I sing the praise of never-change with every single breath...

“Lombardi? What are you doing back here already? I heard your team was on Fortuna,” a surprised nurse at the Corneria City hospital checked in the wounded pine marten. It wasn’t just any old nurse; she was Gloria Stevens, the same nurse who had cared for the Star Fox team on their last visit to the hospital. Oddly enough, those visits seemed to occur rather regularly.

“My team is on Fortuna,” Falco sighed. “I just came back to get this guy into a little better medical care than what it outlines in Bill’s pamphlet.”

“Who’s Bill? Nevermind, it doesn’t matter. There have been rumours going around,” the French poodle chatted. “Have you seen the papers?”

“Well, let’s think about this logically,” Falco said sardonically. “I’ve been on Fortuna for the past day or so, and I rushed back to Corneria as fast as my little airplane would go to get a soldier to the hospital. On top of that, I’ve been on Great Fox for the past two weeks. I guess the answer is no, I haven’t seen the papers.”

“You don’t have to get angry,” replied the nurse, miffed.

“I’m not angry, just a little tired,” Falco said, with subtle overtones of apology. “What’s in the papers?”

“Just things. We’ve heard lots of things. About what you’re fighting.”

“That it’s a bio-weapon? We know.”

“A bio-weapon?” Gloria looked confused. “We heard it was a squadron of Invader class ships, lying in wait to ambush you.”

“I’m sure that’s what they want you to think. But it’s not. It’s worse than that.”

“Are you sure?” the nurse folded her arms critically. Falco sighed.

“No, I’m not sure. Thanks for helping this guy here. I’ll be on my way now.” He turned and tottered off down the corridor to the parking lot, hoping nobody had vandalised his Arwing yet.

*  *  *

“Can’t....can’t breathe....” Katt choked out. Gritty ectoplasm closed around her outstretched fingers as she sank into the mire.

“HAAAAAAAALP!!!” Slippy was screaming over and over, trying desperately to keep a piece of the liquid stone at bay by blasting it relentlessly with a phaser. It was to no avail, and a bit of stone curled around his ankle and yanked him down.

 The gooey rock was spreading out now, covering a lot of distance. A bulge formed in the center and it reared up. Katt had disappeared from view entirely. Bill stood a few feet away from the mass of liquid, paralysed with fright. Fox clung wildly to a scrubby, dead tree while the bio-weapon pulled on his feet with all its strength.

Peppy ran around the edge of the mess of stone and grabbed Slippy’s hand. With phaser set to level 9, he blasted the tendril that was trying to drag the toad down. The force shattered the stone and threw Peppy and Slippy back 90 feet into a forest. Small pieces of wet rock thrown by the blast quickly reformed and began searching for a new target.

Bill finally overcame his fright and ran maniacally around, trying to draw the stone juggernaut away from Fox. It worked, but a little too well. A wave of stone splashed at him and nearly enveloped him; he dove out of the way just in time. Fox and Bill ran wildly for the forest, turning around every once in a while to fire a shot at their strange pursuer. Fox halted. “Where’s Katt?!”

The answer came in the form of a writhing bulge on the outskirts of the mass.  A furry pink head popped up from the stone and took a big breath, then screamed for all it was worth. Fox and Bill ran back to her as fast as they could and tried to pull her out.

“OUCH!! OUCH!! Please, STOP THAT!” she remarked, a comment pertaining to their yanking on her ears.

“It’s no use! We can’t get her out!” Bill wailed.

“DON’T SAY THAT!” Katt moaned.

Fox pulled his phaser and set it as high as it would go. Bill did the same. They couldn’t really see where to fire, so they just shot anywhere.

Fox’s extremely fast retreat into the forest was stopped abruptly by a tree. Groaning, he slid to the ground.

Katt was free, but recoil from one of the shots had struck her in the leg.  Practically immobilised, she tried to crawl for the woods. She cried in odd, choking gasps, both from sheer terror and from the pain. “H-h-eellp meee!” she sobbed. But it was no use; Peppy, Slippy, and Bill were too far back to hear, and Fox was in no shape to do much of anything. The frothing lake of rock had reformed and was grouping into a tall pillar, ready to crush her. She tried to scream, but nothing came out.

“HIIIIIIII-YEEEEEEHAAA!!!!” an exuberantly loud shriek rang out through the chilled air. Puffy-eyed, Katt lifted her head and looked around for the sound that seemed to come from everywhere.

And with that, a cracking shot split through what seemed to be the planet’s very existence. Katt winced from the volume and almost immediately after passed out.

It was impossible to tell what happened next; it seemed at first like the rocky bio-weapon had split into two halves and shattered upon the hard-packed stone, then it was as if a great wind had broken it up and scattered it to the four winds for fate to deal with; it could have been a thousand or more things, but there were only two witnesses, one of whom had initiated “it”, whatever “it” was. And he never seemed to tell the truth anyway.

*  *  *

Falco stopped in a greasy spoon diner for a quick bite to eat, then left Corneria. The flight from Corneria to Fortuna was a long and lonely one, and after a few hours he got bored, input the coordinates for the former base’s location, set the Arwing to autopilot and went to sleep.

He came to more than seven hours later, still in space. “That’s funny,” he mumbled to himself. “I should have gotten there by now....” He looked out the open window and almost choked on his next breath. There were no stars.

He checked his radar; it was extremely long-ranged and he had often used it to locate Great Fox, his teammates, subspace anomalies--that kind of thing. Now it registered nothing: No planets, no people, no meteors. Falco stared at it for more than two minutes in disbelief. Finally it started to pick something up; but within a few rushed moments whatever it was had disappeared, and the instruments used to read the device began mindlessly twirling and registering impossible numbers. He swore quietly. “I used this flippin' thing to locate people more than halfway across Lylat! What the holland is wrong with it?!”

He stared out the window, hoping the radar was just malfunctioning. Searching through the freakish realm of blackness, he saw nothing.

What he saw next was a sight that was imprinted on his mind for the rest of his life. Most of the things he saw were things that had already been imprinted on his mind. Falco’s mind seemed to almost shut down as he watched the horrible scenes flash over and over again; then he panicked and did something that, in hindsight, was really rather rash.

*  *  *

Peppy put cold washcloths on Katt and Fox’s foreheads and raised an eyebrow. “Ya haven’t said a single understandable thing since you came in here, mister,” he proclaimed skeptically. “Would you mind explainin’ just who you are and what happened?”

“Name’s McCoy. Radley McCoy. The real McCoy. You’re lucky I’m an amiable old sot, or your friends here would be in some trouble. You kids these days, young rips with their long hair and their loud music; they’re lucky I didn’t help out that guy against ‘em. As for you, Mr. Hare, you seem extremely well along in years...”

“What!”

“...Frankly, I’d think that someone as seasoned as you would have calmed down these whippersnappers afore they got themselves into this much trouble. Call yourself a chaperone? Why, for all I know you put them up to this! And you being so old, you oughta know better. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Well, thanks. Now that you’ve lectured me, ya mind telling me who you are and what happened?”

“I told you. I’m Radley McCoy. As for what happened, the kids were causing trouble for the entire neighbourhood and I put a stop to it.”

“Neighbourhood??” Peppy’s mouth dropped open. “Neighbourhood?! Are you some kind of loon? Nobody lives on Fortuna!”

“I do, don’t I?” Radley drew himself up. He was a stocky badger with an odd, rasping voice and a strange outfit; he acted insane, but something about him made it seem that he couldn’t really be skipping without a rope. It was hard to explain, but it was impossible to write him off as crazy.

Peppy sighed and sat down heavily on the canvas floor. The tent wasn’t completely watertight, and snow was beginning to melt through. There were already a few small puddles of water lying around. He was trying to decide what he should say to Radley McCoy when Slippy galloped merrily through the tent flap and jumped to a stop in the middle of the room, Bill in towe. “We found some wood we can use for a fire,” Slippy announced cheerfully. “We’ll have a roaring inferno in no time! Won’t that be fun?”

Bill concurred. “We’ve got a stack at least as high as the tent, and we can get more.”

Peppy nodded his approval. “Sounds good. Why don’t ya start building one? I think there were some matches in that first-aid kit.”

Bill went to work, and soon they had a fire going just outside the tent entrance.

Katt shifted a little and woke up. Immediately she wished she hadn’t.  “Ooohhhwwww!!!!” she wailed. “It hurts!”

Peppy pulled a strong painkiller out of their first-aid kit; that kit was the only provision they had, and he intended to make use of it. He forced a couple down her throat and then administered a sedative.

Now, feeling good from the painkiller and almost drunk from the sedative, Katt was just lying there, a grin plastered on her face. She wasn’t asleep yet, but would be that way very soon. Slippy skipped in with some leaves. “Here, chew on these.”  She took a couple of pulls at them and then spat them out, gagging. “Eeewww!  What are those supposed to do?!”

“They taste bad,” Slippy grinned. Katt attempted to slug him. Still laughing, he ran off out into the frozen woods.

*  *  *

Falco fired a nova bomb.

It was a stupid thing to do; there wasn’t really any logical evidence that would allow one to assume that it would help at all, but at the time Falco was so fervent in his wish to make the terrible visions stop that he didn’t care. Just shoot it and maybe it’ll go away, he thought feverishly.

Of course it didn’t. And as soon as the bay doors on his Arwing that allowed a bomb to discharge opened, he felt a horrible sucking pull and a strange clammy darkness flow into the plane. The cold dark fingers of a black hole crept over him as all the breath whooshed out of his body in one long gasp, and a furtive thought that he wasn’t going to make it out alive this time was the last thing he knew before the blackness that dominated the world outside the Arwing enveloped him, too.

Chapter 4