Insurance

Author's Note: Okay, okay, so this is the third one. Long road trips, I'm telling you- they're killer! I can't watch eight episodes of Star Trek: Voyager more than twice before I start getting bored with them, nor does Stuart Little provide much beyond the boat race and the aerial confrontation that appeals to my taste.

I don't have any other movies in here either. So here goes with oneshot number three. Trust me, this has nothing to do with any kind of Star Fox you guys know. Well, maybe if you have a certain little thing called a Wii…..heh. Just some short light humor regarding the mad Arwing killing spree that took place in Brawl. Seriously, I was crying…

Oneshot…Insurance

Clouds whipped by beneath him as his Arwing tailed the behemoth ship before him, sensors locking onto the three engines of his target, glowing blue amidst the red-tinged clouds. Twin trails of condensed water vapor sprouted from his wingtips as the chase continued.

Inexorably, he crept ever closer, his sleek Arwing beginning to overtake the large, clumsier warship before him. As a spray of yellow energy pulses came raining up at him, he banked in sharply, dodging the hail of death as the slower guns on the deck struggled to track his progress.

Abruptly, his computer alerted him to a missile. He whirled, startled, but there was a deep impact on his aft quarter.

There was no explosion, but the damage was done. Smoke poured from his disabled engines as his Arwing careened into a wild spiral, descending rapidly in a slow roll. As he struggled to regain control, his wing scraped against the deck of the warship, nearly taking out two figures standing there.

His ship plunged into the cloud layer, streaming acrid smoke behind it. The engines would not restart, nor would the boosters allow him to attain level flight. Gritting his teeth in determination, he pulled up on the unresponsive controls, paw tapping on the computer to electronically adjust his headlong fall.

As the airbrakes flared, he looked for a safe place to land. Nothing- everywhere he looked, there was only uniform jungle, lush and green, but thick and full of limbs that would tear his ship to pieces in an unpowered crash.

Then, he spotted a lake, a thin beach ringing it. It wasn't much, but it was his best shot. He pulled his ship into a banking turn, the airframe groaning around him and threatening to buckle. As the sand rushed up and filled his vision, he gripped his seat and prepared for impact, one finger on the ejection system.

His Arwing hit the ground, the nose bucking up as if by a giant hand. A scorched trail in the earth was left as his Arwing plowed through the turf, before grinding to a painful halt, forward quarter buried in dirt. The halt nearly gave Fox whiplash. But he was alive, and he was about to reach for his ejection controls, having gathered his emergency supplies, when his cockpit slammed sideways to some thunderous impact, the computer going dead and lurid flames becoming visible through the cracked cockpit.

There was nothing for it now. He pressed the control, and a chemical detonation device blasted the canopy off his fighter and rocketed him into the sky. His eyepiece flashed in the sun as he began his descent.

"Warning," intoned ROB. "Forward deflector shields are sustaining heavy damage. Shield integrity at eighty percent."

"Maintain your fire!" ordered Krystal, clinging gamely onto the command chair. "Peppy, any luck raising the others?"

"None!" shouted back the hare. "Those weapons are causing too much interference. I can't get anyone on the line- those voids keep distorting our signal!"

"They'll be able to take care of themselves!" called Abbey, who's paws flew over the flight console. "I'd be more worried about us!" The ship shuddered. "Shields are at seventy six percent!"

"We need Falco at tactical," griped Slippy, working the forward guns with pudgy fingers. "We're not doing any damage to that ship. I don't get it- doesn't even have shields!"

"Point is, we're getting killed over here!" roared back Peppy. "Krystal, we need to break off!"

The vixen never got a chance to reply. As she was going to, the Great Fox was borne into the clouds by Abbey, dodging a particularly nasty blast from their enemy's cannons. The viewpanes pinpointed its location through the haze, before suddenly, sensors went blank. Krystal's instincts kicked in, but just as she yelled for a course correction, the Great Fox shook to a tremendous impact.

"Grapplers!" yelled Slippy. "Shields are down!"

"Are they boarding us?" yelled Krystal.

"Negative, they're- Abbey, look out!"

Hurled downwards by the force of the ship above, the Great Fox struck the mountain top with a sickening crunch of armored plating. Rock and ice grated with inhuman screeches past the polarized hull, which sparked and flashed before a polarization node was destroyed by the debris, immediately depolarizing the armor.

An impact from above loosened the ship, and Abbey took the opportunity to ram the engines to full power. Coughing and spluttering, the damaged engines belched black smoke and red flame, and the Great Fox lurched away, swinging wildly on its horizontal axis as it threatened to roll over. Only Abbey's desperate course corrections from the helm prevented the disastrous yawing from turning into a full-fledged crash.

It was clear that they were out of the fight.

With a new Arwing taken from the damaged Great Fox, Fox flew out once more against the warship that had claimed both his first Arwing and his dreadnought. It would not do so again- he barrel rolled tightly as he swooped down on his target, reflecting the stream of gunfire headed directly at him. Banking to one side, he cleared himself for another attack run, just as a round clipped his forward wing, piercing his damaged shields to ping harmlessly off of the armor.

His eyepiece locked onto two of the gun emplacements, feeding their coordinates to the computer. But moments later, sensor data rushed into the uplink, and Fox gasped as three more heavy guns flickered into view.

Undaunted, his twin lasers blasted out, raking the deck until they reached the first gun, destroying it in a blaze of fire.

What happened next was almost instantaneous. There was a blur of shadow, then some impact struck his canopy and shattered it, forcing Fox to eject as his Arwing plowed on without him, now pilotless and swinging crazily as it was buffeted by the high altitude winds.

"So?" That was the insurance officer, putting down the papers and photos before him. "Do you expect me to cover this?"

"What do you mean?" demanded McCloud, outraged. "That's four or some Arwings gone and heavy damage to the Great Fox! Of course I expect you to cover it!"

"Mr. McCloud, we will compensate you for the damage to the Great Fox, but not for the Arwings."

"Why? I demand to know!"

"See here, we were monitoring you closely," began the official. "It is necessary to prevent fraudulent claims. We took photos of your lost Arwings, and we see violations of our warranties in several cases."

"On your first claim, for the Arwing struck by a missile, your shields were clearly not activated," he pronounced, producing a photo of the Arwing being struck by a claw-like device. "Had your shields been on, this missile would have been reflected and no damage done. That claim is rejected."

"The second Arwing was ejected from unnecessarily by Falco Lombardi. Claim rejected- its subsequent loss was to be expected."

"Arwing number three was lost when it was punched. If you cannot pay for canopies rigid enough to withstand a simple punch, then we will not cover losses due to forced ejection. Besides, your shields weren't on here either- claim rejected!"

"And your last two Arwings were lost also because of premature ejections. Claims rejected."

Fox sat up, storming. "See here, mister, these Arwings were not lost by mistakes on our part! I have definitive proof that shields were online at all times- weapons we faced were simply able to pierce them!"

"I'm sorry, but weren't the black boxes destroyed in the crashes?" replied the officer, tone almost sweet. "And other Arwings of yours weren't found or sank in the ocean. No, I don't think you have any evidence. You'll get your check from the company for the Great Fox in the morning. Good day."

As he left the room, Fox smoldered, before getting up and stalking to the launch bay.

When he reached the shuttle that the Cornerian Government had loaned them, he found the rest of the team in attendance.

"Any luck?" asked Krystal, clearly not expecting anything. There was a groan of collective sympathy as Fox shook his head.

"Course not. Lousy idiot claimed our shields weren't online. He'll pay us for the Great Fox, and that's it."

"Bah, why get money from them?" drawled Falco, feet propped up on a table. "We'll just go talk to that princess, the monkey, and the knight- we'll get money from them."

"Good idea, Falco," replied Fox, a glint coming back into his eye. "They broke them, after all, and we did save their hides…."

Some time after this, a mysterious bankruptcy of the Hyrulian Royal Family was declared and the castle mortgaged. And while the triforce was being used to regenerate the lost gold, Fox and Falco were already winging their way to the next world.

Orders for a new battleship Halberd were abruptly cancelled when a very certain Meta Knight was relieved of a good amount of funding.

Mushroom Kingdom's very own King Bowser was forced to sell his castle, despite arguing that Falco had, in fadct, ejected himself when he could have stayed inside his Arwing without trouble, or landed it.

At the end of the day, with lawsuits flinging out between all sides and governments suing each other left and right, the Star Fox team was left with almost more money than they'd had before, and disappeared to Titania to retire. With the subspace war over, after all, it wasn't like they had any more jobs to take.

Not like anyone would hire them again, anyway.