“Okay, run your theory by me again.” Falco Lombardi paced the darkness of the bridge, one of his feathered arms now in a makeshift sling. “I’m just not buyin’ it.”
“Well, to put it in a basic way, I think the warp drive somehow jumped into warp without us.” Slippy Toad sat at the flight controls, a panel open before him, and the guts of the control console resting in his lap as he tinkered with it. “It must have taken the engine room with it, just sort of… yanked the whole area around it into warp with it and folded it off somewhere.”
“You think there’s a chance we can track it down? Maybe salvage the engines and get power back?”
“Slippy tinkered with the wiring in the control console. “No way. It has to be light years away from us by now. The hangar and life support are on their own power grid though, like the doors. We have a lot of supplies, maybe we can wait out repairs on the gate, and Corneria will send someone to check up on us.”
“We don’t have that kind of time.” Falco pointed out the viewing window of the bridge, at Katina, the only real source of lighting for them at the moment. “No power and no engines mean no thrusters. Our orbit will decay and Katina’ll pull us in. We’ll be dead before help ever arrives.”
“Oh… right.” Slippy sighed. “But, the Vissago is a big ship, right? We might be able to make a crash landing…”
“She won’t burn up completely, that’s for sure.” Falco rested his beak on his hand, considering the idea. “I dunno, maybe we could survive a crash if we had ROB back online to help us figure out our trajectory. We still need some kind of emergency power, or thrust to let us correct ourselves on the way in. It’s a start at least. How are we lookin’ on getting him back?”
“Five minutes, maybe.” The frog mulled over a circuit board and its wires. “I’m gonna tie the ship’s computer into the emergency power. After that, we’ll be pushing capacity, though, no more systems unless I take the door power off or something… This is my fault, isn’t it?” He sighed loudly.
“What?” Falco was disarmed by the sudden change in subject and mood.
“I was supposed to fix the engines, and I must have made a mistake. Now we’re all in trouble. I thought I fixed Krystal’s Arwing, but now she…” Slippy swallowed hard, and stared at the floor, on the verge of tears.
“Hey, now, wait a minute.” As de facto leader with Fox incapacitated, Falco needed his friend thinking straight. He patted the toad on the shoulder with his good hand, and tried his best at being reassuring. “That is NOT your fault, Slip. The Vissago’s a piece of crap, and you got it working with the tools we had on hand. It’s a wonder the ship even made it here, no matter how good you are. And Krystal… she, well…” He paused, still shocked at the idea that she’d died so suddenly. “Look, you can’t blame yourself. This isn’t the Great Fox. There’s no diagnostic equipment here, and there’s hardly anything to even work with. How can you even tell if you got it fixed if we didn’t take it out and fly it to see? It was an accident. You didn’t have anything to do with it. All of this is… really bad, yeah, but nobody’s to blame. I’m…” Falco strained to utter the word, “…sorry… for giving you a hard time about stuff. As far as I’m concerned you’re a miracle worker, Slippy, and I need your help to get us out of this, okay?”
The toad stared at the dark floors for a moment. He nodded, faintly. “Okay.”
“Good!” Falco patted his friend on the shoulder, kneeling down to his height and looking him in the eyes. “Now help me out here. We need to get this hunk of junk to move, even a little. Without the engines, how can we do that?” His voice was tinged with a hint of growing desperation.
“We’d have to push from outside somehow. If we attach some small source of thrust to the hull in just the right spot, we might be able to re-stabilize our orbit…”
“How about my Arwing? If we took the engines out and mounted them on the side of the Vissago, would that work?” Falco stood up, eying the looming planet, so far away, yet so large already.
“Yes!” Slippy shot up in his seat, a mechanical task was the perfect thing to take his mind off of everything else. He hopped out of his chair and resumed working on the wiring at a swift pace. “You’ll have to suit up for a spacewalk, we’ll need to manually attach them to the hull and wire them for remote control, but we can do it! Hangar is on its own power supply, so that means the loader arm might be running, too! If it’s not, I’ll splice it in to the power supply; it won’t take me too long to do.”
“Good!” Falco paced, rubbing the underside of his beak, the excitement returning to his voice for the first time since they’d left Corneria. “Yeah, that’s good! I’ll go start removing the engines, you check on that loader arm, and get ROB back online!” He was out the doors and on his way without another word.
… … …
Navigation by tripping over objects had proven painful, but fruitful. Fox McCloud staggered blindly into the hangar; he couldn’t see, but the change in the ambient light that filtered into his wounded eyes told him the room had power. He wasn’t sure where the Arwings were, but if he followed a refueling hose, he might find one. His bruised hands searched the floor where he knelt, taking what could only be one of the fuel lines and following it along the ground all the way to its end. Unfortunately, it ended in a nozzle on the ground, and not a ship. He raised the tip to his nose and sniffed, turning his head away in sudden disgust. At least now he knew it was a fuel hose, and recently used.
“Help… help me please!”
Fox rose to his feet at the sound of the vixen’s disembodied voice and instantly bashed his head against something large and unyielding directly above him. “Augh!” He crumpled to the ground, clutching his head and writhing from the sudden pain. This was hopeless! How could he find a ship if he couldn’t see anything? The hangar was huge and largely empty.
Largely empty, save for the Arwings…
Fox’s groans turned to weak laughter as he realized what he’d struck. Slowly he raised his hands and felt the smooth metal, the sharp angles… he rose and ran his hands along the smooth, bladelike wing. “Got it!” Literal blind luck had led him to the Arwing, or perhaps Krystal somehow had.
His blindness was no longer impairment once he sat down in the cockpit; he knew every dial, every switch, and every button inside, and exactly where they were. His fingers nimbly darted across the keypads and switches, searching for the small personal effects that identified it as his ship; instead, he found someone elses. “Sorry, Falco,” He sighed, “but I’m borrowing this!” Automation proved itself to be his ally, as the hangar systems loaded the ship into a launch gantry and prepped it for takeoff.
… … …
Falco had made it as far as the door to the hangar when he heard the roar of engines. The door refused to open for him; the pressure warning light above it was on, meaning the hangar’s launch systems were in action. “What’s goin’ on, here?!”
Unexpectedly, he received an answer from ROB, who had only just come online a moment before. A speaker beside the door crackled to life as the ceiling lights flickered back on. “The hangar is currently depressurized; entry is not possible.”
“What?” Falco banged on the door. “Who’s in there?!”
“Fox McCloud is taking off.”
“WHAT!?” Falco repeated himself. “How's that possible? He can’t see!” The blue bird raced to the viewing window and banged the glass in frustration. “He’s makin’ off with MY Arwing!!” The gantry ejected the small ship into space and it thrust out of sight.
“Aww, man…” Slowly, Falco stepped back and slid to a sitting position against the wall. “We’re dead.” He listened to the hiss of pressured air filling the hangar and it was only then that a new plan dawned in his mind. He remembered the pressurized plumes of smoke billowing from his friend’s cockpit after the crash. Fox’s Arwing.
Falco raced into the hangar the moment the door would unlock for him. The wrecked ship of his commander and friend was still there, in a broken heap. It would never fly again; a grim reminder of what happened only a few hours before. However, that didn’t mean it might not still have working parts. The feathers at the edges of his beak upturned slightly in a faint smile.
… … …
“All stop.” The hum of the Arwing’s engines faded away in Fox McCloud’s ears, as his borrowed fighter responded to his voice commands. He folded his hands in his lap and let the vessel drift on its own. He wanted desperately to save Krystal, to find her, help her, to prove to himself she wasn’t gone. He’d gotten this far, but now he had to think. Re-entry would be easy; the nimble fighter would handle the process itself if all went well, but he had to begin the process by pushing into the atmosphere, and he wasn’t sure exactly where Katina was in relation to him. Finding it without some sort of visual guidance would be almost impossible in this three-dimensional vastness.
“Son…” A male voice was in his ear, as clearly as if he were seated beside someone. It was alarming for a moment, but the voice was one he knew.
“Dad!?” It wasn’t possible, he knew. It was a hallucination, a side effect of the painkillers he’d been given in the medical bay. But he’d heard his father, no, seen him even, before, always when he needed help the most.
“Space may look silent and empty, son, but don’t let that fool you. It has a life all its own.”
These words were familiar, too… It was part of something his father had told him the day he first took him up into space, in the cockpit of his old starfighter. Fox recalled it vividly, and continued it for him. “It… has a rhythm and a flow, and everything’s moving; even if you can’t always see it.”
That day, his father showed him all the different visual overlays the ship could display. Bands of colorful radiation, swirls of invisible energies, all made known with the help of the computer. He remembered the childlike wonder he had as he stared out into the infinite vastness with his father, watching the overlaid filters give shape and color to the forces he’d never seen or comprehended until then.
“Even if you can’t see it, you can hear it. Space has a song, too.” His father showed him how to tune the sensors to detect things that couldn’t show up visually. They drifted high above the planet and listened to the waxing and waning chimes of the ship’s sensor picking up the planet’s strong gravity field again and again. They’d spent hours in the cockpit together that day; it was the day before the war broke out. It was the day before his father flew that fateful mission to the planet Venom and never came back.
Fox activated the gravity sensor in the Arwing. It was normally used to detect stealthy ships, or to warn against any dangerous small space-borne bodies that might otherwise be hard to see. The initial sound was a cacophony of tiny beeps; the debris field they had come to salvage contained enough sizable objects to confuse the sensor. Slowly, calmly, fox tuned the sensor up and down, until he only heard the directional ping of objects the size of his ship or larger.
A faint chorus of soft tones; it could only be the debris field.
A stronger, single tone; this was the Vissago, in orbit.
A deep, loud tone that warbled between pitches as the scanner slowly passed over it; this was Katina.
He let the scanner pass by several times, listening to the tones, mapping the area out in his mind. After he was satisfied, he turned the sensors off, and set a course he knew would bring him in to the atmosphere. His ears had guided him through the vast silence of space. He would go to Katina, and he would find Krystal, and bring her home. She would not disappear forever, like his father. The whole universe had vanished when he lost his eyesight, maybe forever. This tragedy was one he could accept, but Krystal was coming back.
With the engines and Krystal gone, Falco and Slippy must work together to prevent the destruction of their crippled vessel as Fox must out-think his newfound disability if he is going to search for Krystal.
(Fox McCloud and related characters are the property of Nintendo. Thumbnail icon graciously made by
....I'm just speechless. Every chapter you make is just....perfect. All I can do is watch from the sidelines, for I know one day, I shall be writing stories even better....or at least, that's what my confidence tells me. Hehe!
....I'm just speechless. Every chapter you make is just....perfect. All I can do is watch from the s
