Inheritance (Metroid)

[Cuofeng]

Inheritance
...
Chapter 1: Sulphur and Ice
...​

An acidic wind gently blew through Samus' short blond hair. The crumbled hill she sat on was nothing special, just a slight five meter rise that gave way before her into a gradual dusty tumble of dull black rocks and reddish sand. Above her, yellow clouds drifted in the light of a cold red sun. The valley beyond was more of the same, broken rocks and sandy lifeless gullies. It wasn't much of a view, but it was there and it was hers to see. There were mountains in the distance.

The thin layer of ice forming on her eyes began to obscure her vision and she blinked it away again. Her helmet sat upside down between some rocks at her feet but she left it there even though she still wore the rest of her armored power suit. The cold stung a little more these days since the metroid DNA infusion but that couldn't be helped. Every once and a while she needed to feel the wind, even if it was only on her head. It had been almost two years since she'd gotten the chance. And besides, the faint tickle of acidic vapors in her lungs felt a little like home. Distantly, she considered smiling.

The footsteps behind her were getting closer. The spinal interface in her suit fed more precise signals; four bipedal individuals of around the same size, two much heavier with intense energy signatures. So power armor, but just on two of them. It looked like they were being polite. Samus leaned back slightly, her armored exterior plates clinking against a bit of jagged volcanic rock.

Now the newcomers were within five meters of her and they stopped at the base of the little hill. Their boots crunched against the bits of gravel on the basalt ground. One set of boots, not either of the power armors', stepped forward.

"Samus Aran."

The voice came out both though an exterior speaker and over com channels, arriving simultaneously through her ears and from her skull implants. A woman's voice. "We are agents of the Galactic Federation Police. You are under arrest for crimes relating to the destruction of Research Station SR388. We are here to transport you the fleet ship Diomedes for your preliminary hearing."

Samus took in one last deep breath and let it out slowly. The white fog of ice crystals gradually turned yellow as it reacted with the sulfurous air. Then she grabbed her helmet in her left hand and stood up. One more blink to clear the ice on her eyes and she turned.

Four humans in varying degrees of armor were waiting at the bottom of her low outcropping, standing in front of Samus's own yellow gunship. Their much larger black and silver GFP transport loomed in the near distance, squatting like a huge bird on uncertain ground. Samus didn't need her visor to know that both those soldiers in power armor were focusing all their targeting on the gun that encased her right forearm. After all, it was currently the most powerful weapon on this planet, and that included the main canons of that ship they flew in on. She would expect nothing less of good soldiers.

"Please deactivate your weapons and come with us." The woman spoke again. Unlike the blank helmets of the power suits, Samus could see her face. She and her unarmored fellow were dressed in thin, heat controlled pressure suits and transparent oxygen masks, just a fabric-like layer of enhanced polymers between them and the planet's air. That might be why she was trembling as Samus walked down the hill, growing nearer with each step.

Samus stopped beside the woman and looked down at her. The woman glanced up, her lips slightly apart behind her faceplate as she tried to think of how to precisely deal with this very irregular arrest. Samus noticed a few strands of straight black hair hanging down near the soldier's ear, motionless even as a new gust once again brushed sulfur through Samus' own hair. In their suits, none of them could feel the wind.

That was a necessary sacrifice. Humans couldn't survive in this atmosphere.

"Er, yes," the woman said, glancing back at her teammate and the other two in power armor. "Thank you for your cooperation. Um..." Here she tapped at the neck of her suit and switched to an encrypted comm channel for her team. "Did she actually deactivate her weapons?"

Samus heard that just as easily, fed straight from the suit systems to her ear nerves. She also heard the slightly nervous response from the righthand armored soldier.

"How should we know? That thing she's wearing is a black box on every scan. The only way I even know she's organic is that she's got her flipping head sticking out. They weren't kidding about her by the way, in this environment? Not baseline indeed."

The woman made a slight flick of her fingers at the soldier before she tapped her neck again and nervously smiled up at Samus. "Ms Aran? I'm Officer Yin. This is Perez and our escorts Park and Nigam. We have a seat ready for you on our transport back to the Federation ship Diomedes." Oddly courteous for an arrest, but then again Samus' status had always been a bit odd within the Federation. Well, 'odd' if that word could fluctuate between 'asset' and 'liability' at a frequency approaching microwaves. She wondered how Yin had been chosen to come retrieve her.

Samus started walking past them. There was a brief flurry of the skritching sounds of boots on gravel as the GF party scrambled to maintain the appearance of custody. Then, as they passed Samus' ship, she stopped again and Yin almost walked into her armored back. Samus turned to the officers and said:

"My ship."

Officer Yin recovered quickly enough from hearing Samus' voice for the first time. "Oh. Yes. Well, if you'll cede navigation controls, our transport's computer can plot an automated guide up to a holding berth on Diomedes. For the duration of your-"

Yin was interrupted by Samus casually banging her arm-gun twice on the nose of her ship and the subsequent roar of igniting thrusters. A wave of dust burst through the party as the yellow hunter-ship began to rise up into the air before reconfiguring to blast off at a steep ascent. It quickly vanished into the cloudy yellow sky.

Samus heard Perez tap his comm controls. "Uh, Diomedes, looks like you've got an impound incoming. It'll be there...whenever it decides to show up, I guess."

One smooth motion of Samus' left arm and her helmet clicked into place over her head. Her vision was instantly once more filled with all the flurry of information she was used to considering part of her. Her senses were back up to fifteen and she wore a slight smirk as she noticed the soldier's weapons twitch up yet again in reaction to even that innocuous gesture. Perez took an unconscious quarter step back and Yin looked like she wanted to. All from putting on a helmet. They couldn't help it; there were enough stories surrounding that image of the Bounty Hunter, fully clad.

Samus didn't have time to deal with that and started walking once more in the direction of the GF transport, slightly faster this time. If they wanted to keep arresting her then they would have to keep up.

It took a second but they did so. The armored soldiers adjusted easily enough though Samus was quietly impressed that Yin and Perez managed to keep pace as well as they did. Over one-and-a-half times terran evolved gravity was nothing to ignore, especially for someone like Yin for whom a glance suggested that her slight frame was from a spacer adapted gene pool. Without any conscious thought, Samus' suit began scanning them as age, equipment, and past medical procedures began to flash across her eyes.

As they neared the transport ship, Samus noticed that Yin was glancing up at Samus even as she herself was looking down at the officer. Perez was keeping his distance while Park and Nigam were mostly concerned with maintaining firing lines focused on her back. But Yin was looking at her, curious inspection in her eyes and something that might have been...disappointment?

After a moment Yin was forced to respond to Samus' persistent matching stare. Those eyes were the only human part of her visible now, and even they were obscured and tinted green by the helmet's visor. Trying to match that gaze only led to Yin almost tripping flat on her face when she realized that she didn't have an augmatic suit to automatically walk across uneven ground without looking.

Catching herself, Yin said, "Oof. Um, I'm familiar with the files on you, Ms Aran, at least the ones my clearance gives me access too. It's just that..." She trailed off. They were almost at the Federation transport.

Samus was used to that unease. People on most planets often had a visceral reaction to being near unfamiliar power armor, even if their own forces used it too. And there was an inherent threat about Samus' appearance; it was a suit designed at every level of its being not just for combat or defense, but for war. War in any shape, against any foe, lit by any star in the sky. She was prepared for anything.

Yin started again. "It's just that...I thought you had long hair."

Samus actually froze in the middle of a step as she blinked with surprise just prior to touching the GF transport's ramp. She was usually prepared.

Yin seemed to take this as offense and began to stammer, "Not that it looks bad this way! I actually kind of like it, I mean. Do you have some sort of system in your suit that changes the length for you or...?" She quietly trailed off once more as Perez treated her to an incredulous look.

Samus slowly turned back and stared with pure confusion over these priorities. It was honestly hilarious what strange things people focused on.

"Haircuts. It grows." Samus considered laughing but decided that would probably be too much. So she stepped inside their ship and made her way to the seats mounted the middle of in the fuselage. There was one which bristled with restraints, locks, and a moderate amount of mid grade explosives. She assumed that one was hers.

Truthfully, this time she'd lost her old mid-back tresses in the combination X-Parasite and metroid biological war-zone the GF's own doctors had turned her suit into during her last ordeal. She'd managed to eventually stabilize things but for a while the suit's organic systems had been running haywire and unguarded protein strands had a way of getting dissolved. It was actually quite interesting from a technological perspective, but at the moment she didn't feel the impulse to explain. At least she had her eyebrows back by now.

As a girl, her parents had loved her hair. Both sets of them had.

The GF soldiers locked into their seats on each side of her. Another encrypted comm line flared to life.

"Transport A-3 to Diomedes. Subject in custody and onboard. Lifting off for rendezvous."

The military ship rumbled as the main engines started up. Everything in its secure computer was instantly available for Samus to peruse whether they wanted her to or not, but nothing of interest presented itself. The other armored soldiers were still watching her and officer Perez glanced at her beam gun and the hull once or twice with an expression that had noticed his own outfit was not rated for vacuum exposure. Clearly there was a measure of uncertainty about precisely how much custody Samus was actually under.

However, something other than hairstyles was still bothering Yin, and after a few minutes of fidgeting slightly in her seat she worked up the nerve to voice it.

"There's something I've got to ask you but...well, I know the charges you're facing. And then you're out here at the edge of space." She looked up slightly before turning back in confusion. "You could have hidden forever. Why did we catch you?"

Samus paused, flicking her eyes over at Yin without moving any other part of her body. The smaller woman shuddered for a brief moment but controlled herself.

"You were getting annoying." Then Samus looked forward again, passing the time by reading the easily decrypted memory banks of this transport.

This pursuit had lasted sixteen months, back and forth across the border of Federation space. She hadn't made it easy for them to track her down, sticking mostly to nonhuman worlds, but then again doing her job even in an unlicensed capacity was hardly low profile. People important enough to slapped with bounties tended to leave a stir when they went missing. Enough of a trail for dedicated investigators to follow. Then there was that one capital which had built a statue of her. That was embarrassing, but she didn't have the number tentacles necessary to communicate her wishes in their language.

Destroying the SR388 orbital station had certainly earned the revocation of her Hunter's license but by now, according to her internal calculations, the repeated diversion of GF forces to wherever a glimmer of Samus Aran showed up on the nets had to have nearly reached a cost comparable to a significant fraction of the original loss's value. The upset scientists might bemoan the incalculable value of scientific discovery but their political superiors were well practiced in exactly that calculation. By stalling the issue this long, Samus figured that the bureaucracy would have rolled along and already mostly forgotten its plans with the research station in favor of shifting the funding to whatever replacement was the pet project of the newest rising cadres. Things moved fast in the universe and even with massive property destruction and a bit of treason Samus's record still looked rosy in comparison to many.

But in the end, it was truthfully Samus' curiosity had led to this surrender. She'd done reparation-by-service before as, like it or not, the Federation valued her far more than most of the individuals they considered their subjects. Samus was willing to take the odds on the charges against her if only buy a freedom from this military pursuit in a few years or decades. It was all the same, more or less. It'd long been an accepted fact that she was unlikely to find out what her natural lifespan was these days. Sometimes she wondered if she still had one.

But still there was something tickling the edge of her thought. Some trick from the mind expanding meditation her second family had attempted to teach her. Something was different now. Something added up strangely. And she was going to find out what it was, even if it meant sticking her head in a proverbial noose. She felt herself smile, invisible to all her supposed captors. The risk was familiar as, after all, mortal peril was pretty much her established method of investigation.

They would arrive on the ship Diomedes in twenty minutes. Samus recognized that name. On ancient Earth, it was a warrior who managed to draw blood from a god. It was a good name.

...​

 

[Simon Buchan]

Holy crap. A good Metroid fic! I never thought I would see the day.

 

[Moonfeather]

Looking forward to more. Like Samus's character.

 

[Corvo Attano]

Very good start, I am quite looking forwards to more; you don't find many Metroid fics around, at all.

 

[Cuofeng]

...
Chapter 2: Habeas Corpus
...​

Samus stepped down onto the Diomedes hanger deck and very quickly reassessed some assumptions about her "capture". This place was huge. Racks of fighter craft waited along the walls and other armed transports were parked across the floor within the absolute minimum tolerances. At least twenty flight crew were moving around within sight and a full squad of armored marines stood at attention. Samus thought to herself that she might have slightly overestimated the GF's commitment to politeness. Two hulking point-defense bots shifted their metal limbs near the main exit, gun barrels the size of her chest aimed down at each step she took. Yes, they were not happy with her.

Her previous two armored escorts disappeared with obvious relief, passing off their charge to a group with stronger armaments. Yin and Perez might have wished they could do the same, but as the arresting officers they were tied to Samus side for the foreseeable future. Samus watched them shrink back a bit as their path took them between the huge robots, atlas-class anti-aircraft guns tracking the base of their spines. Samus shook her head as inside her helmet her lips curled up at the corner. The show was actually amusing. Apparently she was a prime bounty now. Then to the side she could now just glimpse her yellow gunship in the process of being rather well restrained into a secure docking location. She gave a familiar two fingered wave in the ship's direction as they left the hanger.

The escort stomped down long corridors. Off down a corner Samus saw another hanger in the distance. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. This ship was too big. There was no reason for something this size to be out here at the very fringes of the Federation space. Nothing in this system could justify even powering up the jump drive on this monster. But they had come only for her, and probably not just to seek justice against her. She was missing something from this cost calculation.

"Right in here," Officer Yin said, gesturing to an open door leading to a clean white room. "You'll be processed inside. Officer Perez and I will be waiting at the exit when you're done."

Samus stepped inside, armored shoulders just barely coming fitting through the width of the doorway. These bulkheads were extraordinarily thick, composed of sturdy, energy absorbing alloys. Sensible precautions, really, if woefully insufficient in this particular case.

The door closed behind her and Samus stood in the middle of the room, an orange and red metal goliath surrounded on every side by seamless white.

"Disable all armaments and exit from your armor." A voice came out of a few artfully concealed speakers. The voice was calm yet firm, any menace dulled by long repetition. Yet underneath it all was a trill of fear. Their sensors would be throwing up only pure confusion as they attempted to scan the Chozo technology.

"Your equipment will be released to you upon your acquittal or completion of your sentence. If you require assistance to remove the armor, automated systems will be made available." Translation: Get out or we'll cut you out.

She had no reason to keep them waiting. Samus reached up with her left hand and grabbed her helmet. It slipped off without resistance, instantly releasing at her will. She tapped it against her thigh and it hung there easily with an invisible bond. Then Samus closed her eyes and breathed in, preparing to step out of her skin.

The entire front of the suit began to unfold and part like a bio-mechanical chrysalis. Alloyed armor plates, contractile cables, crystalline nerves, energy systems, and shield emitters all slid apart in a chaotic ballet. Samus moved one leg forward and now her armor remained behind. She walked forward into the room while in the corner of her eye the shit resealed itself. Tiny shimmers danced over the sliding metal and organic systems as small bits of matter dematerialized and reformed to permit this geometrically impossible process. She felt light; light and weak.

"Step forward into the next room."

Samus glanced up at the speaker as a portion of the white wall slid open to real a small corridor lined with sensors. It seems the people running this inspection were fine with her not striping off her blue interface-bodysuit. It was just as well, the linkages with her biology took almost twenty minutes to deintegrate especially after such a lengthy fusion. The spinal connections always tingled a bit. Samus stepped forward through the door.

This new little corridor was less well lit than the previous room. In fact it was positively dark compared to the blinding white which sealed off behind her. The one of the hallway's walls was mostly taken up by a long window looking into an adjacent, slightly elevated room that housed the specialists examining her. There, a number of human technicians and officers were glancing at the invisible readouts of sensors which were already having a field day after finally being able to peer into her unshielded body. Yin and Perez were missing, presumably being quickly debriefed. This inspection was a little like being on display but still Samus felt a small warmth of comfort. There was something primally reassuring about standing unguarded among people who looked like her. However, another part of her was growing tenser by the moment.

Sensors spun, flashed, and pinged her with invisible radiation while behind the glass the science team conversed in the illusion of privacy. It was trivially easy to read lips of you were fluent in the language. Well, fluency and the subject deciding to remain facing you.

One of the technicians turned around from inspecting a readout on the far wall, already in the middle of talking. "... programs not even recognizing her as human?"

The warm feeling began to drift away again.

Another technician glanced over. "...that far outside even any of the divergent population DNA lines? The....and those fully adapted space colonists from the pre-FTL days with the deformed skulls slip through and this lady doesn't? I know her file lists her as augmented but the system should have been taken that into account."

"Just look at this. It's not just some suite of soldier boosts, even the most extreme. Her bones are laced with carbon fiber and an alloy matrix. There's vibratic tensile fibers in her muscles, abnormal tendon reinforcement, and at least three stable nanobot colonies I've found so far. Half her nerve ganglia are now crystalline fiberoptic and I'm not even sure what some of these other implants are doing."

A third man was now just staring at Samus through the window with disbelief and something between pity and fear. She stared right back at him from inside the silent scan room.

He said, "Even with all these documents I can't imagine her medical history. Everything on the surface looks perfectly healthy, but... The modifications were all post-utero but started long before puberty. Fifteen percent of her DNA shows splicing and her cells have three organelles not native to any human population. There's what I assume is Chozo modification, semi-random damage from long term radiation exposure and acute phazon poisoning, metroid based DNA therapy, and what's documented in the file as some sort of classified parasite infection." He sighed.

"At this point she's basically scar tissue in the shape of a woman. It's-"

Then he suddenly noticed Samus' focus on his lips and turned away as he continued talking. She breathed out. Yes, she was certainly back among her species.

Evidently this inspection was taking longer than it should be because a tall man with bars on his shoulder stepped inside the other room and started saying something that, when he was periodically angled Samus' direction, looked rather loud.

"What's taking...damned scan?!"

"..."

"If...you override it! Just get... before... out here!" With that he turned and strode out of the room again.

Very quickly a voice came over the speakers in the narrow scanner hallway. "You may step forward into the next room."

Outside, Yin and Perez were waiting once more, now with a new complement of armored marines. From there the newly assembled convoy made its way down the ship corridors. Once or twice Yin and Perez tried to make light conversation but with all these gun barrels on hair triggers around her Samus didn't feel particular chatty.

Then they crossed a security airlock and saw up ahead a large dark room room covered with glowing analyst workstations. This was an absurdly well-outfitted ship. In fact down at the end of that room filled with advanced machinery and trained personnel was an armored door Samus recognized as the gateway to an Aurora unit housing. Indicators on the doorframe said it was empty. The mystery was growing by the minute.

There was a small group of people waiting at the edge of the room of where the white hallway intersecting that dark and blinking information cathedral. A black haired man in an unmarked dark jacket stood with his back to them, looking out at the banks of specialists and glowing computer displays. Whoever he was, he was flanked on each side by a taller man and woman in uniforms that bristled with obvious marks of rank. As Samus drew near the decorated man turned back and saw her. His expression was dour and unreadable as he leaned down slightly to whisper to the man in the blank coat. There was no visible reaction.

Officer Perez almost jumped as he snapped to attention when he recognized the people at the end of this hall. "Commander!"

The man in the dark jacket slowly turned as Samus got within a few paces of him. With casual interest she looked down and was met with piercing eyes staring up to meet hers. Her eyebrow ticked up slightly in provisional respect. So this was the man who controlled the interstellar fortress around them. There was a measure of power he exerted, which clashed invisibly against Samus' own presence in a way that unnerved the bystanders. His second in command edged forward, now trying to match stares on an even eye line with Samus but though he might meet her in height she had him beat by thirty pounds even before her special gifts were accounted for. Whatever sense of threat he was trying to project did not materialize.

The Commander continued inspect Samus. His eyes roved fearlessly over her body but there was no lust or anxiety, only a frustrated searching. She represented something to him, some resource he needed. The only question was what.

Then Samus heard Yin's voice behind her. "Um, sir? The tribunal is scheduled to start."

Well, they certainly weren't wasting any time. Which only made things more suspicious. Samus never trusted it when justice was swift.

...​

Samus slouched back in her chair behind a little desk facing a semicircle of elevated people in various highly decorated uniforms. Above, this chamber had an actual vaulted ceiling, almost preposterous on a military ship. The whole tribunal was a joke. Worse than that, it was boring.

She'd barely been escorted into the room when an officer with grey at her temples slid into the seat beside Samus and quickly started typing on the interface which flicked to life on the desk. From the way the woman did not seem at all concerned with Samus' existence she had to assume that this was her lawyer.

After a few moments typing the woman finally looked up and inspected Samus' face, eyes quickly dancing over the faint phazon corruption scars across her cheek. The lawyer's voice was brusk and businesslike.

"Aran, I'm Michelle Ortega and I'll be acting as your counsel today. I'm familiar with your case. Rather familiar in fact, since I've had sixteen months to prepare." There was a note of frustration there. "Just don't address the bench without speaking to me first. Nothing hurts a defendant more than talking too much. Got that?"

Samus continued looking at Ortega and leaned slightly further back in her chair. The chair creaked faintly.

"Perfect. Just like that." Ortega seemed as pleased as she was likely to get.

Then a general warning sounded out that the ship was warming up its jump drives to transfer systems in fifteen minutes. That actually did surprise Samus. It hadn't even been an hour since her apprehension, three hours since the ship dropped into this system, and this massive vessel was already basting off with all haste. That was a quick turnaround.

So this hadn't been a case of the Federation dispatching nearby teams to wherever they caught a whiff of Samus showing her head. Ortega had known she would have this assignment. This ship in particular had been hunting her for all this time. Or at least it had been consistently in the area, out here in the frayed edges of "civilized" space. What were they doing here? What could possibly be worth all the resources it took to operate this massive thing?

But once they dropped in and out of jump, hours passed while the other crew recovered from the physical and mental disorientation of warp jump. Samus sat in bored silence. Then the tribunal was talking again.

"...born to Virginia Aran and Rodney Aran on Colony K-2L. Most records were lost during the attack on..."

It still wasn't interesting. There was no need to listen to other people talk about her life. What was more important is what they weren't mentioning in all these procedures. Back in the examination chamber this crew hadn't received clearance to know the details of the X-parasite, and yet the metriod gene therapy directly resulting from her infection was easily displayed to them. Here the tribunal seemed to operating on the same level of information. Why was the metroid procedure declassified and not the details most relevant to the destruction of the SR388 Research Station?

Samus wished she could run these thoughts by Adam back on her ship, but the computerized mind was currently otherwise occupied. In fact she could currently hear his voice here in the tribunal room, listing off the many crimes against the Federation she had committed in the last two years. The Diomedes had of course copied Adam off the heavily modified but commercial grade memory banks of her gunship and the tribunal was currently interrogating selected snippets of his personality. He'd still be fine on the ship when Samus got back, but as she heard his voice reciting answers to all their questions and accusations it felt uncomfortably like she was being mocked by someone close to her.

However, if someone was trying to railroad her towards conviction, they were doing a very poor job of it. The list of charges they had levied against her were lengthy but utterly preposterous. Treason? Dereliction of duty? They had her dead to rights on a massive count of destruction of government property and grand theft, but here those points were muddled under a rambling thesis of conspiracy across decades. In fact the narrative seemed designed to bring up her best and most public actions; Zebes, the opening of Aether, the defense of Norion, and her assault on the Pirate home-world among others.

Samus narrowed her eyes. This narrative also mentioned the Chozo: mentioned them a lot, almost as much as her conflicts with the Space Pirates. Her childhood with them was frequently brought up, as were the technology of her suit and her enhancements. Even Tallon IV and Elesia were brought up in a rather forced way. Again, referencing the legacy of the Chozo. Most of those particular reports were signed "-N."

There was a hand behind all this. But in order to find out more Samus first had to sit through this interminable show. Old lessons of meditation came to her mind and as her stare locked on the head of the tribunal up on his bench. While he droned on about boring matters like treason and a threatened death penalty, her mind was cast out to the infinite web of existence that surrounded them all to the edge of the universe. So preoccupied, she didn't notice how profoundly uncomfortable that stare was leaving the man.

Then a change in his tone of voice snapped Samus back to attention.

"This tribunal finds Samus Aran guilty of the following charges: two grand counts of destruction of Federation property, unauthorized access of classified data, and reckless contamination of a planetary orbit."

Samus arched her eyebrow. Really, they didn't even find her guilty of stealing Adam? That charge at least was a slam dunk. They had the stolen property testifying in the tribunal room! Instead they transformed blowing up a multi-trillion credit Research Station into an orbital littering ticket.

The tribunal bench continued, "The recommended sentence is fifteen years imprisonment, commuted through government service and subject to parole. Commander Nakamura is hereby appointed as your overseer. You are to report to him to receive your assignment. You are now..."

Here there was a bit of confusion as Samus had already gotten up from her seat and pushed past the surprised marines on her way to the door. She stopped when she realized that the Chair had not actually signaled the end of the tribunal. Samus was now politely waiting by the door with two pulse rifles pointed at her head. She gave the Chair a vaguely apologetic nod.

"...Er, you are now free to go."

Samus gave a two finger wave and strode off to push open the chamber door with a bang. Commander Nakamura: there was not really enough to go on but Samus' trained intuition told her there were good odds she now knew who "-N." was. She remembered the short black haired man from the hallway. She remembered his stare. The master of this ship had written half the background documents for her trial. This was quite a lot of trouble to go through to arrange a meeting.

Out in the halls Samus took advantage of the confusion from her shifting legal status to blaze her own path through the ship, choosing directions based on wherever looked like the places that someone like her should least be allowed to go. The sound of rushing footsteps behind her showed that Officer Yin had managed to extract herself from the tribunal room and was still in some nominal sense Samus' guardian. Once Samus got in the lift she decided to let a now breathless Yin push the correct button after she just slid in through the closing doors.

Nakamura, Samus visualized his face, those dark and searching eyes. Let's see what you want.

....​

"Commander Nakamura will meet with you in his quarters."

Samus nodded to Officer Yin as the door to to the commander's room opened in front of her. Instantly, a lot of things became rather more clear. There was a consistent decoration theme in here and that theme was Chozo artifacts.

Miniature reproductions of statues lined a shelf and one wall was covered with a large and heavily engraved sheet of metal filled with the slashes and cuts of ornate Chozo script. Samus moved into the room, glancing at a framed slice of an ancient fresco mounted across from a piece of technology that even she didn't recognize off the top of her head. So, the commander was a fan of her second family.

Then she saw the man himself at far end of the room, once again standing with his back to her, now silhouetted against a full wall holo display. The commander who wore no decoration on his jacket. Behind her, the security door closed.

"Samus, it's good to meet you." Nakamura started talking without turning around. Glowing information continued to flow through the air in front of him. "I would have said more prior to the tribunal but given the uncertain nature of such proceedings I didn't want to unfairly get your hopes up. The sentencing was not my jurisdiction, though I had my hopes."

Samus quietly snorted. As commander of a newly constructed Aurora-class warship out here at the bleeding edge of Federation space the things that were not effectively under his jurisdiction were limited to certain laws of physics. The computer behind him displayed something about the movements of ships in this sector.

She was just waiting now for the other shoe to drop. Then Nakamura turned around and to her surprise his face was lined with worry. Something had him scared.

"Please, I need your help."

And there it was.

Nakamura continued to lay out his case. "I don't know what you've heard while hiding out here but things have been lively back in the core worlds. The Federation has been rolling back the Space Pirates since the end of the phazon crisis. Fantastic work there, of course."

Samus didn't say anything. She was naturally suspicious of praise from any source and right before someone asked her to do something was even more spine tingling. In her experience, pleasantries were rarely so.

Nakamura seemed to notice her reluctance. Perhaps in an attempt to set her at ease he moved over and sat down in a comfortable looking chair, but since Samus declined to notice his waved proffering of the other seat this maneuver just left her towering over him by still more.

"Right. Our business." He gathered his thoughts again. At least he didn't seem physically intimidated by her like many human men. "There's still an observation fleet enforcing a partial blockade on the Pirate home-world but most of the fleets had already fled out in every direction to the black beyond our reach. As a culture the Pirates put too many eggs in the phazon basket and without it they're still in full recovery mode. An entire society in corruption withdrawals. There hasn't been much threat from them as a result." Here he paused. "At least no direct threat."

He waved his hand and glowing information popped into existence in the air beside his chair. Samus glanced over and saw holographic images of different breeds of Space pirates and technical specifications on a wide range of different ships. Then she looked closer. Some of those ship specifications looked off.

Nakamura was talking again. "For the last twenty-three months Intelligence has been following traces of a certain Pirate splinter fleet. Not the biggest by any measure but it attracted attention by being distinctly...heterogeneous. Heterogeneous and rather well behaved. When they fled the home system they just seemed to follow their own strange path out through space with not a single notable raid to their credit. Of course that made us think something had to be wrong."

Samus had walked over and was now stood very directly in front of Nakamura's seat, obliviously infringing on his personal space as she carefully studied the display beside him. After an uncomfortable moment Nakamura flicked the information over onto another projector and Samus was led away but she was too far into her thoughts to notice the reason for this migration. They were showing at least five Pirate ethnicities operating as a single fleet operation. That was something Samus had never seen before.

The pirates were a morphologically diverse species, made more so by their total lack of augmentation taboos, but their old world-bound cultures still shone through in their strong tendency to only operate in related clans. It as a much stronger instinct than even Humans suffered under, though tempered by the Pirate's willingness to reassign ethnic lines under the surgeon's knife or gene-molder's tank. However, this fleet was acting differently and strange behavior from your enemy was always worrying.

Nakamura continued, "While the main Pirate fleets have been skipping around with small raids in their respective territories of unclaimed space, this band of misfits seems to have called dibs on the most hard to reach sectors and then burned hard out beyond our furthest listening posts." The shadows played over his face as the projector flickered to display new information. "When they came back into our range they were changed. Their behavior was oddly restrained. One report even has them paying for goods they needed on an inhabited world, not stealing and salvaging every bit of technology they found. Because they already found something. Something lost out in the dark beyond Federation space. Something powerful and old. Archeotech. But now their violence is increasing again and the fleet is getting closer to inhabited Federation worlds, searching for something else."

Now it came together. But Samus was very used to military officers talking around what needed to be said. Given the chance they'd leave out information the size of a mountain and expect a soldier to "adapt" before plowing into its side. This pirate fleet had found something powerful out in the depths of space and was now turned on to other similar payloads. They had tasted a new treat and they were hungry for more. And there was a reason Nakamura was out here at the fringes. A ship like the Diomedes was not built to chase, but to protect.

She decided to speed this up. "You've already found it."

Despite having chosen her for precisely this task, Nakamura was still impressed. "Yes, we did. Admittedly, we already had it long before we knew they were looking. Once we guessed the Pirates had found something Chozo it wasn't hard to guess what was at the center of their narrowing search pattern out in this sector. Whatever was in their cache must have only described the general location of this other base." He nodded at the computer and once again the entire far wall lit up into a window-like display of a planetary landscape. A dry rocky landscape reaching up to a mountain of almost preposterous scale. "Admittedly we could still be wrong about their target but if they're collecting Chozo stuff out here then I'm feeling pretty safe about my bet."

In the light of the projected screen, Samus looked out at a mountain as thin wisps of clouds slowly splashed against its flanks. She had to agree with Nakamura; The carved image on the mountainside of a seated Chozo pointing forward was a pretty good sign. Since it was over half a mile tall and apparently wrought from more living stone than a whole city, one might even call it a great sign. The statue was larger than this entire ship. She smiled to herself. No one had ever called the Chozo self-effacing.

Nakamura saw that smile, but his face was still grave. "Now the crux. The Pirate fleet is coming, and there are five thousand human colonists living at the base of that statue. We only have a week to prepare and defend them."

That certainly changed the tone.

The commander was pacing in his cabin as the ship intercom announced preparations for yet another warp jump. Samus let him do so as she continued to cycle her finger in the air, scrolling through the information the ship's computer was projecting in front of her. He continued his lecture.

"This isn't the first time the Pirates have salvaged and adapted foreign technology. In fact, that's nearly all they do. I mean, you know that." Deliberate informality injected into his speech to build rapport. He was a good speaker. Possibly gained his advancement through politics. That wasn't a mark against him, just a different skill set.

He was chatty though. "Not that we humans can be to superior on the issue of technologic scavenging. I doubt there's a multi-system species in this galactic arm that hasn't been combing through the Chozo's ashes. They were invincible, rulers of space for five thousand years. Then they just...collapsed. In the span of a few centuries their dominion splintered, fleeing to hermitages and before disappearing completely leaving only...Well, that's not important right now."

Nakamura shook his head. "We've, I mean the Federation, have been learning what we can. Trying to rebuild something like the Pax Chozo in this region of space. The Elesia research base eventually gave us the clues to planet J-4M here, though not without resisting. This planet wasn't on the standard lists of Chozo contacted systems. We only inferred its existence from forensic data, and extrapolated its location from a curious absence of recorded ship routes. But this little world may be the real treasure we were waiting for."

He gestured to the image of the planet, mostly brown with wide ice caps at both poles. "The Chozo love of secrecy hid it well. But unfortunately our current intelligence on these Pirates isn't much better. At first Sig Int were very confident since this splinter fleet of ours seemed much more talkative than normal, positively oozing communication traces as they left home-world and headed out to the black. But it's mostly unintelligible chatter to our code-breakers if its code at all. The best interpretation leaves the bulk of it as devotional wailings. These Pirates sound like a cult."

Samus frowned. Cult-like behavior? That didn't make sense. The Space Pirates were notoriously indisposed to religion. They took an almost pathological pride in their materialism, consigning the fields of philosophy and morality to the babbling of children. This was all very strange. Well, she could understand why Nakamura wanted an expert on Pirates, in addition to his Chozo fascination.

At that point he turned dramatically, arm held out to sweep her into his next topic. "The thing you must..."

He wobbled a bit off his step when he saw Samus wasn't there anymore and was instead now across the room. She glanced up from where she casually leaned against the wall and gave him a finger twirling "go on" signal. He did, but Samus thought that he was faintly offended she was not fully buying into his theatrical presentation.

"Yes. Well, for how open handed the Chozo were at their height they took the balance of their most valuable secrets to the grave or wherever they went. Frankly, I'm a bit jealous if the Pirates found something this useful out there. We humans missed the largés of the late Chozo empire by just a few centuries at most and even down on J-4M we're mostly left with poetic prophecy and black boxes. And even with putting our Aurora unit down on the planet surface to help decipher, none of the relics have proved useful yet. They are pretty though."

He was gesturing to the inscribed slab on his wall with something approaching reverence in his eyes. Samus looked over too, casually peering a little closer to read the elaborate script out of curiosity for whatever the commander had scrounged up. Then she half choked in surprise as she blinked rapidly to clear the whatever emotion he might see on her face.

It was a poem, and the poem was filthy. Flowery and poetic, rife with metaphor, but absolutely obscene to its core. Samus was left struggling between bursting out laughing and burning with mortification. The bit about beaks and mountains alone was almost too much.

Nakamura continued, oblivious. "So much wisdom held inside. Now they're gone and we're just left with frustration. If only we could strip away the ornamentation and get a grasp on what they were really saying."

It took Samus a considerable amount of mental energy to remain expressionless. Apparently Nakamura's translator was serviceable but not culturally fluent. Mercifully he got back to the matter of the Pirates.

"But however they managed it, this Pirate fleet has shown signs of a technologic jump and a singleminded pursuit of more Chozo relics. Their first find has improved their ships considerably. J-4M must be defended, not just for the lives of the colonists and scientists down on the surface but because we can not allow this Pirate fleet to rejoin contact with the rest of their population. This fleet is behaving odd and we like the enemy we know."

Samus could agree to that. Truthfully, that expression might also describe why she had worked with the Federation so often.

Nakamura looked back at her, tilting his head down slightly even though she was much taller than him. "Well, there you go. All my cards on the table. You've got decades more experience and wisdom with this type of thing than any of my people. Out here at the edge, we humans are on a bit of tightrope but we're in it together. I'd ask you to help though you've already got a tribunal sentencing ordering you to do so." He met her eyes, dark brown locking on blue. "But I'll ask you anyway. Will you help us?"

Wisdom, he said. Samus breathed heavily. Her oldest enemies were arming themselves with her own strength and she had to figure out a way to take it back. With all this talk of the Chozo around her, Samus did not feel wise. Despite being around enough other humans to remind her that even if she didn't look it she was now over fifty years old, the carvings and the statues still made her feel so very young. Young and lost.

Her lips parted without conscious thought, catching her off guard with a whisper; a bit of wisdom long ago drilled into not just her head but her muscle. "Energy is matter."

"What?" Nakamura was startled by this seeming non sequitur. Then Samus realized that she had spoken in Chozo. But why had she spoken at all? It had risen unbidden from the unconscious depths of her mind. She hadn't spoken that language in decades.

Still, Samus felt no need to repeat herself. She barely knew why she said it herself. Somehow it felt like meditation, the techniques of generating new discovery from deep within the mind, like prophecy. So she continued to recite the rest of that old lesson, though switching languages to the commander's own. The translation didn't hold up, but she doubted Nakamura was conversational in the Chozo. "Matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Past and future are the same present. All divisions are an illusion."

It was the first lesson and the last; the one her second family had tried to drill into her again and again. They called it the Blood of the Chozo. They said it was the sum total of all wisdom. Their eyes had smiled in a familiar sad way when she said that she understood. They had said it was ok that she didn't. Not yet. What did it mean that this had come back to her now?

Nakamura was over his startlement and gave a faint and weary smile of his own. "Why Aran, that was almost at speech. Not really relevant, but I'll take what I can get."

Then the final jump warning alarm went off. Samus and Nakamura sat down and strapped themselves in as outside the cabin porthole Officer Yin did the same. The Diomedes' metal ribs hummed as it prepared to head to J-4M, to protect another set of humans hunched at the feet of the Chozo from the specter of the Space Pirates. Samus supposed that for her it was a bit like going home. She breathed deeply and found peace within herself. With great and terrible power, the ship lurched beyond the speed of light

When they fell out of jump they met the communications of a colony that was already screaming.

...​

 

[Corvo Attano]

Hmm. Not sure how I like the setup with the supposed cult-pirates, but it is an interesting and unique twist for fics like this. I'll stick around and keep reading- this looks great. Some minor spelling errors, I would point them out but I'm at work so I don't have a lot of time; besides, they are minor and detract little from the story. Overall well written, and I look forwards to more!

 

[Simon Buchan]

while in the corner of her eye the shit resealed itself.

Click to shrink...

While not incorrect, you probably meant suit here

fine with her not striping off her blue

Click to shrink...

stripping

massive vessel was already basting off with all haste

Click to shrink...

blasting

They took an almost pathological pride in their materialism, consigning the fields of philosophy and morality to the babbling of children.

Click to shrink...

I mean, they aren't wrong...

Flowery and poetic, rife with metaphor, but absolutely obscene to its core.

Click to shrink...

Pornography, in my archeology? It's more likely than you'd think! (I particularly enjoyed the sentence "A small dog is also at the center.")


I really hope we get some space pirates curling up into balls here. Nothing makes Samus angrier than copyright infringement!

 

[PurgeTheXeno]

A bit disappointed really.

Tribunal: Why did you destroy the SR388 orbital station?

Samus: Because your science cast has vapor for brains.

(If i have to explain the response in detail, i will be very sad.)

 

[Prime 2.0]

Not every day you find a metroid fic, and today I found two. But the other one sucked, so I'm relieved that this one doesn't.

I have no clue how well you write action since you haven't gotten to any yet, but the imagery is pretty nice and I like your portrayal of Samus thus far. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this.

 

[Cuofeng]

Not every day you find a metroid fic, and today I found two. But the other one sucked, so I'm relieved that this one doesn't.

I have no clue how well you write action since you haven't gotten to any yet, but the imagery is pretty nice and I like your portrayal of Samus thus far. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this.

Click to shrink...

Don't worry, action is coming. Next chapter things kick off.

 

[13th Bee]

I like this so far, it's quite good. I do disagree with some of your interpretations of how things work, but that's not really a big issue considering how much interpretation is needed. I do like your characterization of Samus.

Samus's physiology shouldn't be too big of a surprise. She's worked with the Federation long enough and they've had her laid out on a surgical table enough times that they should have a decent idea of what she looks like under the hood. The same goes for her suit. They can't replicate or even fully understand what they've seen, sure, but i's not some complete unknown. As you have it, it isn't too bad though. It reads as "her file said it, but seeing is believing."

I prefer the interpretation that Samus's armor is physically part of her. Like, a combination of cybernetics and grafting it onto her soul. She can dismiss its physical form, and it can get damaged or disabled or otherwise rendered unavailable, but she's basically always carrying it with her. How you have it is fine and all, this is more a statement of views that don't often get to come up because nobody ever talks about Metroid. Although I do think it would be interesting if one reason the guards are still so twitchy around her is because she never truly disarmed. Like, she "took off" her armor with a thought and a flash of light, but it could just as easily come back with another thought and another flash of light.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, now that my inner nerd has been satisfied, great work so far!

 

[Cuofeng]

Samus's physiology shouldn't be too big of a surprise. She's worked with the Federation long enough and they've had her laid out on a surgical table enough times that they should have a decent idea of what she looks like under the hood. The same goes for her suit. They can't replicate or even fully understand what they've seen, sure, but i's not some complete unknown. As you have it, it isn't too bad though. It reads as "her file said it, but seeing is believing."

Click to shrink...

My idea is that the Federation does have files on Samus, but they are classified on a heavily need-to-know basis. The different branches and deployments of Federation would not immediately have everything. Notice that the X-Parasite is classified to the Diomedes crew, and so are Samus' Fusion medical procedures. You could imagine that the Phazon Trooper program would be similarly classified. There would probably medical reports from Samus' time serving in the military but in my version that was decades ago. Samus is by now rather different even from how she was when she left Zebes.

Hmm. Not sure how I like the setup with the supposed cult-pirates, but it is an interesting and unique twist for fics like this. I'll stick around and keep reading- this looks great. Some minor spelling errors, I would point them out but I'm at work so I don't have a lot of time; besides, they are minor and detract little from the story. Overall well written, and I look forwards to more!

Click to shrink...

The pirates are a bit odd, but every metroid story has an element of mystery to it. I try to keep compliant with the canon details but I am not not exactly the most slavish author in that aspect. And as for the typos, another poster has got your back on pointing those out.

Thanks for reading.

Everything you said

Click to shrink...

Typos are the bane of my existence. My spellchecker works its little electronic heart out but it can only do so much.

Tribunal: Why did you destroy the SR388 orbital station?

Click to shrink...

Samus: ...

Tribunal: Do you hear us? Why did you do it?

Samus: ...

Tribunal: Listen, if you don't- Wait. Oh no. We're the first location of a Metroid story. OH GOD! We're doomed! EVERYONE, RUN!

Samus: ... <Did I leave the AC on in the gunship?>

 

[Prime 2.0]

Wow, that is a lot of sequential posting. You should consider doing it all as a single one.

Something I forgot to mention earlier, but I prefer reading the boards using a light theme, which the color formatting in chapter 2 makes very difficult. I'd appreciate it if you could avoid using colored text unnecessarily.

 

[13th Bee]

My idea is that the Federation does have files on Samus, but they are classified on a heavily need-to-know basis. The different branches and deployments of Federation would not immediately have everything. Notice that the X-Parasite is classified to the Diomedes crew, and so are Samus' Fusion medical procedures. You could imagine that the Phazon Trooper program would be similarly classified. There would probably medical reports from Samus' time serving in the military but in my version that was decades ago. Samus is by now rather different even from how she was when she left Zebes.

Click to shrink...

The pirates are a bit odd, but every metroid story has an element of mystery to it. I try to keep compliant with the canon details but I am not not exactly the most slavish author in that aspect. And as for the typos, another poster has got your back on pointing those out.

Thanks for reading.

Click to shrink...

Typos are the bane of my existence. My spellchecker works its little electronic heart out but it can only do so much.

Click to shrink...

Samus: ...

Tribunal: Do you hear us? Why did you do it?

Samus: ...

Tribunal: Listen, if you don't- Wait. Oh no. We're the first location of a Metroid story. OH GOD! We're doomed! EVERYONE, RUN!

Samus: ... <Did I leave the AC on in the gunship?>

Click to shrink...

You are aware that the multiquote function is a thing, right? Just hit the "+Quote" button next to reply on each post you want to quote and then the Insert Quotes button at the bottom left of the reply box. Posting like you just did is kinda against the rules.

 

[Cuofeng]

You are aware that the multiquote function is a thing, right? Just hit the "+Quote" button next to reply on each post you want to quote and then the Insert Quotes button at the bottom left of the reply box. Posting like you just did is kinda against the rules.

Click to shrink...

Ah, I was not aware. This is my first time using this site. I will adjust my posting accordingly.

...after this last post pointing it out.

 

[Cuofeng]

...
Chapter 3: War in Heaven
...​

Vibrations and distorted vision signaled Diomedes dropping out of jump with a soundless thump that hit the soul. Samus glanced over at her designated overseer. Nakamura looked rather groggy and pale at the moment; hyper jump was really disorienting to any mind not disciplined enough to handle it. But still, the people on this ship were experienced space crew and would be back to busy operation in thirty seconds or so. Samus closed her eyes again and tried to take advantage of this last moment of meditation available to her. Breath and the slow beat of her heart was an anchoring rhythm. There was something moving in the fabric of fate; a thought hiding at the back of her mind. She sat and tried to recapture it in the music of silence.

Then the ship shuddered in pain. A blaring alarm instantly filled the air as Samus' eyes snapped open. Nakamura fumbled for the computer controls as Samus was already out of her restraint seat and bolting towards the cabin door.

Nakamura called into the coms. "What's...Bridge, report! What just happened?"

He was still disoriented, they all were. It would be a few more seconds before the human crew truly registered that the ship was under attack.

Samus slammed the emergency release on the commander's cabin door as she barreled out into the hallway, rebounding off the wall to change directions more quickly. One of the decorative panels cracked under her shoulder and Officer Yin was thrown back into her restraint seat as she tried to rise but Samus was already gone down the passage at a full run.

From behind her, Nakamura yelled out, "Samus, what are...?! Dammit! Bridge, emergency alert and full countermeasures authorized. Fire on all targets! Clear our space!"

Samus' feet pounded on the hallway floor. They'd dropped into an ambush. The Pirates had somehow tricked the Diomedes into predicting a much longer path for the splinter fleet than they actually took. Now they were already waiting for the Federation's return to the colony planet.

The pirates or someone else. She had to consider possibilities. In any case, the Diomedes was caught in the teeth of a trap and as Samus ran the huge ship shuddered again from another impact against the already stressed shields.

Silent cursing filled her head as Samus ached for the missing navigation displays from her suit visor. Her previous path through this ship had been too circuitous so she was relying on pure intuition from her time on other Federation ships to find the straightest route to her destination. At this point she just had to hope that the lead designer of this new vessel class was human so she was working off the correct layout assumptions. She dropped down a stair port without once touching a single step and now there were uniformed crew around her rushing to their combat stations. They all had other things to worry about and on a military vessel anyone running with this amount of determination was unconsciously granted at least a provisional sergeant rank so they got out of her way.

There, Samus thought, spotting a directory on the wall as she ran by. The intersection of munitions and quarantine. That's where they'd be keeping it. She was charging down an empty corridor but she knew better than to think that no one was watching her.

"Nakamura!" she yelled at the blank walls. "My suit!"

Then she rounded a corner and two armored marines stood between her and the destination.

Both weapons snapped up in response to the six-foot woman suddenly leaping through the bulkhead airlock and charging their position. Time slowed for a second as Samus' foot came down, two gun barrels targeted her heart, and one of the marines reflexively cocked his head as a coms voice began to speak in his helmet. Nakamura's crew was quick on the uptake and seemed to be already granting Samus clearance to pass by.

Unfortunately, that conversation would take a few seconds too long. Samus leaned back from her dash into a slide, letting her momentum close the distance as her toe shot up to catch tip of the first Marine's weapon, deflecting it up. Then her hand shot out to grab his armored ankle. There were a few crashes as the two soldiers were rendered into a state of no longer blocking the hallway and Samus regained her feet in a single smooth motion, recovering the small bit of speed she'd lost. She raced off again. People in power armor never expected an unarmored human to match their strength.

The quarantine lab fortunately had time to respond to the bridge's warning and the correct sequence of doors were open and clear for her, laying a path free of otherwise necessary violence. Then, there at the end of the corridor, a single suit of orange armor stood in an empty room. Even at full sprint, Samus felt a slow breath slide out of her lungs. The front of the armor shimmered and began to slide open. It needed no signal to recognize her.

Then they met and she was whole once more.

...​

The Diomedes bridge blazed with red tinted combat lighting. Screens and holo displays blinked warnings as the seats deployed crew's void suits onto their bodies even as they worked the controls. Commander Nakamura gripped a passing lieutenant's shoulder for stability as he skidded onto the bridge and his station, panting after the run from his cabin. He didn't bother yelling, right now all his crew knew their orders, but his eyes flickered from display to display as his brain overheated processing the mess outside their hull. Hostile ships in every direction, and the planet stretched out below them. They were almost surrounded. Then the hostile markers were blinking red as they shifted around the map display.

To his right one of the crew reported. "Shield load spiking up to eighty percent but still holding."

"Bay two fighter launches complete."

"Direct hit. Enemy corvette disabled."

New alarms started flashing. "Commander! Data intrusion against servers Beta and...! Sir, intrusion on every network! They're ripping through our firewalls. They've got access to everything! I can't stop them!"

"Intrusion traced to...! Onboard! Quarantine level!"

Nakamura finished bucking himself into his combat station. Onboard? He could guess what that meant. "Deprioritize that intrusion. I know what that is. It's Aran."

"Sir, marines reporting single attacker on deck-"

"Yeah, that'll be her too." Half symbols on the screens abruptly turned red and the ship shuddered. "Focus on punching us out of this damn encirclement! Light them all up!"

News of disaster from the colony below filled his screen. The planet-bound Aurora unit was still filling a communication line with its coded assessment of the ongoing Pirate ground assault. Out here hostile ships were on every side, surrounded the lone Federation vessel and its spreading cloud of fighters. Nakamura felt a smile twitch at the corner of his lips. For a ship like Diomedes, surrounded meant that half of those hostiles would soon be relevant only as floating debris. There was a reason the Federation felt comfortable with Diomedes acting alone out here.

His chair vibrated faintly as the bones of the ship hummed. The main canon was charging.

The display in front of him continued blinking the colony's distress message. They had been under attack for three hours.

...​

Information flooded in front of Samus' eyes. System warnings from across the ship. Telemetry data from the attackers out in space. Communications between combat stations as the crew of hundreds all rushed to their designated tasks.

The suit's haptic feeds and audio queues integrated everything into her awareness in a way that even the best computer terminal could only dream of. That cumulative pound and a half of Chozo computing could equal anything human built short of a full Aurora unit. Right now, Samus was busy convincing those same systems that it wasn't worth smashing through every bulkhead in a straight line to her gunship in the hanger. There were currently enough people trying to put holes in this ship without Nakamura having to deal with holes spreading from within.

The Diomedes briefly hummed around her and two enemy indicators on her visor winked off outside the ship as Samus charged down the corridors. That would be the main cannon. Samus approved.

However, this whole ambush attack didn't make sense. Without phazon corruption maddening their decision makers the Pirates just didn't take risks like this. That rag tag splinter fleet Nakamura had shown her was practically guaranteed to lose at least half their numbers before they even scratched something like Diomedes. If they'd managed to get intelligence of the Federation ship being out of system, then the Diomedes should have dropped in to see the fleet scrambling to lift off from the planet J-4M with whatever loot they'd managed to grab during the the ship's absence. But instead nearly everything the Pirates had was out here in high orbit, waiting for a heavily armed battleship to drop out of jump.

Samus didn't like when things didn't make sense. But despite her confusion and unease, in the middle of this battle a familiar sense of balance was rising within her. She could feel her heart beating in her veins. There was a rhythm in her bones. There was part of her that loved this. Then, just before she reached the hanger, her suit flashed a warning as a horrendous crash ripped through the ship.

She continued forward and leaped through a twisted and damaged airlock door as a hurricane of atmosphere suddenly rushed past her, sucked into the hanger by a new vacuum. Her boots locked on the deck in an easy resistance but she stopped anyway to stare out at the newly missing outer wall. She was looking into the black of space. The ship's hull now ended at the edge of the hanger in glowing molten edges, blinding orange against the void, a void that flashed with the blazing spears of laser fire. Outside, new constellations swirled as missiles swooped towards their targets across thousands of miles. Comparatively tiny fighters swerved and sparkled in dogfights before they took a wrong move and bloomed into brief shining novas. All without a sound but the rushing of air from behind her.

In the hanger, Samus sprang forward. With each muted thud of her boots against the deck and each rumble of the suit's jets, ripples of speed boost energy formed around her armor as she accelerated towards the missing wall. Off to the right, her gunship was already powered up and broke free of its bonds, her suit's Chozo hacking smashing against the electric locks that restrained it. Samus didn't need to signal any plan; from inside the shipboard computer Adam knew her history well enough to predict what she was about to do and her personality well enough to not bother advising against it. Samus raced on, still building speed as energy shimmered around her.

Then she reached the melted edge of the hanger and jumped, thrusting her legs back as she thundered out into the black silence of vacuum. She smiled as the imagined music of battle whispered in her ears. She rocketed through space, alone.

Samus set her suit into a slight spin, taking in the conflict that stretched for a twenty thousand miles in each direction around her. For this moment she was too small a target to be focused on so she could think and plan without worrying about evasion. There were over fifty Pirate ships of significant size but they were getting shredded, or rather some of them were. Certain other ships were standing firm against the Federation munitions and something out here had ripped a hundred meter gash in the side of Diomedes. The Pirates had new weapon.

A metal surface thumped into her boots from behind, acceleration creating an imitation of gravity. The gunship had caught up to her and Samus was now standing on its nose, a lone woman perched on a mountain peak as it revolved through space.

"Adam," she murmured. "Where did the hanger blast originate from?"

The digital mind spoke from the gunship. "At this point, I believe I will simply transfer that question over to the Diomedes' encrypted communications. A few of them have been quite loudly wondering what you've been doing."

A second later, as Samus flipped backwards into the void before launching headfirst through the gunship's briefly open airlock, voices exploded into her helmet.

"Aran!" It seems Nakamura had seized the bridge coms. "That shot pierced straight through our shields with only forty percent power loss! It's frequency shifting or something...we're still analyzing. That's something new, and way too dangerous. Get back in on Diomedes this moment; we can't afford to lose you here!"

During the commander's pause for breath Adam gently interjected for Samus' ears only. "The beam origin is now marked for you."

Samus twirled as she maneuvered inside the tight gunship cabin, and locked into the cockpit harness. She glanced out the view-screen into space just in time to notice the blaring alarm of an incoming locked missile. A nearly mortal fifteen Gs of burn blasted the gunship out of the way at the last minute as she and Adam wordlessly plotted a weaving, twisting course toward the largest Pirate vessel.

Nakamura's voice came back over coms. He sounded resigned now. "And there's the intrusion alarm in our combat computers so I suppose you have the beam origin already. At least you're now out of range to keep hacking us but, Aran, be careful."

The battle was chaotic. Diomedes was successfully retreating towards the planet's distant horizon but that path turned the main guns away from the remaining bulk of the enemy fleet and the Pirates were pursuing. In fact, the largest Pirate vessel and its escorts were actually gaining on the powerful Federation battleship's acceleration. Again, that shouldn't be possible.

The expanse between this chase was filled with the clash of smaller ships. Dying fighters exploded like blazing confetti. Missiles detonated in a constant sparkle of pinpricks as laser shots traces a strobe-like web. Samus' ship dove into the heart of this.

A target reticule popped up on the cockpit display and a hunter missile fired from the gunship as Samus' finger twitched in command. She wasn't entirely sure if she or Adam had fired it. The AI clone of her old commander had evolved since those days when he had been issued in the failed attempt to control her. By now they'd reached a point where they barely talked to each other. Samus liked that.

A GF fighter radioed thanks as that missile shredded the Pirate raider that had been bearing down on it from behind. Samus just tapped "acknowledged" as her yellow ship continued its knifelike plunge down the battle's neck.

Her cockpit shook as a partial hit nearly blew out one of the shield emitters. Samus jerked the controls and a hard evasive turn hit her with enough acceleration that she could feel it in her organs even through the ship and suit's dampeners. Another alarm went off. Atmosphere was venting through a pinprick somewhere on the gunship but she didn't bother with that. In fact, the cabin was only pressurized at all because she never bothering to change the factory settings on this latest replacement ship. She never risked removing her suit amid vacuum, no matter how secure things seemed. That was the sort of lesson you only needed to learn once in a lifetime.

The gunship fired again and again. A hundred miles away a breacher missile exploded against the side of a mottled black Pirate cruiser.

Adam's voice imposed itself over the alarms, silencing them. "The ship missile stocks are being depleted rapidly. This model is not suitable for this type of combat mission. I predict a seventy percent chance of total destruction before you manage to breach the Pirate command ship. Do you understand the risks?"

Text flashed onto the view screen. "Yes/No"

Her thumb twitched to the right to select the option as a smile floated onto her lips. "Yes"

Adam simulated a sigh. "I assumed as much. Well, I no longer regret being forcibly duplicated onto the Diomedes systems. No matter how they treated that copy, it is some small degree of enforced immortality." There was a slight pause, filled with the flashing of frustrated ignored alarms. "I wish I could do the same for you, Samus."

"Then let's not die."

Fighting in space was so quiet. Explosions sparkled like scattered gems but the gunship only made any sound when it was changing velocity or firing, or when an enemy's attack came near enough to brush against the shields. Otherwise, no matter how violent the spectacle outside, it unfolded in perfect silence. That was true even if every mammalian instinct screamed that it should be hearing the end of the world.

A beam of blinding light split the black expanse, erupting from the Pirate command ship to splash against the back of distant Diomedes in a shimmer of purple and gold and fire. That should have made noise.

Samus felt her heart thud as she watched the massive beam wink out. It had to be the weapon that had slashed across the hanger bay earlier. This told her that it had a long recharge cycle but even so she doubted Diomedes' ability to withstand a third hit. Nakamura's encrypted transmissions to his fighters in the battle had fallen silent. Possibly that beam had damaged something important to their communications. Samus locked her eyes on the enemy ship as she dove and rolled to avoid more Pirate fighters. So it was true, the Pirates had found some piece of new technology out in the wilds. None of this changed her mission but it added a more definite time limit.

She had to board the Pirate Command ship, find whatever ancient treasure these raiders had unearthed, destroy it, and escape preferably while disabling the vessel, all before the weapon recharged. She could do this. She could probably do this. Adam helpfully flicked a countdown to the top corner of her visor as all the while warning lights continued to blink around the cockpit.

Then her gunship exploded.

For half a second, sound and fire engulfed her. Then it was gone and Samus frantically twisted in her seat to see that fifteen feet of the side of her ship had been replaced with a jagged sparking hole into space. The stars outside were spinning.

Adam was speaking in her helmet. "Direct hit sustained. Catastrophic damage. Primary engine offline. Secondary engine failing. Reactor containment failing. Missile launch offline. Computer cooling-"

Samus interrupted. "Final burst of thrusters to confirm a near miss trajectory then red-line secondary engine without limiters, followed by complete transmission cutoff. Now."

She felt the dying ship shudder and screech under her as it complied. The fitful, intermittent rumble of the secondary engine told her that it was trying its best, even if it could only manage this for a few more moments of acceleration. Luckily they had already been going very fast and the enemy shouldn't bother targeting them again. It was easy to pretend to be a disabled wreck when you absolutely were.

She detached from her restraints and moved to the shattered hole in the side of her ship. Outside, the dark mass of the Pirate Command ship was growing larger with each appearance from the gunship's slow axial revolutions. The enemy ship's long spines glowed with dull purple illumination as it hung amid the stars, seemingly motionless even as this view spun. Then the vibrations in the gunship's hull stopped as the last engine failed. Her ship was completely inoperable and they were not on course to impact the command ship, if only by a few miles. Suit calculations said that at current angles the wreck would orbit the planet obliquely for twenty-six months before the orbit decayed into the atmosphere. Tactically irrelevant. Samus smiled. Really, it was almost perfect.

But she had to move fast. She reached up to grab the twisted metal edge of the hole in the hull before twisting and flinging herself out onto the still spinning exterior, free of gravity but fighting the rotational inertia all the way. Her boots locked down with a magnetic clunk as her inner ear tried and failed to do the same. She walked across the still spinning hull as her left hand signed out the commands to initiate downloading the gunship's computers into her suit systems. Adam would be coming with her. The Pirate ship rotated into view again, it was growing closer, then it was gone again and the planet rose again to fill the sky before its own descent.

"Data transfer speeds insufficient to complete task with the timeframe." Adam's voice was already losing the more subtle inflections. Those shipboard systems were heavily damaged. "Most transmitters are offline. You can not risk detection by boosting the signal strength. Do you understand?"

Samus had found what she was looking for, a fold in the outer hull where the armor was thickest. It would have to do and she could only hope that the fuselage hadn't cracked too much. She gestured to the right and the gun that surround her forearm began to expand and glow as segmented chunks of metal rearranged. The gunship completed another rotation and the Pirate Command ship swung by in a new arc, growing closer all the time. The pirates, the planet, and her; all spinning in space.

Adam was still speaking, "Download thirty percent complete. I have rigged the reactor and the remaining munitions together. Your maneuver window is closing." She hadn't vocalized her plan but it was obvious enough, even as pieces of Adam's memory overheated one by one.

She had to time this right. The gunship hurtled on, still spinning. Projected dotted lines in space appeared in Samus' visor as the powerless ship coasted towards the final calculation. There! Her gun let out a vibrating hum as an orb of white energy slowly detached from the barrel, small arcing sparks forming a web that held it still in that crook of the hull. The center portion of the orb was raised and seemed to be revolving; spinning faster and faster as the light it emitted curiously dimmed. Samus scrambled across the hull, magnetics and muscles fighting the centripetal force as she struggled to get more of the ship between her and that energy egg. You did not want to be standing by a Power Bomb when it hatched.

A flash of light and an impact like a mountain smashed through Samus' bones. Shards of metal slashed at her suit, draining a bit of shield strength as the magnetic systems surged to ensure she wasn't thrown off the hull. But after that single second there was only silence again; silence and the Pirate Command ship which was now directly in front of their newly modified trajectory.

Adam's voice was in her ear. "Successful maneuver."

Samus glanced at the indicator in the corner of her vision. "Download 52%" It would have to be enough. Samus moved back to the rear of the gunship, finding the exact middle of the spinning axis. Adam had been reconstituted from worse. And there was no time for apologies. So she bent her knees, aimed carefully, and jumped with all her might up into the empty void of space.

The gunship hulk hurtled on down towards the side of the Pirate vessel and Samus trailed directly behind it at only a slightly lesser speed, just another piece of wreckage thrown free from the hull after some damaged systems must have produced a rogue weapons detonation. The Pirate command ship expanded against the stars below her as she fell towards it. A careful twist of her legs and she canceled out her rotational inertia, setting up a stable reference point to the command ship. Everything according to plan. Still, she held her breath as the next few seconds passed. But the Pirates didn't even bother shooting down the carcass that was aimed at their side. Nothing of the gunship's mass could do more than scratch the hull of a ship that large. That is, if four buster missiles and a warp-class antimatter reactor weren't all rigged to detonate on impact.

Samus felt her smile slip a notch. It was a pity she couldn't hear the explosion.

The flash was still pretty and as soon as it erupted Samus was firing hard with all the thrusters on her suit, bleeding out as much of this velocity as possible. The suit vibrated and hummed, Varia components venting heat buildup, as she plummeted down to a scorched hole in the side of curbed black metal. Despite herself, Samus squinted. This was still going to be be a hard landing.

She hit the inner bulkhead at a relative two hundred and sixty three miles per hour.

It only took a few seconds for the suit and her enhancements to ameliorate the resulting concussion, at least enough to allow her to get her bearings. It took a few seconds longer to extract her lower half from the hole she'd punched in the wall. It was an undignified, wiggling, metal melting procedure that left Samus annoyed, face first on the floor, and in the perfect mood to turn her attention to the two poleaxed Space Pirates in maintenance crew void-suits who apparently had been watching this entire performance. Samus raised her power beam as they belatedly turned to run, their pincers raised in panic. Sometimes it really didn't pay to be the first responder.

...​

 

[13th Bee]

Samus's ships have an even poorer survival rate than the planets and space stations she enters.

 

[Wolfund]

Samus's ships have an even poorer survival rate than the planets and space stations she enters.

Click to shrink...

Well actually...

There is only 5 different design of ships for samus in all her games.

The Zero mission design, presumably the original design of samus ship, shot down during zero mission and later retrieved and modified into the...

... metroid prime hunters/metroid prime design. Who was never shot down but was, maybe, remplaced later on with a more advanced design the...

... MP2/M2/MSR/SM/MOM design, Build by the GF Shipyards on Aliehs III who crashed in a asteroid field in the MFusion beginning after a retrieval mission on SR388 gone wrong.

Of course the MF design, the presence of Adam on board suggesting GF involvement as well, Samus was able to flee the station onboard of this ship, it is still out there somewhere.

And finally the MP3/MPFF design, custom build by our lady of armcanon herself, the position in the timeline would suggest that Samus does have multiples gunship in her possession. To the best of our knowledge not destroyed.

So, out of her four ships, three are still flying, albeit one had been shot down at one point before being retrieved and updated, and the last one crashed into an asteroid field.

I think her ships have quite the survival odds compared to that of the space station she enters xD

 

[Prime 2.0]

That mad dash for the armor and the ship was lovely. Piloting the ship directly at the opposing vessel was pretty sweet too, though I question how Samus is still alive if she goes for the big risk like that time and time again; I've always conceived of her previous exploits relying a lot on stealth, and striking at just the right moment. Mind you, it's not like there was a wealth of choice here, but unargued resignation at accepting a 70% chance of death implies one hell of a lucky streak.

 

[ShiftingSandLand]

I question how Samus is still alive if she goes for the big risk like that time and time again

Click to shrink...

It's very simple. She is Samus Aran, one of-if not THE- most dangerous people in the galaxy. She is a repeatedly enhanced super soldier armed with some of the meanest tech in her universe. She is literally known as the "Protector of The Galaxy". She is basically Captain America mixed with Iron Man, turned up to Eleven, with not nearly as many moral or legal restrictions on her.

A better question is "How many times must the space pirates try before they learn that they REALLY ARENT CAPABLE ENOUGH to do it?"

 

[Prime 2.0]

A better question is "How many times must the space pirates try before they learn that they REALLY ARENT CAPABLE ENOUGH to do it?"

Click to shrink...

To be fair to the pirates, they probably didn't even know Samus was there. They were attacking a federation ship, and no way those chucklefucks actually caught up to her, right?

 

[Cuofeng]

Chapter 4: The Fall

...​

Samus' fight raced through the halls of the Pirate ship. Her visor displays were still notifying her that the suit's screw attack components had been dissolved into energy to absorb that first high speed impact. At least it hadn't been any of the more crucial systems; she could deal with that one ability being cannibalized. Her weapon still worked and she was currently blazing a path of destruction through a vessel that did not expect boarding via meteor.

A gun clattered across the ground as a purple-shelled Pirate slowly slipped down from the dent it had left in the far wall. Samus held out her right arm and shot off three blasts through the smoke and frost that now filled the room, hitting three cameras in each corner. A tap at her temple shifted her view and through the far wall she saw the dim x-ray outlines of five heavily armed pirates gathering in the next room to stem her advance. As she watched, one was angrily hitting its arm presumably trying to convince some interface to give a view of her room.

So she waited. A few seconds passed as Samus idly shifted her weight back and forth. She took another look at her suit shield readouts. She'd managed to absorb enough energy from that last power main she'd gained access to that the suit was almost back up to her current operating capacity. Behind the wall, the pirates were still panicking. Samus briefly flicked her visor back to normal view and looked at that wall again without penetrating scans. Then she returned to watching the marshaling strike team through the wall but she wondered at what she'd just seen. This was the first time she had ever seen art on a pirate vessel. It was...disturbing.

The Pirates finally lost their patience or worked up their nerve. They moved over, opened the door, and were instantly met by the shrapnel of said door exploding under a charged super missile blast. The first to stand up screamed as the next shot from Samus' gun froze three quarters of its body into a grisly statue. Samus hoped she'd managed to download enough of Adam's personality before the gunship blew. It would be a hassle to rip his backup out of the Diomedes servers. The remaining Pirates were screeching as Samus leapt through the air, dodging their shots in order to line up one of her own as her weapon shifted and glowed with charging energy. The enhanced plasma shot pierced through three of them and they fell back, trailing smoke and viscera. Her suit shield power indicator flowed upwards.

After a moment the shield indicator ticked up slightly one more time. Apparently one of the Pirates had taken longer to die than she would have guessed. Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Old lessons, drilled into her head long ago. The suit's harvest system was merely a practical demonstration.

These Pirates were a motley bunch. She briefly scanned the scattered bodies that littered this vaulted hall. There were purple shelled Zebezian tribes, the claws and fangs of the Talon fleet, and one example of the thin digitigrade legs and four eyes of the gene-line that had been on top of the home-world ladder during the phazon assault. What was it that brought these dregs together? Samus remembered the strange art in the other hall. There had been two abstract bipedal figures, presumably Pirates, floating in a web of swirling patterns. She wondered which group had painted it.

Then a low crackling roar rumbled through the long corridors, bouncing off bulkheads and ruined Pirate bodies. Samus' weapon snapped up, a beam attack already charging as her heart thudded so hard she felt her teeth vibrate. Her visor said that it was just a sound over the ship speakers, but Samus recognized that voice without needing the suit to list out the identification. That screech was etched on her bones. Ridley was on this ship.

Samus burst forward, ripping through bulkheads, firing off missiles into any open hatchway as she made her way towards the ship's center. As she ran, Ridley's voice echoed around her, every speaker screaming threats and orders to the Pirate crew. Samus retreated into the calm of battle meditation. She'd killed Ridley so many times before. He was the Pirate's perfect general, bred for war and cloned endlessly, modified to the absolute peak of their society's ability, dispatched to anywhere they needed a champion. And she'd killed him over twelve times.

The fight continued into what seemed to be an engineering access. So, this splinter fleet had their own Ridley; unexpected but at least they would only have the one. Ridley, the "ultimate commander", never tolerated any perceived threat to his authority even from himself. Samus' left hand threw out a grapple beam to draw the next Pirate close as a briefly living shield against his comrades' fire. Then she fired from behind it and a second later her shield energy levels ticked up a few more times. She advanced, as behind her one of the ship's primary engine rooms exploded under her departing missile barrage.

She was leaving a trail of destruction behind her but it was almost purely incidental. She was searching for the artifact; whatever technological haul the Pirates had found deep out in space that wet their appetites for the J4M colony. However, the ship's computers were putting up a surprisingly firm resistance to her suit's scans; taking terminals off the network almost as quickly as she could access them. It was curiously good security for the Pirates. It managed to stand up against her Chozo tech but in doing so the defense betrayed itself. Samus plotted a course to the part of the ship that went dark to her the quickest. That was where their greatest treasure would be.

Then one final door exploded before her and Samus ran into an anticlimactically dim room. After passing, and damaging, lab after lab and endless factory lines assembling new weapons she had expected this most secret chamber to be more dramatic. The dark room was still large and high ceilinged, important enough to be made accessible for even Ridley's great bulk, but the space was deserted and had a pervasive air of disuse. A single large cube, each side over twice Samus' height, took up most of the room. A dim golden light glowed from under the tarp that covered it.

Blue energy cracked around Samus' left hand as her grapple whip shot out and threw back the heavy tarp in a second. The cube was Chozo all right, she recognized the glowing golden lines that decorated its engraved metal sides. However, she had no idea what this thing could possibly be. Her scan gave back nothing but some low level power source and an encoded Chozo warning not to approach. The Pirates didn't even seem to be using the damn thing. There were no cables hooking it up to the ship computers, no disassembled components laid out to reveal their secrets. Just a lone abandoned box.

Then the room's only other door opened with a hail of blaster fire that heralded the end of investigation time. Samus threw herself behind the cube to just barely avoid most of the subsequent missile barrage as a full troop of armored Pirate commandos advanced into the room at a full run. She needed to go. That first blaster volley had hit her shields unsettlingly hard. From cover her gun was already charging, devastating energy washing her face with white light as power built inside the barrel.

Her weapon-bound right hand made a sign and the gun morphed slightly, even as she sprang back to leap off the wall behind her. The charged beam spread out in wide stream of piercing energy, throwing the Pirates back as it cracked their power armor. Unfortunately two of them seemed to almost completely ignore that wave beam attack. Samus noticed the white markings on their armor. Great, some of that advanced weapon-immunity armor. Someone had scavenged equipment from the old Talon fleet. She really hated those.

The other Pirates were also standing back up far too quickly for Samus' liking. Her weapon changed configuration again as she quickly waved that arm in an arc, her visor lighting up with a flurry of missile locks. However, these Pirates were soldiers. They reacted in a split second and threw up energy barriers from their off hands, setting a wall of oval shields in a semicircle before her. It would have been brilliant, if the gun Samus pointed that way was actually aiming at them.

Samus' arm shivered with recoil as a stream of missiles shot out in a sweeping arc. In the instant before they hit the Pirate barriers the missiles swerved up and over to slam into the mystery cube. Even that many explosions all converged on a single point was not enough to destroy Chozo metal, but it was enough to crack it. The super missile that followed it was what actually blew open a hole into some inner compartment of the cube, and the next was enough to thoroughly ruin whatever was inside. The one after that was mostly for fun.

Even Samus had to admit the next few missiles were probably redundant.

A moment later she skidding out into the hallway, her armored shins raising sparks as they left scratches in the metal floor. One of the Pirate elites was dead, another injured and confined by ice for the next couple seconds, but that still left too much firepower for Samus to want to deal with. Whatever that cube had been she had destroyed it. Luckily this ship's builder seemed to have really liked long straight corridors. Samus felt her heart fall back into a steady rhythm as she ran. Blaster fire impacted her from behind, draining her shields, but a sheathe of shimmering energy began to build up around her suit as she accelerated still faster. She ran and in a moment she was a blinding streak that crossed the length of the ship like lightning.

Scan said that the main hangar was through that next bulkhead in front of her. Samus squinted her eyes as there was a slight crunch. Then there was no longer a bulkhead and she was in the hanger.

Samus slammed to a screeching stop and then jerked to the side as her suit jets threw her off at an angle, dodging a blast of the hanger's point defense cannons. Ridley was screaming out over the ship coms again but he still hadn't decided to show his face. Unfortunately a great number of his underlings had. A rather great number. Samus was already firing but it was mostly suppressive at the moment as she quickly dashed for cover.

Metal scraped metal as she thudded her back against a bit of solid looking machinery. She needed to get off this ship. Information flew across her eyes as she scanned the Pirate systems even as their powerful data security continued to push her back. Suit missile stocks were still pretty good though so she stuck her right arm out from behind her cover and shot out a few more at any target lock that popped up to her suit systems. In the middle of the following series of explosions a deeper rumbling traveled up her legs from the hanger floor. Samus looked up to see an inner hanger wall open up to reveal huge mechanical arms carrying a Pirate fighter craft out into launch position. Scan said it was a rush repair-and-relaunch job from something sustained in the battle outside. That could work.

Samus focused her attention for a moment back on the mass of Pirate troops on the other side of her cover and noticed that there was not much return fire happening at the moment. That meant it was time to move. Above, the Pirate fighter-ship's engines hummed up into ignition as the mechanical arms withdrew from it. Samus raced forward and jumped up, suit jets blasting to double the apex of her leap. She bounced off the hanger wall and leapt back again, thrusting out her left arm as the grapple beam deployed from the back of her hand. It attached to the fighter belly with a crackle of blue energy even as the engines roared to life in launch. Her speed added with the ship's carried her up and over in a tight swing, suit magnetics latching down on the top of the hull even as her grapple stretched and broke.

The ship burst forward out of the hanger, and Samus turned back at her attackers down on the deck, wearing a cocky grin. Then her smile slipped. Now that she could see them all at once, she recognized that there was a reason this maneuver of hers had been so easy. Most of the pirates were not shooting. True, some individuals and teams were unloading in her direction with futile desperation but squad after squad were simply standing there in the hanger and watching her go. Now that she thought of it she wasn't sure they had ever fired on her. Then the Pirate fighter carried her out into space beyond sight. The uneasy feeling in her stomach grew.

That feeling was not helped by the fact that someone had clued in the pilot of her ride to the fact that he had a very hostile barnacle attached to his hull. Samus could look down into the cockpit where the Pirate thrashed at his controls and sent the fighter into a chaotic mess of spins and rolls, desperate to fling her off his ship. That was annoying. Samus tapped her temple and the suit scans proceeded to disable some of his flight controls. Fortunately, whoever had been upgrading that Command Ship's software hadn't gotten to the fighters yet and the Chozo suit still smashed through these systems. Samus even got access to battle telemetry, though the news there was less good.

The Diomedes was a long way off. Evidently they'd made good advantage of the damage Samus had managed to do to the Pirate command ship's engines and had pulled away from the pursuit to actually near rounding the planet's horizon. The remaining GF fighters were pulling back too, though there was still a good amount of combat happening in the intervening space. In fact, as Samus' unwilling ride twirled and swerved through the black, she saw another briefly nearby pirate fighter that was still making a direct bee line towards the Diomedes, a path that cut deep down towards the planet's atmosphere. Another opportunity.

It was tricky timing but the suit handled the calculations. The virtual mark in space approached, then Samus jumped free of her frantic fighter and sailed through space on a high speed intercept course to this new ride. She just barely got within grapple range but managed to draw herself in as it continued to accelerate on towards the Federation ship. She was heading back into the fight.

With this ship's current orientation the planet hung above her, close enough to blot out half of space. White storms and white ice mixed with brownish green land and a few equatorial oceans. For the first time since arriving in this system Samus directed her suit to scan to place, to learn something about J-4M other than the fact that the Chozo had been there once and the humans were there now. Atmospheric data and a Federation data entry popped up and started scrolling for a second. Then those entries blinked and abruptly disappeared. They were replaced by a single word of text displayed across Samus' visor.

"Welcome"

That was decidedly ominous.

Then the Pirate fighter under her feet shook and the planet began spinning around her. Samus looked to the side with disbelieving exasperation at the hole some GF fighter had just shot through her ride. She really wished ships would stop getting shot out from under her. This was becoming a serious problem and the planet rapidly becoming much bigger was an even more serious one.

The Pirate pilot's distress was very briefly increased as a sudden blast ripped his cockpit canopy off and an orange gauntlet reached in to rip him out of his seat before hurling him out into space. Samus swung into the newly vacuum-filled interior and set about trying to wrangle things into order as the suit patched into the ship computers. Unfortunately, what the ship computers told her was that core containment had been breached and the main reactor was a few seconds away from exploding. These Space Pirate constructs really weren't built to last. Samus spun the ship around to face away from the planet and set the engines for full bone-crushing burn, cutting speed as she prayed that the antimatter containment was failing more in the direction of five seconds rather than two. Faint orange flames began to lick around the edges of the shattered cockpit as they plummeted into the atmosphere.

Samus managed to fling herself out of the ship right as her suit said that it was now more improbable that the ship had not already exploded. The quickly following flash still thudded against her personal shields but at least she'd managed to get behind it so the explosion bled off a little more of her orbital velocity. That was nice. However, that meant that she was still left hurtling toward the planet's surface with reentry flames burning through her fingers. She was all out of ships.

Well, this was the first time she'd experienced free-fall reentry. It was actually rather pretty though likely to be fatal. She was above the planet's northern hemisphere where the massive polar ice caps eventually gave up against an expansive barren mountain range whose southern slopes were marked with dark lines, branching and joining as they led down to the equatorial lowlands that actually supported life. There was now a dim haze of panicked radio messages drifting up from the surface as the populated area rotated into view. A little blue icon blinked on near the horizon and slowly moved into Samus' view as the suit told her the human colony actually lay perfectly at the end of her uncontrolled descent.

Somehow that did more to add to the sinking sensation in Samus' stomach than the hurtling fall to her probable death. She'd made no effort to aim her trajectory and yet out of an entire planet she was aimed directly at the one place she could possibly want to go. There had been a few times in her life when she'd felt the touch of something like fate. She never liked it. Her second family had taught her that probability and chance was a mind of its own, the gestalt of all matter and thought in the universe. That it could have a will and a direction like all other things; a music to existence. But they had also taught her how to survive and right now that had to be her chief concern.

The friction flames around her suit had now increased to the point that they were interfering with her organic vision. Samus briefly flipped feet first, fired her widely insufficient suit jets, then returned to the flat limbs-spread aerobraking position as she waiting for them to recharge. Over the nineteen minutes until impact she would have to repeat this two hundred and twenty eight times to of bleed off every last scrap of velocity that she could hope for. Unfortunately, the suit told her exactly how much she could hope for in the distance provided. She would hit the ground at five hundred and thirty eight miles per hour at a sixty degree angle. The visor displayed those particular numbers in red.

Absolute surety of death was oddly familiar. She'd made peace with death so many times before. The first had been when she was six years old. Her second family had saved her then. They had saved her body and then they had saved her mind. They taught her their view of existence; that nothing ever ended. Death might come at anytime but the discrete self was an illusion, just as the discrete now was an illusion. When Samus died she would not be gone. All the times she had been alive would always still exist. Every memory was still alive, and every future she had ever imagined was just as populated as when she first envisioned it. They were all equally true in their own way. The old lesson always helped in these times. It was designed to lead her to peace and to union with all the other minds that had ever roamed this universe.

However, Samus was nagged with a bit of guilt as she fell to her death, alternating suit jets and spreading against the bone rattling wind. This time she mostly just felt bored. She'd died too many times before. The ground was approaching. Outside her suit the wind was screaming.

Red alerts flashed across her visor as the suit gave up on organic reaction times and prepared for its worst case scenario. The mountains rose up below, now actually visible in relief. The suit glowed and hummed as it readied all remaining shields and any possible bits of matter that could be converted into energy to soften this impact. The mechanisms curled her into a ball as barriers shimmered into temporary existence around her. In the rapidly approaching distance Samus briefly saw a light glint off glass or metal down amid the dust. She supposed that was the human colony. The buildings sat at the mouth of a network of canyons or riverbeds that stretched up to the end of her projected path.

Then Samus saw the mountain Nakamura had shown her, looming high above that little human settlement. She saw the giant statue of an unknown seated Chozo carved out of its side. As she fell, the outstretched hand almost seemed like it was pointed at her. She smiled as the suit screamed warnings and alarms. She liked that.

Then she hit the ground.

...​

 

[13th Bee]

Welp, it wouldn't be Metroid if Samus didn't lose all her power-ups.

 

[farren55]

She smiled as the suit screamed warnings and alarms. She liked that.

Then she hit the ground.

Click to shrink...

Aaaand this is now officially my favorite Metroid fanfic, this is exactly how I think Samus (based around how I played in the games) would act, well done!

 

[Lone Courier 6]

Time to lose all her upgrades again