Star Fox - Omega Wolf and his Alpha Fox Alt Version
The Aparoid Queen’s death-throes still burned across the void like a dying star when the final swarm closed in. Fox McCloud’s Arwing was a scarred wreck of scorched armor and flickering shields, one engine coughing plasma as he fought to keep the nose up. An Aparoid drone had latched onto the canopy frame, its chitinous limbs punching through the reinforced glass, feeding tendrils already beginning to worm toward the cockpit seals. Fox’s lasers were dry. His Smart Bombs were spent. The targeting computer screamed static.
He never saw the Wolfen until the crimson beam lanced past his wingtip and vaporized the parasite mid-feed.
The explosion rocked the Arwing. Fox’s head snapped sideways against the restraint harness. Through the cracked canopy he caught a single glimpse of the red-and-gray fighter rolling away, Wolf O’Donnell’s voice crackling over the open channel.
“Pitiful, pup”, The dry and almost bored tone in his voice made Fox chuckle. “Don’t get the wrong idea, McCloud. I just don’t want some bug finishing you off before I get the chance.”
Then the Wolfen vanished into the debris field, engines flaring, and the channel went dead.
Fox never mentioned it in the debriefings. Neither did Wolf.
Two years later the Lylat System had settled into the uneasy quiet that follows total war. Corneria rebuilt. The Star Fox team scattered between contracts and long stretches of downtime. Wolf O’Donnell and his remaining crew kept to the outer lanes, taking the kinds of jobs that appeared on official manifests in order to keep the goodwill of the public underneath their wings.
“Public relations was important for me who were not decorated service members,” General Pepper said in a private meeting without camera, the implications clear from across the desk where he sat.
Fox agreed, more so because it meant keeping his ship powered up, his crew fed, and Falco from bitching about ‘finding better work as a freelancer’, something he often did anyway whenever the lull of civilian work grated on his nerves.
Fox was just happy that he didn’t have to do anything unscrupulous to protect what belonged to him, not because he wouldn’t, but because it might spark something deep inside he was tightly keeping the lid on.
The challenge came through an anonymous relay on an old mercenary frequency months into the quiet of a peaceful mission. Coordinates. A time. A single line of text:
No teams. No spectators. Just you and me. Prove which one of us was always better.
Fox accepted.
They met in the empty gulf between Sector X and the remnant of Venom’s debris field—an unclaimed stretch of black with nothing but distant starlight and the cold geometry of asteroids. Fox’s Arwing II was polished and lethal, the new paint still bright. Wolf’s Wolfen looked like it had been rebuilt from wreckage more than once: heavier armor plating, mismatched thrusters, the same predatory silhouette that had both haunted and challenged Fox’s peripheral vision for years.
They fought the way only the two of them could—close, brutal, almost intimate. Arwing and Wolfen carving mirror arcs through vacuum, laser fire stitching the dark between them. Fox flew with the clean precision of a Cornerian ace. Wolf flew like something half-feral that had learned the language of machines only so it could tear them apart. For twelve minutes there was nothing in the universe except the two of them and the narrow margins of skill that separated life from a sudden, silent fireball.
Then the pirates arrived.
They came out of the shadow of a tumbling asteroid cluster—seven ships of scavenged design, bristling with jury-rigged weaponry and the ugly pragmatism of scavengers who had survived by never fighting fair. Their lead vessel was a converted Andross-era carrier fragment, its hull still bearing the faded insignia of the old Venomian navy. The gravitational projectors mounted along its flanks were new technology, black-market prototypes that generated localized wells strong enough to pin a fighter in place like an insect under glass.
Fox and Wolf broke off their duel without a word and turned outward as one.
They fought together the way old enemies sometimes do—efficient, wordless, covering each other’s blind spots. Fox’s lasers punched through pirate shields with surgical accuracy. Wolf’s heavier cannons tore whole sections of hull plating free. For a brief span it almost looked like they might win.
Then the gravity wells activated.
Invisible fists closed around both fighters. The Arwing’s engines screamed as thrust was suddenly meaningless. The Wolfen’s thrusters flared uselessly against a force that dragged it sideways, spinning, locking it in place. Fox felt the inertial dampeners fail under the strain; the cockpit groaned; his vision grayed at the edges. Wolf’s snarling curse came over the open channel a half-second before both ships were reeled in like hooked fish.
They woke in the same hangar bay, still strapped into their seats, the canopies forced open. The air stank of oil, recycled oxygen, and the sharp metallic tang of weapons that had seen recent use. Rough hands hauled them out. Fox’s boots hit the deck first. Wolf landed harder, already twisting, already looking for an angle.
The pirates were a mixed lot—mostly opportunistic scavengers of various species, but the core group of simians wore the remnants of Venomian uniforms. Their leader stepped forward from the shadows of a loading gantry: a broad-shouldered primate, gray-furred and scarred, one eye replaced by a crude optical implant that glowed dull red. Gearain. Once a mid-level general under Andross. Now the self-appointed warlord of a pirate flotilla that preyed on the shipping lanes the Cornerian fleet was still too thin to properly patrol.
He looked them over with open satisfaction.
“Well. The great Fox McCloud and the infamous Wolf O’Donnell. Delivered to my doorstep by their own rivalry. How considerate.”
They were separated only long enough to be stripped of flight suits and any obvious weapons. Then they were dragged deeper into the ship—into a converted cargo hold that had been fitted with restraint hardware scavenged from old Venomian interrogation decks.
Wolf went first.
They forced him against a reinforced bulkhead. Gravity cuffs locked around his thick wrists and ankles, the field generators humming as they pinned his limbs wide. Heavy chains followed, looping across his broad chest and around his waist, drawn tight enough that the metal bit into dense muscle. Wolf was massive even by the standards of his kind—seven feet of scarred gray fur and heavy muscle built for violence. He thrashed the moment the last cuff engaged, muscles corded, fangs bared, a continuous low snarl vibrating in his chest. The chains rattled. The bulkhead groaned. Two pirates went flying when he managed a partial lunge before the gravity fields increased and slammed him back against the wall hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.
They beat him anyway.
Fists. Boots. The weighted end of a shock baton. Wolf took the punishment the way a cornered animal does—snarling, twisting against the restraints, trying to turn every impact into an opportunity. Blood matted the fur along his ribs and the side of his muzzle. One eye began to swell. Still he snarled. Still he thrashed until the gravity cuffs were dialed high enough that even breathing became labor.
Fox was next.
They did not bother chaining him to the wall at first. Four of them held him while the rest worked. Fox was smaller—five-foot-eight of lean, athletic muscle under orange fur—but he did not make it easy. He simply refused to give them the satisfaction of sound. Blows landed across his midsection, his shoulders, the side of his face. A knee drove into his gut and folded him. Someone grabbed a handful of his crest and wrenched his head back. Another fist split the skin above his brow. Blood ran warm into one eye. Fox’s breathing stayed controlled. His expression stayed locked. He looked through them rather than at them, the same cold focus he used in a cockpit when the odds turned lethal.
Gearain watched both spectacles with the patience of a man who had waited a long time for this.
When the pirates finally stepped back, breathing hard, Wolf was still straining against the chains hard enough that the metal links creaked. Fox was on his knees, one hand braced against the deck, the other pressed to his bleeding temple. Neither of them spoke.
Gearain paced a slow circle between them.
“Do you know what the Cornerian government would pay for the body of Wolf O’Donnell?” he asked conversationally. “Not as much as I would like, as it turns out. A nuisance. A footnote. But Fox McCloud…” He stopped in front of Fox and crouched, optical implant whirring as it focused. “General Pepper would empty half the treasury to get his golden boy back in one piece. Or close enough to one piece.”
He straightened and turned toward Wolf.
“You, however, are surplus. A loose end from the Andross years I never liked. Tomorrow I’ll put a bolt through that thick skull of yours and dump the carcass out an airlock. McCloud I’ll keep breathing long enough to negotiate a proper ransom. After that…” He shrugged. “We’ll see how much of him is still useful.”
Wolf’s answer was a wet, furious snarl that ended in a cough of blood. Fox said nothing at all. His green eyes stayed fixed on a point somewhere past Gearain’s shoulder, as if the primate were already irrelevant.
Gearain made a sharp gesture. The pirates unlocked Wolf’s restraints just long enough to drag him, still fighting, into a narrow cell farther down the corridor. The door sealed with a heavy magnetic lock. Fox was hauled to the cell opposite. The door closed. The lights in the corridor dimmed to emergency red.
Inside his cell Fox sat with his back against the cold bulkhead, arms resting on his knees, blood still seeping from the cut above his eye. Across the narrow hall he could hear Wolf’s heavier breathing, the occasional shift of a large body against metal, the low continuous growl that never quite stopped.
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Outside the hull, the pirate flotilla continued its slow drift through the black, carrying two of the most dangerous pilots in the Lylat System toward whatever Gearain had decided would come next.
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