I believe you warm,
I believe you’ll stay
I believe you cold
I believe you’ll stray
I believe you
What else can I do?

“Guys? Hello, guys? Where are you? If you don’t say something I’m leaving without you!” a voice called from the frozen woods.

No one answered.

A bird who looked exactly like Falco came closer. “Hello?” Then he spotted the tent and pulled aside the flap. “Guys? Are you okay?”

Katt woke up from all his shouting. “Who’s there?”

Falco folded his wings behind his back. “It’s me.”

She looked over at him in the entryway. “You’re alive!! Is it really you?”

“Gee, you know, I think it’s really me. But then, I can’t really be sure. Why, just last time I checked to see if I was really me, well, what do you know, it turns out someone else was me,” he commented sardonically.

Katt was too happy to much care. “What happened to you? Why didn’t you come back sooner?”

“I don’t really know what happened,” the clone said truthfully. “The last thing I remember is falling asleep on my way to Fortuna. Then I woke up on the ground by the remains of Ice Eye a few hours ago. I can’t imagine what happened; my Arwing is nowhere around and it didn’t look like I had crashed. Anyway, why am I telling you all this? Where’s Fox?.....Oh.” He spotted the sleeping lump in the corner.

“You’ve been gone for more than two weeks! It couldn’t have taken that long....I wonder what happened to you. Well, who cares! You’re back now, and that’s what matters, right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Falco said quietly. “Why is everyone asleep?”

“They’re sick. I am, too.” She shivered. “It’s freezing cold in here. If we can’t get a fire built, I’m afraid all of us are going to freeze.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll go get some wood,” Falco promised, and then danced off into the forest. Katt nearly wept with joy and wanted to shriek and wake everyone up, but she didn’t because she didn’t really have enough energy to repeat the story.

Gerdendrul’s Falco clone fed on the real Falco’s life force. The real Falco would not feel any energy depletion; however he felt physically was the way the clone would feel. That was why the clone had not “come to life” until the real Falco was out of the black hole. But the real problem was that the clone did not know he was a clone. And any clone who fancies that he is the real fajita can present many problems after a while.

*  *  *

“Are you ready to go, ma'am?” Ferdinand Shalwast queried.

“Ohhhh, woe is me!” shrieked the sparrow. “We’ll go, but we’ll probably never come back!”

“Oh, good merciful heavens,” Shalwast muttered under his breath.

The sparrow looked piercingly at the mockingbird. She was at least half a meter shorter than Shalwast and seemed to practise her melodramatic, suicidal look. In fact, she did. Her name was Helen Jeritrali, and everyone who wasn’t scared silly that she was really going to kill herself thought she was completely ridiculous.

“Ms. Jeritrali,” Shalwast said finally. “Are you going, or were you planning on standing here on the launch pad all day?”

Helen’s beak cracked into a morbid grin. She turned to her teammates. “The bird doesn’t care about us,” she said bemoaningly. “It’s time for us to go.” She threw a wing over her eyes for dramatic effect and climbed blindly into her jet, until she hit her head on the canopy and uncovered her face, cursing inaudibly.

Helen’s team, the Light-Bearers, had been named by a mouse who worked in computer repair. The team consisted of two rabbits, a tree frog, a capybara, a wombat, and Helen herself.

Their jets, which the tree frog (her name was Sherry) had painted purple, took off quickly and fluttered about aimlessly, barrel rolling and twisting every which way before they finally cleared the atmosphere. Shalwast wondered about General Pepper’s choice of which team to send.

*  *  *

Falco returned to the tent thirty minutes later, his wings loaded with firewood. He dropped it all on the floor without even an effort to be quiet. Bill and Fox woke up.

“Falco!” gaped Fox.

“No, it’s not really Falco. This is Zort, Falco’s evil twin.”

“Really?” Fox’s mind was still muddled from sleep.

“No, not really.” Falco resisted the urge to maximise this opportunity.

Bill blinked several times. “Hey, man, you’re back!”

“Yeah. I still don’t know what happened, though.”

Suddenly, Radley McCoy appeared in the doorway carrying a bottle of wine. “Who are you? Another one of these crazy kids, I’ll wager,” he said to Falco. Falco eyed the badger piercingly but said nothing. Radley was oblivious. “I couldn’t find anything useful out in the woods--this is an ice chunk, after all--but I figured some spirits might cheer everyone up.”

Bill smashed his pillow against his face. “No more wine, please!”

Fox had never been a part of Radley, Slippy and Bill’s drinking parties. “I’ll have some of that.”

Peppy woke up then, still groggy. “No you won’t! No drinking in this tent! Ever!” And just for the heck of it he stuck his tongue out at Radley McCoy.

It froze that way.

*  *  *

The Light-Bearers were edging ever closer to Fortuna, but they still had about twenty minutes to go before they got into the atmosphere. Sherry buzzed Helen on her comlink. “Helen, will you promise me something?”

Helen threw her head back. “Anything, as long as it hurts.”

Sherry’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Promise you won’t frighten the poor Star Fox boys out of their wits? Corneria needs them, you know.”

The sparrow pondered it. “I’ll do my best,” she said finally. “Although, it probably won’t be good enough.”

Fred, the capybara, wanted in on the fun. “Hey, Helen, do that thing where you look really despairing. You know, where you get that tear in your eye and put your wing on your face like you’re about to faint away.”

Helen obliged gladly. She’d never felt suicidal in her life, but she didn’t know anything more fun than pretending at it. Fred applauded her performance, but Sherry wasn’t sure it was healthy. Melody, Tiffany, and Sam all grinned widely and flew spastically around, as was their fashion.

*  *  *

“Aravit has a mission for you,” Freeble the sheep informed Falco. The bird was sitting outside the House, still feeling nostalgic from the last time he’d been here.

“Wonderful. What is it?”

“It’s just to prove your worth. It’s been a long time you know. He wants to make sure you can still pull your weight.”

“He won’t be disappointed. Now tell me what it is.”

“You and Rhandon are supposed to go to the temple on the other side of the Quilawine and take the relic of Hervunlian! That’s in the Fulormese territory, you know. They won’t take kindly to it. This is not going to be an easy mission.”

“Why must I take Rhandon? Isn’t he already ‘proven?’”

“It would be cruel to send you alone,” Freeble shrugged, then turned and walked silently away.

Falco hopped up and walked inside the House to Aravit’s chamber. “When am I to depart?”

“Thou will leave at dawn in a half-fortnight. But leave now, there shall be a council in the evening and thou shall find out what thee may need to know then.”

That was rather rude, Falco thought grumpily, tromping down the hallway again. He almost bumped into Rhandon. “Oh, there you are.”

“Yes. Do you have something to say?”

“Why does Aravit use thee’s and thou’s and all that?”

Rhandon shrugged. “That is his fashion. Do not all eagles do this?”

“Not in Lylat.”

Rhandon did not ask what Lylat was before he moved on. Again, Falco did not wonder why he hadn’t. And again, he did not care.

*  *  *

Falco was busy heating some water for Peppy’s tongue. The miserable hare was still wrapped in a blanket with his tongue out in the direction Radley McCoy had been in before he moved. Every two minutes or so Falco would still look in Peppy’s direction and laugh.

Falco’s merriment awakened Slippy not too soon after. Now everyone was awake, and gladly they were alive (Peppy had worried that falling asleep in this cold might prove fatal). Falco’d had to endure scores of questions from everyone, almost none of which he could answer.

No one questioned his authenticity. Why should they?

*  *  *

Gerdendrul ran into some problems in the catacombs. A broken support in one of the cave walls had caused almost the whole tunnel to collapse, and now the way to the animals’ camp was blocked off. It wasn’t much good being able to ooze around the debris if he couldn’t see where he was going, so he had to turn around and go back up the tunnels, and since he couldn’t seep straight through the surface this time (gravity was against him, you know), he was forced to search the tunnels until he found the one that led to the surface. This little romp had led him kilometers away from where he knew the camp to be. But even that is not enough to discourage a Venomian bio-weapon.

He had returned to the site of Ice Eye and discovered that his clone had come to life. And now came the fun. The signals from Katt and the clone would be quite enough to lead him straight to the camp with no turnarounds.

Now he was aiming for speed rather than stealth. The Falco clone was not controlled by Gerdendrul, but it was basically made out of another part of him, and it had another piece that was controlled by Gerdendrul implanted in its brain, like Katt.

Sometimes it wondered if it oughtn’t to make a Katt clone, since he had been busy with one when that fool of a badger had scattered him the first time. But no; a Katt clone would only make them suspicious, because it wouldn’t have ended up being a very good one: He only had what his slug told him of her persona, but no personal artifacts such as a piece of fur. It was a rotten deal for him. But ANYWAY, as long as they weren’t expecting him, he didn’t really need to be as stealthy as he had been trying to before.

There it was...the tent, less than 40 meters away. Gerdendrul liquefied and rushed onward, a horrific torrent that splashed around and enveloped trees, rocks, and anything else it came into contact with. It rushed around the outside of the tent and poured inside.

“NOOOO!!!” Katt screeched as the gritty slime enveloped her again, just like in her nightmare and just like what had happened on her first encounter with the bio-weapon. She fainted and was of course no help at all in the ensuing battle.

Falco (or rather, Falco’s psychic essence) had, of course, never seen the bio-weapon, and now he jumped back against the back of the tent with the stone lapping around his ankles.

The blasters had all been lying on the floor by the doorway, and now the only sign that they were still there was a slight interruption in the flow of rock. Slippy, Bill, and Fox had found some strength they didn’t know they had (or were pretending they didn’t have so everyone would still wait on them) and were using it to jump up and down like mad children at play on the top of their cots to avoid coming into contact with the bio-weapon. Peppy was miserably trying to ward off the bio-weapon with his little shield of a cot, trying to ignore the pain in his frozen tongue.

Radley had lopped off a bulge of rock with an umbrella that had suddenly seemed to appear in his paw, and he jumped over it and dashed outside, where he continued to whack at the rock with it. Peppy viewed this with disgust. The others had no opinion; they were scared out of their minds.

Falco dove straight into the swell and groped around for a blaster. The shortened stub of rock that Radley had temporarily taken care of was back now, full force, and it slammed him back down when he tried to get up. The rest of the rock covered him and he couldn’t breathe. He found the blaster and fired one shot before something very curious happened.

Apparently, the reaction between liquid stone and the solid, psychically implanted stone of a clone causes both to liquefy and merge. Falco was no more.

*  *  *

“Scanning! Scanning! We need some better planning!” chanted Melody and Tiffany together. The Light-Bearers had been scanning for signs of life for at least five minutes now with no luck.

“We’ll be too late!” shrieked Helen. “They’ll die and it will be all my fault!”

Fred suddenly noticed something on his radar and tried to jump up and down with joy. He only succeeded in hitting his head on the canopy of his jet. “I found them, I found them!”

Sherry twirled insanely around in her purple jet. “Well, let’s go!”

Sam the wombat did slow turns in his jet and then somersaulted a couple of times, narrowly missing a tree. He grinned, admiring his own skill. Then he ran into the tent.

Suddenly, Star Fox and Gerdendrul were out in the open. Sam flew wildly around, trying to get the tent off his jet’s nose so he would be able to see. Because there were no longer any walls to pile up against, Gerdendrul bubbled and oozed back to the center, too shocked to make sure he stayed where he was. Coughing and choking, Katt tumbled off her cot.

Radley McCoy yodeled and subdued another chunk of bio-weapon with a hearty thwack of his umbrella. “All right, you crazy youngsters, keep clear!” Peppy, afraid of what he might do, urged all the others to comply. He fell off his own cot and stumbled as far away from where the tent had formerly been as he could. Fox bumbled around and grabbed Slippy by a foot, dragging the luckless toad over rocks and tree branches. Bill seemed to be in no hurry. Shrieking and crying, Katt fell several times on her way to a nearby tree.

Radley pulled a plastic explosive out of a pouch hanging at his side and planted it in the bio-weapon like a birthday candle. He struck a match against a tree, and, jumping and yelling, lit the explosive and hopped away like a drunken rabbit.

Suddenly, the others realised that they didn’t see Falco anymore. “Falco! Where’s Falco?? No, he’s still there! You’ll kill him! NOO!!!” Katt screeched.

Helen flew in and fired a few shots at the bio-weapon. This caused the explosive to detonate, and it seemed to pack more of a punch than it looked like it should. Pieces of the bio-weapon struck Fox and Bill in their faces, but most of it flew out of sight. Katt stood there staring at the scorched earth for three seconds. Then she crumpled to the ground, unconscious.

Chapter 8