[b][u][center]The Lylat Wars XXX
Part 15
Sponsored by GlynWolf
By Draconicon[/center][/u][/b]








Fox and the others stood out like a sore thumb at the gathering of High Command at headquarters. Unlike the local pilots, all dressed up in fancy flight-suits that were lined with breathing tubes and other higher-tech devices, he and the rest of his team were dressed in rough suits with jackets. Not much to look at, any of them, but he could pretend that didn’t matter. Most of the time. 

Until Bill looked his way. 

The first time it happened was when they walked in with some of the other local pilots and officers. The gray-furred bulldog glanced at him from the front of the meeting room. Their eyes met for half a second, and Fox felt every bit of grubbiness on him, every bit of sweat, every bit of everything below the ‘acceptable line’ for an officer. No shower after sex with Slippy, no chance to get clean before coming here, no chance to get his head on straight after what his copilot had said after they fucked, and it meant that he was as self-conscious as he’d ever been. 

“C’mon, Fox,” Falco grunted, nudging him from behind. 

“Yeah, yeah.”

There wasn’t much space. It was like all the officers and squadron commanders and XOs had been brought in for the meeting. No surprise; from the air raid sirens sounding off and everyone feeling the tension in the air, he was amazed that the rest of the pilots weren’t crowding the doors and trying to get an ear in themselves. It was kind of a miracle that he and the rest of his team were let in, honestly. 

They found a spot somewhere near the middle of the room, pressed against the wall. Peppy took the rear, Slippy the front, and Fox and Falco stood in the middle of their little group. Elbows out kept the rest of the Katina pilots from getting too close or shoving them out of the way. 

[i]If it’s getting everyone called in, this is gonna be big,[/i] Fox thought as the last of the officers filed in. [i]Is it another push like the one on Corneria? Andross can’t have that many large forces left that aren’t pinned down…[/i]

He supposed he’d have to wait and find out. Looking over his shoulder at Peppy, Fox arched an eyebrow in silent query. The hare shrugged. No answers there, either. 

The doors shut. A moment of silence fell and Fox had to squeeze himself all the tighter to keep from asking questions to fill the space. One second, two, three – 

A hologram projector came to life. The room filled with blue light as General Pepper’s face filled the front of the stage. The pilots at the front of the room turned the same hue from the brightness of it all, and some had to shield their eyes from it. The rest of the room was a gradient of blue to black, with faces disappearing toward the back of the room. Fox shook his head as the bloodhound officer looked back and forth as if he could really see them; he knew from experience that the general would be seeing maybe the first rank, if that. 

“Alright, men, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. We got a serious problem coming your way. Katina’s gonna see the main wave of the enemy’s new offensive in three and a half hours. The outriders for the assault are going to be there in three. 

“The enemy has a brand new machine for this fight. We haven’t had a chance to get much from the scientists, but reports say that this one can keep churning out fighters like an airborne factory. Until you take down this mothership, there’s going to be an endless wave of fighters raining down on you. 

“The one upside we can tell you is that they don’t have any ground forces for this assault. Andross must be sending this out as an experiment to see if it works well enough for mass-production.”

“Or to get air superiority for a land invasion later,” Fox muttered. 

“We won’t be able to get any back-up to you for the next forty-eight hours. If you can hold that long, we can divert half of the main battle fleet your way, as well as more supplies. Hold out for two days, and we’ll be able to rescue you.”

“Nice plan, General, but what if we can’t hold out that long?” Bill asked. 

Fox was honestly surprised that the bulldog was questioning the general. The Bill that he had known at the Academy would have fallen in line and just gone with the orders as writ. 

The bloodhound’s head turned toward the bulldog in the front row. 

“Bill Grey, right?”

“That’s correct, sir,” Bill said. 

“How many men do you have ready to fight?”

“Hundred-twenty ready to take to the air.”

“The enemy’s coming in with a starting fleet of six-hundred-plus starfighters, and there are more being produced every minute. That’s a fight of five-to-one odds.”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“The best tactical approach you can take is to hunker down and wait. You’ve got hardened bunkers for personnel; send them there.”

“That’s not going to last forever, General, and that’s with the assumption that you can actually get here in forty-eight hours. I don’t want to have my men pinned down and waiting for something that might or might not make it here.”

“Commander Grey, I am ordering you to –”

“He’s got a hundred twenty-four, General.”

Fox hadn’t realized that he’d spoken up until after the words had left his mouth, and by then, it was well and truly too late to take them back. All eyes turned to him and his team, and he forced a chuckle that he didn’t really feel. 

“Katina’s got my team here, too.”

“Fox? When did you –”

“General. I’m going to have to side with Bill on this one. If there’s a fleet bearing down on us – one that got this close before we got any warning – then that means there’s a real chance that Andross has something else to keep the rest of the fleet tied up so that you can’t help us with this. Either we take this out now, or we get ready to lose a lot of people.”

“Fox is right, General,” Peppy said, nodding around Fox’s shoulder. “Besides, if what you’re saying is right, then you’re gonna have the mother of all hornets’ nests to kick when you get here. You really wanna fight through that when we can trim it down before you get here?”

“…Official orders are still to hunker down and wait for rescue…but, heh, not that I can stop you from off-planet,” General Pepper said, shaking his head. “I’ll leave it up to you. I’ve done what I can.”

The hologram shut down. The room erupted in chatter, pilots talking to each other, XOs and squadron commanders calling out to one another from different parts of the room, and more. Every officer had an opinion of how they were going to have to run this, and Fox groaned as he looked away. 

“Well, I didn’t think we’d be fighting again this fast, but you ain’t wrong, Fox,” Falco muttered, shaking his head. “I don’t like the odds against a ship that can pump out more baddies for every one we shoot down.”

“Same,” Fox muttered. “And the odds are going to get worse and worse the longer it takes to get the fight started. Slippy, any thoughts?”

“W-well, it’s n-not as b-b-bad as it s-sounds,” the frog said. “Anything that b-b-big is going to suck a lot of p-power, and that means that they’re g-g-gonna be low on f-fuel when they get here. A-and there’s another thing.”

“Please let it be good news.”

“Yeah. It is. Something p-pumping out ships like that isn’t g-g-going to b-be making g-good ones. They’ll be fragile. All numbers.”

That wasn’t much of a good thing, but it was better than the alternative. It would be one thing if it was 124 fighters up against 600 ones of the same quality. But if it was 124 against 600 that were barely half the design, with less armor and less shields…

Well, there was a chance. Provided the pilots here were good. And with Bill in charge, he was pretty sure that they were. 

He looked back at the bulldog. This time, Bill looked back for a bit longer. Less judgmental, more curious. There was something else there, something that he missed from the academy. 

Respect. 

It made him feel a little better, at least. Not much better, but better. 

“Excuse me,” he muttered. 

Dodging through the other officers, he made his way to the front. Bill either had the same idea or was ready to meet him, because the bulldog did the same, making his way from the front row to the side aisles. They met halfway between, the taller canine shaking his head as he waved Fox off to the side.

“Didn’t expect that kind of back-up from you, Fox,” Bill said. 

“Well, I wasn’t going to leave you hanging.”

“Anymore?”

“Anymore,” he said, shaking his head. “Bill – let’s leave the academy shit behind us until after the fight, okay?”

“Took the words right out of my mouth. You can still fly?”

“Better than you.”

“Now that, I have to see.”

“Oh, you will.” 

They had a short, shared smile before it faded. Bill looked back at the gathered pilots first, and Fox joined him a second later. He saw who his friend looked at, who got the sympathetic glance, and who got the wince that meant the big guy was sure that someone was gonna die in the upcoming fight. 

“Slippy says we got a chance,” he said. “Might have a lot of numbers, but they won’t be built well.”

“You think that he’s right?”

“I think he’s got a pretty good chance of being right. He’s reading these journals all the time, keeping up to date with all the science. And he’s got Beltino shouting in his ear every night about all the stuff that they’re discovering.”

“Yeah, well, Andross is ahead of them on the science front. Always has been.”

“But not as much as he wants people to think,” Fox said, shaking his head. “If there was even a chance of making something good, Slippy would know about it. Hell, he would have yapped my ear off weeks ago if anyone had even been theorizing about it.”

“I hope you’re right, Fox. I hope you’re right.”

“…There’s something else, isn’t there? Something that Pepper wasn’t telling everyone?”

“…Something that we’ve been hearing.”

“What is it?”

“Classified,” Bill muttered. 

“Bullshit. You have good pilots, but you know my team’s going to need to handle the big stuff.”

“You looking down on my people?”

“I’m saying, do you really want someone like me and Peppy caught off-guard because you thought we couldn’t handle it?”

“…Fair.” Bill shook his head. “We’ve got reports that there’s a merc team working for Andross. Good ones, too.”

“Got a name?”

“Not yet. But they’re supposed to be in the area. They’d hit Fichina, last we heard; blew up an outpost out there and damaged most of the Cornerian depot on the planet. The whole place went dark.”

Fichina. It took a minute to remember where that was. Other side of the Meteo belt, where they would have ended up if they hadn’t taken the portals through to Katina. He kept the shock off his face, or at least, he hoped he did. Bill didn’t react, at the very least. 

[i]We could have been there…and fought…or maybe died…[/i]

He didn’t know what would have happened. Maybe they could have helped, maybe not. Either way, it didn’t matter now. He had to keep his thoughts in the moment, not off in the ether. 

“Well, if they show up, let me know. Me and the team will hit them.”

“I’m more concerned about the mothership.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“You think that your Arwings have the firepower to take it down?”

“Maybe, maybe not, but I think I know something that does.”

Bill arched an eyebrow. Fox chuckled. 

“You didn’t think we came here in just those dinky things, do you?”

#

Ten minutes before the scouts were due to arrive, the pilots took off. Fox and the rest of his team were last off the ground, but with their engines, they caught up with Bill and his pilots with ease. They rolled and circled around the main group as they went up in the atmosphere, putting a couple thousand feet between them and the planet’s surface. 

“[i]Careful with the tricks over there, Fox; this isn’t zero grav,[/i]” Bill said over the communicator. 

“Don’t worry about me. Just getting a feel for Katina’s grav.”

“[i]Yeah, it’s a little heavier than Corneria. One reason why we want to blast everything clear before it falls too far.[/i]”

Fox nodded. That had been part of the briefing, too: anything that got shot needed to be obliterated. Not just damaged to fall, but obliterated. Without that extra step, anything shot down would be pulled down harder and faster with Katina’s gravity, and that could lead to catastrophic damage to anything that got hit. 

They reached the lower part of the atmosphere in short order, their engines dulling and hover-capability kicking in. Fox and Falco swerved around to either side of the rest of the main squadron, while Peppy and Slippy ducked under the group to keep their noses pointed toward the horizon rather than space. Fox tapped his screen, linking his ship-scanner with everything that the Great Fox could pick up from orbit. 

“Alright, everyone, keep your eyes peeled. We’re going to see them any second,” Fox said. “Second someone sees anything, I wanna hear about it.”

“Got it, sonny.”

“Yeah, yeah, get off my back, Fox.”

“G-got it.”

The rest of the chatter was quieter. The team’s communication channels were set up on a priority list. Bill had top billing, then Fox, and then the rest of his squad, and then the rest of the unit. Everyone could hear each other, and everyone was tied in to make sure that they could hear the tactics being passed down to the rest of the group. 

Just because they were operating semi-independently didn’t mean that they could afford to be completely cut off from what their allies were doing. 

Fox took a few deep breaths, keeping an eye on the radar while scanning the skies himself. With the scouts due in just a couple minutes, they should have seen something by now. Even if it was just a hint, one or two on the edge of the scanners, someone should have slipped up and popped onto the radar by now. 

Why was there nothing?

Why was the whole thing clean?

“Slippy.”

“Yeah?”

“When you said that they were made cheap…how cheap?”

“Uh…why do you ask?”

“Cheap enough that they might not show on scans?”

“…Oh. [i]Oh.[/i]”

“Slippy?”

“That…yeah, that might be possible.”

“Shit – eyes only, everyone, look around – anyone see anything?!”

“Hey, sonny, think I got something. But, uh, it looks like…it looks like a flying tree on my scopes.”

“Go for it.”

Peppy broke formation with the others, darting down. Fox gritted his teeth and shook his head. If that one was already under the atmosphere – if it had already gotten past them – 

“It’s a ship, Fox!”

“Everyone after Peppy! Change your scanners for timber.” Fox flipped switch to speak ‘up’ at Bill. “Bill, they’re not showing on scanners. They’re made of wood. They’re made of fucking wood!”

“What? That’s –”

Some of the clouds broke, and suddenly they had visual contact. Six hundred, eight hundred, a thousand ships were spinning and spiraling around a disk-shaped central craft, all humming and snarling with the wind whipping around their ships. Even at a distance, he could see that they were made piss-poor, chunks of wood that were wrapped around an engine and kicked out, each of them armed with a single laser cannon and no more. 

But that’d be enough if they were just dropped like bombs from this height.

“See?!”

“Bulldog unit, attack!”

They surged forward. Bill and his unit went high, Fox, Falco, and Slippy went low. Slippy was shouting all kinds of nerd-speak through the chatter-box while Falco was already counting kills. 

Fox shut them all out. Time to focus on flying. Everything else could wait. 

He kicked the g-diffuser into high gear, engines roaring behind him as he cut across the distance between them. Overshooting Bill and Bulldog unit, he spun through the laser blasts, rolling through them and sending the lasers spiraling and spinning all around his craft. The enemy ships were starting to turn to face him, but too late. He brought the nose of his ship up, pulled the trigger for a bomb, and loosed. 

The sparkling white dog shot out from the front of his ship for a few hundred meters before hitting one of the fighter-craft. The world went quiet – 

BWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

And then exploded as the bomb went off. The shockwaves knocked a few dozen starships off-course and vaporized at least a dozen near the core of the blast. The others were already starting to fall, drifting downward in straight lines. 

“Bombs away!” Fox ordered. “Fire as many as you can before Bulldog unit gets close!”

“Firing!” 

“F-firing!”

Four more bombs exploded into the ranks of fighters around him. Fox let loose one more of his own, aimed right for the mothership before pulling up. Red blasts chased him as he pulled away, spinning around as he turned and gunning the engine once more. 

Spang-clang-thunk. 

One of the blasts got through his shield, but it didn’t do any serious damage. Fox shook his head as he pushed back the urge to leap right back into the fight. Not again, not like Corneria. 

[i]Be better. Don’t fuck up. Don’t fuck this up.[/i]

Slippy said – 

[i]Don’t think about Slippy. Don’t think about all the other shit. Just think about flying.[/i]

Because that was one thing he was good at. 

The bombs had destroyed over fifty of the fighter-craft, maybe as much as a hundred, but that was only a tenth of what the mothership had to offer. Fox spun around again as his adjusted scanners picked up his pursuers, leading them around. Bulldog unit was overhead, but – 

“Left 30, Fox!” 

“Confirmed, Bill!”

Fox yanked the stick left. The ships turned to follow – 

And there was Bill, screaming in with a ship five years older than Fox’s and lasers blasting. The six on his tail burned up in seconds, and Fox finished the turn, rolling to come up alongside the bulldog’s ship. 

“Nice shot.”

“Don’t expect me to keep saving you, heh,” Bill said. 

“Speaking of saving, how long until I save your ass?”

“Fat chance –”

“On your six.”

Fox jammed the retro-thrusters hard. His Arwing dipped a hundred meters over the course of a few seconds, but the dozen-plus ships behind him and Bill roared into the space he’d just vacated. Bill yelped over the intercom, throwing his ship into evasive maneuvers. 

“You couldn’t have warned me about that!?”

“Just keep ‘em busy for a couple of seconds.”

“Yeah, and I’ll give you the crown of Corneria in a few more. Want anything else impossible?”

Fox rolled his eyes, adjusting the stick in one hand and tapping a few buttons with the other. He gunned the engine, coming up behind the ships following Bill. A second later, he pulled the trigger. 

The ship rocked. One, two, three ships went down in as many shots. The others started to take notice of him – four-five-six. The others scattered – seven-eight, rapid-fire. The rest fled, getting air or falling lower. 

Fox came up alongside Bill again, chuckling. 

“Fat chance, huh?”

“Bastard, heh.”

“You ready to get some kills?”

“You know it. Let’s take it to ‘em.”

#

Thirty minutes later, the fight had gone from the atmosphere to barely five hundred feet over ground level. Fox and the others were still fighting, and the enemy fighter-count had dropped massively, but there were still three-hundred-ish fighters left. The mothership was still spewing them out at the rate of two or three a minute, an insanely fast production count. 

[i]How many did they lose in transit if they only had a thousand fighters when they arrived?[/i]

Even if the enemy’s fighters were fragile, mounting a cannon and engine on a hunk of wood still meant that you had a mobile gun platform. Shooting a wall of lasers into air didn’t mean you’d hit much, but anything coming close would sure as hell lose a lot before they got to the other side. 

“How we doing?” Fox muttered. 

“Hundred-sixteen for me,” Bill said. “You?”

THUNK! Fox rolled out of the way of a falling ship. 

“Hundred-twenty-three.”

“Dammit.”

“I think we’re good to call the game here, don’t you think?”

“Game? Fox, the hell you think this is?”

“You been following the scanner?”

“I – how long has it been overhead?!”

“Great Fox has been waiting,” Fox said, shaking his head. “Just wanted to get a lead in our little competition.”

“You fucking asshole.”

He could still hear the chuckle in Bill’s voice, but in all seriousness, the bigger ship had only been in position for the last sixty seconds. He’d only just noticed it; it was just happy coincidence that it coincided with him taking the lead. 

“Alright. Get your guys clear,” he said, shaking his head. “Gonna give that thing something to chase. Don’t want it coming down on anything important, right?”

“Right. Bulldog unit, retreat! Any direction but the city; don’t draw anything too close.”

“Alright, team. Soon as Bulldog’s clear, another bombing run, then over the top.”

As his team formed up on his six, Fox pulled the stick back. He soared up to a thousand feet, then brought the Arwing around. 

[i]Missed this,[/i] he thought, shaking his head as the four of them lined up. [i]Nah. Missed Bill. Missed when it was just that easy to slide into it like this…[/i]

It was easier to forget about all the bad stuff and just…fly…when he was with someone that he knew that well. Peppy was good, so was Falco, so was Slippy, but Bill…

Bill had been his first. And Bill still matched him in so many good ways. 

But Bill had to stay here. And he had to keep going. 

“On my mark. Mark!”

Four bombs. Four explosions. The mothership rattled but didn’t fall, its shields holding as Fox and the others flew over it. The massive disk turned, slowly rolling to follow them across the plains. Whoever was in charge had clearly figured out that they were the ones doing the most damage and wanted them gone. A hundred-some guns fired at them as they went over the top, and more kept turning to chase them as they flew in the other direction. 

“Slow ‘em down and keep weaving,” Peppy said. “Don’t wanna leave ‘em behind, you know.”

“Don’t tell me how to fly, Peppy. I know all about how to bait someone,” Falco muttered.

“Ain’t like dodging cops here, boy.”

“You worry about your own hide!”

Fox tuned it all out and focused on the stick between his fingers and the feeling of the ship around him. For the first time in too long, he left everything else behind. Him, the ship, the feeling of the Arwing thrumming all around him, and the clues that it gave him. A little twitch left, then right, then down, then right again. All just enough to look like the ship was barely missing him instead of shooting wide. 

It was almost peaceful, zen-like. He was completely connected to everything but the past, and it could not have felt better. 

A minute went by like that. Then another. And then a third. 

BOOM!

It was the orbital strike from the Great Fox that shattered it, and Fox gasped as he was flung forward by the shockwave. He grabbed the stick desperately as the mothership exploded behind them, barely able to pull himself up in time. A cloud of dust surrounded his ascent as he dragged himself out of a fall, and the rest of his team was scarcely better. 

“[b]Great Fox reporting. Target: Completely Annihilated.[/b]”

“Thanks, ROB,” Fox muttered, shaking his head. “Goddamn…”

“Holy f-f-fuck, that was…that was huge!” Slippy said, all but cheering through the comms. “Man, why don’t we d-do that more often?”

“Heh, that’ll put a crater in Andross’s army. They aren’t gonna be making any more of those things,” Falco said. 

“Looks like the other ships are going down, too,” Peppy said. “Scans show ‘em falling all over the place.”

“Thank god,” Fox muttered, shaking his head. 

As the battlefield settled down, he spotted Bill swinging over on the scanner. He sighed. Might as well talk to him. He flicked the comm up for a chat. 

“Everything good, Bill?”

“Good as we can hope. Minimal damage, and very low casualties. We got lucky; if you hadn’t picked up the wooden ships –”

“We got lucky. That’s it.”

They both knew what that meant. They couldn’t rely on luck. They had to get better. They shared a look over the comm, and eventually, Bill sighed. 

“Look. About what happened before –”

“I probably deserved it,” Fox admitted, shaking his head. “I mean, still fucking hurt, but I probably deserved it.”

“…Full of surprises, aren’t you?” Bill shook his head. “Look. It isn’t going to happen again. You know that, right?”

“Yes, yes, I get it. Bill, you don’t – you don’t have to keep telling me that, okay? I fucking get it.”

“…Sorry. You were…pretty bad at the academy.”

“Yeah, well, I’m still pretty bad now. Just…a different kind of bad, I guess. But you don’t have to worry about [i]that[/i].”

“Okay. Well…thanks again, Fox. You coming in?”

“Going to do another patrol, make sure that nothing came loose that we have to worry about. After that, we’ll come in.”

“Take care, Fox.”

“You too, Bill.”

The channel cut off, and he sighed, rubbing his forehead. It shouldn’t hurt that bad. It [i]really[/i] shouldn’t hurt that bad. 

“You good, Fox?” Peppy asked. 

“Yeah…yeah, I’m okay,” he lied. 

He watched the other ships fly back to their base. As soon as they were off the scanner and out of sight, he slowly tilted his ship back toward the burning wreckage of the mothership. Nothing was immediately visible on the scanner, but there was the chance that something had gotten flung off. Not to mention that there was a possibility that more than just the mothership had penetrated the atmosphere. Not a very high chance, since nothing else had attacked them yet, but it was something to be aware of. 

“Fan out and do a circle 5 kilometers out,” Fox said, setting a course for himself. “Make sure that you scan low, and make sure that you check for anything that’s higher-tech than local plant life. You spot anything, you call it out, and we all come running. We clear?”

“Crystal,” Slippy said. 

“I’ll shout, but I bet it’ll be one of you that need me,” Falco said. 

“Heh, you’re getting more like your father, Fox,” Peppy said. 

That almost broke him. He gripped the flight stick tighter, letting that wave of pain pass, and shook his head. 

“Tell me that when the mission’s done, Peppy. Alright. Everyone, let’s –”

SPANG!

Fox’s ship rocked from nose to tail. Everyone else gunned their engines and Fox was a hair behind as dozens more blasts rained down from above. 

“What the hell –”

“Can’t let you do that, Star Fox.”

It was a new voice…and yet, not. The same voice that had been there at the bar back on Corneria when he was recruiting. The same guy that had nudged him about working for another side. The same voice that had told him that maybe Corneria deserved this. 

[i]What…the…hell?[/i]









[b][u][center]The End[/center][/u][/b]

Summary: Fox and Co end up going through a briefing with the rest of Katina military command, and then help fight off some of Andross’s forces. 

Tags: No Sex, Flight, Fighting, Banter, Friend, Regret, Uh-Oh, Starfox 64, Fox McCloud, Peppy Hare, Falco Lombardi, Slippy Toad, Reference to Sex, Series,