me why I shouldn’t have the agonizing sounds of their deaths broadcast over this comm-line. Give me a reason, Fox. Any reason at all.”Fox felt empty. There was no hesitation, no sense of justice or morality. He felt his iron code of conduct slip away, if only for a split-second. “Because if you do, I’ll kill you.”Tertulli chuckled. “Now that’s more like it. Congratulations, Fox: you’re not a hero anymore. Just another warrior on the blood-soaked battlefield of life. You’ve won your friends’ lives, for now – on one condition.”“Name it.”He could practically see the bashar’s smile in his words. “Walk onto that battlefield, and face me.”The comm-line went dead with an audible click.Fox fumed in his seat as Wolf spoke up. The lupine had been listening in, making sure not to say anything to reveal himself. “You can’t fight him.”“I have to!”, Fox shouted. “You heard him: he’ll kill Krystal and Slippy if I don’t!”Wolf remained steadfast. “Your Arwing’s busted, and you’ll never be able to fight alongside people who’re putting innocents at risk, regardless of what that fat elephant says.”Fox stayed silent for a moment and Wolf spoke up again. “Listen to me, dammit! He’s baiting you into a trap.”“Then what should I do?” Fox heard his own voice sound defeated.“Isn’t it obvious, pup? Save your fucking friends.” Wolf’s words felt like a wake-up slap. “We land our ships behind one of the Gorasi, out of the city’s line of sight, and swap them. You slip behind the city walls in my Wolfen and save the princess. And her frog.”Fox couldn’t abide that. “You said it yourself, my Arwing’s in no shape to fight right now. You could die.”“Then I’d die for a good cause.”Fox struggled to remain calm. “You don’t have to do this.”“You’re right.” He took a deep breath. “But I want to.” ………. Krystal laid prone on a balcony overlooking the shadowy room below, Fang and Slippy beside her. The central comm station of the Eish-da-Tertulli was the darkest room in the palace, she thought; even more so than the dungeons. Looking at it from above, it gave off the semblance of a starry night – LED nodes and monitors blaring in stark contrast with the lack of actual lighting. Armed guards paced through the ‘halls’ between long computer stations.It was a miracle they hadn’t been caught yet. Shortly after they left the courtyard, she’d overheard two guards talking about ‘the escaped prisoners’ in an adjacent room. According to their account, the bashar was wroth, and had ordered a full sweep of the entire palace until they were found.Luckily, Fang had proven worth his salt. He really did know the ins and outs of the palace: where the guards were likely to patrol, where to find good cover – even a secret passage that led from the first floor to the overhang they were currently hiding on. He also clued them in that Tertulli refused to allow security cameras in his complex because he didn’t want his copious criminal activities caught on record. Krystal thought that was incredibly short-sighted, but she was grateful for it; it made their job much easier.Fang tapped her shoulder and scuttled back towards the passage, urging her and Slippy to follow. When they entered, he began to speak.“Okay: the central satellite control is in the middle of the room. There’s no way we can get to it without starting a firefight.”Slippy gulped. “Are you sure?”“Yes”. Fang gestured at the blaster strapped on Krystal’s belt – she’d refused to give it back to him after he took it from their cell-guard. “I’m going to need that.”Krystal frowned. She didn’t distrust him anymore, but… “Why?”“Because I’m the best shot between the three of us, and we can’t afford to waste any time.”She thought that was a little presumptuous. “How do you know you’re the best shot here?”He rolled his eyes. “Because I’m LCI – I have access to all your personnel files, including your general rate of firing accuracy. Mine is higher than either of yours.”Slippy looked miffed. “The LCI keeps files on us?”Fang gave him a withering look. “Of course the LCI keeps files on you. We keep files on all potential threats.”“I wasn’t aware Star Fox counted as a ‘potential threat’”, Krystal said with more than a hint of what she believed to be justified anger.“Anyone with over a certain level of power is a potential threat”, he growled. “Don’t take it personally: every active politician, military leader and prominent businessman has one too. Hell, I have one.” He glared at her. “Now are you going to give me the gun or not?”She chewed on her lip for a second before reneging. “Fine.” She removed it from her belt and handed it over. “You better not turn that thing on us.”He smiled treacherously. “No – not today, anyway.” He jerked his head towards their objective. “Now come on. We have a mission to complete.” ………. Wolf tried to keep the Arwing steady, but it was a trial. The Goras really did a number on it; Wolf wondered how Fox had managed to keep it in the air for as long as he did.He hoped the loveable protagonist had managed to make it into the palace alive – the last he saw of his own Wolfen was it snaking around the back of the city. He had to hope Fox knew what he was doing.For his own part, he was trying to stay alive.The bashar had scrambled some of his aerial forces shortly after Fox departed: a combination of Skip-Hoppers and FDE fighters. Luckily his teammates (and Falco) were more than able to take most of the heat off him… but Wolf knew this was just the opening foray, a prelude of what was to come. He knew there were several gunships and another flock of starfighters waiting in the wings – he only hoped they’d be able to repel them long enough for Fox to get back with his captured teammates. Then they could get the hell out of dodge at their leisure and regroup.At least, that was Wolf’s plan, anyway. The Great Fox was still in orbit, and even though it wasn’t exactly a top-of-the-line battlecruiser, it’d be more than serviceable enough to get them all off this godforsaken planet. They wouldn’t be able to contact it due to the lack of comms, but nothing was stopping them from just flying right up there and absconding as soon as Krystal and Slippy were back in safe hands.
Nothing but our own consciences at least.
Wolf knew getting Fox to go along with this would be a longshot. The vulpine was such a do-gooder. On some level Wolf realized this plan was never going to work, because Fox would never abandon a situation like this to chance – to fate. But did he realize there was no hope for a good outcome? That either Tertulli would win and continue his reign of criminality, or Izaak would win and sack the city? As far as Wolf was concerned, the whole situation was screwed six ways to Sunday. There was no miraculous conclusion waiting in the wings here.But would Fox see it this way? Would he finally be dragged down to their level and be forced to make a bad decision amongst bad choices – or would he die fighting both sides at once?“Wolf, watch out!”Wolf responded to Falco’s warning, lurching into a janky half-roll and narrowly missing the missile. “I owe you one, bird.” And damn, wasn’t that a horrible turn of events?“Don’t mention it. Ever.”The lupine was struggling just to keep the Arwing out of the line of fire, and Falco’s save had been the third such near miss in the last few minutes. If they were going to survive until Fox got out – especially against the bashar’s forces still yet to be deployed – they’d need the help of the Gorasi.Unfortunately, it looked like Izaak had a different plan in mind.Rather than set the Gorasi in a defensive position to weather Tertulli’s forces and thin the herd, he’d apparently put the order to march on the walls of Tytos itself. The Gorasi staggered their way across the sands, laser-fire from the mounted turrets along the walls dissipating against their shells like raindrops on pavement. They were doing nothing whatsoever to stave off the aerial assault against their mercenary allies.Wolf commed the lead Goras, knowing Izaak would be at the forefront of the assault. “Hey, we could use a little help up here!”Izaak’s response was choppy and full of static – unsurprising, given the comm-devices used by the bedanti were all relics of the Titanian war half a century prior. “You will not need any help once their defenses are breached – when we leave their walls shattered and begin to bleed the city dry, I promise their focus will all be on us.”Wolf thought his choice of wording interesting. “’Bleed them dry’? What do you mean by that?”There was a pause before Izaak responded. “An example must be made. The bashars of Titania must learn the punishment for striking the bedanti”, he practically snarled. “The red bricks of Tytos will be made even redder by sunset, this I swear.”Wolf knew he should be angry, but all he felt was exhausted – he saw this coming from leagues away. He sighed into the comm channel and closed it. What was the point of trying to ‘do good’ in a galaxy like this? The universe would keep spitting out people like Izaak, and Tertulli.And Andross.He opened a channel with Panther, Fay and Falco. “Bad news, people. I’m pretty sure Izaak is about to march on the city.”Panther rolled out of the way of a fighter and responded with fire of his own, knocking out its wing and sending it spiraling into the surface. “He should be helping us swat these flies.”Wolf made a dismissive sound. “Oh, he’s planning to swat some flies alright. Only the ones he’s going after won’t be able to fight back.”“Wait, hold on – you’re saying he’s going to attack the civilians!?” Wolf thought Falco’s indignance was cute. He forgot how innocent Cornerians were, sometimes.“Should we attack him, then?”, Fay asked with an air of nonchalance.Wolf sighed. “We couldn’t take him down if we wanted to – those Gorasi are impervious to everything we’ve got, and we can’t pull a Fox maneuver and shut them down up close because there are too many bedanti in the way.” He thought on it for a beat. “I think we’re well and truly fucked.”“We can’t just let him do that!” Falco was practically brimming with righteous rage. Panther held his tongue – he knew a hopeless situation when he saw one. Fay stayed silent too.“What do you propose we do then? Have any bright ideas?” Wolf unsuccessfully tryed to rein in his irritation.“…We have to hold on. Wait for Fox.” The avian sounded hopeful. “He’ll know what to do.”Wolf watched as the lead Goras reached the city wall and tore through it with one of its claws, throwing up a cloud of crimson rubble and dust. “He better.” ………. Fox didn’t know what to do.Beyond all odds he’d managed to get into the palace. He’d surreptitiously parked the Wolfen in an alcove tucked into the walls of the fortress. It was the de facto hangar where the bashar’s Skip-Hoppers were stationed before they’d been scrambled: Fox had watched the bay doors lift open and the fighters fly out, and took the opportunity to sneak in.There were a few guards waiting within, but Fox had blasted them with the Wolfen’s laser cannons while it landed. Not exactly a subtle entrance, but it would have to do. Afterwards, he swiftly exited the cockpit and made his way into the labyrinthine hallways beyond, blaster primed and in hand.But now he was at a loss as to where to go next.He’d stealthily made his way to the guest quarters, but wasn’t surprised to see they were vacant; he hadn’t really expected them to still be there, but he still had to make sure. Afterwards he’d scoped out the dungeons – same deal.He had no idea where Krystal and Slippy could be; and even stranger, he’d met practically no resistance despite running free through the palace after entering in the most bombastic way possible. He’d only bumped into two guards, both of which easily dispatched with blaster bolts. He knew Tertulli had way more manpower than this: he’d seen them crawling all over the place during Star Fox’s stay after all; wielding heavy, expensive weaponry.So where was everyone?He heard footsteps closing on his position fast and hugged the wall. The guards stopped just around the corner from him, however, and began to talk.“Still no sign of the intruder?” The voice was fuzzy, obviously coming from a comm device.“Negative, sir. We’re trying, but we need more men.” The guard sounded fatigued.The voice on the other end sounded even more strained than the guard. “We can’t spare anyone: the situation in the relay room is still unfolding. They’re pinned down, but we can’t break them.” The voice paused for a second. “In fact, we need you down here.”“But, sir –”“No ‘buts’. The comms take precedence. Bashar’s orders.”Fox could see the shadow of the guard straighten up from around the corner. “Understood.” He closed the comm channel and continued to walk down the hall.Fox furtively followed after him, trying to remain quiet and dodging out of sight when possible.He had a solid suspicion where to find his teammates – and it sounded like they could use his help. ………. “Slippy, watch out!”Krystal snagged him by the collar of his jacket and pulled him around the corner of the computer desk she was crouched behind, blaster shots scorching holes into the place he was standing just seconds ago.He gulped. “Uh, thanks, Krystal.”She handed him the gatling gun Fang had managed to take from a dead guard, her brow creased in a worried frown. “You’re welcome – but please keep better track of the enemy’s location.”He hefted the large weapon and just barely managed to hold it aloft. “I’m trying, but my senses aren’t as acute as yours.”He had a point there. “Alright: when I point out where they’re taking cover, I want you to tear the cover apart with that gatling – then I’ll take them out once they’re open.” She raised the rifle she’d grabbed off a guard earlier in the firefight.“Got it”, he said as he nodded.She snuck out from behind cover and dodged behind a tall computer tower as fire rained down on her, making sure to track where it was coming from. When she was safe, she pointed to a spot halfway along the balcony above them and nodded at Slippy.He responded by jumping out of cover himself and letting loose a barrage of concentrated gatling fire on the enemy’s location, almost shredding the desk the guard was hiding behind to bits. When the guard began to relocate, Krystal took him out with the rifle.Slippy regrouped behind the tower with her, sweat dripping down his forehead. “How many more are there?”Krystal considered the question, thinking back to the duration of their encounter so far – they’d been at this for an indeterminate amount of time, dodging guards and taking them out and stealing their weapons, only to use the weapons up and begin the cycle all over again. “It was around fifteen last I counted, but there are sure to be more by now. There’s no way Tertulli won’t have focused all of his security here at this point.”Slippy chewed on his lip. “How long is it going to take him to finish up?”She frowned. They were doing all of this to keep the heat off of their temporary ally while he tried to reactivate the extraplanetary comms system. Slippy offered to do so, being the most proficient with computer systems – but Fang had been adamant he had to do it himself, for ‘security purposes’. She wasn’t sure how much longer they could keep this game of high-stakes laser tag up. The relative darkness of the room helped, but eventually they would be overrun by sheer numbers.“I don’t know.” She hefted the rifle once more. “But we have to keep going. We can’t give up yet.”Slippy nodded resolutely as more blasterfire rang out, this time to their right. He gestured for her to take the lead, and she did.They darted in and around the maze of desks and computer towers for another few minutes, Slippy chewing apart cover and Krystal popping the guards off one by one as they came into view, before Slippy tapped her shoulder.“I’m out of ammo.”Then we’re out of luck, she thought unwantedly. Slippy must have realized it too, because his expression turned into one of hopeless resignation.She began to vainly reassure him when she heard one of the guards shout, followed by a new chorus of blasterfire punctuated by the loud sounds of the heavy guards falling to the ground.“It’s the fox!”, one of them shouted.She quickly glanced at Slippy, whose expression mirrored her own. Did she dare to hope?They ran over to the source of the commotion as silently as they could before coming to a dead stop in front of a row of three guards. The guards turned to them in surprise, and as the elephants began to raise their weapons to take them out, a series of blaster shots took them all square in their chests and they fell over.Krystal turned towards the direction of their savior. She shouldn’t have been surprised.“Am I too late to help?”, he said with an apologetic half-smile.“Fox!”, Slippy shouted in elation.Krystal smiled. “You’re just on time, more like.”She and Slippy relieved the guards of their weapons as Fox looked on. “We need to get you out of here”, he said.“No.” Krystal shook her head. “Not yet. Fang’s still trying to reenable the comms so we can call in aid from Corneria.”Fox did a spit-take. “Fang!? As in –”“Yes”, she cut him off. “That Fang. His name’s actually Gerald – he’s an LCI agent.”Fox looked deeply confused. Slippy patted him on the arm. “It’s a long story, we’ll explain later.”The vulpine took a deep breath. “Alright. Where is he?”“Behind you.”Fox turned on a dime and raised his blaster to the jackal’s snout.Fang slowly raised his paws. “Your teammates are telling the truth.” He nodded towards Krystal. “The comms are back on, and I’ve taken the liberty of calling in the Cornerian forces Peppy had stationed for you. They were worried when you never followed up with them, actually, and were thinking of coming here anyway.”Fox removed his finger from the trigger and slowly lowered his gun. “You really are LCI, then?” Fang – no, Gerald – nodded, and Fox sighed. “You have a lot of explaining to do.”The jackal shook his head. “Not to you I don’t.”Fox scowled at that as Krystal laid her paw on his shoulder. “We don’t have time to worry about this. We need to get out of here.”They made eye contact, and Fox nodded. “You’re right. Luckily, I think most of the guards are dead at this point. It shouldn’t be too hard to break out.”“…Uh…Fox?”Fox looked at Slippy, who had that nauseous look he was prone to getting when things went south. He was afraid to ask, but he knew he had to. “What’s wrong?”Slippy gulped. “Well, the comms are back on, and I just got a message from Falco. He’s happy we’re all alive.”“…And?”“And he says we won’t be if we ‘don’t get the hell out of here right now’.” He paused. “The Gorasi are attacking the city: they’re making their way to the palace.” ………. Fazanh stood in silence as he watched the Gorasi tear down his walls and crush so many houses beneath their claws. There were people in those houses, he knew. People running in the streets trying in vain to avoid being torn up and sliced into pieces. His people. The Gorasi were towering, lumbering beasts – his own men were like ants before them. He was like an ant before them.He idly wondered if he was mistaken in his quest to take one.“Inigo, where are my warheads?”, he queried without turning, watching the orgy of death and destruction take place. He’d asked his steward to have them primed some time ago. By all rights, the Gorasi should have been reduced to radioactive ash by this point – long before they made it to his walls. Long before they breached them and made it into the city itself.“In their bunker, bashar.”Fazanh narrowed his eyes and cocked his head. “I told you to have them primed and fired at the beasts. Minutes ago.”“Yes. And I disobeyed you.”That was new. As Fazanh began to turn, he felt a sudden thrust of concentrated, unberable pain in the side of his back. He gasped as he felt the curved knife enter all the way to the hilt, and twist.It took all of his willpower to not shout out. Instead, he gritted his teeth as he fell to his knees, the knife still in his side – still held by his would-be assassin.He began to laugh, the seizing movement of his lungs causing more excruciating pain. He knelt there for a few seconds, getting himself back under control, holding onto consciousness through sheer force of will.“So”, he grunted out. “Who got to you?” He panted, short of breath, every word coming out strained. “Was it the bedanti? The Enclave?” He laughed again, sending another wave of agony up his side. “Please tell me it wasn’t my council – I’d like to at least be able to respect you from the grave.”Inigo chuckled, warmly as ever. “Heavens, no! I’d never turn coat for any reason as banal as that.” There was no hint of malice in his words – no guise of cruelty or brutality. “In fact, I’ve never turned coat at all.”Fazanh adjusted as much to the pain his side as he could, though he still had incredible difficulty breathing. He knew where Inigo stabbed him, knew what it meant – as soon as that knife was out, he was a dead man. “Oh? Is that why I have a knife in my back, friend?”The fennec’s smile fell somewhat, and he turned Fazanh to look more clearly at him. “I wish I could say I never was your friend – but that would be a lie.” Inigo’s eyes carried a hint of grief in them. “But before you were ever my friend, you were my father’s murderer. That cannot go unpunished.”Fazanh sighed, and it came out gurgled and wracked. He felt the iron taste of blood on the back of his tongue. “Is that what this is then? Vendetta?” He stared his steward straight in the eyes. “Then just kill me, and be done with it.”Inigo shook his head. “No. If I wanted to simply kill you, I could have done it at any time these past few decades.” He raised his head and took a deep breath, a peaceful expression on his face Fazanh had never seen before. “No, my old friend. I don’t want to kill you.”He twisted the knife again, sending another tidal wave of anguish through his body.“I want to destroy you.”This time, Fazanh could barely speak. He felt himself begin to slip.“…Why…?”“Because you destroyed my family. You destroyed my home. You destroyed me.”Fazanh reached for him, but his hand never left his side. His body shook uncontrollably. “…Inigo.”“No.” His steward shook his head. “Chazem V.”He felt his body turn, and he was forced to look upon his city – look upon the hell it had become. Half of it was rubble, the other half on fire.Red.Blood-red.“This is what you did to my family’s land. Now you will spend your last moments watching everything you’ve ever worked for reduced to dust.”Inigo’s words sounded distant, and he felt a strange weight leave his side.Why was Inigo here again?Oh, that’s right. He was watching his city be decimated. It was hard to watch though, not least of all because his eyes weren’t focusing right.It must have been nighttime, because he was so cold. Where was his steward? He could get a pot of tea going.Inigo?Did he say that out loud, or in his mind? Was there a difference anymore?Yes, bashar.Oh, there you are! I’d like some tea.Of course, bashar.He looked at the desert night, but the sands were red for some reason.Why are they red?Why are they anything at all? Chazem stood vigil over Fazanh’s body. The old elephant went more peacefully than he thought he would.He sighed and turned the blade of the knife towards his own chest.It didn’t do for a steward to outlive his bashar, after all. ………. He fired another smart bomb at the Goras’ shell – and it was another waste of a smart bomb.Wolf’s inner accountant hated to waste his precious few payloads like this; those bombs weren’t cheap, after all. But for one, Fox was technically footing the bill, seeing as this was his ship he was flying; and for another, what else could they even do at this point? It wasn’t like the blast radius from the bomb would destroy any houses and harm the civilians inside – the houses were already rubble, and the poor bastards holed up within were almost certainly dead at this point.All they could do at this juncture was goad the Gorasi into chasing them instead of reducing the more of the city to ruins.They were meeting mixed success.Izaak was dead-set on his grand plan of total Tytosi genocide, and the bedanti were apparently reluctant to oppose him. Sure, the other tribes didn’t partake in the carnage – Wolf could make out the other clans breaking off from the battle-group, the one led by that yellow-frocked lemur looking especially pissed – but they weren’t exactly rushing to stop it from happening.Wolf wondered again how he’d gotten roped into all of this. He’d sworn to himself at the outset of this mission that he wouldn’t let him and his team get sucked into some kind of political thing. And here they were, the three of them flying alongside Falco Lombardi of all people, risking death to try and prolong the inevitable.Because it was inevitable, no matter how much Falco claimed otherwise. The smart bombs staggered the Gorasi somewhat; but they only had so many of them, and sooner or later they’d run out – then Izaak would level the rest of the city. The locals didn’t even have anywhere to run. What were they going to do: escape into the desert and die of thirst and exposure? That is unless the bedanti got to them first and ran them down, seeing as the desert was their domain.The only reason Wolf hadn’t called it ten minutes ago was that he was still hoping against hope Fox would return, teammates in tow or not. But deep down – feelings for the vulpine aside – he couldn’t let his own teammates die on the altar of high-minded ideals. He couldn’t let them die over a false hope.It’d been a nice chunk of time since Fox went into that palace. Realistically speaking, he was dead, along with Krystal and Slippy. He’d suggested as much over the comms, and Panther concurred. Falco refused to believe it, though.Wolf wasn’t a monster – but he wasn’t a hero either. He was a survivor, and he was determined to see his compatriots survive alongside him. He refused to think too deeply about the idea of Fox’s death; he knew if he let that idea in, it would kill him as surely as the swinging claws of the Goras. So he pushed it aside for now. Compartmentalized it.They needed to get out of here. Falco could come along too, Wolf supposed, if the stubborn bird so desired. He was about to open the comms and call for a retreat when Fay spoke up.“Cap’n! We have a new contact approaching!”Wolf turned the half-functioning Arwing around to take a look at the direction Fay indicated on his HUD, unsure quite what to expect. More FDE reinforcements to help the bashar? Perhaps Corneria finally decided to get off its ass and intervene?What he didn’t expect was a seventh Goras.Oh, for – “That’s it. We’re done here, it’s time to pull out.” His voice sounded dead to his ears.“No!”, Falco shouted into the comms, giving Wolf a headache. “We have to give Fox more time! I know he’ll come through!”Wolf gritted his teeth. He wanted to believe in Fox, but he couldn’t sentence them all to death over a vain hope. The appearance of another Goras sealed it – they could barely keep up as it was.“Do you even see what I’m seeing? We’ll die if we have to fight another one of these things on top of everything else.” He exhaled loudly through his nose. “Panther, Fay – we’re getting out of here.” He paused before addressing Falco specifically. “…You do whatever you want, birdbrain. You’re welcome to join, but I’m not your boss.”“Is that how little faith you have in him?” Falco sounded enraged. “You don’t know him like I do. He will get through this.”Wolf almost responded by saying Falco didn’t know him like he did, but he knew it would be petty and cruel. What point would it even serve? They were arguing about a dead man, and would join him sooner rather than later if they didn’t get their tails in gear right this second.Panther and Fay took up positions on his flanks, and he gave Falco one last chance. “You in, or out?”The channel remained silent before it was interrupted by a massive burst of static. Wolf toggled the ship’s comm controls, but nothing happened. A few seconds later, the static subsided… and the extraplanetary comm system was back online.Wolf was stunned into silence, and Falco spoke up. “You see! I bet ya anything he did this, along with Slippy and Krystal!”Wolf began to respond but was interrupted by an earth-shaking roar from the approaching Goras. He turned to look at it, and…Something was different here.It reared back on its hind claws, and roared with that distorted burst of sound again. The other six Gorasi paused in their destruction of the town, and turned to face the newcomer. The lead beast, the one controlled by Izaak, took up position in front of the others.“What’s going on down there?”, Panther asked.“I don’t know”, Wolf responded. And it was true – he really didn’t.A broad channel message opened across all of their comms, coming from the new Goras. It was just as fuzzy as the one from Izaak.“I am Rena of the Yazdah Tribe of Uzach Basin. I hereby formally challenge Izaak of the Boue Tribe for the role of Warmaster.”Wolf sat in stunned silence as a second channel opened in response. Izaak’s proud laughter rang out across it. “What is this foolishness, Rena? Can you not see the battle is already well under control?”“Yes”, she said sadly. “I challenge you not for the honor of leading this battle… but for the right to end it.”Izaak didn’t respond for a little while. Wolf watched as the bands of bedanti who’d abandoned the lion’s murderous crusade started to form a loose circle around the Gorasi. “So”, Izaak finally replied. “You believe you can best me, then?”“I do. I challenge you to the Rite of Titans.” She took a deep breath. “I challenge you to the Dance.”A longer pause this time. “…And what if I say no?”“You will not”, Rena’s voice was firm. “You said it yourself: you follow the laws of the desert, and the Boue are a lawful tribe.”“So be it then”, he said with conviction to match hers. He marched his Goras to face hers and reared it onto its hind claws in turn. The two Gorasi stood facing each other, mirror images, beyond of the ruins of Tytos.“We will Dance.” ………. Fox went as fast as he could down the hallway – it was hard going with Krystal slumped over his back. She managed to retain consciousness this time, but the steady approach of the Gorasi was taking its toll on her.They were unable to get to their Arwings or the Wolfen, as the paths leading to them had caved in. Although none of the Gorasi had made it quite all the way to the palace yet, it’d still taken damage when a gunship carrying a payload of smart bombs was flung into the fortress’ walls and detonated on impact.Luckily they’d encountered no resistance so far. They even bumped into a few guards who simply nodded at them and continued running to escape – at this point, no one even really cared about them, not when the palace was at risk of coming down around them at any moment.“How much longer?”, Fox asked.“Not too far – it’s in the bashar’s war room.” Fang was leading them to a secret exit that – according to him – went far underground enough to avoid destruction by the Gorasi, and would deposit them some distance from the city. Fox was still blindsided by the LCI’s presence here. He had more than a few questions for Peppy once they were done with this.Fang and Slippy worked together to ram open the doors to the war room when they arrived. Fox thought it was an odd choice for a defensive position. Usually, rooms like this were towards the heart of a building – and based on Tertulli’s paranoia, Fox would have assumed that trend would hold true. This one was right along the front façade of the palace though, and had a huge window overlooking the city below.Or at least, what was left of it.A solid half of Tytos was in utter ruins, and there were six Gorasi flailing around and knocking down as many buildings as they could. Fox and Slippy stood and watched agape in horror.Fang’s brow furrowed. “It’s a slaughter.” He turned towards one of the walls and began to run his hands over it, trying to find the entrance to the passage. “We need to get out of here ASAP.”Fox felt Krystal’s arm rise, and she spoke up, though it took quite a bit of effort on her part. “Fox…” She pointed at something on the ground off to his side.He turned to look, and –“Oh my God.”Slippy and Fang looked up to see what he was talking about – the former gasped, and the latter cursed.The bashar lay dead on the ground, and the steward right beside him; both of them with relaxed smiles on their faces, their pools of blood mingling. The steward laid on his back with his hands together over the handle of a knife, the blade in his heart.“Is… was it a murder-suicide?” Slippy looked to be in disbelief.Fang shook his head. “It’s one less thing to worry about, is what it is. Saves me the time of hunting them down and taking them out myself.” He pushed a brick inward and the wall slid aside, revealing a spiral staircase that led down. “Alright, let’s go.”Slippy turned to follow him but Fox held up his hand. “Wait – something’s happening out there.”Fang stared at him like he was an alien. “Yeah, it’s called our impending death. Now let’s go.”Fox shook his head. “No. Look.”Slippy and Fang turned to look out the window, and at the sight of two Gorasi facing each other.“What are they doing?”, Slippy asked no one in particular.Fox didn’t know how he knew, but he just knew. The way the Gorasi were standing on their hind claws, the way the rest of the battle subsided around them to watch; he knew what was happening here.“It’s a duel. They’re going to fight each other.” ………. Wolf hovered as far back as he could, his teammates and Falco alongside him. The bedanti had made it very clear no one was to interfere. The Dance was sacrosanct.Rena’s Goras ripped off one of its own front claws with an agonized roar that caused the Arwing’s cockpit window to rattle; a green, viscous substance ferociously shooting from the self-inflicted wound. Before Wolf could even think on how impossibly stupid a move that was, Izaak’s Goras mirrored the action.They stood like that for a moment, their claws thrown aside and screaming at each other.Izaak’s moved first, not very fast but with plenty of strength to back it up. His Goras’ remaining front claw slammed down onto the shell of hers, causing it to buckle somewhat and fall lower to the ground.Rena turned this to her advantage by using her low position to grab at one of her opponent’s hind claws, enclosing it in a vice grip and pulling it towards her, causing Izaak’s to fall onto its back.As she went in to stab through its soft underbelly, however, he flipped his Goras right back up with a kick of a hind claw, and used the momentum of the flip to bring another heavy blow down on the other beast’s shell – causing a crack to appear.Rena’s roared in pain and started swinging its claw around wildly in a frenzy, only half of its hits making contact with Izaak’s, and only half of those causing it to flinch.Izaak’s managed to grab the flailing front claw with its own, and began to pull her towards it for the kill.Rena was pulled in with seemingly no resistance on her part – she was letting her Goras be dragged in. Izaak was obviously unaware of this, as he continued to pull her towards him.As soon as she was within close striking distance, her Goras’ claw plunged itself deep into the others’ underbelly, eliciting a scream so loud Wolf’s teeth chattered. It removed the claw just as swiftly as it plunged it in, causing a jet of the green fluid to pour from the wounded underbelly. She capitalized on its injury by grasping its front claw with her own, right at the socket, and pulled on it with all the beast’s might.She ripped its other front claw clean off, causing Izaak’s Goras to buckle and fall.Rena’s Goras stood there, its claw holding the other aloft, and it let out a loud call. The remaining five Gorasi bowed to hers, and the bedanti forces on foot bowed their heads.“…Is it over?” Falco sounded unsure.Wolf saw an incoming comm from the palace on his HUD – it was Fox’s callsign.He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, watching Rena’s Goras swing its opponent’s denuded claw around in victory.“Yeah.”He looked at the ruins of half the city, and of the remaining population tentatively beginning to come outside, hoping the violence was over. He turned his gaze upward to see a small fleet of Cornerian ships approach the planet’s surface, framed by the sun.“It’s over.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
XIII Fox sat down on the bench and rested his head against the wall as the Cornerian troops passed by. They nodded at him, and he nodded back.He was exhausted. The battle was over, but he didn’t even want to begin thinking about how much work there still was to be done: search-and-recovery for civilians, criminal charges for Tertulli’s people, rebuilding a good chunk the city’s infrastructure.That wasn’t even getting into the issue of leadership – the bashar had left no issue, and no one was really sure who was in charge. For now, the captain of the Cornerian squadron Peppy sent was de facto acting commander.He felt blessed that he didn’t have to worry about any of this since it wasn’t his job – and then immediately felt guilty for thinking that.But realistically speaking, what could he do? His expertise was in military engagements, not in reconstruction efforts.And certainly not in subterfuge, as this mission had woefully proven. They still didn’t understand why the steward killed Tertulli and then himself. He was nothing if not an enigmatic individual, and Fox guessed it would probably always be a mystery.As for the rest of the bashar’s fortress: Cornerian forces had already sniffed out and confiscated everything from stashes of illicit drugs to high-level hacking materials – they even uncovered a handful of nuclear warheads (those had raised more than a few eyebrows – apparently even the LCI was caught flat-footed by that one).He felt unsettled as his thoughts drifted back to Lylat Intelligence and their role in all of this. Fang, or Gerald, or whatever his name really was, was still reticent to share anything about what the LCI was really doing here. Luckily, Slippy had clued him in to the fact that they were using Tertulli as an inside-man to infiltrate a greater criminal network… and were also trying to procure a Goras for Corneria’s own use on the side – secretly, of course.It wasn’t that Fox was offended by either of those goals (though he imagined Krystal was livid about the second one) as much as he was offended by the fact the LCI felt it wasn’t safe to clue them in. To clue Peppy in. If the Cornerian military was divided to the extent that they could have secret operations running that directly counteracted each other, what would they do if something more serious happened? It brought his thoughts back to his conversation with Peppy before they’d embarked on this whole Titania debacle, about how – since Pepper’s departure – there was growing fractionalization in the Cornerian leadership.He knew worrying over this right now wasn’t going to get him anywhere. It was all too fresh – too raw. So he stood back up and started heading for the guest quarters. Krystal should have been waking up about now, recuperating from another bout of Goras-exposure.Thinking about the Gorasi and their riders brought a wrinkle to his brow.No one really seemed to know what, if anything, to do about the bedanti. The ones taking orders from that deceased lion warrior had wreaked havoc on Tytos. There was no proper death toll yet, but Fox knew it was going to be bad, and almost all of it was made up of random citizens who had the misfortune of living under Tertulli’s thumb. Were the bedanti liable for war crimes under Lylatian law? Titania was only a part of the Protectorate, not a voting member in the House – the sand-soaked world didn’t even have a planetary government to vote. Whether or not the individual city-states were subject to Cornerian law was a grey area to begin with; so what did that mean for a separate culture that didn’t consider itself part of Lylat at all?Regardless of the finer details, the captain of the Cornerian forces ordered the bedanti to stand down and retreat from the city – but it wound up being a largely vapid gesture on his part as the bedanti were already departing before he gave the order. All Fox knew at this point was that Rena somehow wound up in charge of the bedanti… and that Wolf had been involved with her ascendancy to that position, and therefore the sparing of so much of the city by proxy.He needed to talk to Wolf about that.He needed to talk to him about a lot of things.But not quite yet, he thought, as he passed the Cornerian guards flanking the entrance to the guest quarters and made his way inside. Falco and Slippy turned to look at him, and Krystal stirred from her relaxed position on the couch to look too.She smiled cautiously, and Fox smiled back. ………. “…You don’t have me to thank for anything.” And she really didn’t – Wolf wasn’t sure why she insisted on the opposite being true.Rena initially ignored his comment. What few bedanti remained were packing up for the journey home, wherever it might be for them.When she spoke again, it was quiet enough that he had to swivel his ears to properly hear her. “If you had not spoken to me, that night at the encampment…” she trailed off, her eyes gazing somewhere into the distance – though Wolf guessed they were really gazing back into the past. “…I would have let Izaak do what he would. I may have even fought with the rest of them.” She turned back to him and made eye contact, just as fiercely as she did on the night she was alluding to. “The city would have been completely destroyed, and the bedanti would be at war with all of Titania.”Wolf frowned. “You still might wind up at war anyway. There’s no telling what the other cities are going to do.”She smiled cautiously. Wolf had only seen the expression twice now – it saddened him that he didn’t see it more often. No one her age should have to be a warrior; he could say so from experience.“I do not think they’ll attack us, not with Corneria occupying Tytos”, she said calmly. “Corneria will bring peace… of a sort.”“For now.” Wolf couldn’t occupy any other role than the skeptic when it came to affairs of politics and government.Rena only nodded at him. “Yes. For now.”He broke eye contact to watch the subdued spectacle set out before them. The Gorasi were retreating back beneath the sands under the auspices of their bedanti riders, to sleep under the smothering blanket of the desert until called forth once more.Hopefully that won’t be any time in the near future, he thought.An indicator light popped up on the HUD of his cybernetic eye, indicating he had an incoming comm message. He excused himself from the conversation with Rena and responded.“What’s up?”“The last of the bashar’s hired guns have been captured; things are wrapping up here”, Panther’s smooth voice stated across the line. “And Fox is wondering where you are.”Wolf chuckled. “He’s probably looking for his Arwing.”Panther paused for just a beat. “Perhaps.”Wolf thought that one word carried a lot of unasked questions. Panther was always too damn perceptive for his own good.“Is that the captain?”, he heard a high-pitched voice ask from somewhere in Panther’s vicinity. “Tell him to get here so we can finally get paid! And also hi!”Panther grumbled into the line, and Wolf smiled.“Tell Fox I’ll be there shortly – Fay too, while you’re at it. I’m just wrapping things up with the bedanti.”“Understood.”He heard the line click off from the other end and sighed.“So, you are being paid by Star Fox too, then?”He turned his attention back to Rena, who was watching him curiously. “You overheard that?”She smiled a mischievous smile – now this was one Wolf hadn’t seen before. “I overhear many things. A good bedanti has ears everywhere, you understand.”He fought the urge to roll his eyes. “I don’t, but I’ll take your word for it.” He shoved his comm-device back into his pocket. “Now, about our payment…”She raised a paw and interrupted him. “Fear not, you will have your money once I retrieve it from the qitnah.”He shot her a lopsided smile. “Well that’s nice – but I was about to say you should keep it.”Her smile dropped, and she gave him an appraising look. “Are… are you sure?”Wolf folded his arms. “I know you were bluffing about how money is ‘nothing’ to you.” He actually didn’t know that for sure, but the way her ears shot up confirmed it. “Oh sure, you don’t live lives dictated by money, it’s not important to you culturally – but that was a hefty sum of gold you gave me. I’ve seen your qitnah. I’m not buying the whole ‘noble savages with tons of gold’ schtick. That bag you gave us was a big chunk of your people’s holdings, wasn’t it?”He didn’t miss the way her claws were gripped into her palms almost tight enough to draw blood. “…We had an agreement”, she muttered. “I would not renege.”He dropped his arms and sighed. “Look – don’t get me wrong – I want to get paid that other half. But I’m not going to bankrupt you for it.” He watched as the last Goras sunk below the dunes, the sight strangely somber to his eyes. “…Star Wolf technically didn’t stop the raiders anyway, at least not alone. So consider us even.”She didn’t say anything for a little while. When he finally turned to look at her, the lynx’s smile was so genuine, so open, that it made Wolf uncomfortable to look at – as if by looking, he’d bespoil it.“You have changed since you came here, Mercenary Wolf.” She held out her right paw. “I wish you luck.”He stared at the proffered paw like it was rigged to explode. “You’re not going to make me stab myself before we shake again?”She chuckled. “We are not in the qitnah, Mercenary.”Wolf stared at it for another moment before he brought his own paw to grip hers – at first warily, and then firmly.He continued to stare as she turned and walked away, the color of her cloak nearly melting into the desert sand. The angle of the evening sun cast elongated shadows over the dunes; and as the bedanti marched away, they seemed to tower taller than any Goras. ………. Fox watched his own Arwing approach from an external balcony on the top floor of the Eish-da-Tertulli. He’d managed to convince the Cornerian guards that, no, he would be fine by himself.The moonlight glinted off the approaching craft, emboldening the blue hues of its fuselages and illuminating the silver portions with a mirror shine. It circled around the palace a few times before landing on the roof. It wasn’t technically a landing zone in the proper sense – but since when did Wolf ever do things the proper way?Fox sighed even as he smiled. He climbed up the elegant, white metal stairway that led to the roof, idly wondering how old they were as he took each step – how old the entire building was. Slippy told him the Tertulli family went back centuries.And it had ignobly ended only a few hours prior.He shook his head to chase off the thoughts about mortality as he approached his Arwing. Its engines cooled, and finally shut off; and Wolf emerged from the cockpit. “I didn’t damage it any more than it already was when you lent it to me. I promise.”Fox chuckled. “I believe you.”Wolf jumped down from the ship and stared at him expectantly. “And…?”“And… what?”The lupine gave him a withering look. “What about my ship?”Fox smiled disbelievingly, partially relieved. For a second, he thought Wolf was about to jump another topic on him entirely. “Your Wolfen’s fine, no damage at all. It’s parked in the courtyard.”“Good.” Wolf folded his arms. “Now what about us?”And there it is, Fox thought. He should’ve known Wolf wouldn’t be able to wait for a more appropriate time. He never hesitated, after all.“You do realize we’re standing on the fortress of a dead warlord overlooking a partially-destroyed city, and one of my teammates is in the Great Fox’s sickbay, right?” Falco and Slippy had departed with Krystal an hour ago, and were still waiting for him in orbit.Wolf scoffed. “Yeah, so just another Tuesday.”Fox laughed half-exasperatedly. “What do you think Star Fox does most of the time? Because I can promise you, it isn’t this.” His laughter subsided, and a strange sense of emptiness took its place.“Hey.”He looked up to see Wolf fixing him with a steady gaze, his eye glimmering violet in the moonlight. “You alright?”Fox felt himself deflate a bit. “I will be.” He broke eye contact and walked over to the edge of the roof, looking out at the ruined city again. “Not yet, though.”He felt a strong paw grasp his shoulder. “It was a rough mission, wasn’t it?”Still not looking back at him, Fox smiled sadly. “Yeah.”Wolf paused. “But it was successful… right?”Fox took in the wreckage. There were so many broken buildings, broken homes. “If it doesn’t feel like a success, does it matter?”He heard Wolf open his mouth as if he was about to say something, then close it again. He removed his paw from Fox’s shoulder, but before the vulpine could protest it grasped around his side instead, pulling him in.They stood in silence like that for a moment before Wolf spoke up again. “At least the bashar’s dead, right?”Fox snorted. “Yeah, no thanks to us.” He thought on it for a second. “And I don’t think the LCI wanted him dead to begin with.”Wolf’s brow furrowed, and he turned to face Fox. “The LCI?”Fox sighed – he forgot Wolf wasn’t party to that bit of the escapade. “It’s a long story.”The lupine hummed thoughtfully and squeezed Fox tighter. “In that case, you can tell me when we go out.”Fox went stiff in Wolf’s arm – and the latter noticed, though he didn’t pull back. “When? Not ‘if’?”“Oh no. You owe me after all this shit”, he grumbled.Fox turned to give him a disbelieving look. “I paid you to help with ‘all this shit’, if you recall.”Wolf shook his head. “Still doesn’t cover it. You owe more.”Fox lowered his head, but he was smiling. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”“Well”, Wolf said with something like hunger in his voice, “that’s what people tell me after I bang them, anyway.”Fox started to feel a boiling pot of warmth in his abdomen, and he decisively put some space between him and Wolf, to the lupine’s obvious disappointment. “If we’re going to make anything out of… whatever this is, we’re going to have to lay down some guidelines.”Wolf stared at him. “Such as?”The vulpine took a deep breath and let it out, willing his anxiety to wash over him and away. “Well, for one: what are we to each other? As of right now, I mean”, he clarified before Wolf had a chance to speak up. “Are we friends? Rivals?”“Fuckbuddies?”, Wolf unhelpfully shot out.Fox frowned at him. “That was one time, I’d been drinking, and it hardly counted as ‘fucking’.”Wolf laughed in his face. “You were ‘drinking’? What is that, some kind of joke? You had like a quarter of a glass the whole time I was there.” He continued to snicker. “Christ, pup – if you think that’s drinking, just wait till you see what I get up to.”Fox couldn’t debate that – he knew he’d brought up the alcohol part as a cheap attempt at rationalization even as it left his mouth. “Even so, I wasn’t… I wasn’t fully myself.”“Oh, so you’re saying it’s not normal for you to get handies from your old rivals?” Wolf adopted an air of exaggerated relief. “That’s good to know; I was worried I’d be getting competition from Leon, or Oikonny or something.”Fox couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of him and – “Oh my God, what is wrong with you?”Wolf shot him one of his trademark grins. “I shared a flat with Oikonny back in my early days with the Venomian Navy, and he’d bring girls back sometimes. He was a very vocal lover, really into loud dirty-talk. Can you picture a barrage of the filthiest shit possible coming from someone with as squeaky a voice as Oikonny’s? Because no matter what I do, I can never forget. That’s what’s wrong with me.”Fox laughed, and felt bad for laughing. He didn’t like to make fun of other people on principle. “Oh God, that’s horrifying.”Wolf joined in his laughter for a few seconds, but as it started to dissipate Fox found himself with another question. “You were in the Venomian Navy? I didn’t know that.”The lupine’s grin was different, now. It held a certain aura of something Fox couldn’t quite pin down. Dangerous, yes – inaccessible too. But mysterious. It was like gazing into the open starfield of space; Fox always felt the pull in the back of his mind to venture off into that unknown. He felt that same pull with Wolf.“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me. That’s part of why we should go out on a date.”Fox was finding it harder to disagree with him. “What do we tell our teammates?”Wolf shrugged. “We don’t have to tell them anything. That way, if things don’t work out, and it turns out we don’t have anything more than the hots for each other, there’s no awkward convo with the unit afterwards.” Fox found himself nodding along until Wolf added an addendum. “Then we can continue to meet as fuckbuddies without the romance part anyway.”The vulpine sighed. “You have a one-track mind, you know that?”Wolf snickered. “It’s one of the few things in this life I do know. But hey, at least I know myself: how many people can say the same?”Fox wasn’t sure how to answer, least of all because he was firmly in that camp. He responded with a question instead. “When and where?”Wolf gave him a mock-confused stare. “When and where, what?”The vulpine wanted the throw his paws in the air. “We’re not doing this again. You know exactly what I mean.”Wolf raised his paws in a placating gesture. “Fine, fine, be a killjoy.” His countenance turned thoughtful. “How about next week? Noon on Saturday work?”Fox nodded once. “Yeah. Noon on Saturday works.” He couldn’t believe he was doing this.Wolf grunted in response; Fox supposed that was a sign he was happy. “As for the ‘where’, I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”Fox had to reframe his mode of thought to answer the question. As a rule, he never wanted to go anywhere – he was assigned to go places. When he was with Krystal, she chose the locations for their dates. He tried to think of somewhere he’d been happy – not somewhere he went with Krystal though, God no.“Uhh…” He racked his brain to come up with somewhere. “Have you ever been to Tlachtsiy?”“Gesundheit.”He ignored Wolf’s lame joke. “It’s on Katina.”Wolf shook his head. “Can’t say that I have, but I also can’t say that I haven’t. I don’t bother remembering the names of places on Katina because I can never pronounce them. So it’s possible I’ve been there and don’t know that I have.”Fox couldn’t hide his chagrin. “How cultured of you.”“Hey”, Wolf shot back. “no one hires a merc for their refinement – they hire us to shoot things.”“True.”They continued to stand there somewhat awkwardly for a moment. Fox broke the silence. “So should I send you to the coordinates to…?”“Sneezetown? Yeah, I’ll be there.”Fox smiled cautiously. He willed down the butterflies in his stomach – he was not going to react to this like a giddy schoolgirl. “Alright. Then it’s a date.” ………. Peppy sat the comm-device back on his desk, having finished skimming the report. He directed his gaze at the jackal seated before him. “You did well under the circumstances. I’m sure Hugin is pleased.”The agent looked remarkably at ease for someone meeting the highest authority in the Cornerian Navy. Peppy supposed that was probably normal for someone with his job. “Thank you, sir.”The old rabbit nodded. “Someone who puts the lives of their comrades over their mission objectives is someone I’d be willing to trust.”Agent ‘Gerald’ (Peppy was almost entirely certain that wasn’t his real name) chafed somewhat under his praise. The jackal had that brand of gruff demeanor that was a dime-a-dozen in the less respectable parts of the System. Peppy wondered if that was his natural disposition, or if he’d trained so hard to adopt that disposition he’d become lost in it.“With all due respect, sir”, the canine replied just respectfully enough, “I disagree. If anything, this proves I’m not fit for future missions of this type.”Peppy leaned back into his chair and steepled his paws. This was an unusual situation he was in: one he’d never faced before. Since he and Hugin had come to terms (of a sort), they agreed to brief each other on what the other was doing – and now Peppy found himself receiving a report from one of Hugin’s top agents. It used to be that they would report only to the head of the LCI himself; that was different now. Peppy was hopeful the difference would be beneficial in the long run.“Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree there”, Peppy said with that trademark comforting voice of his. “If Hugin gives you crap for it, you can always come work for me.”Gerald nodded carefully, and Peppy could tell he would never do anything of the sort. Once an agent, always an agent, he thought.“That wraps it up, I think”, the hare said. “You’re dismissed, agent.”Peppy stood up along with Gerald, and outstretched his paw. The agent looked caught off-guard for a second before he quickly regained his composure and shook it. Peppy watched after the jackal and smiled and the he left the room, letting it drop the instant the agent was out the door.He let out a long-suffering sigh as he fished out a bottle of scotch and a glass from his drawer. He grumbled under his breath as he poured himself a lonely drink, thinking about how much he had done, and how much more he still had to do.He’d already wired the payment to Star Fox, despite Hugin’s insistence that they not be paid for ‘bungling his mission’. Peppy supposed that was just going to have to be part of this new open communication between them: if he could disagree with Hugin and put pressure on him, there was no reason the raven couldn’t try to do the same. But Peppy had gotten his way in the end, and got Star Fox their payment.The Goras project was put on hold indefinitely after Star Fox’s report on the mission. When the prime minster read about the bioweapons in detail from a more unbiased source, he got cold feet. Peppy had breathed a sigh of relief when he’d heard that bit of news.But now they weren’t sure what to do about the Enclave with Tertulli out of the picture. Hugin was practically pulling his feathers out over it – and really, Peppy couldn’t blame him, being partially at fault for that himself.He thought on it as he drank, and he had an idea. A controversial idea, to be sure, but… why not, after all? It made sense.He almost paged Hugin then and there before he thought better of it – message the avian now and he’d lose out on this precious moment of relative relaxation.Instead he simply sat in his chair, glancing out the window of his office, and at the vista beyond. The sky was pregnant with rain – the sort of cloud cover that looked like it would burst into a storm at any time; and the sea matched its color. It made all the space outside his window look like one steely gray morass, accentuated by the slightly brighter shade of gray of the city’s buildings.He wondered when the storm would break.